My PERFECT WordPress SEO Plugin Setup

Key Takeaways

in this video I'm going to share with you my 10 essential SEO WordPress plugin setup we're going to start with the plugins that were highly voted on in a huge poll on the subject and then we're going to get into more obscure ones that you didn't even know you needed if we haven't met before my name is Matt Diggity and I live in breathe SEO with the proper WordPress plugins my clients websites do better at my agency the search initiative my websites perform better at my portfolio company leadspring my student sites do better in my Coursey affiliate lab and I get better gains at the gym bro now SEO is divided up into two main camps on one side of the coin we have on-site SEO this is everything you do to your own website to get it to perform better on Google then we have offside SEO which is everything you do off your website such as building links in the grand scheme of things onsite SEO is way more important think of it like this SEO is like a race where you're competing against other people to get to the top of Google in this race your on-site SEO is your car and the offside SEO is the gas you put in your car sure gas is important but if you have a flat tire you're not going anywhere WordPress plugins are like adding a supercharger air intake and nitrous to your Honda Civic but if I can say one thing before we get started although WordPress plugins are essential for SEO these days you don't want to install too many too many plugins installed on our website can cause it to slow down it takes time to load plugins even if they're not actively being used on the page that's loading how is that fair so you really want to be selective about what you install in this video I'm going to show you the essential plugins that you absolutely must install and make sure to stick around to the end because the last plugin has saved my ass more times than I can count now before that check out the link in the pin comment to join my free SEO training masterclass it's current and it goes over everything I'm doing today to get to number one on Google Now back to the show first on our list of essential plugins is the SEO plugin rank math rank math is a freemium all-in-one plugin that covers a range of essential SEO optimization tasks which I'll get to shortly I ran a poll on my Facebook group The affiliate SEO Mastermind asking which plugins were considered must-haves of the community rank math came out on top the comparative plugins that rank map competes with didn't get nearly as many votes let's take a look at what rank math does for one out of all the SEO plugins it has the best schema generator schema is code that you place on your articles that tells Google exactly what your page is about so they don't have to guess when you make life easy for Google they make life easy for you Rick meth has an easy to use interface that allows you to Simply click and fill out a form to generate schema for whatever type of content you like this allows you to get rich results for your informational articles product reviews including review Stars recipes and events check out my video on how to get content to the top of Google to learn more about schema Link in the description rank math also automatically handles your XML sitemap generation which is a no negotiation requirement to do well on Google just install rank math and you're done now most SEO plugins give you the ability to create and edit your titles and descriptions for each article but what I like about rank math is it gives you the ability to adjust them all in bulk this is a godsend if you have multiple people working on a website the designer uploads the content and then the SEO manager comes in later and updates all the titles descriptions in one shot next on the list we have Elementor which is a page builder plugin that allows you to create designer quality designs in a drag and drop editor as of right now Elementor costs 199 dollars per year which is well worth it in my opinion once you see what it can do if you can imagine it you can create it using elementor's drag and drop editor you can arrange your text in blocks completely customize your fonts drag in highly formatted images and create completely custom tables it even handles advanced stuff like pop-ups one thing to note going back to the poll you'll see a table of contents plus coming up as the fourth most used plugin and I agree it's the best option for a table of contents if you're not using a page builder the only reason I didn't include it on this list is because Elementor covers your table of contents anyways is Elementor SEO friendly anything you create in Elementor is completely responsive meaning that if you view it on desktop or mobile device the layout will change to match the viewing experience which is the Google requirement that said if you install Elementor you will slightly slow down your website's load time there's no way around it page builder plugins require a lot of code and they bloat your website imagine you just walk out of an all you can eat buffet and you went nuts on the mac and cheese that's how your website feels when you install a page builder compared to the other page Builders it's not that bad though and if I find lines like these in a drag and drop interface I'll take the speed hit any day of the week we're getting into the speed optimization plugins right now so load speed shouldn't be a problem anyways real quick here's a shout out to the sponsor of today's video HRS yuminohrs is an all-in-one SEO tool used by many Professionals in the industry but it's also a great resource for those who are just starting to work on their website and learn about SEO if you're looking to improve your SEO knowledge or to start learning about SEO visit ahrefs Academy it features courses on blogging link building a beginner's SEO course and more also if you want to improve your website's ranking but don't know where to start sign up for ahos webmaster tools