WordPress SEO: Essential Plugins To Get The Job Done

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show, where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now, here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Welcome to the SEO show. It is a wild and wet Tuesday. It's late in the day. We've had technical difficulties. We're going to fulfill our contractual obligation to our adoring fans to deliver one episode a week. And, uh, yeah.

ARTHUR: How you going Arthur? I'm doing good. I'm doing good. It's finally raining in Sydney. It hasn't rained in a while.

MICHAEL: I've actually just put some new plants in at home, as you know, and I'm very excited. I saw the photos.

ARTHUR: Very excited about the potential this rain brings. I saw you put some pavers down as well.

MICHAEL: Well, they're not down yet. I'm framing it all out ready for my weekend work. It's about all we've got to do around here at the moment. But yeah, look, we're not here to talk landscaping. That's our new podcast coming next week. This week we're staying on the SEO show and we are going to talk WordPress plugins this week. A very exciting world of WordPress plugins. Now look, WordPress powers about 40% of the web, you were saying?

ARTHUR: That sounds right, yeah. I think I mentioned it a couple of weeks ago.

MICHAEL: Well, look, if you think you mentioned it, then I'm going to quote it this week and say, yes, 40%. You know, I can check while you're talking. But anyway, it doesn't matter whether it's 40, it doesn't matter whether it's 25, they power a lot. And most businesses, you know, most lead generation type businesses, service businesses and the like are using WordPress. And if you want to get good SEO results, WordPress out of the box or off the shelf is not really going to do all you need to do, or you need it to do. You need to have plugins to extend different functionality and make your website nice and pleasing to Google. So we're going to talk about how you can best please Google, you know, the best plugins to use, or at least the plugins that are in our arsenal that we're using most of the time. So hopefully there's a few handy hints in here that help you with your own efforts. So what can we start with? Let's start with the most obvious one to start with, SEO plugins themselves. Right? Because SEO in the main, you know, you need to control title tags, meta description tags, schema data, robots files, and all that stuff you can't control with WordPress. You can install SEO plugins and get the job done. So what are some of your faves, Arthur, when it comes to SEO plugin? My faves?

ARTHUR: Probably not my favorite. Not my favorite, but probably one of the more common plugins would be a plugin called Yoast. Um, over 5 million active installations. Basically, like you mentioned, it's just a, it's a SEO plugin that you can use to update the pages, you know, page titles, meta descriptions, meta robots, canonicals, a free tool with a pro version.

MICHAEL: And these plugins, it's not like you just install them and they magically SEO-ify your WordPress. You know, they're just a means to an end to control SEO factors on your pages. So you still have to put in a title tag that makes sense and works to optimize your page, but these plugins just make it easy. So Arthur's mentioned Yoast. My personal favorite is SEO Press. Another couple are RankMath and SEO Framework. In and of themselves, they're not going to improve your SEO just because you've installed them. It's how you use them that matters.

ARTHUR: That's right. And look, they all do the same thing. You know, like with SEO framework, it was one of your favorites back in the day, just because of how light it was, how nice the code was. It was secure and safe. We know that Yoast had a couple of issues back in the day with vulnerabilities and, you know, page titles being wiped and things like that.

MICHAEL: They also had that problem where image files were creating their own page on your site. I remember that. So this is the thing with these plugins, if they make a mistake, it can negatively impact your site, unfortunately. So you do need to keep on top of things, keep them updated, like with everything on WordPress. That's it. But they all essentially do the same thing. Some of them have costs, all of them have a free version. Most of the time, the free version is going to be fine for most businesses. I think so, yeah. A lot of them, it's just, you know, if you create a page, you can control the metadata for that page straight from the page itself because these plugins will add that functionality to the, I guess, the editing section of the WordPress page. But much better than not having them because it just speeds things up, makes your life easy. Moving on, another big part of WordPress SEO, of course, is the speed of your site, as we always harp on about. Very important. Very important. And like with everything with WordPress, there are plugins to help with speed. There's things like caching plugins, there's things like plugins that strip needless stuff out of SEO, out of, sorry, WordPress. And then there are plugins like NitroPack, which basically do all of it. Probably my favorite. That's your favorite? Yeah, well, give a little rundown. Give us your high level spiel or your elevator pitch for NitroPack. Why do you love it?

