In this post, we have listed the best SEO WordPress plugins for yoursite, these SEO plugins will make sure that your site is user-friendly and help you get much better search result ranking.
You have great quality articles posted throughout your blog. You know every reader is going to benefit from reading your blog. So now what? Why aren’t the readers coming in?
Or is it that you are the sole provider of an internet service that is desperately needed in the market. So why aren’t the customers coming in?
Well, have you bothered with the probability that these people, who are your potential audience, just might not have heard of your site at all?
No one these days remember the names of websites or stumbles into one by typing URLs into the address bar.
It would be great if that were the case, but it isn’t. Mostly all the people you are going to get on your website comes through after finding your site on a search engine.
And if you plan to come on top of these search results on the search engine then you will have to think of SEO.
Search Engine Optimisation means that you are optimizing your website and all its content to get better ranking on a search engine. And it is through the search engine that you will get most of your audience.
So now you know that SEO is important for your site. So the question arises, how does one go about doing proper search engine optimization on their website.
Well, if you will need some SEO knowledge, but along with that, you will also be needing some tools. For a WordPress site, these tools are disguised in the form of Plugins.
All these options can be confusing and so here we have shortlisted the best SEO plugins for WordPress.
Best WordPress SEO Plugins
WordPress SEO by Yoast
WordPress SEO by Yoast is arguably the most downloaded plugin for the platform. It is also the most popular plugin for SEO purposes.
WordPress SEO by Yoast provides a comprehensive solution for all your on-site SEO necessities. You can use the plugin for the purpose of adding SEO titles, Meta Descriptions, and Meta Keywords to each post and page of your site.
Again, if you want to include custom titles for your main site, archives, categories and tag pages, then that too can be handled through the plugin.
The plugin also adds Open Graph metadata, Twitter Cards, Sitemaps and ping search engines if you ever need it.
A comprehensive arrangement of the key features that Yoast SEO has to offer will include powerful Page Analysis, Meta and Link Elements, XML sitemaps, Social Media integration, Multisite compatibility, Breadcrumbs and a lot more.
SEMrush
Referring to SEMrush as merely a WordPress plugin would be an insult to all its capabilities. It is, in fact, a trusted tool used by a lot of professional bloggers for a competitive edge.
The tool helps you to gain insight on any website which can help you to make a better decision and beat your competitors in the search engine wars.
SEMrush is a premium tool, and the pricing can be considered to be expensive. However, it is a worthy investment and can help you a lot in keeping your game aloof.
The tool can be used to learn about keywords which can help you get a better ranking. It can also be used to gain knowledge on your competitor’s advertising strategy, an idea on how to generate effective backlinks, details on the kind of traffic you will get and loads more.
Google Keyword Planner
Most people use Google as their default search engine. Hence in the process of making your site and content optimized for the search engine, you should keep Google as your top priority.
In this regard, Google’s very own Google Keyword Planner will help you to a great extent.
No institution in the world has more insight into people’s search habits than Google themselves. So why not use this tool to mention.
The Google Keyword planner can help you with generating some keyword ideas by using the Google Keyword Planner tool.
The tool is available for free to people who use Google’s advertiser’s platform and anyone can use it. The main purpose of using the tool is to gain some insight on which keyword a blogger or marketer should bet on for the successful advertisement campaign.
Broken Link Checker
Your SEO score is dependent on a lot of factors, and one of them is whether your site has any broken links. A broken link can not only affect user experience but is also a negative influence on your SEO.
So having a plugin to check for any broken links on your website can be very helpful. It sure beats having to manually go through all the links on your website.
Now, this plugin is available for free, and you can use it to easily detect broken links on your site and fix them without having to edit your posts.
Now the feature does seem handy but there is a downside. Apparently, if installed on your WordPress site, it is notoriously known to slow down your server.
Hence one method of using it would be uninstalling it after use and then reinstall when necessary.
SEO Ultimate
SEO Ultimate covers all the necessities you will want from an SEO plugin. However, it also brings some added features to the table which helps you follow the best of SEO practices right at the point of content creation.
