Make Your Website Search Engine Friendly

WordPress is undoubtedly one of the best content management systems when it comes to SEO. Now that you have a blog on WordPress, you need to keep your site updated to increase your presence in the virtual world.

No matter how fresh your content might be and how updated your site might be, good on-page seo can help. You need to optimize your site to improve your ranking, maximize your visibility and get more traffic and leads.

To optimize your site and get your site ranked higher, you may require plugins that will take care of the SEO for your WordPress website. There are many plugins available and they all work differently so you need to select the best suited for your website. Here goes the list of some of the Must have SEO plugins for your WordPress website.

Slideshare Summary

WordPress SEO by Yoast

WordPress out of the box is in itself a good platform for SEO but what’s the harm in improving it. WordPress SEO is arguably the best SEO plugin with over 4-5 million downloads and an average rating of 4.7 stars. This single plugin literally takes care of all the technical optimizations for you. Let’s look at some of the features of this plugin.

Content: WordPress SEO by Yoast helps you optimize your content for your readers. You can easily add custom meta description and keyword tags and you can check in the snippet preview whether meta description makes sense or if the title is too long.

Page Analysis: Page analysis gives you a better idea about your keyword density, it checks the images and whether they have alt tags having the targeted keywords. It checks whether your targeted keyword is present in your title and url and so on.

Social SEO: WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin also has the Facebook open graph, Twitter meta data integrated and soon they might come with G+ as well.

Advanced settings: WordPress SEO by Yoast has some advance setting to take care of the technical elements. You can control the indexing of your page, generate sitemaps and breadcrumbs. You can also edit robot.txt, .htaccess and add canonical tags and optimize RSS feeds to get rid of scrapers resulting in better ranking.

WordPress SEO by Yoast has much more features and is definitely a great plugin for your WordPress site. It’s also absolutely free!

WP Smush It

The longer it takes your site the load, the more it harms your SEO. The larger your images, the longer it’ll take your site to load.

WP Smush IT is a plugin that helps you compress the uploaded images very easily. It’s a freaking awesome plugin that every wordpress site should use.

WP Smush It directly smushes your images as you upload and you also have the option to smush previously uploaded images.

Usage
It comes with some very useful features. Let’s take a look at some of them.
1.Wp smush.it compresses images that are smaller than 1MB however the Pro version compresses images up to 5 MB.
2.It processes GIF, PNG and JPEG image files.
3.Wp smush it optimizes your images using the lossless compression technique.
4.It removes unused colors from indexed images.
5.Older images can also be smushed with this plugin.
6.It strips meta data from JPEG image files.
7.It also converts certain GIFs to indexed JPEGs.

Support
The plugin comes with good support as well, it has an active support forum where all your queries related to the plugin can be answered.

Wp smush.it has more than a million downloads and these numbers just prove that it is the best free image optimization plugin available today. Faster loading speed means your website will be more search engine friendly, this plugin is highly recommended.

Total Cache‏

As I have mentioned earlier that page loading plays an integral part in page rankings, this plugin will take care of all your page load woes. WordPress is a popular platform built on PHP and your site becomes slow when traffic increases on your site and this in turn affects the rankings. W3 Total Cache is a smart solution and is used by some popular heavy traffic sites such as Mashable, Smashing Magazine, Yoast and more.

W3 Total cache improves user experience by increasing server performance and it is recommended by web hosts like Host Gator, Go Daddy, DreamHost and more. Let’s look at the features and benefits of this awesome plugin.

1.It offers at least 10x improvement in the site performance when it is fully configured.
2.Your conversion rates will improve and the site performance which in result will improve your rank in search engines like Google.
3.It reduces the page load time and increases visitor’s visit time and due to faster loading visitors tend to view more pages.
4.Instant subsequent page views resulting in browser caching.
5.It also improves the web server performance and sustains high traffic periods.
6.It also saves upto 80% of the bandwidth space by minifying and HTTP compression of CSS, Javascript, HTML and feeds.

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Broken Link Checker

There isn’t much to be said about this plugin. It will quickly scan your entire site for broken links and will allow you to make bulk changes. A site with a ton of broken links won’t be good in Google’s eyes. Fix this and your on-page seo will definitely increase.