ARTHUR: Man, to be honest, I don't quite 100% understand how it works. I know that it speeds up the site. I know that it's got a built-in CDN. It minifies CSS and JavaScript and all that. I was just reading the way they do it is they have, they preload the assets away from the main thread. So all this complex stuff, technical stuff sometimes goes a bit over my head, but it does a great job in improving paid school, paid school speeds. You know, if you're running a GT metrics test or if you're using page speed insights, nine out of 10 times, whenever I've installed nitro pack on a site, you know, the scores are close to perfect. If not a hundred.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So it, um, it, it has a lot of features built into the one tool. So as you said, a CDN, a content delivery network, that's where your files are served from computers all around the world. So that the closest computer to the person accessing your site is what serves up the files and makes it nice and quick for them. That's good. If you have global traffic, if you're just a local Australian business, then you probably, you know, it doesn't matter that much. But it has things like HTML and CSS minification, where it will strip out, you know, all of the spaces and needless aspects of the code to make the file size smaller. Yeah. It presses images and the like, and then it does all that sort of like pre-fetching and pre-loading stuff that these speed tools look at when assessing, you know, how fast your site is. So yeah, it works in a different way.

ARTHUR: It works in a bit of a different model as well. So you pay per page view. So it's not like these other tools like WP Rocket where you pay an annual fee and you can go in there and optimize your site. You pay per page view. So basically it optimizes every time someone visits the page. Is that right?

MICHAEL: I think it optimizes it and then it just counts the page views. The page views, yeah. I guess the, um, part of that, that, um, page views might be related to the CDN bandwidth or is the CDN bandwidth might be even be separate from the page views. And they're just, you know, they put these pages in to try and make people pay more if you have a bigger site, perhaps.

ARTHUR: Yeah. We can get it for free. Yeah. But you have to have, if you've got a small site. Yeah. Yeah.

MICHAEL: And you have their logo at the bottom of your site, which not everyone wants.

ARTHUR: No, it's good for testing though. If you want to see how, how quick it can make your site.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah. So that's probably the way to go with it. You know, install it. It's pretty easy to set up. You can install it, do a page speed test on your site first. And then again, once you've installed it, wait for Google to come back and crawl it on. Just see if it helps with your rankings and the like before you even pay for it. Otherwise you're looking at like anywhere from 20 bucks to a few hundred bucks a month.

ARTHUR: Yeah. It's not like you get what you pay for, like most things in life and it's not cheap, but if you want to have a fast, quick site and you want to rank well, then you know, what's $30 a month. Yeah. It's nothing at the end of the day.

MICHAEL: Like if you're going to pay for a CDN, like, you know, max CDN or something like that, anyway, that's probably, you know, 8, 10, 12 bucks, something like that. So this is more expensive, but it has all of the magic secret sauce that they use to really make you site fast. And it's not just the speed tools that, um, that see your site as being fast. Like if you use a site, particularly a site on ludicrous mode, so they have different settings within NitroPack. You can go like slow, medium, fast, ludicrous. Yeah, your sights load bloody fast.

ARTHUR: Yeah. And one big benefit is you don't need to be a developer to do it. You can, a lot of the time you can just install NitroPack and then, you know, flick the switch and it does everything for you. Like WP Rocket and all these other tools, sometimes you do need someone who knows what they're doing to play around with the settings. Otherwise it can break your site. Don't get me wrong. NitroPack can break your site if you, you know, put it straight to Ludicrous mode and you have a bunch of, you know, CSS or stuff that gets stripped. It's happened in the past, but generally it's pretty, you know, easy to set up out of the box for someone that's never used one of these PageSpeed plugins before.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Normally with NitroPack, if you just roll it back from like ludicrous to a less, a less ludicrous version.

ARTHUR: It fixes it.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah. Whereas if you install W3TotalCache, for example, a plugin on your site and put a setting the wrong way, it could totally break your site. Excuse me, I'm getting excited talking about PageSpeed.

ARTHUR: It's happened in the past.

