So now you’ve built your site using the popular website builder WordPress, what’s your next step? Make sure it features near the top of any search result, of course. And this is where SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) tools come in. There are many plugins available out there to help you improve your ranking, and we’ve selected five we feel you should definitely take a look at.
If you’re looking for a plugin that can take care of most of the heavy lifting for you, All In One SEO Pack, may be the one for you. Upon activation, it uses “wizards” to set up your SEO settings, even advises you on how to improve your webpages so they get a higher ranking in search results. You also have a large amount of customisation open to you.
WooCommerce SEO is available for all plans, but LocalSEO is excluded from the cheapest one. Other features include social media integration, SEO analysis, image SEO, and news and video sitemaps.
As is often the case, the more you pay, the more features you get, and the more websites you can install the plugin on. As of this writing, there’s currently a 50% discount promotion. Prices start at $49.50 per year for Basic and go up to $299.50 per year for Elite. The developers also offer a 14-day money back guarantee.
Not only do broken links lead to a bad user experience, it actually hinders your SEO ranking. If you have a small site, it’s highly likely you can manage this on your own, but as your site’s content grows, so does its complexity. Broken Link Checker is a very useful plugin to make sure nothing gone wrong with your internal and external links.
Once the plugin has analysed your site, you can then look at the list of faulty URLs, which you can then edit, delete, dismiss (if the plugin mistakenly tagged a live URL as a dead one for instance), or ignore.
It’s a very simple single purpose tool, but it’s highly useful if you want to make sure your site is as current as it can be, and offers readers a great user experience, not a bunch of discontinued URLs.
SEOPress is an excellent plugin that offers many features to improve your SEO ranking. It’s also integrated with Google Analytics to help you see how your changes improve your site’s traffic and optimise your site.
Best of all, it comes with a free version which features no ads, and includes an installation wizard, XML and HTML sitemaps, and content analysis, among many others. The Pro version costs $39 per year for an unlimited number of sites, and comes with a wealth of additional features, such as htaccess control, 404 monitoring, Google News Sitemap and URL rewriting to name but a few.
Squirrly SEO aims to make tweaking your pages to improve your ranking as visually interesting as possible. This makes it very appealing to newcomers, but there’s more than enough here to also entice SEO veterans.
One feature we quite liked was how Squirrly analyses your writing in real time. This is a great way to optimise your pages as you create them. It also offers a series of articles and is incredibly confident that if you follow their instructions, your site will shoot up the ranks – or your money back (conditions apply – obviously).
The whole plugin is visually interesting, using blocks of colour (red, yellow or green) to let you know what works, and what needs changing. It also comes with a wealth of features including tracking your performance across over 170 search engines, help with finding the right keywords, and determine how your pages will look when shared on social media – among many others.
Squirrly offers three different plans depending on your budget and needs, from Pro ($29.99 per month), to Business ($71.99 per month), to Agency ($75.99 per month). It’s definitely not the cheapest SEO plugin around, but excellence does come at a price.
Yoast is one of the most popular SEO plugins on the market – if not the most. It comes in two flavours, a free, and a premium version. The free version is highly useful but has some annoying limitations, like only offering you one keyword or keyphrase for instance, or limiting preview to Google, rather than including Twitter and Facebook as the Premium version does.
If you’re serious about SEO, it’s clear that Premium is the way to go. Some of the features we liked include offering suggestions for links to other pages on your site, and helping you redirect old URLs to new ones. Premium costs $89 per year for a single site. You do save the more sites you add, from 5% for 2, up to 15% for 10.
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