Do you want to add an SEO Editor role in WordPress?
If you have hired an SEO specialist to work on your website, then adding them as an SEO editor is the safest way to give them access to your WordPress website.
In this article, we’ll show you how to easily add an SEO editor role in WordPress.
Why Add an SEO Editor Role in WordPress?
WordPress comes with a user role management system that defines what a user can and cannot do on your website. You can assign different user roles to your team members depending on their job descriptions.
By adding an SEO Editor / Manager role to your WordPress website, you will be providing secure access to the SEO features and tools to some specific members of your team.
An SEO Editor role has access to the SEO settings for all your posts and pages. This allows them to optimize posts for SEO and work on search rankings.
An SEO Manager tends to have access to sitewide SEO settings including sitemaps, redirects, local SEO, and more.
By default, WordPress doesn’t offer either the SEO Editor or SEO manager user roles.
Note: You’ll need the Pro version of the All in One SEO plugin to unlock SEO user role features.
Upon activation, the plugin will launch the setup wizard which will walk you through the setup. If you need help, then you can follow our guide on how to set up All In One SEO in WordPress.
Now you can simply add a new user to your WordPress website by visiting Users » Add New page or you can edit an existing user account by visiting the Users » All Users page.
After that, simply click on the Edit link below the user account that you want to change.
On the Edit user screen, scroll down to the Role option and select SEO Editor or SEO Manager user role from the drop down menu.
Don’t forget to click on the Add / Update User button to save your changes.
These users will now be able to access SEO features based on the user role assigned to them.
For instance, SEO Editor will be able to see and edit SEO Settings for a post or page by simply editing them.
On the other hand, a user with the SEO Manager role will also be able to view the General SEO settings on the WordPress admin sidebar.
They will be able to make changes to site-wide SEO settings that may affect your entire website.
How to Customize SEO User Roles in WordPress
By default, All in One SEO selects the best access control settings for each SEO user role.
However, sometimes you may want to add or remove permissions from the SEO editor or Manager user roles.
All in One SEO lets you customize SEO user roles so that you can select which options they’ll have access to.
Simply head over to the All in One SEO » General Settings page and switch to the Access Control tab.
Caution: Be very careful when giving a user role access to any option under the General SEO Settings. These options may allow them to apply SEO changes that will affect your entire website.
From here, scroll down to the ‘SEO Editor’ option and toggle the switch next to the ‘Use Default Settings’ option.
This will reveal the Default Settings that All in One SEO has chosen for the SEO Editor role.
As you can see that by default the SEO editor user role only has access to Post SEO settings.
From here, you can check or uncheck items that you want to allow the SEO editor to have access to.
For instance, you can remove access to the Manage Redirects option or give them access to the Search Statistics feature.
Similarly, if you want to change settings for the SEO Manager user role, then you will need to switch off the ‘Use Default Settings’ toggle next to the SEO Manager option.
This will reveal the default settings that All in One SEO has chosen for the SEO manager user role.
By default, the SEO manager user role has access to several options under the General SEO settings as well as all the options under the Post SEO settings.
You can change that by checking the items that you want them to have access to or unchecking to remove access from specific items.
Once you are finished, don’t forget to click on the Save Changes button to store your settings.
Adding FAQ schema can help boost your SEO rankings and organic click-through rate by making your frequently asked questions appear directly in Google’s search results.
In this article, we will show you how to add FAQ schema in WordPress and improve your rankings, step by step.
What Is FAQ Schema?
FAQ schema is a smart markup code, also known as structured data, that you can add to your website pages to help Google identify an FAQ section.
If you add FAQ schema, then Google may choose to reward you with an enhanced search result listing that also shows FAQs directly below the name of your WordPress website.
Here’s an example of an FAQ result. Google shows the questions, and you can click the down arrows to see the answers.
This increased visibility on Google means more traffic to your website. It also makes your blog look like an authority on the subject.
Plus, FAQ schema makes your content more helpful to users who prefer the question-and-answer approach.
With FAQ schema, you have control over the questions and answers. You can customize the content however you like. You can even add emojis to boost your organic click-through rate (CTR).
Your FAQs can also appear in Google’s ‘People also ask’ boxes, which is another potential visibility boost.
These boxes appear for many search queries and offer a list of additional questions, each linked to a website for more information.
It’s important to note, though, that adding FAQ schema in WordPress will not guarantee that your FAQs appear on Google. However, it will improve your chances of being seen.
