by Imagine getting a steady stream of visitors without spending a single penny for advertising costs. Sounds too ideal, but it’s realistically possible! You’ll simply have to invest time and effort into your SEO strategy. By getting high rankings on Google, you’re able to lay a strong foundation for your authority site’s revenue stream.
Bloggers’ go-to platform is WordPress, a Content Management System (CMS) that helped build over 455 million websites as of April 2020. It’s pretty easy to start an authority site with this platform, but it only provides you the bare minimum of SEO functions. Not much help in surviving the competition.
Thankfully, WordPress is compatible with helpful plugins that can give you a boost in Google’s results pages. Count on this guide to walk you through the best SEO plugins WordPress authority sites swear by.
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WP Fastest Cache
With more users surfing the web through mobile devices, there has been an increasing demand for fast loading speeds. Smartphone users rarely have access to fast WiFi connections, so your page must be fully displayed in a matter of seconds. Otherwise, expect to lose a lot of impatient visitors!
Apart from enhancing user experience, optimizing your website’s speed is a must since Google’s algorithm considers it as a factor in ranking search results.
This is where another WordPress plugin comes into play, WP Fastest Cache. Here you can use other caching plugins, but WP Fastest Cache has proven to be very reliable and works fine. A caching plugin stores loaded content from visitors and helps new visitors to view the page faster. This can reduce your loading time enormously. In my eyes the premium version of WP Fastest Cache is not worth it, the free version is enough.
If you are interested, you can also measure the loading time of your site with Pingdom before and after installation. So you can see how much influence a caching plugin can have on your loading time. If you are looking for more tips to improve the loading time, I can recommend this guide to make WordPress faster.
WP Schema
A trend in the SEO area are rich snippets. These allow you to display information in Google search results in addition to description and title. There are many different types, such as star ratings, pictures, event dates, prices or opening
Depending on the niche, Rich Snippets are more or less relevant to you. However, if you have opportunities to do so, you should definitely use them. Rich Snippets increase the click-through rate and thus your rankings in almost all cases.
The best plugin in rich snippets to use in WP scheme*. It supports all major types of Rich Snippets and the setup is extremely user-friendly. Just enter your company data and social media profiles and the basic settings for Rich Snippets are ready. Depending on the type of content and niche you have, you can also tag reviews, recipes etc.
SEO Backlink Monitor
After being successful in publishing high-quality content, authority sites take their SEO strategy farther by generating backlinks. These are external links from other websites that will lead users to your authority site, and boost your pages’ importance in the eyes of Google’s algorithm.
It usually takes a lot of effort to secure partnerships with other webmasters, so it’s smart to keep a close eye on your link building campaign.
Therefore you should keep an eye on your hard earned backlinks at all times and monitor your link building campaign. Here you should use a plugin like the SEO Backlink Monitor. With this plugin you can easily enter your existing backlinks and they are monitored continuously. The plugin provides information about the type of backlinks, so whether follow or nofollow and checks at regular intervals, whether your backlinks are still active.
If you want to learn how to improve your SEO through backlinks, here is a great guide to building more backlinks.
WP Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
You remember the importance of a fast WordPress website? Then this plugin is made for you. To meet the demand for fast websites for mobile devices Google developed Accelerated Mobile Pages. Without going into too much detail, AMP is a way to remove unnecessary JavaScript and CSS to display pages at lightning speed on mobile devices. To set up AMP for your website you need the help of a developer or a plugin like WordPress AMP.
This plugin easily converts your WordPress website to AMP. You can choose if you want to display only posts or also pages or the whole website on AMP.
I recommend to use AMP especially for blog articles, because it has a major impact on the look of your pages. Since blog articles mostly consist of text and images, AMP is especially effective here. And the best part? Google uses AMP as ranking factor and boots your rankings with it.
The disadvantage of the plugin is the lack of individualization options. Your page will be switched directly to AMP, but you have little influence on how it looks like in the end. Therefore I recommend you to test the plugin and find out if it works well with your theme and other plugins. Especially with page builders like Elementor there are sometimes problems.
Yoast SEO
The most important settings in Yoast SEO are:
- Create Sitemap
- Create Robot.txt
- Create meta description and title
- Link Search Console
To create the sitemap you just have to install Yoast SEO and then click on “General” in the settings. Here you can decide which functions you want to use. XML Sitemaps should be active in any case.
To create the Robot.txt you have to select the “File Editor” under “Tools” and can specify your Robot.txt here. For most WordPress pages a simple Robot.txt like:
Another important function is the creation of meta-titles and descriptions for individual pages and posts. You can specify these individually for each page in the Yoast SEO Box.
Conclusion
I hope I was able to give you valuable tips regarding the most important WordPress SEO plugins. If you implement them, I guarantee that your rankings will improve. But one thing is for sure, SEO is the interplay of hundreds of optimization measures and you will not suddenly end up on top of the rankings with just one plugin. At the same time, the quality of your content is still the top priority, if it doesn’t fit, even the best plugin won’t help. But with good content combined with strong SEO you will surely manage to achieve high rankings in your niche.
