As someone who practices SEO every day on the lovely WordPress blog you are currently reading, I have experimented with what techniques make the site more efficient. Some of these tactics include micro level changes like alt tags and post titles, and macro level changes like reducing page load time and editing code to make Google happy. I’ve found the easiest way to implement changes big and small is to use SEO WordPress Plugins. Not only are they easy to implement, but they can reduce the headache of constantly talking to your developer for every minute change.

Although there are many different types of plugins on the market, there are some that I highly recommend for SEO purposes. So let’s get right into it and reduce those manual code changes with our list of the best SEO WordPress Plugins:

Content optimization

You can’t discuss SEO on WordPress without mentioning WordPress SEO by Yoast. I use this plugin daily, and it really helped me when I was starting out to know what a website requires for SEO. This plugin gives you the option on every post to include a title, meta description, and content with the same focus keyword. This helps streamline your ideas and gives you the chance to edit your content to best fit the search engines and your readers.

Another plugin that some people may prefer to do similar tasks is the All in One SEO Pack. This differs from the Yoast Plugin because it automatically generates titles and meta tags, so there’s no hassle. It also has the option to label duplicate content with Canonical URLs and to submit your XML sitemap to Google and Bing.

Security

However fun it is to read spam comments by robots with broken English, they can pile up. Your best bet is to maintain and delete them with Askimet. This plugin goes through your comments and filters out all the spam. No more ads for toothpaste on your tech blog, hooray!

It’s not something you really think about when maintaining your WordPress site, but preparing for hackers is a must. Using Wordfence Security you can rest easy with scans of your site for malicious users and IP addresses.

Performance

Without a fast site and working links, you might as well admit defeat on getting more visitors. Broken link checker is a must to ensure all your links are working properly. You can get emailed when it discovers an outdated link, so you can update it right as it happens.

While doing website scans, one of the most prominent problems I discover is page speed. This is normally the case because of large images or too many files to load. WP Smush.it can reduce your image sizes by “smushing” them while W3 Total Cache caches your site by minifying your posts and inline styles. Be careful when installing these plugins, though, because there is a possibility of reducing image quality and corrupting the site’s files.

Communication

Everybody needs a contact form on their website to give customers the chance to talk to you about your awesome product/content. Contact Form 7 and Gravity Forms are great examples of plugins to make the creation of forms easy.

Contact form creation is a painless process with Contact Form 7 because all you have to do is create a form on your WordPress back-end and add its short code to whatever page you want to include a form. You can also add analytics to track the form’s submission through Google Analytics Event Tracking by inserting a JavaScript code into your form.

Gravity Forms can not only create contact forms, but also surveys, online orders, and feedback forms as well. When you’re done creating the form, you can add it to any post by clicking the button next to adding media above the kitchen sink. You can also receive an email notification for any of your form’s submissions.

As a list, this hardly scratches the surface of all the SEO WordPress plugins available. Some can go into every detail of your code or add fun social media widgets to your site. However, these SEO plugins can be the backbone of your site and the core of your digital marketing efforts to get more targeted visitors. At the end of the day, it isn’t about pleasing website crawlers and search engines, but the people who will benefit from your content.