WordPress is one of the most popular CMS for content publishing and in an ocean full of WordPress plugins, it is very difficult for any WordPress user to find the best suitable plugins for their use. Not every single plugin is great.
Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing are the two most important sources of targeted traffic and there is not one who doesn’t want to leverage the immense potential of these two sources of traffic.
So in this article, I have compiled a hand-picked list of 20 SEO and Marketing plugins, to make your lives a bit easier with WordPress SEO and Social Media Marketing.
No one can guarantee you #1 position using these SEO plugins, or viral social media traffic immediately after installing these marketing plugins, but these plugins will surely help you optimize your site better for the search engines and the social media sites and in the long run will skyrocket the traffic of your blog.
SEO Plugins that Make Wonders
1) WordPress SEO by Yoast (Free)
Once again, this is the name that comes first in any SEO plugins list as one of the most popular (4.7 stars out of 5) and most critically appreciated SEO plugin ever. This plugin literally does wonders with your on-site SEO like writing better content, generating XML sitemaps, configuring various link elements, breadcrumbs, social integration and much more.
The only down-side with this plugin is its difficulty in configuration. When I was very new to SEO and I installed this plugin, I was wondering what to do and what not to, in the huge ocean of options it was offering.
But if you have a descent experience in SEO, then this plugin is a must-have for you. It’s absolutely free, but it functions like something even better than premium.
2) All in One SEO Pack (Free/Premium)
As the name suggests, All in One SEO Pack is another great SEO plugin taking care of your entire on-site optimization. With a whopping 13 million downloads, this plugin is surely the most popular SEO plugin among all WordPress users, but it obviously has some pros and cons.
The thing that I and its 13 million users mostly like about this plugin is its simplicity in usability. You get almost every functionality you need, everything in a single page. This plugin appeals to the masses mainly because it’s extremely “easy to use”.
Obviously the SEO by Yoast plugin is a higher-quality option, but it is not for the new and unexperienced users with very little SEO knowledge.
3) SEO Ultimate (Free)
SEO Ultimate is a complete plugin to manage the search engine optimization of your entire site. It’s the ultimate SEO plugin you must have, if you are not a big fan of the SEO of Yoast or the All in one SEO plugin.
It has some exclusive features that I don’t see in the other two aforementioned plugins like the Canonicalizer, 404 Monitor, Link Mask Generator and Author Highlighter. The only thing that it doesn’t have is the functionality to generate XML sitemaps.
4) Scribe SEO (Premium)
Anybody has got enough reasons to fall in love with this awesome plugin. I have used this plugin for a long time, and the main thing I like about this plugin is the fact that it is vastly different from many of its competitors.
It will not ask you to enter your keyword term in the beginning and then push you to construct your article, but it will analyze your content after you have finished writing it in your natural flow and will then suggest you tweaks to make it more search-engine friendly.
It will also help you connect with other fellow bloggers and social media users who are interested in the linking back and sharing the particular content you are writing.
But the only reason that stopped me from using this plugin, is its cost. It doesn’t even have a free version or even a trial one to try out.
5) SEO Pressor (Premium)
If you write good quality content naturally, then you will obviously rank good in the SERPs, but this doesn’t happen all the time. There are only 10 spots in the first page of Google and the competition is immense. So, you need to do something different to outrank competition.
SEO Pressor is a great tool to assist you in writing a very good quality content giving you a score based on the quality of your entire article. The thing that I like mostly about this plugin is its Over Optimization check included in the latest version and also the LSI keywords feature.
I must say that it is one of the most affordable plugin available for only $47 for a single site and $95 for multi-site licenses lifetime.
6) SEO Rank Reporter (Free)
One of the most important aspects of SEO is to track how you are progressing. SEO Rank reporter is something that will make rank tracking of our keywords super simple. You can just add your keywords and it will check the rankings in every 3 days and report it in a graph.
And the most important thing is that this plugin is absolutely free, so you are going to save a lot of money from using the premium alternatives. But I expect some usability improvements in the recent future and also the ability to add multiple comma separated keywords at once.
7) SEO Smart Links (Free/Premium)
SEO Smart Links is known to be one the best automatic interlinking plugin. Interlinking of different posts, tags, categories from blog posts really matters a lot in term of both SEO and user engagement. Without proper interlinking of posts and pages, the search engine crawler will find it difficult to index all pages of your blog and pass link juice effectively.
I have found this plugin to be one of the most complete solution to this problem. You can easily control – dofollow and nofollow, manage your affiliate links and redirection requirements too from this single plugin.
8) W3 Total Cache (Free)
You might wonder, how W3 Total Cache is included in this SEO plugins list. Directly, I cannot say that W3 Total Cache is a SEO plugin, but indirectly it is. Matt Cuts have mentioned that Google uses “page load speed” as a signal while ranking websites.