You should only use FAQ schema if your page has a list of questions with answers. If your page only asks one question, then you should use the QA schema instead.
You should not use FAQ schema for advertising purposes or for questions and answers that contain violent, obscene, hateful, dangerous, or illegal language.
If the same question and answer appear multiple times on your page, then it’s important to only add FAQ schema in one instance.
The questions and answers in your FAQs must also appear in the content on your page.
Finally, make sure each question includes the entire text of the question and each answer includes the entire text of the answer.
How to Add FAQ Schema in WordPress
The easiest way to add FAQ schema in WordPress is to install a plugin that handles it for you, but you can also do it without a plugin.
We will cover both options and you can use the quick links below to jump to the method you want to use:
Note: There is a free version of All in One SEO available, but you need the premium version to add FAQ schema in WordPress.
Upon activation, the plugin will run a setup wizard. You can follow the on-screen instructions to set it up. If you need more help, then please take a look at our guide on how to properly set up All in One SEO for WordPress.
Once you are done with the setup, you will return to the WordPress dashboard.
You can see a new ‘All in One SEO’ menu item in the admin sidebar.
If you had the free version of All in One SEO installed, then all of your settings will automatically transfer to the Pro version. The free version will be automatically deactivated.
Now that All in One SEO is installed and activated, you need to navigate to the page or post where you would like to add FAQ schema.
Simply scroll down to the bottom of the content editor, where you will see the AIOSEO Settings.
When you click on the ‘Schema’ tab, you can see that the schema settings are automatically enabled by default. Then, you can click on the ‘Generate Schema’ button to customize it.
This will bring up the Schema Catalog, where you can select the type of schema you want to implement.
Next, you need to find the FAQ option and click the ‘Add Schema’ button next to it.
Now, you can start entering your FAQ information.
Start by adding a name and description for your page or post. You can even use AIOSEO’s easy emoji picker to add emojis to these fields.
After that, you should scroll down to start adding the Question and Answer fields for your first FAQ question.
You can also click the ‘Add Another Question’ link to add more questions.
Once you are done, don’t forget to click the ‘Add Schema’ button.
Start by adding your questions and answers on the left side of the tool. You can click ‘Add Another FAQ’ to add as many questions as needed.
As you type, the schema markup will update on the right.
Your next step is to paste the code you just created into WordPress. Simply click ‘Copy FAQ Schema’ to copy the code.
After that, navigate to the page or post where you want to add the FAQ schema.
If you are using the block editor, then you need to add a Custom HTML block and paste the FAQ schema markup inside that.
If you are still using the old classic editor, then you need to toggle to the text editor.
After that, you can paste the schema markup at the bottom of your post.
When you are finished, just click the ‘Update’ or ‘Publish’ button to save your changes.
Testing Your WordPress FAQ Schema
Since your FAQ schema code is specifically for Google, you can’t tell whether it’s working just by looking at your page.
To test whether your FAQ schema markup is correct, you can use Google’s Rich Results Test page. Simply enter the URL of the page with FAQ schema and click ‘Test URL’.
Google will analyze your page for all kinds of schema markup, not just FAQ schema. You may see multiple results if your page uses other kinds of schema.
Once the text is complete, expand the results under the “FAQ” heading.
You should see the actual question-and-answer pairs that you added to your FAQ section. If these are correct, then you are all set.
If they aren’t correct, then you will need to go back and double-check that you set up your FAQ schema properly.
If the correct items still aren’t showing, then we recommend clearing your WordPress cache because caching plugins may show an outdated version of your content to Google.
Improving your WordPress SEO is crucial for getting more traffic to your website. Sadly most WordPress SEO guides are too technical for new users to get started.
If you are serious about increasing your website traffic, then you need to pay attention to the WordPress SEO best practices.
In this guide, we will share the top WordPress SEO tips to help you improve your WordPress SEO and get more organic traffic.
You might have heard experts saying that WordPress is SEO friendly. This is actually why a lot of people choose WordPress to start a blog or a website.
While WordPress makes sure that the code it generates follows the SEO best practices, there is a lot more you need to do if you want to maximize your SEO efforts.
We have a number of actionable steps that you need to take to properly optimize your WordPress SEO.
To make it easy, we have created a table of contents to help you easily navigate through our ultimate WordPress SEO guide.
We know the idea of optimizing for WordPress SEO can be intimidating for beginners, especially if you’re not a tech geek.
