Top 10 SEO Tools and Plugins for WordPress
SEO is vital, and traffic is a key factor for your success. Blogging on a no-traffic blog is like performing in front of an empty theater. Just as a movie theater wouldn’t make money without its movie goers, without visitors coming to your site, you won’t earn any money. Visitors to your blog are like your movie goers to a theater.
Below I have listed some of the top seo tools for WordPress that you can use to make your site SEO friendly. This is a mix of both WordPress plugins and other stand alone software tools to help boost up your sites rankings on the SERPs (Search Engine Resultant Page). Some of these cost money but the rest come free of charge.
1. W3 total cache
W3 total cache is a nifty little tool for WordPress. It’s one of the top free web performance optimization tools. It uses caching to improve page speed and reduces download time. That speeds up your page and reduces page load time.
2. Copyscape
Copyscape is a great tool for seo, especially if you hire outside writers. Some people are devious and wily and you have got to be in no doubt that those are not the people you hire. If you want to do that, this is the tool for you. You can use it to check if an article is duplicate or not by simply copying and pasting it into a box. This is pretty important for SEO because search engines don’t like duplicate content.
It is also a software tool with which you can check if some spammers and content thieves have copied your articles or posts and posted them on their scraper sites.
3. Google XML Sitemaps
This one is a free WordPress plugin that generates XML sitemap for your site. When you install and configure it, it lets you crate an XML sitemap. Its function is simply to smooth the progress of your site indexation.
It makes it easy for search engine bots to index and retrieve your site more easily and it also pings the bots whenever you publish new posts, so that your site gets indexed faster.
4. SEMrush
SEMrush is an all-inclusive keyword research tool with robust features. It is created by SEO professionals with immense expertise and has so many great features. It’s definitely the one to use if you are serious about finding high quality keywords.
The tool costs money but it has a free trial too. You can use it for both, SEO and paid advertising. The least price is $69.95 monthly for individual users and goes upto $549.95 monthly for multi-user businesses.
5. Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner came as a substitute for Google Keyword research tool that was discontinued sometime back.
Google Keyword Planner owes much to its forerunner and many of its features are the same. The only thing that sets this one apart is that you need to create an account and there are also some features that have been added to the tool. The tool lets you search for keywords that are related to your website or your services and products. It also shows you so many other key data.
6. Long Tail Pro
Long Tail Pro is also another paid keyword tool with great features. It also has 10 days free trial.
It’s fast and easy to use and it’s best for finding profitable keywords. It costs a one time payment of $97 for the regular membership and the Platinum version costs $97 setup and $17 monthly.
7. Rank Checker for Firefox
Rank Checker is a popular rank checking plugin for Firefox by SEObook. It also has versions for Chrome and other browsers. The main function that this tool performs is track your site and notify you as to where your site ranks in top search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing. The plugin comes free of charge and downloading and installing this plugin is easy. Just head over to the website and click the ‘Download now’ button.
8. SEOQuake
SEOQuake is a SEO toolbar that you can download and install on your Mozilla Firefox browser. Then every time you fire up your browser, the toolbar shows up right under the menu bar, and that makes it easy tracking and checking your site.
This SEO tool tracks page rank, Alexa, number of links and many others. Its use is chiefly to track a competitor’s websites and to check the strength of a keyword. Not all keywords are easy to rank for so it’s always good to check the strength of the keywords that you plan on using. This has been downloaded one and a half million times just for Firefox.
9. All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack is an all in one SEO tool as the name indicates. It makes optimizing your blog and the internal pages automatic.
10. Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin
This is an alternative to All in One SEO Pack and it’s a free SEO plugin for WordPress. It also analyzes your content and lets you know as to where you can improve. It also generates XML sitemaps automatically. I use this for my blog.
Honorary Mentions (Bonuses)
11. MyBlogGuest
This one’s more like a link building tool than a SEO tool. Link building is key to SEO and this tool lets you find and connect with websites or blogs that publish other people’s articles as guest posts. It’s not really that easy finding blogs and selling your guest post to them, it is mind numbing and tedious. But this tool makes it uber easy for you as you can connect with any blogger from within your dashboard.
12. Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools may not be a search engine optimization tool per se, but it diagnoses your sites for glitches and notifies you to the fact, which in turn helps your SEO. It also diagnoses broken links, click-through rates and finds out whenever there’s a glitch on your site.
13. Keywordtool.io
KeywordTool.io is another free keyword research alternative to Google keyword tool or other paid keyword research tools.
14. Market Samurai
Market Samurai is a keyword tool by Noble Samurai. It is used by dozens of gurus to successfully find high paying and profitable keywords fast. It costs money to use this software but it’s definitely worth it.
What’s Your Feedback?
Which SEO tools for WordPress do you use on your blog? Share some that you think should need a mention here.