One of the highlighting features of the plugin involves the ability to include a link to the draft which will activate when you have published the post. Besides this, you also get features like title tags, meta description editors and so on.
Squirrly SEO
This plugin has over 30k active installations. It is one of the best and well kown SEO plugin for WordPress. This plugin brings in complete SEO solution for your WordPress business.
Along with all the important SEO featured and options, the team behind this plugin will keep sending you all important information to make sure that you are always updated the upcoming SEO changes and the trend.
Squirrly SEO is a free plugin but it offers you complete 360 degree solution as far as the SEO of your site is concerned.
From keyword research to on-page SEO, everythisn is taken care by this amazing plugin.
Live SEO Assistant
Think of a vartual assistant who will be guiding you while you create content on your WordPress blog to have the perfect and correct SEO for the post, it will be of immense help.
The Squirrly SEO plugin acts as a live assistant, so if you are a newbie or even a pro blogger, the live assistant will be of great help.
Audit Suite
Another very effective and important feature offered by the Squirrly SEO team is the audit suite. Every website or blog needs maintanence time to time, and the Audit Suite will help you to find the issues on your site that needs correction so that you don’t go wrong at any point of time.
So, overall Squirrly SEO is a very effective SEO plugin that can be one of the best replacement of the Yoast SEO plugin.
Rankie – WordPress Rank Tracker
Rankie will help you to keep updated with the keyword position of your site. This is very important for every blogger to know how the keywords are positioned currently so that it can be improved further.
This plugin will offer you detailed keyword position report, it will also let you know other possible keywords which are being used by the users to find the kind of content you are publishing.
Big blogs spend a lot of money and time to find the potential keywords to bring in more traffic to their site, this plugin will do the same thing for you but with a very limited investment.
All in One SEO Pack
If you are looking for some popular plugins to help you reassure on quality then All in One SEO Pack is something to look into. The plugin has been downloaded over a million times which says a lot about what it has to offer.
Furthermore, if you are just starting out to optimize your site, then you will love the plugin for its intuitive and user-friendly feature set.
Firstly you will not have to worry about any custom settings becomes the default installation covers most of the aspects you need. After you have become familiar with the inner workings, then you can go for setting it up according to your requirements.
One of the notable aspects of the plugin includes its feature to automatically optimize the titles of your blog posts for Google and other search engines.
But it also gives advanced users the freedom to overwrite the default meta details when required.
WP Meta SEO
If you want constant coverage on the current SEO status of your website, then WP Meta SEO is a recommended plugin. It comes with a powerful dashboard and intuitive settings.
Now, not only can you learn to use the plugin very quickly, but you can also use the plugin to make it too quickly optimize your site using the bulk SEO processing feature.
To use the feature, all you will have to do is select the content and the image size, and then voila, all the rest will be handled by the plugin.
Premium SEO Pack
Premium SEO Pack is a high-quality plugin which packs in almost everything you will need to have your site optimized for best SEO performance.
Through the use of the plugin, you can make improvements on the internal links, optimize the images on your site and help you to reel in a lot of organic traffic to your website.
One highlighting feature of the plugin includes the minification feature which can help you to make your site load fast and improve the overall user experience.
The plugin covers all basic features that you can come to expect like Title and meta description editor’s, Google Analytics, 404 pages, backlink builder and so on.
You will also get your hands on the SERP tracker through which you can track the search engine ranking of your keywords in a user-friendly and intuitive manner.
Other notable features of the plugin include the option to build XML sitemaps for videos on your website, offers optimization support for one-page websites, and also help you with Twitter Cards and Facebook planner to make sure your content is posted and shared automatically.
All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets
Rich Snippets can help you to increase click-through rate of your blog posts dramatically. You can use this plugin to make sure that all the code is in place to show an amazing rich result on the Google search page.
If you are not aware what rich snippet is, have a look at the Google result below; it shows beautiful start rating which can easily attract the visitor’s attention and increase the click-through rate of your site.
However, you need to understand that even if everything is in place; your search result may not show rich snippet because Google will take the final call if they want to show it or not.
Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights
If you are using Google Analytics to track the performance of your site, this plugin can be very effective for you.