But don’t worry — it doesn’t have to be complicated. Start here to learn the basics, and then you can start applying them to your own website.
What is SEO?
SEO is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s a strategy used by website owners to get more traffic by ranking higher in search engines.
Search engine optimization isn’t about tricking Google or gaming the system. It’s simply about creating a website that has optimized code and formatting which makes it easy for search engines to find your website.
When people search the web for the topics you write about, your search-engine-optimized content will appear higher in the search results, and you’ll get more people clicking through to your website.
Search engines are often the biggest source of traffic for most websites.
Google and other search engines use advanced algorithms to understand and rank pages appropriately in search results. However, those algorithms aren’t perfect — they still need your help to understand what your content is about.
If your content isn’t optimized, then search engines won’t know how to rank it. When people search for the topics you write about, your website won’t appear in the search results, and you’ll miss out on all that traffic.
It is really important for all business owners to make their website search engine friendly, so that they can maximize their search traffic.
SEO can get technical, but it doesn’t have to be. Just learning a few basic SEO tips to optimize your site can give you a noticeable boost in your website traffic.
You don’t have to be a tech genius to use the techniques below. If you’re already using WordPress, then you’ve got what it takes!
Let’s get started optimizing your website.
Check Your Site’s Visibility Settings
WordPress comes with a built-in option to hide your website from search engines. The purpose of this option is to give you time to work on your website before it’s ready to go public.
However, sometimes this option can get checked accidentally and it makes your website unavailable to search engines.
If your website is not appearing in search results, then the first thing you need to do is to make sure that this option is unchecked.
Simply log in to the admin area of your WordPress site and visit Settings » Reading page.
You need to scroll down to the ‘Search Engine Visibility’ section and make sure that the box next to ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’ is unchecked.
Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your changes.
Note: If your website has been running for more than 6 months, then please don’t change your permalink structure unless you’re using the numbers option. If you’re using Day and Name or Month and Name, continue using that.
By changing your permalink structure on an established site, you will lose all of your social media share count and run the risk of losing your existing SEO ranking.
If you must change your permalink structure, then hire a professional, so they can setup proper redirects. You’ll still lose your social share counts on the pages.
If you are just starting out with your website, then you need to choose whether you want to use www (http://www.example.com) or non-www (http://example.com) in your site’s URL.
Search engines consider these to be two different websites, so this means you need to choose one and stick to it.
You can set your preference by visiting the Settings » General page. Add your preferred URL in both the ‘WordPress Address’ and ‘Site Address’ fields.
Despite what someone else might say, from a SEO standpoint there’s no advantage to using one or another.
One of the best parts about WordPress is that there’s a plugin for everything, and SEO is no exception. There are thousands of WordPress SEO plugins which makes it harder for beginners to choose the best WordPress SEO plugin.
Instead of installing separate plugins for individual SEO tasks, we will help you choose the best WordPress SEO plugin that does it all, and it’s 100% free.
Choosing the Best WordPress SEO Plugin
When it comes to choosing the best WordPress SEO plugin, you will most likely narrow your choices down to the two most popular solutions: Yoast SEO or All in One SEO Pack.
An XML Sitemap is a specially formatted file that lists every single page on your website. This makes it easy for search engines to find all of your content.
While adding an XML sitemap does not boost your site’s search rankings, it does help search engines find the pages quickly and start ranking them.
If you’re using the Yoast SEO plugin, then it will automatically create an XML sitemap for you. To find your sitemap, just go to this URL (don’t forget to replace example.com with your own domain name):
http://example.com/sitemap_index.xml
We will show you how to submit your XML sitemap to Google in the next step.
Google Search Console, also known as Webmaster Tools, is a set of tools offered by Google to give website owners a look at how their content is seen by the search engine.
It provides reports and data to help you understand how your pages appear in search results. You also get to see the actual search terms people are using to find your website, how each page appears in the search results, and how often your pages are clicked.
All this information helps you understand what’s working on your site and what’s not. You can then plan your content strategy accordingly.
Google Search Console also alerts you when there is something wrong with your website, like when search crawlers are unable to access it, find duplicate content, or restricted resources.
If you’re not using Yoast SEO, then you can watch our video that shows an alternative way:
Once you have added your website to Google Search Console, click on the Sitemap from the left menu and then paste the last part of the sitemap URL.
Click on the submit button to save your changes.
Google Search Console will now check your sitemap and use it to improve your website’s crawling.