Not only Google, but also Bing is quite obsessed with speed. So, it is very crucial to speed up your WordPress site, and here comes W3 Total Cache to the rescue. It generates static HTML files of the dynamic PHP files of WordPress, thereby speeding up your WordPress site, enhancing user experience and improving SEO.
9) AuthorSure (Free)
I have found this plugin to be one of the simplest and easiest way to verify your Google Authorship. Now a days, the face of SEO is changing significantly with the increased focus on AuthorRank.
So, if you are well-active in Google Plus and want to get your profile photo in the SERPS, then this is the plugin you must install. This plugin features a whole lot of options and customizations to get your authorship verified, so that AuthorRank can help you get better rankings in the SERPs.
10) Google XML Sitemaps (Free)
With around 10 million downloads, Google XML sitemaps is one of the simplest plugins you can use to create XML sitemaps for your site, so that the search engines like Google and Bing finds it easier to index your site. It will also notify the search engines whenever your posts and pages gets updated.
There are many other plugins which does the same thing, like the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin too have a built-in feature to generate XML sitemaps, but they are not as good as this plugin. I have been using this plugin for such a long time, and I have never found a single problem with it.
11) Broken Links Checker (Free)
It is very essential to monitor the broken links of your site and fix them as soon as possible, as it affects both user experience and SEO. Broken links are like dead ends where for both the visitors and the search engine crawlers.
This plugin does a great job in automatically scanning all your posts, pages and comments for links which are broken, or have redirects. You can easily edit these links right from the plugins page without manually going to each and every post or page.
12) SEO Friendly Images (Free)
Many a times, we forget to add proper TITLE or ALT attributes to the images. Sometimes, it’s a tedious job to add these attributes to each and every single image on a resource or showcase post having around 50 or 100 images.
This plugin works like a charm adding these necessary attributes to all your images ensuring that you don’t miss to grab the huge image search traffic. I myself have seen a considerable improvement in my image search traffic after installing this plugin.
Social Media Marketing Plugins
13) Flare (Free)
It’s a simple yet fantastic looking social sharing plugin for WordPress. It is quite similar to Digg Digg and Sharebar, but it looks better than the others. The sharing bar will not appear from the start but will slowly fade in as the user scrolls down and will follow the user.
It supports Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Reddit and the icon sets used here are simply awesome.
14) ShareThis (Free)
It’s another very popular social sharing plugin for WordPress. You can customize this plugin in any way you want to match it with the look-and-feel of your site. The best thing about this plugin is that it is constantly upgraded by its developers and they work very hard in adding some exclusive features to it every time.
Installing and configuring this plugin is very simple, quick and easy, thanks to the intuitive settings page it offers.
15) Social Metrics (Free/Premium)
I am simply in love with this plugin right after installing it. It’s a very new arrival to the market. It gives a great way to track or monitor how all the posts and pages of your entire blog are performing.
The user interface is clean and simple, just the way it is meant to be. It will show you the number of times the posts have been shared over Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Digg, StumbleUpon and many more in a well-formatted tabular form.
16) Shareaholic (Free)
With around 2 million users, Shareaholic is one of the most popular sharing plugins in WordPress. I have used this plugin for a long time, and it has never disappointed me.
The look-and-feel of this plugin is simply fantastic which helps a lot to grab the eyes of the readers and get your content being shared virally. I once had some functionality problems but the support team is very prompt and helpful in solving your problem right on time.
17) Most Shared Posts (Free)
Another simple yet cool plugin, which you can use to display the most shared content of your blog to your visitors. It is very likely that the most shared posts in your blog will catch the eyes of the new visitors too and will get shared again and again.
You can display the Facebook Likes, Twitter tweets and Google +1’s in this widget. It’s very easy to configure and you can also select the no of posts you want to display and also the time period.
18) SocialBox (Premium)
If you have a good fan base of your WordPress blog in Facebook, Twitter and YouTube then why not display it to your visitors so that you can have a chance to increase your fan base even more.
It’s a very simple and easy to configure plugin which adds a good-looking social widget to your blog. It supports many social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo and many more. The widget looks simple and can easily match the design of almost any blog.
19) InsiteBar (Free/Premium)
InsiteBar gives you a chance to be more social and interactive with all your visitor through a fast and reliable toolbar at the top of your site.
The bar has a Facebook like and Twitter tweet button and also gives the visitors a chance to make a Google search right from the toolbar.
You can also customize the bar in any way you want with its huge collection of apps. It’s also known to work seamlessly in mobile devices like iPad, iPhone and many more.
20) Social Toolbar (Free/Premium)
It’s something quite similar to InsiteBar, but I must say it is even better in some aspects. It can display your latest tweet right in the toolbar and also has counters to display the Facebook likes and tweets for any particular page.
There are lots of settings available so that you can customize the toolbar to match the design of your theme and if you want to get Google+ and Facebook fan pages or want to put the toolbar in the top (instead of bottom) then you should go for the pro version of it.
