In this post, we have listed the best SEO WordPress plugins for your site, these SEO plugins will make sure that your site is user-friendly and help you get a 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?
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 Optimization means that you are optimizing your website and all its content to get a 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 need 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.
Top WordPress SEO Plugins & Tools
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.
Rank Math
Rank Math is a complete SEO plugin that is developed by the MyThemeShop team. It is a comparatively new SEO plugin but many users have reported positive feedback about the plugin.
Rank math has quickly created a name for itself in the WordPress community and it is now being used by many top bloggers and marketers. Even we have started using Rank Math recently and migrated our site from the Yoast SEO plugin.
We have written a detailed Rank Math review, how to use it and how it is different from the Yoast SEO plugin.
There are a number of advantages of using Rank Math over any other SEO plugin, here are a few features that make this plugin a better choice.
Other than the above-mentioned important features the plugin offers you a number of useful options such as redirection management to manage your URLs effectively. So, you don’t need a separate URL redirection plugin for your site.
And the best part is that it is free to use an SEO plugin that you can install right from your WordPress dashboard and get started.
SEMrush
Semrush is not a WordPress plugin, but it is an SEO analysis SaaS platform. 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 into any website which can help you to make better decisions 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 that can help you get a better ranking. It can also be used to gain knowledge of your competitor’s advertising strategy, an idea of how to generate effective backlinks, details on the kind of traffic you will get and loads more.
For more information about the tool, you can read this competitive analysis of SEMruch Vs Moz.
SEOPress
SEOPress is the most complete SEO plugin for WordPress. It includes everything you need to optimize your website for search engines, and you can use it 100% free.
If you need all the premium features for advanced SEO, you can upgrade your plan and start using the premium features. The price for the premium version starts at $49 per year.
Here are some of the top features of SEOPress plugin:
- Optimize your website’s title and meta tags
- Add rich snippets to your website
- Generate an XML sitemap
- Control which pages are indexed by search engines
- Monitor your website’s SEO score
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 itself. 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 into which keyword a blogger or marketer should bet on for a successful advertisement campaign.
Broken Link Checker
Your SEO score is dependent on a lot of factors, and user experience is one of the most important factors. When it comes to user experience the broken links can ruin it. 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. 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 reinstalling it 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 help 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 most well-known SEO plugins for WordPress. This plugin brings in a complete SEO solution for your WordPress business.
Along with all the important SEO features and options, the team behind this plugin will keep sending you all important information to make sure that you are always updated on the upcoming SEO changes and trends.
Squirrly SEO is a free plugin, but it offers you a complete 360-degree solution as far as the SEO of your site is concerned.
From keyword research to on-page SEO, everything is taken care of by this amazing plugin.
Live SEO Assistant
Think of a virtual 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 maintenance from time to time, and the Audit Suite will help you to find the issues on your site that need correction so that you don’t go wrong at any point in time.
So, overall Squirrly SEO is a very effective SEO plugin that can be one of the best replacements 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 they can be improved further.
This plugin will offer you a detailed keyword position report; it will also let you know other possible keywords that 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 ensure 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 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 because 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 of 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 that 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 the basic features that you can come to expect like Title and meta description editors, 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, offer 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 the 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 of what a rich snippet is, have a look at the Google result below; it shows a 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 a rich snippet because Google will take the final call if they want to show it or not.
We have listed the top rich snippet WordPress plugins here. And if you are looking for a top-quality premium option, Schema Pro is the plugin to go for.
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 downloads, MonsterInsights is the most popular site statistic plugin that will make it super simple for any WordPress user to link their site with Google Analytics.
A huge section of WordPress users are complete newbies and don’t have the technical knowledge to connect their site with 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 onto your WordPress site. Now, you don’t have to move out of your site to see the stats of your site.
The SEO Framework
The SEO Framework is another free SEO plugins 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 many SEO-related errors that otherwise go unnoticed.
It will resolve the issues related to the canonical errors with categories, pages, and subdomains. The plugin allows you to enable a 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 requirements 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 the Google search algorithm; it will also impact the user experience.
So, you must use a cache plugin. The W3 Total Cache plugin comes with a range of settings options 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 its 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 look messy.
This plugin will help you to quickly redirect the links and create short, good-looking links with your 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 the 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 a 404 error to your visitors.
An increasing number of error pages can have a severe impact on the overall SEO of your site. So you must keep 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 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 an 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.
If you are using the Gutenberg editor, there is a built-in option to manage your external links. Also, here are some additional Gutenberg plugins that can be helpful for your blog.
FAQs About SEO Plugins
01. Is it mandatory to have an SEO plugin for a WordPress site?
Yes, you will need to install an SEO plugin to make your site SEO friendly and optimize your pages and posts. While a single SEO plugin that offers all the optimization options, sitemap options is good enough for a site, you may need additional plugins depending on your needs.
02. Which one is the best free SEO plugin for WordPress?
SEO plugin by Yoast is widely considered as the top SEO plugins that are used by millions of users, there are a number of other options like Rank Math, All in One SEO Pack and other that you can try.
03. How to make a WordPress site SEO friendly?
SEO depends on a number of different factors. So, installing an SEO plugin is not enough. You must use a good quality, well-coded theme for your WordPress site. Make sure that your site loads quickly, the speed of your site largely depends on the hosting that you use. Other than these factors, there are aspects like backlinks, internal links and many other factors.
04. Is WordPress the most SEO-friendly CMS?
WordPress is widely considered as one of the most SEO-friendly content management systems. Most of bloggers and marketers prefer WordPress mainly because it is easy to use and it is SEO friendly.
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.
