If you run a WordPress site (or a site on that subject) that is not SEO friendly, you are definitely missing a lot of opportunities for traffic and conversions. Organic Search Traffic 2020 (76%) was defined by marketers as the key metric for defining content success. The majority (67%) also highlighted SEO as the best way to improve content effectiveness based on the latest SEMrush Content Marketing survey statistics. Do you know, Best SEO Plugin for WordPress?
But how can you ensure that your WordPress site is optimized for search engines, especially if you are a beginner to SEO? In the WordPress Plugins directory, you can find many SEO plugins to help you take your site to the next level, regardless of the power of SEO.
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Let’s Know about What are WordPress plugins?
Plugins for WordPress are tools that can be added to improve the overall look, functionality and efficiency of your WordPress site. Multiple installs are possible and if used properly they can help dramatically improve the user experience on your site. Even better, you can use these plugins on your own site without the need for any coding.
With more than 55,000 WordPress plugins available in the official WordPress repository, the value of each plugin may vary. Some may slow down your site; Others may not be the best for your website, depending on your personal preferences.
Not all WordPress plugins are free with premium products available from third party companies and developers. Many of these are free WordPress plugins with free, i.e. users have the option to pay for access to additional features.
Here are the best SEO plugin for WordPress
To start the list, we will talk about SEO plugins for WordPress. These are so easy to understand and install and you can choose from a wide range of featured plugins. The best plugins show you SEO estimates and recommendations in your page and post editors, while others are limited to their feature sets but have unique resources like options for checking their broken links or reducing the size of the file.
Yoast SEO
If you want to talk about the WordPress SEO plugins then you have to talk about Yoast SEO. With over 5 million active installations and over 25,000 5-reviews, Yoast SEO is the most-used WordPress SEO hand-down plugin.
The all-in-one SEO plugin has SEO capabilities for 47 languages and does a great job of optimizing content for both search engines and site visitors.
One of the top features is consistent templating for titles and meta descriptions which improves your site’s branding and ensures consistency of snippets in search engine results.
There is also a bulk editor that allows large-scale editing of your website’s title and meta description.
And while WordPress 5.5 now creates XML sitemaps without the need for additional plugins, Yoast SEO provides much more advanced XML sitemap functionality with just one click.
Yoast SEO gives users complete control over the breadcrumbs of their WordPress site. That means you can control the copy in the text path which is often located at the top of the page where it indicates where the user is.
Another useful feature is the option for automatically setting canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content. Sometimes you have products or content that are found in multiple URLs that can cause problems. A canonical URL lets you tell search engines that certain similar URLs are the same so they don’t hurt your rankings.
Yoast SEO is great for simplifying the various steps of the process. Its SEO analysis is a great easy way to make sure you are producing SEO-friendly text and using the right keywords, while its readability analysis helps ensure that the content is easy for search engines and readers to digest.
With Yoast’s snippet preview, users are able to see how their content is viewed in search engine results.
Bonus for those who are managing the team: Yoost has an SEO Rolls feature that lets you control which sections of the plugin have access.
All in One SEO Pack
If you want to know the purpose of the All in One SEO Pack plugin, it is right there.
It is the original SEO plugin and has been downloaded more than 65 million times since its debut in 2007, making it one of the most downloaded WordPress plugins of all time.
Why it is not difficult to see. The All-in-One SEO Pack is designed for both beginners and advanced users, with settings and tools that enable you to scale what you control as you gain more experience.
Just out of the box, the plugin automatically generates meta tags and optimizes titles for all search engines. It provides XML sitemap support for both Google and Bing, as well as image sitemaps and RSS sitemaps.
Don’t like some of your settings? The All-in-One SEO Pack gives users the option to override any setting.
This plugin is also a great choice with e-commerce websites, as it is the only free SEO integration plugin for e-commerce sites including WooCommerce.
Other useful features include improved canonical URLs, the ability to redirect attachment pages to their parent posts, and built-in nonsense protection.
W3 Total Cache
With 40% of customers reporting leaving a website that took more than three seconds to load, it’s hard to overestimate how much your website’s speed will affect your business.
Among the things that Google considers an SEO ranking factor is not only the speed of the site, but it can be the difference between gaining a customer or losing one.
