Is your Wordpress website ready for being indexed by search engines? If you doubt it, you could use the following plugins that will help you to do simple and basic SEO improvements.
While no one can tell you for sure that you will be on the first page of Google, if you monitor your website and constantly improve, you will gradually get better search engine ranking. If your site is on Wordpress there are thousands of alternatives and guides to make your website friendly to search engines. I want to share with you 6 plugins that I have tried at some sites and that seems to help you improve the SEO ranking without much technical knowledge.
Before you start, make a backup of Wordpress
It is important that before you test any Wordpress plugin, make a backup of your site.
Before talking about SEO plugins I want to share with you a plugin that you can use to make the backup of the database, files and the structure of your Wordpress site, it's called BackWPup and in its free plan you can schedule the backup and even connect it with Dropbox to have your backup outside your hosting, which is the most recommended. You can download it from the Wordpress plugins directory or add it to your current installation.
You can save the backup to zip but if errors occur due to processing time, you can change it to tar gzip format.
Now that you can make a backup of your site, these are the 6 plugins that you could use to improve the SEO of your Wordpress website.
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For SEO optimization on Wordpress
These plugins will help you configure some important SEO parameters on your site and improve your search engine ranking:
Yoast SEO
This plugin is one of the best in optimizing SEO features on Wordpress. It will allow you, among other things, to adjust:
- Site titles, pages, and entries
- Set description meta tag for each page
- Create the sitemap.xml files to submit to search engines.
In its free plan, there are many options you can take advantage of. I leave this video on this plugin:
SEO Optimized Images
One of the most common mistakes regarding SEO is to not add any text in the Alt attribute of the images. This is a practice that makes it easier for search engines to know what the image is about and thus facilitates its indexing. This plugin allows you to generate texts in the ALT attribute dynamically and based on the name of the image or the title of the post.
The filename of your images should be descriptive since the search engines also take it into account in its indexing process.
Broken Link Checker
As you add new content to your site, there may be cases of broken links that can affect the positioning and user experience. This plugin does a periodic review of the links of your website and reports on the Wordpress dashboard those who have a problem.
Redirection
Do you know which links have gone to 404 pages? This plugin will tell you and will also help you redirect these wrong visits to the correct page. It is completely free and keeps you the record of the redirects.
To improve the site's speed
Your site's loading speed has a big impact on your ranking; if your website is too slow you can lose many points regardless of the content relevance and its good quality. These plugins will help you improve the loading speed; however, you must be careful because to achieve this they can make changes to the site so you must be careful.
Before testing these plugins, I recommend you measure the performance of your website using GTMetrix
W3 Total Cache
This plugin focuses on site optimization by helping you add cache headers to pages, compressing javascript and CSS files and also optimizations to the Wordpress database, besides many other options. You can have substantial improvements with this plugin, but you need to adjust it properly and read some.
It is important to run tests with this plugin since when applying javascript compression some third-party scripts may be affected.
I share a video that can be useful, although it is not the latest version it serves as a guide to start using this plugin:
By the way, you can start receiving free calls from customers with a click in your website with our Wordpress Click to Call plugin
ShortPixel Image Optimizer
Images are a vital element for any website; but they affect the loading speed of your site and if you think that on your desktop computer a 5 Mb image is downloaded very fast, keep in mind that many users will visit your site from mobile devices or without the same internet bandwidth. Any millisecond that is optimized on the load of your website counts. This plugin performs an image optimization process, reducing its size without affecting its quality and eliminating additional data that is not necessary when they are on the web. The free plan processes a maximum of 100 images per month, so you must select the most important ones.
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