The Best SEO Plugin For WordPress 2013 – WordPress SEO Reviewed

In the previous article about 30 Top SEO Blogging Tips To Sky Rocket Blog Ranking In Search Engines, I talked about the one and only WordPress SEO plugin that I use for my blog. In this article, I am going to review it and explain to you why I consider it as the best SEO plugin for WordPress and I will also explain why it will help boost your rankings in search engines. So if you want to rank higher in the search engines and improve your WordPress blog’s visibility in search engines, read on to find out more.

The Best SEO Plugin For WordPress 2013 – WordPress SEO by Yoast

Undoubtedly, WordPress is proven to the most popular blogging tool used by millions of users today. WordPress has made blogging very easy and simple for all the users. Anyone with basic knowledge of computers can now start a blog. Apart from that, WordPress has gained immense popularity because of its ease of use, extensive customization, robustness, frequent updates and help from the community. And the best part is that WordPress is completely free and they don’t charge you a penny to use it to start a blog yourself.

Now as if it weren’t’ enough, the WordPress community didn’t stop there. Although they provide us with vanilla version of WordPress that any user can use to get started immediately with, they have gone a step further and have made provisions for us to add additional functionality by means of “plugins”. All these plugins are available for free and we can install these plugins and use them as we see fit. One of the most important reasons to use a plugin would be for the benefits of “Search Engine Optimization”. With a well Search Engine Optimized blog, your blog can receive large amount of traffic every day. And in order to get more traffic from the search engines, you have to make sure that your blog is optimized well and completely for the search engines so that the blog ranks higher. For a novice user, this is very difficult. So what to do?

Enter “WordPress SEO by Yoast”

One of the most appreciable additions to the plugin repository is the addition of a WordPress best SEO plugin called “WordPress SEO by Yoast”. This plugin is available free of charge and you download this from WordPress and get started using it within the next couple of minutes. I have personally used this plugin for over an year and because of the features it offers and for it’s simplicity, I consider the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin as the best WordPress SEO plugin. By using WordPress SEO by Yoast, you can perform Search Engine Optimization on your blog/website with minimal efforts and boost your website’s ranking in search engines. The following are some of the features that I find, are important and very appealing.

Very Useful and Important features of the WordPress SEO by Yoast

1. Article Posting area

WordPress SEO – Article Posting Area

1. Focus Keyword

This is by far the most important feature that separates WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast from other WordPress SEO plugins, in behavior and looks. As can be from the image, WordPress SEO offers different functionality in the article posting area. The main feature that I want to highlight now is the auto-suggestion of applicable keywords. Notice how I have entered my main keyword and how it is showing the related keywords for my keyword? I use the keywords as basis for my long tail keywords and I include the most relevant keywords from the suggestions box into my article. That helps my articles rank better in search engines and increases overall visibility of my blog.

2. Snippet Preview, SEO Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords

Under the General Tab, along with the focus keyword option, you can find Snippet Preview, SEO Title, Meta Description and Meta Keywords. I am going to discuss the functionality of each of these features below.

Snippet Preview: Enter something in the SEO Title box & in the Meta Description textarea. The Snippet Preview area will show a preview of how your article might appear to visitors when your blog shows up in search engines. This is very helpful as I can either add new content or edit existing content in the SEO Title & Meta Keywords so that most of my content (if not all) can appear to the users.

SEO Title: There is a limit counter right beneath the box against this. This limit counter shows the number of characters that will be shown from as your Article Title to search engine users. You can fine tune this to make sure that the title does not get cut off.

Meta Description: This works similar to SEO Title with the exception that it previews Meta Description and allows more number of characters to be input. Fine tuning this Meta Description can help convey the intended message to your users and help increase more clicks to your website.

Meta Keywords: As I stated in my previous article, these are useless for Google, but may be useful for the other search engines. Use this if you want to target search engines other than Google.

3. Page Analysis Tab

WordPress SEO – Page Analysis Tab

This tab is awesome too.It shows the mistakes that I am making in terms of under-optimizing my blog for search engine optimization or if I am over-optimizing them for search engine optimization  Either ways, it analyses my mistakes and tell the same to me and I get to correct them. This is a huge time saver and I do not have to use any other external software do do my page analysis.  Everything happens right here, right now, with the blog. Can’t beat that!

4. Advanced Tab

WordPress SEO – Advanced Tab

Lets you provide more information that the search engines can make use of. This will again help increase your blog’s visibility  in search engines, so you can change them as needed.

5. All Settings of WordPress SEO by Yoast – Top WordPress SEO plugin

WordPress SEO – All Main Settings

As can be seen from the image above, there are loads of other options available. Each of these options have many settings, so I may not be able to cover them in this article. But I will try to summarize the functionality of each of those options below.

Dashboard: Provides different options to maintain general setting including Webmaster Tools info for Google, Bing & Alexa.

Titles & Metas: Provides you rich set of options to show default values in your blog articles/pages, should you forget to include any while posting a new article. So this will serve as backup if you forget to include all necessary info. This will save your search engine ranking, at least to some extent.

Social: Provides access to Facebook & Twitter sharing & lets you customize them.

XML Sitemaps: Lets you generate XML Sitemaps. This is the format that Google bot will need in order to be able to understand the structure & layout of the articles in your blog/website to crawl effectively.

Permalinks: Let’s you modify the Permalinks for boosting ranking in search engines.

Internal Links: Provides enhancements for Internal Links. This will improve ranking in search engines when used correctly.

RSS: This helps enhance your blog feeds and also protects them from dumb web scrapers.

Import & Export: Import & Export data for re-installation or for backup purposes.

Edit files: Let’s you edit the contents of the .htaccess file. Warning! This is strictly for highly advanced users only. If you are a new user or want to play safe, just forget about this option and use other options normally.

Conclusion:

So as you may have understood by now, there are many obvious benefits to using a SEO plugin for WordPress and specially WordPress SEO by Yoast for your blog/website, than not using it.

Note:

It’s a good idea to take a backup of your blog/website, whenever you are experimenting with a plugin or adding a new one. I have used WordPress SEO by Yoast for over an year and have had no problems at all. Hopefully this will be the case with you as well.

Your Turn!

Have you used WordPress SEO by Yoast so far? Do you agree that it is the Top Best SEO Plugin for WordPress? If you are using it, can you share your experiences with us? Or are you using different WordPress SEO plugins? Would you mind sharing your feedback on them? Please feel free to share your thoughts and views by commenting below.