MICHAEL: Um, so. What else? So the other ones, yeah, on the PageSpeed side of things, there's NitroPack, which does all its magic secret sauce out of the box, sort of like the, you know, the one click install, very easy approach to things. The other way is installing caching plugins like WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache. So there are the ones we've used in the past. They allow you to turn on, you know, browser caching and server caching and compression and CSS minification or combining files together, that sort of stuff. But it's much easier to break your site with them. Yeah, that's why you always have to have a backup. Absolutely. Another thing on the speed side of things that I like is ShortPixel, the plugin ShortPixel. So it's an image compression tool. You basically just install it in WordPress. You need to have an account with ShortPixel. And then as you upload images into your WordPress library, ShortPixel will compress them and make the file size much smaller if possible. So it's sort of like a, you know, really with your images, you want to be uploading small files to begin with. But if you don't, for whatever reason, having this short pixel in place is like a fail-safe. It will detect if the file sizes are massive and make them smaller, which is good. Really handy. Yeah, because big images are a really quick way to slow down your site. Another thing on the PageSpeed side of things is a plugin called PerfMatters. So performance, perf, matters. You know that one, Arthur?

ARTHUR: I do, yeah. I'm not overly familiar with it because I haven't played around with it too much, but I know you love it, so.

MICHAEL: Yeah, I just think it's pretty cool. You can check it out at perfmatters.io. They actually have a really good guide on their site as well called the performance checklist, where they run through things like hosting and caching and all that stuff. If you've been listening to us for a while, these guys recommend Kinsta. We love Kinsta. So if you have your Kinsta combined with NitroPack, and then install PerfMatters and ShortPixel, that is a really good stack of tools for WordPress speed.

ARTHUR: So this perf matters, does it work with NitroPack or does it conflict? It's its own independent tool. Can you run an independent tool so you can run them together at the same time?

MICHAEL: Yeah, you can. Okay. There would be some of the functionality of perfmatters is duplicated by nitropack. So things like, you know, CSS and JavaScript optimization, but within perfmatters, you know, if there is a conflict between the two, you can just toggle different things that you want on and off. Right. But what perfmatters does is, you know, it can disable things that you're not using on your site. So things like emojis and all that, if you're not, if you don't want, if they're not being used on your site, you can just disable them. Or you can disable self pingbacks and you can remove RSS feed links and you can disable comments and comment URLs if you want, like all these little settings within WordPress that are just there by default that you don't necessarily need. So you can just move through and very quickly get rid of them all. And it's a very lightweight plugin.

ARTHUR: I'm looking at the site now, so it looks really handy.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So if you, if you, um, if you use, as I said, PerfMatter is combined with NitroPack combined with ShortPixel and hosted all on a great host like Kinsta, you're going to have a really fast site, basically. Anything you want to add to that nerdy little diatribe I've just been on?

ARTHUR: No, I think you nailed it. I think you nailed it. I mean, like, like you said, they're all, all the plugins are very similar. They all do the same thing. So it's just a matter of finding which one works the best for you.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So what else is important from an SEO point of view? Security. Absolutely.

ARTHUR: So I guess the two main plugins that we use would be WordFence and Securi. So basically these tools or these plugins just help permit your site from getting hacked.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Which with WordPress happens a lot. Yeah. Very common. We have business owners come to us all the time. Their site's hacked. Like they will have, Nike Air Max or Viagra.

ARTHUR: Viagra is a very common one.

