Four SEO Plugin Types Any WordPress Content Creator Needs

Your content deserves an audience – and a good SEO strategy allows you to get just that. The good news is that you don’t even need any real SEO knowledge to come up with one, because there are a lot of great beginner-friendly WordPress plugins that can help you accomplish pro-level SEO tasks effortlessly.

Below are four of the most important ones:

A keyword manager

Back in the day, all you really had to do to rank high on search engine results pages (SERPs) is to stuff your website with keywords. The content didn’t even have to make sense as long as you were able to use the most important ones frequently enough. Unfortunately (or fortunately for people who actually spend time creating quality content), Google and most other popular search engines have adopted a stricter screening process since then.

Today, aside from having to pick the right keywords, you also need to use each one just the right number of times. Otherwise, your website might end up banned or penalized. This is why it has become crucial for anyone who produces content to have a tool to help them better manage their keywords.

WordPress Keyword Tool and Expand SEO are some good tools to start with.

A comments platform

SEO is not just about getting people to visit your website, it’s also about keeping them there and then getting them to come back once they leave. A good way to do so is to make your website as interactive as possible – which is what a good comments platform does. By encouraging people to talk about your website and content, you are not only able to engage them better, you also build a more active community.

Check out Disqus and Comments + to see what you can do with a good comments platform.

Social tools

Pretty much everyone is on social media nowadays – which is a good thing because it presents you with an opportunity to increase your reach significantly. All you have to do is make your content easy to share using a plugin that allows you to add share buttons on whatever web page or content you choose. This gives your followers the power to do your marketing for you (provided you put out share-worthy content in the first place). Keep in mind the word of mouth is still one of the most powerful marketing tools because it’s easier to trust real fans, followers and customers than someone who is trying to sell you something.

But these social tools are not just for sharing. Most of them also allow you to take control over how your content looks when shared on social media. Some even give you the ability to listen to social media sites like Twitter and repost any mentions of your brand to your website. The more mentions you showcase, the more popular and appealing your brand becomes to prospective customers or followers.

Some pretty good tools to start with are Easy Social Share Buttons for WordPress and Social Buzz.

SERP tools

Rounding out our list are the plugins that allow you to control how your link looks on SERPs using rich snippets. Simply put, rich snippets enable you to put more than just a basic description under your link. Reviews, business hours and pricing are just some of the things that you can add to make your link more attractive to users even if it is not number one on the list.

Tools like SEO Ultimate+ and Yoast allow you to not only play with rich snippets, but also do pretty much everything we’ve covered so far and so much more. You can think of them as all-in-one SEO solutions that are perfect if you don’t have the time and patience to search for a separate plugin for every SEO task that you want to accomplish.

Got an interesting WordPress SEO plugin to share? Tell us about it in the comments!