SEO Plugins for WordPress are usually a big mess. Some of them conflict with each other, some include paid links which you should avoid and a lot use outdated SEO techniques or require a lot of maintenance. So I decided to create a list of the plugins I use when dealing with WordPress, including SEO plugins, social media plugins, VPNs and link protection tools.
Here, I have outlined some couple of important steps to that you will have to take notice of when you try to use wordpress without an SEO plugins.
Carry Out Keyword Research.
Any SEO strategy has keywords at its core. A search engine’s job is to provide users with content that will be most valuable to them based on their search terms. Smart use of keywords helps Google determine the relevance of your page to the user’s search. If you are most relevant you get the highest ranking, for the greatest visibility and the most traffic. While keywords aren’t as prominent a factor as they once were, it’s still worth doing at least some keyword research rather than guessing.
There are great tools (both free and paid), as well as common sense ways, to research the keywords you will use to optimize your content. An example of a great free to is SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool.
Sitemap Generators
As noted above, a site map is not strictly necessary because Google crawls URLs via RSS feeds and links.
However, a site map is useful if you have made major changes and want Google to discover them as fast as possible. In this case, a manually generated site map is useful, as you don’t have to install a plugin to generate it.
You can still install a site map generator plugin and that makes far more sense to do than installing a huge SEO plugin to do this one single task.
Keyword Research and Word Processing
WordPress and your server resources might not be the best platform for conducting keyword and word processing functions. If you want a real-world app for checking your content, use a real software program like the Hemingway App. If you want to do web page analysis use a real app that generates a word cloud.
All of these kinds of functions are limited on an SEO plugin anyway. A standalone app will do a better job.
Reliable hosting increases uptime.
First, choose a reliable hosting provider. The provider you choose will be an enormous factor in your website’s speed, security, and uptime—which are all SEO factors that Google uses to determine the position of each item on search engine results pages (SERP) in response to a user query. It’s a good idea to use a fully-managed WordPress hosting plan, in which the provider manages thorny administrative tasks including updates, daily backups, website uptime, and scalability. BlueHost, WP Engine, and SiteGround are among the most popular managed WordPress provider.
Using Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs is a useful feature.
Adding Schema structured data to it will get you enhanced listings if you rank in the SERPs. And the enhanced listings may help the click-through rate.
It’s possible to code breadcrumb navigation without a plugin. The code is supposed to go into your website’s “child” functions.php file.
Most tutorials say to add it to your theme’s function.php file but you’ll lose your breadcrumbs if the theme is updated and the functions.php file is part of that update.
Getting breadcrumbs right can also become complicated because you still need to associate schema markup with the breadcrumbs. So that’s even more coding.
It can be done but at this point, it might be easier to offload the responsibility of making sure it works to a plugin.
I have found that using BreadCrumbs NavXT WordPress Plugin is an adequate solution. It handles the breadcrumbs and the schema data.
The NavXT plugin was the subject of a medium-level vulnerability but it was quickly patched. This was unusual for this plugin and unlike more serious events associated with dedicated SEO plugins, it did not cause problems for users.
Choose a WordPress theme that is SEO-friendly.
Some WordPress themes are more SEO-friendly than others. Whether you use a free theme or premium theme, choose carefully. The wrong theme, such as those that come bundled with scripts and plugins that you probably won’t use, will just slow down your site. Look for ones that have fast load times, responsive design (so it works well on all devices), clean code, and easy navigation. You can search for WordPress theme ratings and recommendations online. There are also free and paid tools for determining how well themes perform in certain areas. One example is Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test page.
WordPress SEO plugs add extra power.
There are many WordPress optimization plugins to help WordPress users with SEO functionality and analysis. Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack are among the most popular. These suites make it easy to adhere to SEO best practices, including optimizing for keywords, linking suggestions, sitemaps, readability checks, and more. Note that this article does not cover plugin capabilities.
Check your website’s visibility settings.
One of the most important things is making sure your site is visible to Google for reading and indexing your webpages. Sometimes developers turn off visibility to hide the website while they are building it and don’t turn it back on after launch. It’s easy enough to check it and click it back on by going to Settings > Reading.
Attachment Pages Redirect
If you have inadvertently created web pages for every image attachment in your WordPress site, this plugin will easily solve your problem.
The Attachment Pages Redirect plugin will restore your individual attachments to their correct behavior. Just install and activate it and that’s it, your problem is solved.
The Attachment Pages Redirect plugin needs no setting up. Just activate it and forget it. Fixing rogue attachment pages couldn’t be easier.
Just make sure to use the correct setting for redirecting attachments to the post when uploading media in the future.
Canonical URLs
Canonical URLs are built into WordPress. You don’t need an SEO plugin to handle this.
Robots.txt and htaccess File Editors
If you have a text editor or an HTML editor, then you have all you need for editing a robots.txt file or updating an htaccess file. Additionally, you should only mess with those files if you know what you’re doing.
If you are skilled enough to edit these, then you don’t need a WordPress plugin to handle this. Just open your text file and an FTP app like a normal person, right?
Or, you can use a plugin like the Google XML Sitemap Generator plugin.
Redundant SEO Plugin Features
You may find features included in SEO plugins that are redundant or not necessary.
Canonical URLs
Canonical URLs are built into WordPress. You don’t need an SEO plugin to handle this.
