There are numerous WordPress SEO plugins available, but some are for people who want to dig into the finer points of on-page SEO. Which should the average non-SEO-savvy user install, if any?
First of all, I would say that any WordPress installation will benefit from installing a minimum of two WordPress SEO plugins.
Website Map Plugin
It is essential that all pages and posts on a site are indexed by search engines and that any new content is detected quickly. This can be helped considerably by using a plugin like “Google XML Sitemaps” to create and maintain a sitemap for search engines (not just Google despite the name).
General SEO Plugin
The best known of the WordPress SEO plugins is probably the “All In One SEO Pack”. This has a number of features to improve SEO and if you don’t want to go into the details, you can simply leave the default settings. If you go that route, all you have to do is enter your homepage metadata (the title and description that appear in search engine results) and you’re good to go.
There are other general WordPress SEO plugins that have more features and if you are prepared to handle this, it may be best to choose something like the “Platinum SEO Plugin” from the start.
Other WordPress SEO Plugins
There are many more WordPress SEO plugins that can be installed and as long as you take the time to understand what they do, they can be beneficial but are not essential. Examples include:
- shorten url
- Title tag control
- Make Images SEO Friendly
- Manage redirects
- Manage 404 errors
- Automatic link generation
- Do not follow external links
- Easy social bookmarking (for visitors)
- Comment pagination control.
On-Page SEO
The most important aspect of SEO for any site is to ensure that the relevance of the content is 100% clear to the search engines. If this is not done, it will be much more difficult to rank well in search results. If your on-page SEO is poor, it will be nearly impossible to rank well, regardless of how many backlinks you get, simply because search engines don’t understand what search queries you’re relevant to.
I am using the SEOPressor plugin, which is a bit different from other WordPress SEO plugins in that it runs every time you create or update a page or post and checks the SEO on the page. It then prominently displays the result with a percentage score. Since on-page SEO is so important, I now see it as an essential tool for anyone who is serious about getting good search engine rankings.