There is a long list of reasons that you should use WordPress to power your website. One of those is the massive of selection of plugins you can use to improve your site. Plugins are essentially features that allow you to add improvements and enhancements to your website. There are over 15,000 plugins available for WordPress websites, and many of them are free!
Knowing that we decided to make a list of the best free SEO plugins that are available and that you can use to improve your Google rankings. Again, there are many that you can choose from, but here what we consider to be the 5 best free WordPress plugins for SEO. Remember, if you want to best increase your rankings it is best to hire a professional Toronto SEO company, but if you are on a budget or are just a DIYer, these plugins will help!
Quick note, use these at your own risk (we like them but we didn’t make them).
Read: What is SEO?
Yoast SEO
This is the one WordPress SEO plugin that you cannot live without. It is the most popular SEO plugin hints down and with very good reason. It is also one of the best if not the best SEO plugins available.
Not only does Yoast SEO give you an incredible flexibility and depth when optimizing your website, Will also guide you and even grade you on how you are doing. Yoast SEO has a very intuitive green light/yellow light/red light system that helps you understand where you are succeeding and where you are falling short when optimizing your website.
Some of the benefits include:
- Add custom titles and descriptions
- Add Breadcrumbs
- Add XML Sitemaps
- Alter your Robots.txt
- Google SERP preview
- Google Webmaster Integration
ShortPixel
In order to keep your website loading quickly, it is important to have your images and PDFs fully optimized. Our favorite tool to do so is ShortPixel. It is a very lightweight, set-and-forget plug-in that will optimize your images in the background.
Read: Hiring a Toronto SEO Company: Is it a Fit for Your Business?
W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is a must for improving the performance of your website. What does plug-in does is improves server performance and caches all aspects of your website so that performance is at its peak. This allows pages to Load very quickly and efficiently and ultimately improves the user experience formatting. Google puts tremendous value on the speed with which pages load, and will increase your ranking with pages that load very quickly.
SEO Redirection
When a page is removed from a website, or moved to a different URL, it’s URL will become a dead link. Google does not like dead links because it makes for a poor user experience. This is particularly bad if you have other web sites or blogs link to that page which no longer exists there.
SEO Redirection addresses is this very issue. SEO Redirection will help you set up what are called 301 redirects. This allows you to take the old URL but existed and is now dead, and redirect it to the new location of the web page. this is incredibly important as it helps you maintain the “juice”, or inbound links, that are helping you with your rankings.
VIDEO: WHY SOCIAL MEDIA & SEO ARE BEST FRIENDS
a3 Lazy Load
You’ll notice that we’ve been referencing website speed and performance a lot in this article. That’s because Google considers it a major factor when it comes to ranking. And again, one of the major players when it comes to slowing down a website are images that are not properly optimized.
One of the major contributors to slow down is that a website, when loading, attempts to load all images on the page at the same time. a3 Lazy Load Is a fantastic plug-in that solves that problem. With this plugin, the images on a webpage will only load as the user scrolls down the page. Not only does this apply to images, but also videos scripts and any iframes that may exist on the page as well.
Conclusion
Optimizing a website from search engines it’s very complicated business. With these 5 plugins you should be off to an excellent start. If you find that you are not having success with your SEO endeavors, please feel free to contact us at Bush Marketing.
Interested in improving your Google rankings and generating higher exposure for your business? Call Bush Marketing today!
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