Once you have successfully added your sitemap, it will appear as pending. It does take Google some time to crawl your website. After a few hours, you would be able to see some stats about your sitemap. It will show you the number of links it found in your sitemap, how many of them got indexed, a ratio of images and web pages, etc.
We recommend that you check your Search Console at least on a monthly basis for gathering insights and see your website’s SEO progress.
Often beginners make the mistake of thinking that installing and activating a WordPress SEO plugin is all that’s needed. SEO is an ongoing process that you must keep up with if you want to see maximum results.
All top SEO plugins allow you to add a title, description, and focus keyword to every blog post and page. It also shows you a preview of what users will see when they Google your website.
We recommend that you optimize your title and description to get maximum clicks.
When writing your blog post, simply scroll down to the SEO section and take full advantage of it.
If you’re wondering how to choose a focus keyword or focus keyphrase, what is a good title, or what is a good meta description, then we have covered it in details in our beginners guide to optimize your blog posts for SEO.
We highly recommend that you read it because on-page SEO is crucial for your success.
Doing Keyword Research for Your Website
Many beginners use their best guesses to figure out what topics people are looking for and what they should add to their blogs and website.
It is like shooting an arrow in the dark. You don’t need to do that when you can use real data to find out what people are looking for.
Keyword research is a research technique used by content creators and SEO experts. It helps you discover words users enter into search engines to find content, products, and services in your industry.
You can then use those words and phrases into your website to get more search traffic.
There are a ton of keyword research tools (both free and paid) that you can use. We recommend using SEMRush, it helps you discover keywords and even find out the keywords where your competitors are ranking.
If you follow the basics of WordPress SEO and use the best WordPress SEO plugin, you will already be ahead of most websites.
However if you want even better results, then you need to follow the WordPress SEO best practices below.
These aren’t too technical and most won’t even require you to touch any code. But they will make a big difference if you follow them.
Properly Using Categories and Tags in WordPress
WordPress allows you to sort your blog posts into categories and tags. This makes it easy for you to manage your content by topics, and for your users to find the content they’re looking for.
Categories and tags also help search engines understand your website structure and content.
Often beginners get confused on how to best use categories and tags. After explaining this to thousands of readers, here’s how we approach categories and tags.
Categories are meant for broad grouping of your posts. If your blog was a book, then categories will be the table of content.
For example, on a personal blog, you can have categories like music, food, travel, etc. Categories are hierarchical, so you can add child categories to them.
On the other hand, tags are more specific keywords that describe the contents of an individual post. For example, a blog post filed under the food category can have tags like salad, breakfast, pancakes, etc. Think of these as indexes section in a textbook.
By using categories and tags properly, you make it easy for your users to browse your website. Since it’s easy for users, it also makes it easier for search engines to browse your website.
Search engines assign each page on your website a score (page authority). The recipe of this score is kept secret so that people cannot game the results. However, the most common signals of authority are links.
This is why it’s important that you link to your own content from your other blog posts and pages.
You should make it a habit to interlink your own posts whenever possible. If you have multiple authors, then create a pre-publish blog post checklist that requires them to interlink at least 3 other blog posts.
This will help you boost your pageviews, increases the time users spend on your site, and ultimately will improve the SEO score of your individual blog posts and pages.
Comments can be a strong indication of user engagement on your website. Engaged users mean more links back to your site, more traffic, and improved SEO.
However, you need to make sure that your comments are real and not spam. Spammers submit comments with bad links which could affect and even ruin your search rankings.
This is why we recommend everyone to start using Akismet. It is one of the two plugins that come pre-installed with every WordPress site, and it helps you combat comment spam.
If your blog posts attract a lot of genuine, spam-free comments, then you should pat yourself on the shoulder for building such an engaging website!
However, too many comments on a post can make it load slower which also affects your search engine rankings. (Keep reading below to find out more about how speed affects SEO.)
To prepare your website so that it can handle the burden comments put on your server and speed, you can split comments into multiple pages. See our tutorial on how to paginate comments in WordPress.
As mentioned above, links help search engines decide which pages are important. When you link to a website, you are passing some of your site’s SEO score to that link. This SEO score is called “link juice.”
For good search rankings, you need to make sure that you are getting more link juice from other websites than you are giving away.
Adding the “nofollow” attribute to external links (links to websites that you don’t own) instructs search engines not to follow those links. This helps you save link juice.
