Twelve great SEO plugins for your WordPress

WordPress is no longer a pure CMS blog. With the Content Management System news pages, shops, landing pages and much, much more can be generated. It is easy to use, very flexible and with very little training time even beginners can create their own web pages. In order to expand the functionality of the CMS, nearly 50,000 plugins are available in the WordPress database. We will now tell you which tools you can use to optimize your page for the search engine.

1. Google XML Sitemaps

With the “Google XML Sitemaps” plugin, you can generate an XML sitemap for your website from the backend or automatically. This helps Google, Bing, Yahoo and Co. to index your site. In addition, the plugin notifies the main search engines about changes on your page completely automatically. The “Google XML Sitemaps”, which has been steadily developed for nine years, is active on over two million websites.

You can download and use “Google XML Sitemaps” free of charge. As an alternative with many other SEO features, the “All in One SEO Pack” is also available.

2. Autoptimize

The loading speed of a website has been an important ranking factor for Google for a long time. An optimized code provides a higher speed. “Autoptimize” combines all scripts and styles, minimizes and compresses them. It also sets expires headers, caches them, and moves scripts into the footer. Furthermore, the HTML code itself is compressed. This results in a noticeable increase in the loading speed of your website, since less data must be transferred.

You can download and use “Autoptimize” free of charge.

3. All in One SEO Pack

The “All in One SEO Pack” plug-in can optimize your website for almost all the requirements of various search engines. With it, you specify important information and metadata to make them easier to digest for Google and Co. For example, it automatically sends a Sitemap to Google and submits changes to your site. It optimizes titles for search engines and automatically generates META keywords. It supports Google Analytics and Google AMP for faster mobile Internet sites. Even in its free version, it provides much more.

You can “download the free version of “All in One SEO Pack” here. The extended version is available on the Semper Plugins Internet site.

4. WP Super Cache

To display an article on your Internet site, WordPress first needs to build a page from it. To do this, it retrieves the desired content from the database and puts it into a website. Of course, this takes time. Especially if many people access your website, the database is much overloaded and the site setup takes a long time. Thanks to “WP Super Cache”, you can optimize the loading times of your website. To do this, the plugin saves the pages and posts on your homepage as static content. This means, it builds an HTML page from it. This can of course be displayed much faster since it does not have to be generated from the database.

You can download and use “WP Super Cache” free of charge.

5. SubHeading

Google loves extremely short headlines. But sometimes visitors need more information to really click on the article. The title hedgehogs fly out is certainly short, but is the visitor also encouraged to read the related post? A subheading (second heading) can make them want more. In this example, it could be: The Hedgehog Children’s Choir was thrown out of the rehearsal hall by the community. With the “SubHeading” plugin, you can easily integrate traced headings into your posts on WordPress. They help visitors to stay longer on your site. Longer dwelling times improve your Google ranking.

You can download and use “SubHeading” free of charge.

6. SEO Image Optimizer

Of course, pictures should also be on a website. Google acknowledges this too. The alt tag (alternative attribute) describes the photo or graphics used in a post. Thus, the search engine knows what is to be seen or with which topic it is related. It also increases user-friendliness for the visually impaired. But it can be very complex to assign these alternative attributes. This is where the WordPress plugin “SEO Image Optimizer” comes in. It automatically sets alt tags. The user can specify how these should look. For example, it is possible to automatically set the title of the post as an alt tag for the photos you are using. The file name of the image can also be changed in this way. In addition, the plugin compresses the image. So it is loaded faster, which contributes to speed optimization.

You can download and use the “SEO Optimizer” free of charge.

7. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)

A good internal linking helps to keep visitors on your website. Customers see products related to the article on the shopping pages. Often they click on it. On a news page or a blog, the topic-related article is recommended for the post-reading article. This makes YARPP automatic. It looks for and recommends similar articles based on categories, tags, content, and contribution title. This improves the internal linking noticeably and dwelling times of users are increased. Google likes this.

You can download and use “Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP)” free of charge.

8. Table of Contents Plus

With the “Table of Contents Plus” plugin, you automatically create a Table of Contents of a page. For this purpose, it uses the different headings (H1, H2, H3, etc.) of the contribution. This makes it easier for users to find what they are looking for, especially with very extensive articles. Just click on the corresponding point in the directory and it jumps to the correct paragraph. Google lists the indexes of the table of contents in its search snippet. Your visitors can then jump directly from the Google results list to the desired point on your website. The increased user-friendliness usually results in more users.

You can download and use the “Table of Contents Plus” free of charge.

9. Relevanssi

The standard search of WordPress is only relatively convincing because it lists the posts by date. The “Relevanssi” plugin searches for relevance. For this purpose it evaluates not only the search word, but the entire text, title, links, etc. The search results are significantly improved. You can also define the appearance of the result list. For example, you can display short teasers of the articles found and highlight the search word in them. They make it much more easier for your visitors to find certain contributions and they stay longer on your homepage.

You can download and use “Relevanssi” free of charge.

10. Search Meter

You can analyze the search queries of your WordPress search with the “Search Meter” plugin. To do this, the tool logs all internal search queries and evaluates them accordingly. Even search terms that did not bring any hits are included. This allows you to accurately analyze the interests of your visitors.

You can download and use “Search Meter” free of charge.

11. Broken Link Checker

Visitors are not exactly happy when they click on a link and only receive an error message. Google does not particularly like a broken link either. In order to free your website from broken links, there is the “Broken Link Checker” plugin. Among other things, it monitors the links in your posts, pages, comments, and even in the custom fields. It detects links that do not work, missing images, as well as forwarding. Subsequently, it notifies you about it on the dashboard or by e-mail. The plugin also prevents search engines from following broken links.

You can download and use “Broken Link Checker” free of charge.

12. P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)

Too many cooks spoil the broth. It is similar with WordPress. Only here it would be: Too many plugins spoil the performance. That is, the more extensions you install on your site, the slower it gets. This leads to unsatisfied visitors because the pages simply do not open up fast enough. With the plugin “P3” you can find all plugins that slow down your website. You can then disable them or replace them with others.

You can download and use “P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)” free of charge.

Note on our plugin recommendations

We have put together our recommendations to the best of our knowledge. However, problems may arise during use. It always depends on the configuration of your WordPress installation. For problems with a plugin, we recommend visiting the help page of the provider and the WordPress-forum. If you cannot find a solution, uninstall the plugin. Then, use a different one instead. There are alternatives to all our recommendations. You can find them on the page of the plugin to be replaced. Just click on one of the keywords in the right-hand column.

PS.: You can get search engine optimized texts in various languages quickly and easily at clickworker – your content provider.