Robots.txt and htaccess File Editors
If you have a text editor or an HTML editor, then you have all you need for editing a robots.txt file or updating an htaccess file. Additionally, you should only mess with those files if you know what you’re doing.
If you are skilled enough to edit these, then you don’t need a WordPress plugin to handle this. Just open your text file and an FTP app like a normal person, right?
404 Status Code Redirection
SEO plugins provide this under the mistaken belief that 404 status codes are harmful. As noted above by Google’s John Mueller, 404 response codes are fine. Just fix the ones that are due to actual errors, like a typo in the URL.ADVERTISEMENTCONTINUE READING BELOW
Sitemap Generators
As noted above, a site map is not strictly necessary because Google crawls URLs via RSS feeds and links.
However, a site map is useful if you have made major changes and want Google to discover them as fast as possible. In this case, a manually generated site map is useful, as you don’t have to install a plugin to generate it.
You can still install a site map generator plugin and that makes far more sense to do than installing a huge SEO plugin to do this one single task.
Keyword Research and Word Processing
WordPress and your server resources might not be the best platform for conducting keyword and word processing functions. If you want a real-world app for checking your content, use a real software program like the Hemingway App. If you want to do web page analysis use a real app that generates a word cloud.
Have SEO friendly URLs
If you have been researching the topic SEO, you might have heard that you should have SEO-friendly URLs on the blog. When it comes to WordPress, it is extremely easy to get such neat and clean URLs that search engines love.
To do it, go to your blog’s dashboard, and then Setting >> Permalink.
And choose the permalink structure that looks more readable and SEO friendly.
Remember one thing; fewer depths in the URL are better. That means less number of “/” (slashes).
I recommend you use the /%postname%/ or /%category%/%postname%/ as they are more search friendly than others. These structures allow you to place your keyword in them as well which the default structure doesn’t.
If you don’t set the permalink of your blog, then it will show the default example.com/?P=123 that is neither human friend nor SEO friendly.
Getting search-friendly URLs is called as URL optimization which is very important factor of SEO, and it’s too easy with WordPress.
Adding title and meta descriptions
Adding Title and Meta Description to a website is really very important because Title is one that impacts search engines the most, thus help in search ranking. Meta description is one that forms the search preview for search engines, it even shows up when you share your links on social media.
Set the WordPress URL and Site URL
Since the Google Panda Algorithm was released, having duplicate content on your blog is like you are inviting Google to penalize the blog.
Many a times, even you don’t copy content from others; you face duplicate content problem due to some internal issues on your blog.
The first thing to avoid duplicate content I would suggest checking whether you have set WordPress URL and Site URL in your blog correctly.
If you haven’t set it properly, you might end up having two different URLs of your blog www.example.com and example.com. Though the same page will open in the browser if you open any of these URLs, but Google considers these as two different sites as they are opening on two different URLs.
If a blog has this problem, it is called canonical issue [Read more details of canonicalization on Moz]. When you type the domain address in the browser’s address bar with www, then the blog opens with www, and if you type without www, it opens without www. That means one site opens on two different URLs.
But if a blog doesn’t have this problem, then either you type with www or without www it will always open with the URL that you have set in your blog.
Go to your blog’s dashboard, and then Setting >> General.
XML sitemap
An XML sitemap is important for all kind of sites as it helps search engine crawlers to find all the posts, pages, and other links of the site on one page.
The standard structure of an XML sitemap looks like:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<urlset xmlns=”http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9″>
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>
<lastmod>2015-07-23</lastmod>
<changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
</urlset>
You can make use of third party tools to generate XML Sitemaps for your website. xml-sitemaps.com is one of the most popular tools to generate sitemaps.
You can even generate it manually by following the above-mentioned structure as that is based on the sitemap protocol.
Generate, download, and upload on your website’s root folder in a way that it displays at example.com/sitemap.xml URL.
Now, there comes the submission of XML Sitemap to the Google webmaster.
Let me show this step by step
Step 1. Set up a webmaster account.
Step 2. Submit your website there, and copy the verification code.
Step 3. Install the verification code into your website’s header.php file between <head></head> section.
Step 4. Go to webmaster tool again and click on verify. It will show you verified status once the webmaster tool finds the verification code on your site.
Step 5. Click on Crawl >> Sitemaps
Step 6. Click on ADD/TEST SITEMAP
Step 7. Enter the sitemap address that is sitemap.xml, and hit submit sitemap
That’s it! You are done!
This helps Google to crawl your site smoothly.
Improve page speed
Google considers loading speed as a ranking factor. Therefore, it’s important to improve the page loading speed of your WordPress blog. You can do it by considering few things:
- Choose one of the best hosting providers.
- Use CDN.
- Check image size before uploading on your blog.
- Crop images rather than scaling because cropping takes out some bytes from the image and make it lighter.
- Use very few banners in the sidebar.
- Make use of Google Speed Test tool to get suggestions to improve the page speed.
- User few number of plugins.
Conclusion
Some would argue that it’s best to avoid plugins altogether when they optimize a website. There’s a good chance that folks in this camp might recommend using a sitemap generator for your XML sitemap instead of installing a plugin. In the long run, though, you don’t need to make waves when you can simply add a plugin, check an option box and move on to more pressing tasks without having to worry about whether you used a plugin or not. Plugin are handy tools and resource for any WordPress site owner and shouldn’t be avoided completely if they help save time and simplify workflows. As long as the plugin is straightforward and easy to use, then it’s doing its job