A normal external link looks like this in HTML:
<a href="http://example.com">Example Website</a>
An external link with the nofollow attribute looks like this:
WordPress displays and links to your posts from a number of pages like home page, category archive, tags archive, date archive, author pages, etc.
By default, it shows the full article content on all these pages. This affects your site’s SEO, as search engines may find it to be duplicate content. Full articles also make your archive pages load slower.
Showing full articles everywhere also affects your page views. For example, users who subscribe to your RSS feed will be able to read the full article in their feed reader without ever visiting your website.
The easiest way to solve this is by showing summaries or excerpts instead of full articles.
You can do this by going to Settings » Reading and select summary.
Even if you follow all the WordPress SEO tips and best practices above, if your site is slow or gets taken down by a hacker, your search engine rankings will take a big hit.
Here’s how to prevent your site from losing search engine traffic due to slow performance or lax security.
Optimize Your Site’s Speed and Performance
Research shows that in the internet age, the average human attention span is shorter than that of a goldfish.
Web usability experts believe that users decide whether they want to stay or leave within a few seconds of visiting a website.
That means that as a website owner, you only have a few seconds to present your content and engage users. You don’t want to waste this precious time making your visitor wait for your website to load. Search engines like Google now rank faster websites higher than slow loading websites.
Images are more engaging than text but they also take more time to load. If you are not careful with image sizes and quality, then they can slow down your website.
You need to make sure that you use images that are optimized to load faster. See our guide on how to speed up WordPress by optimizing images for the web.
Another trick you can use to optimize your images for search engines is to use a descriptive title and alt tags. These tags help search engines understand what your image is about. They also help users with visual impairment as their screen readers can read the alt text to them.
WordPress allows you to easily add title and alt tags when you upload an image.
If you are a photographer or add a lot of images to your WordPress site, then you need to use a gallery plugin.
Each week, Google blacklists around 20,000 websites for malware and around 50,000 for phishing. When a site is blacklisted, it doesn’t show up in any search results at all.
This means that the security of your WordPress site is crucial for good rankings. You don’t want all your hard work on SEO to go to waste if your site is compromised by a hacker.
The good news is that it’s not that difficult to keep your WordPress site safe — see the step by step instructions in our ultimate WordPress security guide.
SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a technology that encrypts the connection between a user’s browser and the server they are connecting to. This adds an additional security layer to your WordPress site.
Websites secured with SSL are indicated by a padlock sign in the browser’s address bar. This makes your website more trustworthy, and it is required if you are running an online store with WordPress and processing sensitive payment information.
If you want a premium wildcard SSL certificate or just a regular certificate with security warranty, then we recommend using Domain.com.
Their SSL certificates come with a minimum of $10,000 security warranty and up to $1.75 million security warranty. You also get a TrustLogo site seal to display on your site for added credibility.
We hope this article helped you learn how to properly optimize your WordPress site for SEO. Go ahead and implement a few of these WordPress SEO tips, and you should see an increase in your traffic within a few months as the search engines process your changes.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
Often we’re asked about what are the best WordPress SEO plugins and tools that we recommend.
That’s because search engines are a major source of traffic for most websites on the internet. Optimizing your website for search engines can help you rank higher in search results and significantly grow your business.
In this article, we will share the best WordPress SEO plugins and tools that you should use. Some of these tools offer similar functionalities, so we will also highlight which ones are the best for specific use-cases.
Things You Must Know About WordPress SEO Plugins & Tools
When reading SEO WordPress tips or searching for “best free WordPress SEO plugins”, you will come across articles that feature several dozen tools.
This can be quite overwhelming for beginners and non-techy users.
The truth is that you don’t need dozens of top SEO tools to get higher search engine result rankings.
While most blog posts (including ours) will share the top most popular SEO plugins, it is extremely important for you to understand the use-cases of each tool.
For example, you never want to use more than one WordPress SEO plugin on your website. We will mention All in One SEO (formerly All in One SEO Pack), Yoast SEO, SEOPress, and Rank Math. You need to pick only one to avoid plugin conflict.
We’ll mention SEMRush, Ahrefs, and few other powerful tools, but you don’t need them all when you’re first starting out since they have a similar feature set. We will share what tools we use in our business, and which features are the best among each tool.
With that said, let’s take a look at our expert pick of the best WordPress SEO plugins and tools.
All in One SEO for WordPress (AIOSEO) is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market. Used by over 3+ million users, it is the most comprehensive SEO toolkit that helps you improve search rankings without learning any complicated SEO jargon.
