The Perfect SEO Setup for WordPress: 8 Plugins to Skyrocket Your Rankings and Traffic

WordPress made it easy for anyone to create a website. It’s easy to use, it’s fast, it doesn’t require a lot of technical knowledge. Heck, even someone like me who’s not a developer can do things like SEO and modify WordPress with a breeze. Today I’m going to cover the perfect SEO setup for WordPress: 8 plugins to skyrocket your ratings and traffic.

Some of the most important factors that Google looks into in order to rank your site are some of the following: user experience, on-page SEO, site speed, mobile-friendliness, internal link structure, structured markups, all these things impact your ranking, and there’s hundreds of other factors. There’s over 200 factors that Google includes in their algorithm, and today I’m going to share with you plugins that’ll help you do all of these things, plus more, in a really easy and controlled way.

Plugin number one, W3 Total Cache.

Look, load time is super important, especially because people are using mobile devices now. Yes, there’s 4G, there’s 5G, you know, LTE, whatever you wind up calling it, but the problem with mobile devices is if you’re in a place that doesn’t have the best reception I don’t care if you have a 5G phone, you’re not going to load websites really fast. The W3 Total Cache plugin, it ensures that your site will load as fast as you possibly can. It’ll improve load times, it’ll help you connect with CDNs, it makes better use of your server resources so that way your server doesn’t have to continue to push the same content over and over again. Instead it caches it so it can deliver it to the user as quick as possible, and if you have a really good hosting provider they have caching built in, but most of the hosting providers that I’ve seen don’t have caching built in, hence I’m wrecking, recommending the W3 Total Cache plugin.

Smush Image Compression plugin.

If you’re creating blog content, and hey, you’re on a WordPress blog, or WordPress as a CMS, there’s a good chance you at least have a blog article or two, and in that blog article what do you think you’re including? Images, if you’re not you should change that and go add images right away. The Smush Image Compression plugin, what this does is ensures that your images still look really good and quality, so that way when someone looks at them they don’t look all pixelated and fuzzy, they still look really sharp, but this decreases the size of the image in which I’m talking about the server size, right, that hard drive space that it’s taking up, so when people ping your site it loads much faster.

Yoast SEO plugin

It does everything from on-page optimization, controlling your meta tags, your title tags. It even analyzes your content, telling you if you’re doing a good job or a bad job. It creates sitemaps for you, helps with structure and markup. It does pretty much what most things that you need if you want to ensure that your WordPress blog is SEO-friendly. Now look, WordPress out of the box is pretty SEO-friendly, but this plugin puts those last, final touches that are really important. Most people think like, “Oh yeah. If I do most of the things, that’s fine.” No, that used to work five, six years ago, but SEO has changed. Now Google wants you to do every little thing right, and when you combine them all that’s when you see the climb in ranking, the extra search traffic, and this plugin will really help you get there. So, use these eight plugins, you’ll find that your rankings will start going up over time, especially if you haven’t used any of them, but when you start combining all of them it does help quite a bit.