With over a million of downloads, MonsterInsights is the most popular site statistic plugin that will make it super simple for any WordPress user to link their site with the Google Analytics.
A huge section of WordPress users are a complete newbie and don’t have the technical knowledge to connect their site with the Analytics, so this plugin will help to get that done.
The best part of this plugin is that it brings a beautiful Analytics interface right on to your WordPress site. Now, you don’t have to move out of your site to see the stats of your site.
- Analytics dashboard
- Real-time tracking.
- Link tracking option
- Custom event tracking
- WooCommerce store performance tracking
- With custom add-in, track AdSense performance within Analytics dashboard.
The SEO Framework
The SEO Framework is another free SEO plugin that comes with some amazing options. The plugin is created to work perfectly with the default WordPress installation.
The plugin is free and it doesn’t show any annoying advertisements on your site. This plugin helps you to get rid of may SEO related errors which otherwise goes unnoticed.
It will resolve the issues related to the canonical errors with categories, pages, subdomains. The plugin allows you to enable sitemap and it will automatically update the leading search engines when you post a new article.
The SEO Framework plugin offers you the option to add the open graph for Facebook and Twitter tags. It will also take care of all the structured data requirement of your site.
W3 Total Cache
You need a cache plugin for your WordPress site. It is a must if your hosting doesn’t offer you a custom solution for cache settings.
The cache plugin is extremely important from the performance point of view. When you install this cache plugin, the loading time of your site will improve instantly.
Now, we all know that the loading time of a site is extremely important these days. The loading time is one of the most important factors of Google search algorithm, it will also impact user experience.
So, you must use a cache plugin. The W3 Total Cache plugin comes with a range of settings option for different functions that will eventually impact the loading time of your site.
Other than cache settings, it offers you options like removing query string from static resources which impacts the loading time to a huge extent.
WP Rocket
I recommend this plugin because of the simplicity as well as performance. While W3 Total is one of the most widely used cache plugins for WordPress, the settings are not easy for everyone to understand.
You will surely get confused if you are a newbie and using W3 Total for the first time. We have used both the plugin and performance wise both are good enough.
We are currently using WP Rocket for this plugin and it works perfectly. As already mentioned, you don’t have to go through highly technical settings because the options are straightforward, you have to tick the options and save.
Pretty Links
Pretty Links, as the name suggests this plugin helps you to create good looking links to your site. Now, if you are promoting affiliate products, the links are generally very long and looks messy.
This plugin will help you to quickly redirect the links and create short, good-looking links with your own domain name.
A search engine like Google doesn’t like tons of affiliate links on a page, so you must consider using an affiliate link cloaking plugin such as Pretty Link so that your site doesn’t get penalized by Google.
Seo Optimized Images
The images on your site can bring in a lot of traffic if they are optimized properly. When you upload an image to WordPress media folder, it gives you the option to add an alt tag, image description, and title so that search engines can read those and rank them accordingly.
The alt tag is very important in the images because the search engines read the alt tag to rank the images, so you must use your keywords in the images you upload in an article.
This plugin will dynamically insert SEO friendly alt tags to your images to make sure that they are optimized properly.
Redirection
If you don’t redirect the updated URL of your posts or any post with a new URL, it will show 404 error to your visitors.
An increasing number of error pages can have a severe impact on overall SEO of your site. So you must keep a track of the broken links on your site using the broken link checker plugin mentioned above and redirect them using this plugin.
You should keep a track of the errors on your site using the Google search console and whenever you see any 404 error, do redirect them to the updated page.
WP External Links
This is a simple free plugin but important. With this plugin, you can make the external links on your site no follow and force them to open in a new window.
When you link to any external site you are distributing a fraction of your site’s authority to those pages if you don’t want to do that just install this plugin.
In Conclusion
If you integrate any of these SEO plugins into your WordPress site, you will get significant help in improving your site’s search engine ranking. If you are using any of the mentioned plugins, then please do mention your user experience.
Furthermore, if you know of some other plugins you believe are better alternatives to the ones sighted above, then please do share your thoughts in the comments section.