The free version of AIOSEO has all the essential features, but the pro version gives you everything you need to outrank your competitors.
It comes with the easiest setup wizard that automatically helps you choose the best SEO settings for your business. AIOSEO shows you TruSEO on-page analysis with an actionable checklist to optimize your posts and pages.
The on-page SEO checklist includes a smart meta tag generator where you can use dynamic values (current year, month, day, custom fields, author info, and much more) in your SEO title and meta descriptions. This means you don’t need to update a post just to change SEO titles.
AIOSEO also comes with Rich snippet schema markup, smart XML sitemaps (with advanced controls), SEO health check, and other useful features to grow your search engine visibility.
There is a built-in social media integration to add Open Graph metadata as well. This means you can choose which image or thumbnail you want to show when your pages are shared on social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.
AIOSEO also comes with built-in WooCommerce SEO tools for eCommerce sites. This includes features like dynamic optimizations, individual product page optimizations, product image SEO, and other handy features to bring more organic traffic to your online store.
For more SEO savvy users, it includes full control of RSS feeds, Robots.txt editor, local SEO, breadcrumbs, Google News sitemaps, video SEO, advanced redirect manager, 404 tracking, IndexNow integration, and more.
For business owners, it comes with SEO user roles, so you can manage access to important SEO features without handing over control of your website.
Update: Recently AIOSEO added a Link Assistant which is a game-changer for internal linking. It helps identify link opportunities, gives you linking suggestions in real-time, and you can bulk-add internal links with just a few clicks.
Overall, All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the most beginner-friendly and comprehensive WordPress SEO plugin on the market. It’s easy to configure and eliminates the need to install multiple plugins to do things on your WordPress site. It works perfectly for all types of businesses, eCommerce, blogs, news, and other websites.
SEMRush is the best overall SEO tool on the market. Used by professional SEO experts, marketers, bloggers, large and small businesses, it provides a comprehensive set of tools to grow your traffic.
You can use it to find organic keywords and search terms that you can easily rank for. It also allows you to do competitive research and see which keywords your competitors rank for, and how you can beat them.
SEMRush SEO Writing Assistant tool helps you improve your website content to beat the top 10 results for your focus keyword. It integrates with WordPress, and this will help you write more SEO-friendly content.
You can also generate SEO templates and get easy search engine optimization suggestions for your content along with advanced SEO recommendations.
SEMRush seamlessly integrates with All in One SEO (AIOSEO) to help you find additional keyphrases for your focus keyphrase. You can see related keyphrases and their search volume right from WordPress. Then, you can add them to your content with the click of a button.
Google Search Console is a free tool offered by Google to help website owners and webmasters monitor and maintain their site’s presence in Google search results.
It alerts you when Google is unable to crawl and index pages on your website. You also get helpful tips on how to fix those crawl errors.
Most importantly, it shows which keywords your website is ranking for, anchor texts, average position, impressions, and more. You can use this data to find keywords where you can easily rank higher by simply optimizing your content. You can also use this keyword data to come up with new blog post ideas.
Tip: You can use MonsterInsights to track your keyword rankings inside WordPress admin area using Google Seach Console data. We will cover this tool later in the article below.
Yoast SEO is a popular WordPress SEO plugin that allows you to optimize your WordPress website for search engines.
It lets you easily add SEO titles and descriptions to all posts and pages on your website. You can also use it to add Open Graph metadata and social media images to your articles.
Yoast SEO automatically generates an XML sitemap for all your website content which makes it easier for search engines to crawl your website. It also helps you easily import your SEO data if you have been using another SEO plugin.
Other features include readability analysis, Google and social previews, and faster load times for a better user experience.
Google Keyword Planner tool helps you generate your own keyword ideas from Google itself.
No one on the planet has more insights into what people are searching for than the search giant Google. This free tool is offered to Google’s advertisers for free and anyone can use it. Its main purpose is to show advertisers the keywords they can bid on for their advertising campaigns.
It also helps advertisers choose the right keywords by showing them an estimate of search volume, number of results, and difficulty level.
As a content marketer or blogger, you can use this data to find keywords with high search volume, high advertiser interest, and more importantly keywords where you can easily outrank all other sites.
Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO analysis tool for marketers, bloggers, and businesses. It is a popular alternative to SEMRush and offers a lot of similar tools and features.
