How to Set Up WordPress SEO? It’s easy! Here’s how.
This post will help you get your WordPress site to the top search engines.
Today we will be discussing 8 WordPress plugins that can help improve your SEO.
To also set up the best WordPress SEO setup possible for any WordPress website.
Google Considers Several Factors To Determine Your SEO Ranking
Google considers many factors when determining your SEO rank. In fact, they use hundreds of them.
You must remember these important points if you want to be found on Google.
- Mobile-friendliness
- Site speed
- User experience
- Structured markups
- On-page SEO
How can someone without any SEO experience manage all these factors?
To make sure their website ranks well in search engine results.
Here’s the solution.
These plugins are yours to use.
You’ll rank higher in search engines like Google if you do.
What is a WordPress Plugin?
Before we get into the best WordPress plugins for SEO setup, let’s first define what a WordPress plug-in is.
Particularly since WordPress has over 58,000!
A WordPress plugin is code that plugs into your WordPress site. It can be used to:
- This extension extends the functionality of your current site.
- New functionality is available entirely
Plugins can be thought of as performance parts for a sportscar.
The car is fully functional and ready for you to drive when it leaves the factory.
Performance parts can increase speed, handling, and downforce.
WordPress plugins are the same.
WordPress offers enough features to make a website that is fully functional with all the features it has.
Plugins are a great way to make it even more useful and to improve your SEO.
These are the 8 plugins that we recommend to get you started with WordPress SEO setup on your website.
WordPress SEO Setup: 8 WordPress plugins to help you
- Smush – Lazy Load Images and Optimize & Comppress Images
- Lazy Load
- W3 Total Cache
- Sucuri Security
- Yoast
- AMP for WP
- Very Simple SSL
- Schema- All In One Schema Rich Scribbles
1. Smush – Optimize & Compress Images, Lazy Load Images
It’s common to include relevant images when creating pages on your website.
Load speed is also a key factor Google considers when ranking your website.
Image size is a major factor in how fast a page loads. It all depends on its size.
The Smush image compression plugin allows you to reduce the image size without sacrificing quality.
When we refer to size, we are referring to the size of the server that holds your image. This is not the size of the image itself, although it plays an important role.
Compressing an image can reduce the amount of time it takes for the server to download it and increase the page’s speed.
2. A3 Lazy Load
It takes time for images to load even if you compress them on your website.
This is why we recommend A3 lazy load as our next plugin.
You don’t want multiple images loaded at once on a page.
Why? It takes time to load every image. If it takes too long, it can slow down your site’s speed, user experience and SEO rank.
What A3 lazy load does for you is that it allows your images to load while the user scrolls down your web page.
It even lets you choose the type of videos and images you wish to see and when.
This will make the web page load faster and provide users with an excellent user experience. Users won’t be deprived of any visuals that you have posted.
As images scroll down the page, they will load.
This is not just for you and your users, but search engines also prefer it.
3. W3 Total Cache
This plugin improves site load times. Hence, all these plugins are needed to speed up load times.
Page speed optimization will be crucial to your SEO efforts.
Load time is becoming more important as more people use their mobile devices to surf online.
You might think, “They just released 5G technology.” You’ll have the fastest load times. This plugin is necessary for loading time.
It is common to believe that internet speed is not possible.
Because load time is not directly related to connection issues, many factors affect your site’s speed.
This is why users with a slow connection cannot improve your site’s speed. However, the W3 total cache plugin can.
The W3 total cache plugin ensures that your site loads as quickly as possible.It will also:
- Connect with CDNs and
- Make better use of the server’s resources.
They also have caching, which is something that most web hosting providers do not have unless they are one of the very best.
Google uses two factors to rank sites: reducing their load time and improving its performance.
Your site speed is the obvious one.
User experience is another important factor. Site speed can greatly impact whether users have a positive experience or a negative one when browsing your website.
Here’s an amusing fact:
- 37% of visitors abandon your site after it takes more than 5 seconds to load.
- 70% of customers believe site speed influences their buying decisions.
Site speed is very important.
4. Sucuri Security
You may think that this plugin is about security. However, you haven’t mentioned it as an SEO factor in your post.
Although you are correct, security is more important than you might think for your website’s SEO.
