7 WordPress SEO plugins to maximise your search rankings

Nov 28th, 2024

Did you know that WordPress powers nearly 60% of the content management system (CMS) market? Moreover, almost 30% of all websites worldwide are built on the WordPress platform, according to recent figures. Quite impressive considering it all began in 2003 following the discontinuation of b2/cafelog.
If you’re reading this, you’re likely one of the many users relying on WordPress for your eCommerce store or blog. In this guide, we’ll take approximately five minutes (yes, we’ve timed it!) to cover a quick Q&A featuring WordPress SEO tips and best practices.

For SEO plugins, the industry standard has long been Yoast SEO, which offers essential features like XML sitemap generation, robots.txt file creation, internal linking suggestions, and metadata optimisation. For businesses, the premium version (at a one-off cost of £79) is a worthwhile investment.

However, based on current insights, Rank Math is emerging as a favourite among many SEO professionals, offering comparable and, in some cases, superior functionality. It’s worth exploring both to see which aligns best with your needs.

Sidenote: During the 2019 YoastCon conference, YoastSEO announced live indexing capabilities with both Google and Bing.

 

Permalinks are the permanent URLs for your posts and pages. By default, WordPress may assign non-SEO-friendly structures like:
https://www.yourdomain.com/?p=1234

To improve this, navigate to Settings > Permalinks and select the ‘Post Name’ structure. This change creates more user- and SEO-friendly URLs, such as:
https://www.yourdomain.com/category/your-post-or-page-name/

Improving site speed is vital for better Google rankings and enhanced user experience. While the popular W3 Total Cache plugin remains a robust choice, LiteSpeed Cache is increasingly becoming the go-to option for many developers. LiteSpeed offers similar caching and optimisation features but is often noted for its superior performance, especially when paired with LiteSpeed servers.

Important: Always use only one caching plugin at a time to avoid conflicts.

For multilingual sites, WPML (WordPress Multilingual Plugin) has long been a reliable solution, offering tools to translate content while adding hreflang tags to indicate language-specific content to search engines. With WPML, you will have the ability to translate your URLs, meta title tags and descriptions, menus and most importantly adds the correct hreflang code to your site. This code tells Google, that the same content is available in multiple languages and protects you from issues related to duplicate content.

That said, TranslatePress is another excellent option that many developers are starting to favour for its simplicity and ease of use. Evaluate both based on your site’s requirements.

Again getting the right plugin will let you optimise your images so they are perfect for your SEO performance and image search. Your cache plugin will automatically cache your images, but adding Imagify will allow further lossless compression and the removal of EXIF data.

You can already set the alt text for an image within WordPress, but for a site with hundreds or thousands of images it is not always possible to add alt tags to every image. Therefore you can add the Automatic image ALT attributes plugin which will use the file name of the image as your alt text, thus saving you a lot of soul destroying hours.

With this one, there are a number to choose from and to be honest you can’t go wrong with any of them. It really is all about how you want them to look on your website and which social media platforms to include.

Rather than me recommend one to you, take a look at this 10 best social media plugins for WordPress 2024 post on WPBeginner. Here you can choose which styles, platforms and more importantly, which ones will not negatively affect your sites performance.

WooCommerce, a plug in similar to Yoast, has become the industry standard for eCommerce sites on WordPress, being used by 21% of the top 1 million websites.

Built with developers in mind, this plugin lets you control every element of your store including adding additional extensions to help combat any issues you may have. It links in with Google Analytics, Amazon and eBay and as mentioned earlier in this Q&A, it links perfectly with YoastSEO.

We can show you what it will take to grow your website’s visibility with a extensive organic search (SEO) analysis from our experts. Cut through the noise of your competitors and make your brand stand out from the crowd – contact us today for a complementary audit!

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