By 2014 more than 75 Million websites were built based on Wordpress. From blogs to company pages, all making use of this wonderful php based framework. One shouldn’t be surprised that a popular system such as Wordpress comes with a great quantity of great plugins that can be added to your Wordpress projects. Amongst these great plugins you will find a number of useful SEO plugins that help to promote your website within search engines. Here we introduce you to our favourite tools, and hope you will find them useful for your very own WordPress and Search Engine Marketing projects.

WordPress SEO by Yoast

Surely one of the most popular SEO plugins to date. It is simple, userfriendly and powerful. It caters for pretty much everything in terms of configuration. With SEO by Yoast you can easily manage metatags of each page, connect to your webmaster tools accounts and manage your sitemaps. SEO by Yoast does not stop there, it also allows you to edit your .htaccess and robots.txt directly. That is how powerful, yet simple the tool is. However, with power comes responsibility - be extra careful when making changes. A click on a checkbox can set a boolean that prevents a particular page from being indexed. We recommend to have a go on a sandbox environment before making changes on live environment. I know it is a no-brainer, but people still tend to take the shortcut since it looks simple. Make sure you install this tool!  

Scribe SEO

Scribe is a professional content marketing application designed for online content creators. It aims to to make content marketing simple. And we couldn't agree more with that statement. Scribe makes it easy to conduct in-depth research that helping writers and content producers to quickly identify content marketing opportunities for search and social media traffic and leads. The tool is less of a general SEO tool in the sense that it focuses on content marketing. And we all know - content is king. It also has the advantage to identify marketing opportunities that lead to more traffic and subsequently leads. We do recommend! 

All in One SEO Pack

All in all a great SEO plugin and it does deliver similar to what Yoast has to offer. However, in terms of usability and what's on offer in the standard version we still prefer Yoast. It is used by many and the reason is that it is reliable and does it well. However, make sure you are prepared to put down some bucks for the pro version in order to get the actual All in One SEO Pack. For a detailed list of functionalities visit the Plugin-website. As always be careful when making SEO related changes on your website with the help of All in One SEO Pack. Going through the reviews on the plugin page there are quiet a few disgruntled users who got into problems due to misconfiguration (most likely).

HeadSpace2 SEO

Most noticeable about this plugin is the support of languages. If you take a look at the plugin page of HeadSpace2 you see that more than 20 languages are supported. However, this alone does not make it a great SEO Tool. The fact that it is easy to use and let administrators and editors easily edit titles and meta data amongst other settings makes HeadSpace2 a solid SEO plugin for WordPress. What we would like to see, however, is the support of custom post-type. There has been rumours going around that it does in the near future, so perhaps the feature has already been implemented at the time you get to read this.

Local Search SEO Contact Page

Local Search SEO Contact Page displays microdata formatted business information for both Schema.org and hCard formats in a customizable fashion. It also generates a QR code, Google map, geo-tag coordinates, social media buttons, and much, much more. It is a great plugin for beginners and non-technical Search Engine Optimisation practitioners. Take a look at the plugin site of Local Search SEO Contact Page - great reviews and lots of options to improve the SEO friendliness of your WordPress site. 

Vibe SEO Pack

The scores on Wordpress.org speak for itself. With 4.5/5 stars it promises to be a great SEO tool. Vibe SEO Pack is not just a regular WordPress SEO tool as it advertises itself. Installing and enabling this tool you will have your WordPress SEO adviser right next to you 24/7. You just focus on writing and the plugin will do the SEO audit for each post and give you hints on what you should change in order to achieve best SEO results. So you have the same features as All-In-One SEO Pack as well as Yoast. We have been installing Yoast for our projects so far but this might changes as our first experiences with this tool has been pleasant. As always it comes down to user preferences. 

SEO Friendly Images

This tool comes in handy to optimise your images as the name suggests. We recommend using SEO Friendly Images for all of your projects. It automatically adds alt attributes and title tags to any images that do not have any. As you may know, a web crawler cannot read the contents or meaning of your images on your site, therefore adding title and alt attribute helps the search engine to know what the image is all about. Hence it allows your site to be better ranked on vertical search engines such as Google Images, which may lead to increased traffic. You can also purchase a premium version that gives you more features such as an images XML sitemap and other advanced settings.