it's a free tool that will show you what errors prevent your website from ranking higher go to ahrefs.com forward slash awt and start improving your website today now back to the video website speed became a critical Factor when Google switched to mobile first indexing you see Google knows that 60 of all online searches are made by mobile devices and that number is going to continue to rise as people get even more addicted to their phones and because Google focuses on great user experience your website needs to load fast here's the plugins that get the job done quick note in the past I've recommended the all-in-one surface Nitro pack for website speed they're still incredible that said with a custom setup with the plugins I'm about to show you I'm able to get a similar result for a lot cheaper first on our list of website speed plugins we have the free auto optimize when your website comes up in a web browser in the background process there's a ton of code that needs to load to display your pretty web page for all it's worth that code comes in the form of HTML CSS and JavaScript so what Auto optimize does is it takes all this code and reorganizes it to load as quickly as possible for example if you had multiple javascripts on your page which I guarantee you do if you have any kind of interaction on your page which you do it takes all these scripts bundles them together strips out extra code and reorders them so they load at the right time when you open up your web page Why load the script for a contact form at the bottom and muck up your initial load time it does similar repackaging and optimizing for your HTML and CSS as well it also handles lazy loading images so you only load them when the viewer is about to see them when they scroll down after that I highly recommend the paid version of the caching plugin WP rocket as of right now it's 59 per year and it's well worth it what is caching as you already know page Builders like Elementor are great but they add a lot of code which slows down your site what WP rocket does is pre-loads your web pages images and scripts and remembers it so the next time someone goes to your page it loads much more quickly if I run an experiment where I turn off WP rocket on my site you'll see my site speed test go to complete in no time the next feed plugin is the paid version of ew image Optimizer I wonder if that's really how you're supposed to pronounce it whatever there's tons of image optimization plugins on the market smoosh and short pixel are also popular but I often tend to offer you when you design a page and place an image on it you want to upload an image that's the exact size that's going to be displayed If You're just showing a small image to your viewers you don't want to be loading up an 8 billion megapixel image it's going to kill your load time What U does is automatically resizes your images for you so you don't need to open up Photoshop and do all the shrinking yourself it will also clean up your previously uploaded unoptimized images and retroactively fix them for you now that we got all the speed plugins taken care of let's move on next on our list we have the free plug-in pretty links pretty links has two main functions that I love first it gives you the ability to cloak links if you're an affiliate marketer and you have a huge obvious messy affiliate link going to one of your recommended products you can instead rename it to anything you want it looks cleaner and doesn't scream out hey I'm about to make some money off you the second thing is that in your pretty links dashboard you get a report of how much each of your links get clicked this is super useful if you're trying to break down which pages are getting you the most conversions after that we have another free plugin and that's redirection every once in a while you'll need to do a three one redirect this is when you tell Google this URL doesn't exist here anymore it's found over here now this could happen if you decided to consolidate your content let's say you wrote a bunch of content on link building but you decided to merge them all together in a single Mega guide on link building normally you'd edit your HD access file to add some code to handle this redirect which works but if you mess up your HD access file Lord help you the redirection plugin gives you an easy interface for creating redirects that's impossible to mess up next up we have the free plugin contact form 7. I've been doing SEO since 2009 and I've never seen this plug-in change versions to contact form 8. I guess they just like the number seven it's fine I like it just the way it is Jokes Aside this plug-in is lightweight and gets the job done that is creates contact forms that you can embed on your website and will email you whenever they're used it's a simple function but every website needs it especially if you're trying to satisfy Google's eat requirements Google's quality Raider guidelines has an entire section on the importance of websites being contactable the next plugin is word fence I use the free version because it does what I need word fence is a security plug-in that protects your sites from hackers namely kids trying to get access to your site if a hacker launches a Brute Force attack and starts blasting your logins with every combination of usernames and passwords word fence is going to say oh no you don't not on my watch it also scans for malware in case someone got in through another route like you're hosting next on this list is manage WP in case you do get hacked you're going to want to restore a backup manage WP in my opinion is the best backup plugin you can schedule free monthly backups to automatically take a snapshot of your site if you want weekly or daily backups you'll need the paid version backups are also useful for cloning your website if you want to move to a new home or perhaps a staging server what it's not good at is subscribing so you can get more videos like this so you need to do that for yourself