MICHAEL: Yep, Viagra, like just page after page after page. On their website, they don't even know it's there, but it's indexed in Google and it's just not good. Google doesn't like serving up hacked websites in its search results. People don't like visiting hacked websites. Business owners don't want a hacked website hurting conversion rates. It's not good for anyone, a hacked website. WordPress makes it easier for hackers to hack outdated sites. So these plugins like Securi or WordFence. will prevent things like brute force attacks from damaging your site, where, you know, bots will just try and guess your login details, or if there's things like, you know, plug-in sort of vulnerabilities, It will detect when that's the case, let you know you need to update them, prevent obvious ones if it's able to. So it's, you know, just again, these plugins, they have a free version. It's just well worth having the free version installed. And most of the time it's well worth upgrading to one of the paid versions of them. Yeah, definitely. You can get really deep with them, set up firewalls and all sorts of stuff. Another thing, you know, our website, for example, we just get absolutely hammered with spam from overseas, in particular from countries like India. So we've just blocked India traffic from going to our website. Because look, it's just a business case decision. We don't have any clients there, but there's a lot of traffic coming to the site and spamming us. So we were able to do that with that plugin. Just stuff like that gives you a lot of control over who is and isn't able to access your site and keep out the bad guys. So what you also probably want to consider with the security side of things or, you know, while we're on that topic is also ongoing management and staging environments and the like for your WordPress site. Because what we find with a lot of business websites is that they don't have staging, they don't have backups. If anything happens to the website, it's a big pain to try and recover it. Clients going in and updating plugins and stuff and just breaking their whole site.

ARTHUR: Yeah. And it happens frequently. And look, it's not intentional, but a lot of, a lot of people don't understand that updating a certain plugin, especially if it's really out of date can break a site instantly. So having that staging environment and backup is crucial.

MICHAEL: So we've spoken about this before, but Kinsta the host has that. Well, it has, yeah, it has staging and backup. It has staging, yeah. Yep. But if you don't host with them and you want to add that functionality, then a tool like BlogVault is good. So blogvault.com. This is a tool that a lot of WordPress maintenance companies use themselves to do the job for their clients. And basically what it allows you to do is take regular backups, you know, daily, weekly, monthly, maybe even hourly, but also then easily restore your site. So if something goes wrong, you can just click a button and it will restore to one of those previous backups, you know, easy one click restore. Also things like one-click updates. So if you want to easily apply updates to all of your plugins in one hit, you can do it. Then if something breaks, then that's it.

ARTHUR: Sounds dangerous.

MICHAEL: No, it's not because you can do it all on your staging environment first and then you can push that live. So this is all functionality that you don't have out of the box with WordPress. But if you use BlogVault, ManageWP is another one that we used to use a bit. They got bought by GoDaddy. not the biggest fan of GoDaddy. But the tool does the job, you know, it allows you to do backups and easy restores and one-click updates.

ARTHUR: I saw that feature in ManageWP when I was setting it up for a client the other day. Did it have staging that ManageWP had? I don't think they did have staging. I could be very wrong. But I know they definitely have the one-click updates and I was so tempted to press that button.

MICHAEL: They like gamify it. Just click this button. Look, you've got all these. Yeah, pretty much. At least with backups and one-click updates, it doesn't really matter as much if you do break the site because you can quickly fix it.

ARTHUR: Yeah, I was surprised at how cheap Managed WP was as well. I think it was like $2 or something a month just to get the monthly backups.

MICHAEL: Not even monthly. That would be for daily, weekly. They let you have monthly for free.

ARTHUR: Wow. Everything else would be an upsell though, wouldn't it? Like the one click, one click updates, I think.

MICHAEL: No, that's in there. But like little thing, they have security and, and like uptime monitoring and all that. And each of them are like one or $2 per month per site. So it's not much, but no, not at all. Managed WP is a bit more suited to people managing multiple websites. If you're just a business owner looking to improve or look after your own site, you could probably go with blog vault. It's cheap as well. You know, like a few bucks, 12 up to 12 bucks a month, something like that. And it allows you to as I said backup staging easy restore one-click updates if you combine that with your security then You've got a site that Google likes you've got a site users like you When things inevitably go wrong at some point you can easily recover from it. So it's a no-brainer And the other thing we like to use a little bit is a plug-in called link whisper as well now link whisper is an internal linking plugin. So it just makes it easy to add large amounts of internal links to your website. Because you know a lot of people will publish blog posts or pages on their site but forget to put internal links in. What this plugin does is basically crawl all your content and then give recommendations around where internal links can be added and it can even automatically apply them for you. And then it's as easy as, you know, clicking a couple of buttons and then the links are live all across your site. Now, this is good for an SEO point of view because internal links, you know, it's a keyword rich signal to Google as to what a page is about. Helps Google find other pages on your site and just, you know, understand the architecture of your site. So it's a, you know, it's an easy win really just to install this plugin and just have all these internal links inserted. Anything to add to that one, Arthur?