Consider this: Your website could be hacked and you will lose significant traffic.
It is very difficult to make a complete recovery once this happens.
Although Sucuri does not guarantee your site will be hacked, it can help and it is well worth the extra protection.
Sucuri scans your website for suspicious activity.
If you sign up for their premium membership, they will even provide a firewall.
Sucuri can help you to protect your website’s security.
5. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO helps with on-page optimization through controlling meta tags and title tags. It also assists with content creation.
It will speed up your site load times, manage data and create sitemaps for site owners.
This guide will help you make your WordPress website SEO-friendly.
WordPress is SEO-friendly from the beginning. This plugin is the missing piece to optimize your results.
Google is now much more competitive than in the past.
It is therefore more difficult to rank higher, if only a few SEO practices are followed.
Google wants you to do everything perfectly.
Yoast SEO lets you combine all your SEO efforts into one plugin. This allows you to achieve higher SEO rankings.
6. AMP for WP
This plugin will help you to be mobile-friendly.
Optimizing your website for mobile in today’s digital world is crucial for improving your SEO rank and providing great user experiences.
In the US, 63% are actually using mobile devices to access Google.
What does AMP for WordPress do for your mobile SEO?
AMP for WordPress speeds up the loading speed of your pages on mobile devices.
This is done by leveraging Google’s AMP Framework so that text-based articles load very quickly.
This plugin also supports Yoast SEO.
If you follow along and add all the plugins that we mention to your WordPress website, this plugin will work seamlessly with them.
7. It’s really simple to get SSL
Let’s first define SSL.
SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. These cryptographic protocols are designed to protect communications over a computer network.
SSL is used to protect sensitive information transmitted over the Internet. Only the intended recipient has access to that information.
It protects you against hackers who steal credit card information and other information.
This is vital because information sent over the internet is transmitted from one computer to another until it reaches its destination server.
You’ll find SSL on most top websites around the globe, including eCommerce sites.
An SSL certificate is now a requirement to rank well in this area.
This plugin will guide you through all the steps necessary to enable SSL on your website.
Browsers will warn users if you don’t have it.
This will result in the user being bounced most of the times, which can negatively impact your SEO rank.
This plugin and SSL security will make your site safer, as well as rank higher.
8. Schema – All In One Schema Rich Snippets
The Schema – All In One Schema Rich Shortcuts is last on our list.
Let’s first talk about snippets and the differences between rich and regular snippets.
A snippet, in the world search engines, is basically a brief summary of your page.
It gives users who are performing a search detailed information about your website.
Rich snippets are much more detailed than regular snippets.
Rich snippets include a similar summary to a regular one, but also star ratings, photos and prices as well as availability and price of products.
Sites with rich snippets are more likely to get viewed than sites that only have regular snippets.
Take a look at this difference.
Which of these sites would you choose to click on?
We are sure you’d click the bottom one!
Why?
A star rating is a sign that someone has actually made and enjoyed the chocolate cake recipe.
We might, judging from the star rating, too – hopefully that the cake is as rich and delicious as the snippet!
Why is it important to click on a website in search engines?
That’s because click through rate, which is the number of times your website appears in search engines and is clicked, is a Google ranking factor.
If you can get more people clicking on your website than a competitor’s, it will improve your SEO rankings.
You may already know this,The All in One Schema Rich Snippets plugin makes it easy to create rich snippets on your WordPress site.
Some people approach this with a “I’m going use as much schema Markup as possible,” attitude, and sometimes use phrases that don’t relate to their site.
We wouldn’t recommend this!
What is schema markup, you may ask?
Schema markup refers to code you put on your website in order to make search engines deliver more relevant results for users.
If you use too many of these and include schema markup unrelated to the content of your website, your SEO ranking will fall.
This is because search engines do not like it.
Don’t cheat the system when you use All in One Schema Rich Snippets.
Schema markup is a smart way to do it.
Try This WordPress SEO Setup
These 8 plugins will help you get started with your WordPress SEO setup. You’ll start to see an increase in both your website traffic and your SEO rank.
These plugins will make your site rank and traffic explode if you don’t use them before.
We are certain that plugins you’ve used before will be of great help to you.
We offer SEO services as well as general SEO services.