WordPress offers its users a multitude of available plugins designed to assist your WordPress site with aspects such as conversion, usability, and search engine optimisation (SEO). Here’s a shortlist of what we consider to be some of the most important SEO plugins available for WordPress.
1) RB Internal Links
The RB Internal Links plugin assists WordPress sites with internal linking. This plugin hasn’t been updated in over 2 years, but still serves its purpose remarkable well.
The best feature of RB Internal Links is that it links using the post ID to link internally, instead of using the URL itself. This means that when changing the URL of a page it is updated dynamically, thus minimising the risk of the internal 404 pages that are harmful to a site’s SEO, and also ensures that website visitors are not trying to reach a page that no longer exists.
2) WordPress SEO by Yoast
This plugin is considered to be one of the most important SEO plugins available, enhancing WordPress’ already strong platform. The Yoast plugin has been designed to improve your site’s search engine optimisation in every aspect, and goes the distance to tend to all technical optimisation, helping you to create better content for your site, by making it mandatory to choose a focused keyword, and ensuring it is used throughout.
The Yoast SEO plugin, in addition to helping you create better content, provides assistance with page analysis, XML sitemaps, meta link elements, RSS optimisation, social integration, provides import and export functionality, is multisite compatible, and allows you to edit htaccess and robot.txt files.
3) NextGen Gallery
NextGen is really the only plugin necessary when it comes to image gallery management. NextGen allows the user to define many things, including alt tags and image titles, which effectively resolves any SEO image problems you may be experiencing. WordPress’ most popular gallery plugin, NextGen offers a powerful engine for uploading and managing your images, and has the ability to batch upload, create and manage albums, import metadata, edit thumbnails, and much more. There are two front end display styles, thumbnail and slideshow galleries, both offering a wide variety of options for control over light box effects, transitions, style, size and timing, among other aspects. If installing NextGen, be aware that it functions hand in hand with the Lightbox plugin that is also available.
4) Simple URLs
The Simple URLs plugin is a complete URL management system with the capability of tracking and controlling outbound links, right from within the WordPress backend system. Installing the plugin adds a custom post type to the Admin menu, which allows you to create, delete, edit and manage URLs. Simple URLs stores click counts in a custom field on the custom post type allowing it to scale considerably well. It also avoids page based redirects, which are used to conceal affiliate links, therefore avoiding any issues with permalink conflicts and keeping things performing optimally.
Incorporating these plugins into your WordPress site will help you get the most out of what you are publishing by making it search engine optimal, therefore improving the site’s Google ratings.