It allows you to do keyword research, competition analysis, backlink research, SEO audit, monitor keyword rankings, and more.
It also offers a detailed content analysis tool that helps you improve content while targeting specific keywords.
While there’s a huge feature overlap, what Ahrefs does really well is backlink analysis. We can use it to see which sites are linking to multiple competitors, but not us. This helps us get more backlinks and build more partnerships.
They also help us identify which content multiple of our competitors are ranking for that we aren’t, so we can create content on those subjects to get more exposure.
Last but not least, Ahrefs helps us better identify duplicate content and keyword cannibalization which helps us merge and upgrade the right content to boost our rankings.
For the reasons above, we pay for both SEMRush and Ahrefs because they’re both good for specific use-cases.
SEOPress is another simple yet powerful WordPress SEO plugin. It includes all the features you would expect from an SEO plugin like meta title, description, open graph support, image and content XML sitemaps, redirects, and more.
It comes with a straightforward setup for beginners and advanced controls for more experienced users. It is comparable to other top WordPress SEO plugins on the market in terms of features and options.
The paid version of the plugin is cheaper than some other premium WordPress SEO plugins on the market.
Note: SEOPress is a WordPress SEO plugin. Remember, you only need one WordPress SEO plugin on your site.
Rank Math is another user-friendly WordPress SEO plugin that allows you to optimize your website for search engines and social media. It comes with a setup wizard and allows you to import data from other SEO plugins during the setup.
You can use it to easily add meta title, description, and Open Graph metadata to your blog posts. The plugin also allows you to generate an XML sitemap, connect Google Search Console, and control access to plugin features based on user roles.
Note: Rank Math is an AIOSEO alternative. Remember, you only need one WordPress SEO plugin on your site.
Schema Pro allows you to add rich snippets to your website which makes it stand out in search results.
Rich Snippets allow you to make your website stand out in search results by showing star ratings below a review, prices below a product, image or video next to the description, and so on.
Top WordPress SEO plugins, like All in One SEO (AIOSEO) already add structured rich snippets data to your website. However, if you need more schema types or want to extend the functionality of your existing WordPress SEO plugin then Schema Pro is the way to go.
Schema Pro also allows you to use it alongside your existing WordPress SEO plugin by mapping the plugin data to Schema Pro fields.
KeywordTool.io is one of the best free keyword research tools available right now. It allows you to simply generate keyword ideas by typing in a keyword. These keyword suggestions are gathered from Google’s autosuggest feature. It also shows you keyword suggestions from Bing, YouTube, Amazon, and more.
These keyword suggestions are a treasure of information. You can also get search volume, cost per click, and other data for each keyword by upgrading to their paid plan.
Redirection helps you set up SEO friendly redirects in WordPress. It is a handy broken link checker that helps you easily fix 404 errors in WordPress by setting up redirects.
Broken links can affect your site’s SEO and create a bad experience for your users. If you have been running a blog for some time, then you should check your site from time to time for broken links and fix them.
There are multiple ways to easily find broken links in WordPress. Once you find a broken link, you may need to fix it by pointing users to the correct link or removing the incorrect link.
SEOQuake is a useful SEO tool for website owners. It is available as a browser add-on for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Safari web browsers.
It provides SEO related information for any website. This data includes page health, age, last updated, Alexa rank, and many other parameters. It is one of the most downloaded browser addons by SEO professionals.
Apart from that, the SEOQuake toolbar can show you all the same data search results when you type in a keyword. This information can be extremely useful if you are gauging competition for different keywords. You can even download search results in CSV format and prepare your own excel sheets of search data.
These tools give you the additional advantage when optimizing your website for SEO. They do not advertise themselves as SEO tools but they are essential for every website and play a significant role in your website’s search performance.
Site speed is a major factor in search rankings. That’s why you need to monitor your website speed & performance to make sure it’s not affecting your SEO.
The easiest way to boost your website speed is by enabling caching. WP Rocket is the best WordPress caching plugin on the market, which allows you to set up caching without diving into any technical stuff.
Many beginners rely on their best guess to make their marketing decisions. You don’t need to do that when you can easily get the insights you need to improve your website’s SEO strategy.
It tells you where your users are coming from, your top content, what users do on your website, and more. It also allows you to track your eCommerce SEO by seeing which products are popular and where you are losing customers.
As a blogger or webmaster, we all care for SEO (Search Engine Optimization, to be sure that we are on the same page). Since the majority of our websites are powered by the WordPress platform,...