link building wordpress site with supportive wp plugins
WordPress users worldwide are constantly looking for ways to implement better search engine optimization (SEO). To meet this demand, WordPress programmers churn out SEO-optimized themes and SEO plugins left and right. Some of these plugins are designed to help with link building, which happens to be a foundational aspect of SEO.

Although WordPress is inherently SEO-friendly, optimization strategies aren’t automatic. You can’t install a plugin and expect to get results. While SEO plugins can certainly help, they aren’t a magic pill. SEO plugins simply add functionality to the WordPress core that allows you to implement better SEO across all of your pages. You still need to do the work.

Plugins aren’t a substitute for professional SEO services

Handling all the components in a comprehensive SEO campaign would overwhelm the average WordPress site owner. A link building strategy, for example, takes a team of professionals to strategize and execute over time. Professional agencies like link.build, for example, require clients to commit to 6-12 months (or more). If professional agencies need a year to create a sustainable link building campaign, it should make sense that results don’t come from plugins.

With that said, as long as you’re willing to do the work, the following list of WordPress plugins will help you manage your link building campaign.

1. Internal Links. Manager

internal link manager wp plugin
With respect to internal links, you should be linking your internal pages within your content. This is often forgotten by those new to SEO who aren’t working with a professional agency.

Each time you publish new content, try to include at least one or two internal links to other content across your website. Choose your links based on what visitors reading each page might find helpful.

You can designate certain keywords to become internal links automatically with Internal Links Manager. However, this plugin should be used with caution. For each link, make sure to set the “number of links” setting to ‘1’ so the link only appears once per page. If you repeat the same keyword or phrase more than once on the page, you don’t want every instance of that phrase to be linked.

2. Broken Link Checker

broken link checker wp plugin
Getting links is important, but managing broken links is equally essential. The Broken Link Checker plugin will search for broken internal links and specified external links. You’ll get a report with a list of broken links, missing images, and redirects. Any broken internal links can be fixed from the plugin’s interface for convenience.

To help your visitors navigate your site better, you can set this plugin to display broken links differently so users will know it’s a broken link. There’s also an option to request that search engines not follow broken links.

3. Yoast SEO

When you’re running an SEO campaign, you need feedback to continually improve your efforts. Yoast will give you feedback on your pages from a search engine’s perspective. You can generate an analysis of your link’s thumbnail on social media, meta description, keywords, anchor text, title text, and more. All of these details are important when you’re planning on linking your content on other people’s websites. Editors pay close attention to thumbnails, page content, and page structure.

yoast for everyone wp plugin
Yoast isn’t perfect, but it will give you a general idea of where you can make improvements.

Link building plugins to avoid include:

  • Plugins that allow users to exchange backlinks with each other. This is an outdated tactic that was used before Google caught on to people gaming the system by generating low-quality links en masse.
  • Plugins that promise to promote your backlinks. You can’t trust a plugin to automatically promote your backlinks. If you don’t know exactly where your links are being published, it’s not worth getting those links.
  • Plugins that publish content to blog rings. This is another outdated link building tactic that won’t work. Search engines will eventually label the blogs link farms and will shut them down. You’ll lose all your links and your domain could get blacklisted from the search engines.

Link building is a manual strategy supported by automation

The bottom line is that link building is a strategy that should be executed manually with the support of automation and not the other way around. Provided you’re willing to put in the time and effort to work on a strong backlink generating strategy, WordPress plugins will help you get results.