With a global market share of 50-60%, WordPress is the most popular CMS for websites. The key to a successful website is traffic, without traffic to your website you simply have something pretty to look at. To drive more traffic to your site from search engines you must be actively working on your site’s SEO. WordPress offers an abundance of plugins with many free plugins available to help you work on and improve your SEO. Whether you are an SEO consultant or business owner, these plugins can help you boost a website’s visibility. In this article we will look at 5 WordPress plugins to amplify your SEO. 

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is one of the most popular WordPress SEO plugins. It’s simple to use and allows you to action your tasks quickly. It can help you get your site get indexed effectively through the creation of an XML sitemap, you are also able to optimise your meta titles and descriptions simply per page. The redirect management tool is an effective way to manage your deleted pages with 301 redirect implementation. Yoast also has capabilities to help you verify your Google Search Console account, Bing Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics more with ease.

Broken Link Checker

Over time the links in your content can become broken, sometimes websites are deactivated or page is deleted on external sites. As a result of this your site is then linking to dead content which is not great for your SEO. The broken link checker plugin can help you stay on top of your broken links a little more efficiently as it can notify you once the plugin has automatically detected a broken link on your website. You can customise how often and where this plugin works to detect broken links. So you can choose options such as posts, pages, comments and the frequency with which checks are made and to where the notifications should be sent. Then you simply jump in and update the content with a new, relevant link or remove it entirely.

W3 Total Cache

Page load speed has been a contributing SEO ranking factor for quite some time. Google wants users to find the right information and to find it quickly. The slower your website loads for a user the more likely they are to bounce from your site which is not a great signal for Google, this is where W3 Total cache can assist. This plugin allows your website skip a few steps of the web page generation process, as it makes a copy of the page after its first load and then serves that cached version to subsequent users. This faster load time is great for user experience, it can not only boost your SEO but with good user experience you often get an increase in conversions too.

WP Smush

On the topic of improving your page speed you need to remember that images can hinder your website speed performance. WP smush is a plugin that allows you to quickly & easily optimise your images without compromising or losing out on quality. It is very easy to use and you can optimise the images automatically as they are uploaded to your WordPress site. When it comes to existing images all you need to do is go to your plugin and request a bulk Smush of existing uploaded images and the plugin will take care of the rest for you. This is a great tool especially for beginners because it's a simple way to optimise your images without any fuss.

When it comes to improving your WordPress website SEO power, plugins can help make the job easier. You don't have to be a web developer to take advantage of these plugins and enjoy the increased SEO benefits.