ARTHUR: No, I was using it the other day as well. I'm pretty sure that one's not free. I think you have to pay a monthly subscription for it, but I was just trying to remember. And there was another plugin that I was using recently that had that feature built into it as well. I can't remember if it was rank math or maybe. Maybe it was RankMath. It was one of the all-in-one SEO plugins that had the internal linking feature. It was part of the pro package. So it wasn't free out of the box, but.

MICHAEL: That's one thing I will say about RankMath, like they constantly adding, constantly adding to that tool. I think, so Link Whisper is not, you're not paying per month. It's a, you're paying. It's a licensing fee. Sorry. Yeah. Probably annually. Like, you know, so you're looking at around a hundred bucks or so. The thing with that tool is if you turn it off or get rid of the plugin, all the internal links stay behind, which is good. But anything like that to save time, like if you have a really big WordPress site with a lot of content on it, to go through and manually prepare all of your internal links after the fact. Oh, it'd be a nightmare. Yeah, just a pain. It'd take forever. So yeah, that's a pretty cool tool that makes your job easier. So, pretty short and sweet today because we're pretty much at the end of the plugins we wanted to discuss. There are a lot of WordPress plugins that you could be using, depending on your use case, but you know, in an ideal world on most websites, this is the basic stack that we'd want to set up, right?

ARTHUR: You don't want to have too many plugins as well. It can slow down your site. So, and look, like you said, there's, there's tens of thousands of different plugins. So we'd be here all day if we were to talk about all of them. But I think if you choose, if you choose one SEO plugin, so you know, your Yoast, your SEO framework or RankMath, one of those, and combine that with one of the paid speed plugins, then you should be good to go as a starting point. Yep.

MICHAEL: And, um, also there was one extra one that I wanted to talk about before we finish. What's that? I've been using it a bit lately. It's Google site kit. I don't know if you know that one, but I do. I do. I've heard of it. Yeah. So it's a, it's a plugin that Google made, made themselves. So you could see this as a good or bad thing, depending on how much of a conspiracy theorist you are. Like because Google make it, they're getting all the data from your website about everything. So, you know, if you're up to no good or, you know, um, the, the conspiracy theorists would say that Google are using this to hurt sites and, you know, improve AdWords, blah, blah, blah. The flip side of it is this one plugin allows you to plug in Search Console, Analytics, PageSpeed, Insights, Tag Manager, Google Optimize, like all of their different products. Very easily you're able to set them all up and connect them with your WordPress site.

ARTHUR: So you don't have to add the code to the page anymore, it just integrates with the plugin.

MICHAEL: So, previously people would be, you know, just shoving a bit of code into the header in the code on their site and then when they update the theme it disappears or they might have to get Tag Manager installed and then set up all the different things within Tag Manager. Whereas now with Site Kit you just plug all of the tools straight in.

ARTHUR: So, call me old school but I think I prefer just to add Tag Manager to the site and do it all within there.

MICHAEL: Well, I'm going to call you old school. I'm going to call you old school. Not moving with the times, all right? SiteKit, SiteKit 2021.

ARTHUR: But you are right though, because they can get data from the site that way.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yep. Yep. They get data anyway, like Chrome. They do. Chrome is a massive Google crawler, so.

ARTHUR: Yeah, definitely.

MICHAEL: Yeah. It's like, I don't know. I've, I've found that tool pretty easy. Like we're not using it on client sites or recommending it anywhere, but it was just one that I've used on a couple of projects, uh, myself recently. And I just found it easy. So for, if you're thinking about like a business owner use case where sometimes they don't have their search console or they've never done any AB testing or whatever, having site kit and plugging optimized and search console and analytics easily is going to be better than not having that stuff at all.

ARTHUR: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Yeah, and better than trying to figure out how to set up, you know, code snippets within Tag Manager. You know, most business owners and people starting out probably don't want to spend their time in Tag Manager. Yeah, definitely. So then I'm going to call you old school and say go with Site Kit. But that now is officially the end of this episode. So thank you for tuning in. We'll be back next week with another episode and happy SEOing. See you later. See you later.

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