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Top SEO Plugins for News Publishers

Start using the best SEO plugins for news publishers to increase your website traffic.

As more publishers switch their websites over to WordPress, there is greater interest in learning how plugins can extend the functionality of news websites. Plugins, which are pieces of software with groups of functions that can be added to WordPress websites, are written in PHP programming language.

One of the most popular plugin functions, for news publishers who are interested in growing their businesses, is search engine optimization, or SEO. Although WordPress is already a fairly search engine-friendly platform, plugins can help publishers extend their reach and ensure their articles receive high positions in Google and Bing search results.

Here are the top six SEO plugins for news publishers who want to ensure their websites show up in prominent positions in search results.

Top SEO Plugins for News Publishers

1. Yoast Plugin

Yoast is the most well-known of all the SEO plugins for news publishers. The plugin handles technical optimization and assists editors and writers in optimizing content before they hit “publish.” Although Yoast offers both a free and a premium version of its SEO plugin, the premium version is more popular—and more widely used—among news publishers.
With the Yoast SEO Premium plugin, publishers can optimize their content for keywords, keyphrases, synonyms, related keywords, and all word forms of those. Yoast can also keep an eye on a publisher’s most important pages and send out warnings when those pages haven’t been updated in six months. The Yoast plugin works both in WordPress’ classic editor and in Gutenberg.

2. SEOPress Plugin

News publishers who are invested in trying to improve their website rankings in popular search engines can use the SEOPress WordPress plugin to boost traffic and social sharing. The SEOPress plugin works incredibly quickly, and it can be used to build custom HTML and XML sitemaps, add schemas, and manage redirects of 301s. The plugin can be setup to remove both stopwords and /category/ in URLs, as well. SEOPress works on a freemium model. A number of features are available for free, however advanced features are reserved for publishers with Pro accounts.

3. SEMrush SEO Plugin

The SEMrush SEO plugin works a little differently than other SEO plugins favored by news publishers. The plugin actually offers up instant recommendations for content optimization, allowing reporters and editors to meet various content-quality requirements before they click “Publish.”

Publishers will need to connect or register their SEMrush accounts to use the WordPress plugin, and then set target keywords to get recommendations for content. SEMrush also lets writers set target locations and devices (like desktop or mobile), along with SEO content templates to promote cohesiveness among larger news teams. Although SEMrush’s SEO Writing Assistant plugin is free, users will need an SEMrush account to create an SEO content template.

4. All in One SEO Pack Plugin

All in One SEO Pack has positioned itself as a competitor to Yoast with its comprehensive WordPress plugin. The plugin works out-of-the-box for beginners, with advanced features like XML sitemap support, Google AMP support, Google Analytics support, and support for SEO on custom post types. The All in One SEO Pack plugin generates meta tags and automatically optimizes article titles for Google rankings. All in One SEO Pack is a free plugin for news publishers.

5. Broken Link Checker Plugin

The Broken Link Checker plugin does one main task, and it does it well. As you may have guessed from the name, the Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin monitors publishers’ websites and fixes broken links. It also fixes missing images. Both of these issues can derail a news publisher’s SEO, so Broken Link Checker fills a vital role. When Broken Link Checker detects links that don’t work, or missing images, the plugin notifies the publisher via the dashboard or by email. Optional features can be setup to make broken links display differently in articles and prevent search engines from following broken links. Broken Link Checker is a free plugin.

6. Rel Nofollow Plugin

Just like the Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin, the Rel Nofollow plugin fills a very narrow role in the SEO market. The Rel Nofollow WordPress plugin automatically adds the rel=”nofollow” attributes to post external links whenever posts are saved. The WordPress plugin also provides a checkbox that news publishers can check to exclude certain posts from the plugin’s action.

Have you tried any of these SEO plugins for news publishers? If not, now is the time to give these tools a try.