Cache is the process of storing a copy of a file or data in a cache, which allows access to data faster than when the request is forced to download directly from the server when you navigate to a webpage. Simply put, caching makes your website faster.
With over 1 million active installs and a strong 4.5 to 4.5-star rating, W3 Total Cache is likely the best caching WordPress plugin that is available and an instant way to increase website functionality and reduce load time.
It provides a wide range of caching that minimizes things like HTML, CSS and JavaScript files and provides optimized progressive renders so that pages start rendering faster and interact with it more quickly.
If that doesn’t make sense to you, it’s also the preferred caching plugin for A&T, Masable and Everest.com (the creator of the Everest SEO plugin).
Rank Math
If you search for “SEO” in the WordPress Plugin Marketplace, Rank Math will come only ranks second after Yoast SEO in search results, but in the case of the best WordPress SEO plugins, it didn’t take long before Yoost surpassed it as a user’s choice.
Rank Math has only been around since 2019, but the plugin already has over 400,000 active installs, and the real five-star rating is strong.
For those who want to do a lot for their SEO but don’t have time to promise to do so, Rank Math is a great option.
The plugin has many useful features like Google Schema Markup (aka Schema Rich Snippets), Google Search Console Integration and Google Keyword Rankings.
It is only scratching the surface of what all Rank Math is capable of but it is still extremely fast despite the features being explained and it puts a negligible load on your server.
Plus, a setup wizard that is extremely easy to use, Rank Math basically configures itself.
Broken Link Checker
Broken links can do or create some serious damage to your WordPress website. While it may not seem like a big deal to have links or two on your site that no longer works, those broken links can hurt your search engine rankings.
But regardless of the size of your website, manually checking individual links is an inefficient and time-consuming task.
This is one of the most valuable SEO tools available to the Broken Link Checker Plugin. This will check your website for broken external and internal links and will notify you of any issues so you can make the necessary changes.
It gives users the ability to monitor posts, pages, comments and even links in custom cases and automatically detects which links are not working.
The Broken Link Checker plugin gives broken links a different look in posts as well as alternative options to prevent search engines from following broken links, an easy way to protect your page’s SEO rankings.
SEO Press
Offering the same parts as Yoast SEO and All-in-One SEO Pack, SEO Press has achieved 5-star ratings as a powerful WordPress SEO plugin that can increase traffic and optimize your site’s SEO.
Dynamic variables for both meta descriptions and titles, canonical URLs, custom XML, image XML and HTML sitemaps and a simple installation wizard which works for quick setup. It has just some of the features SEO Press has in common with the more popular plugins, but it stands out in its SEO.
SEO Press gives open graphs and Twitter cards for social media sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, WhatsApp and Pinterest, and previews make it easy to optimize content for each channel.
At the moment it may have only one million more active installs but it has only been around since 201 and is growing steadily.
Also, if you want to migrate from a big name plugin to SEO Press, importing post and term metadata can be done with a single click.
The SEO Framework
The SEO Framework is the only feature-complete SEO plugin that follows the white-hat guidelines and rules imposed by WordPress and search engines and has a five-star rating for backing it up.
It is the only plugin that can intelligently create critical SEO meta tags in any language by reading the user’s WordPress environment which eliminates the need for a huge time saving and advanced SEO knowledge.
Save the user time by pre-installing the SEO framework. Your WordPress site will be instantly protected and your meta tags will be predefined as soon as you activate the plugin.
The overview pages in the post provide color-coded guides, which show you how to improve the pages as you hover over the pages with your mouse. And since it follows Google’s webmaster guidelines for mail, users are free to optimize pages without having to worry about making critical mistakes.
Another advantage of the SEO framework is its support network. It has a great support forum and over the past five years, its internal support team has personally answered more than 14,800 inquiries, usually within a 48-hour window.
Final Thoughts
There are no two ways about it and that’s why for anyone who is serious about the success of their website, SEO is a necessary practice.
Luckily, WordPress is rocking for you with great SEO plugins designed to automate and simplify a few steps of the SEO process for you.
The list above is by no means limited and contains lots of useful plugins that are not mentioned, but the ones that were covered are proven resources to help you on your SEO journey.
Most of the plugins here offer premium versions with enhanced features and advanced capabilities but all reviews here are free versions of each plugin.
So which plugins are you using let us know by your comment!