You’ve built a great site, spent a lot of time on its content and design and launched it for your website visitors. Now you might be under the impression that if it’s perfect, visitors will automatically come. But in reality, that’s not the case.

For example, a good film will not reach its targeted audience if it’s not marketed accurately. Same is the case with websites also. If you don’t embrace certain techniques and tools for your website, it won’t reach your targeted viewers. This is where SEO comes into action which helps your website to drive organic traffic.

Though many of you might have heard of the term SEO or Search Engine Optimization, you may not have a clear idea on what it is or how it helps a website. SEO is nothing but the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. It works by demonstrating to search engines that your content is the perfect result for the topic at hand.

When you type a query into a search engine such as Google, Yahoo, Bing etc it looks through all the pages in its index and tries to return the most relevant results. So, to be in that relevant results, you have to make sure of everything from how informative your title tags and meta descriptions are, the right length to pointing internal links at pages, keywords and much more.

Yoast SEO is the most credible and popular WordPress SEO plugin available in the market. It helps you identify and prevent duplicate content so that there is no reason to be alarmed about being penalized by Google. The plugin also provides templates for titles and meta-descriptions, which will make your pages more tempting in SERPs.  Yoast SEO also creates an XML sitemap (acting as a road map of your website) for all your website’s posts and pages. Its on-page SEO insights feature is another key highlight of the plugin which will tell you how to incorporate your target keyword, whether you’ve used the keyword too many times and so on.

Rank Math is a powerful, rapidly growing, user-friendly SEO plugin that permits you to shape your website for search engines and social media. It helps you optimize your site as you write content, offering real-time insights about your posts without having to leave the WordPress interface. It also comes with a setup wizard that guides you through the installation process, and it has the nicest UI of the bunch. The setup wizard also allows you to import data from other SEO plugins during the setup. Rank Math also has a 404 error monitor, which search for visitors hitting 404 (dead) pages and lets you know the URLs and number of times they’ve been hit.

All in One Schema Rich snippet is a Google feature that displays search results in a more alluring way to improve click-through rate. It allows you to make your website emerge in search results by showing star ratings below a review, prices of products, image or video next to the description, etc. Getting placement in a rich snippet is important because you’d be standing out from the competition. All in One Schema Rich Snippets help you optimize your website by including Schema metadata to your website. It supports Review, Recipes, Events, Products, Article, Services, and more.

Redirection is a simple, free plugin for implementing 301 redirects. Using it is easy as pie. Just enter the source URL and target URL, then click “add redirect.” These 301 redirects are a crucial part of SEO strategy, and you can calmly redirect those URLs with Redirection, without much extra effort. It also provides to keep on top of 404 errors as well. For more advanced users, there’s the option to use regex matching for redirects, ignore trailing slashes, ignore URL parameters, and so forth.

Broken links can disturb your site’s SEO and create a bad experience for your users. This is where tools, such as the Broken Link Checker plugin can help. As the name suggests, Broken Link Checker is a powerful plugin that checks for broken links(both internal and external) and missing images on your website.  It has a user-friendly dashboard from where you can quickly fix those broken links.  If your website is quite old, then it is necessary to check your site once in a while for broken links and correct them.

As the name implies it’s another ‘all in one’ plugin for your SEO needs. The All in One SEO Pack has many functionalities that are similar to Yoast SEO. The only difference is that it is more customizable and has a few extra features.  It has a comprehensive set of tools that allow you to add SEO title, meta tags, XML Sitemaps, etc with no sweat. SEO Pack also has support for AMP, which means that it integrates with the official AMP WordPress plugin out of the box. Their support team is continuously updating the plugin, and you can integrate it with other popular plugins such as WooCommerce.

SEMrush is a web tool that helps in keyword research to optimization. Recently they launched a plugin called SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant that could improve your content’s SEO to a great extent. Though this plugin is not as broadly used as the other plugins we have mentioned in this list, but it’s still a front runner to consider. The plugin goes through your content and gives you scores based on how SEO-friendly the writing is. You will see text suggestions that will explain how to polish your content for SEO purposes. It scans the existing top 10 ranking pages on Google, and suggest what is not present on your content, that could boost your ranking.

A good quality WordPress SEO plugin is a must for any WordPress site. You may find that your framework with built-in SEO settings. However, it’s best to use a plugin instead of the built-in theme SEO functionality because you may lose those SEO settings if you change your theme in the future. If you search for SEO plugins in the WordPress repository, you will be surprised to see the numbers. So, just watch how many plugins you install because you don’t want to blow up your WordPress site. Which other WordPress SEO plugins do you use? Feel free to recommend that should be added to this list.