Since 2020, websites can no longer afford to ignore search engine optimization.
93% of all Internet experiences start with a search engine and 39% of eCommerce traffic across the world comes from organic search. Most businesses have recognized this and adapted accordingly — 61% of companies named SEO as their biggest marketing strategy priority. In short, you need to be prioritizing SEO and be a top result if you want to have any chance of driving organic traffic to your website. But if you aren’t an SEO expert, where do you begin?
Fortunately, there are plenty of great SEO tools available. If you have a WordPress site, there are a number of plugins you can install that will really help you out. Finding a great host for your WordPress site is sure to speed it up and boost your SEO rankings. However, there’s much more that goes into it, including which keywords you target for product pages and blog posts, how large your image files are, and whether or not your content is readable. That’s why you need a good SEO plugin for WordPress.
Now, are you looking to get your WordPress SEO off on the right foot, but feel overwhelmed by the number of SEO plugins available? Keep reading.
7 Best SEO Plugins
Here are the 7 best SEO plugins we picked for you. Have a look at each and see what plugins you think will work best on your WordPress website.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is the most famous SEO plugin for WordPress. It is developed by Joost de Valk and his company Yoast, which offers excellent and actionable SEO features. With 5 Million active installations on WordPress, Yoast continues to wow the WordPress world with impressive updates, a beautiful interface, and the most user-friendly option for making your blog posts and product pages stand out.
One of the best parts of Yoast SEO is the ability to create and manage your XML sitemaps. This is much easier than having to code your sitemap on your own, especially if you don’t have much of a technical background.
Yoast SEO helps you identify and avoid duplicate content, so you won’t have to worry about being penalized by Google, and it offers templates for titles and meta-descriptions, which will make your pages more appealing in SERPs.
You can also gain access to Yoast SEO premium from that website, which offers more advanced features like keyword optimization for five keywords on a page, previewing what your page will look like on Twitter and Facebook, and internal link suggestions for sending users to other locations on your website. Keep in mind that that’s a small portion of the premium features provided.
The premium plugin sells for $89 per site, making it a desirable deal for anyone. However, those on a budget still receive the free plugin, which beats out most other SEO WordPress plugins by a long shot.
All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack is yet another robust WordPress website SEO plugin to automate single pages or posts. It comes with a user-friendly option for beginners and experienced users alike. The plugin creates meta tags for all of your articles, posts, and custom sort automatically and optimizes your website to rank the content on the search engine. In addition, the plugin also supports Google Analytics which works perfectly to track traffic on each page of your website and post.
This plugin was designed to help you improve your WordPress website and its search engine content — increasing the chances of finding your website while people are searching for words you’ve written about. Provided that your website covers subjects that people are really looking for, good SEO will help your audience grow.
All in One SEO’s free version has a fantastic collection of features, most users won’t need to upgrade to it. But if you want more advanced features, then All in One SEO Premium is recommended. All in One SEO Pack includes a comprehensive collection of features to turn into your SEO powerhouse. Setting up and using the SEO tool may not be the simplest, but it will definitely help you better manage your SEO webpages.
SEO by Squirrly
SEO Squirrly is designed specifically for people who aren’t experts in SEO. Other plugins have different ways to access and implement SEO suggestions, but SEO Squirrly brings this to the next level. Take a look at its live SEO assistant feature.
The SEO Live Assistant is such a helpful widget because it allows us to optimize the different pages of a website, as it suggests keywords, makes it easy to embed images, and lets you know how well optimized your content is for your target keywords.
Its keyword generation tool is superior to others because it extracts tons of ideas from different sources. It is incredibly helpful to understand what questions people are asking, and thus, to make the content more engaging and conversational. Finally, the analytics for measuring the performance of the articles – along with the weekly SEO audit – aid me to identify the areas that need more work and the opportunities that are ready to exploit.
Its artificial intelligence enables it to identify the gaps that are keeping your site from ranking as well as you’d like so that you can focus on the activities that will give you the fastest results. The idea is to achieve big breakthroughs from fewer activities, saving you time and money.
Rank Math
Rank Math is a fast-growing user-friendly WordPress SEO plugin that allows you to optimize your website for search engines and social media. It allows you to manage all of your on-page SEO needs for every type of content on your website. It pulls off the rare feat of being feature-packed and user-friendly. There’s even a setup wizard that guides you through the installation process, and it has the nicest UI of the bunch.
With Rank Math, you can manage the on-page SEO of your posts, pages, products, or other taxonomies. You can also control noindex/nofollow/noarchive meta tags of all taxonomies in general and individual posts or pages in particular. This WordPress plugin will tell you which keywords you’re ranking for, and also show you how many impressions you’re getting for various searches. Rank Math also identifies any errors that Google sees on your site. All of this information is easy to access, read, and digest.
It also allows you to easily add meta title, description, and Open Graph metadata to your blog posts. The plugin also allows you to generate an XML sitemap, connect Google Search Console, control access to plugin features based on user roles, have an inbuilt 404 Monitor, Redirections, Rich Snippets, Local SEO, Automated Image SEO, Internal Link Building recommendations, etc.
Broken Link Checker
Broken links can affect your site’s SEO and create a bad experience for your users. If you have been running a blog for some time, then you should check your site from time to time for broken links and fix them.
Broken Link Checker is a free WordPress plugin that allows you to find broken links on your WordPress site. You can then fix those links without even editing your posts. This plugin monitors your site searching for any broken links, missing images, and redirects. You can edit and fix the broken links directly from the plugin’s dashboard, (without having to update each post or page manually). Or you can remove the broken link but leave the text in place.
It’s good to know that the plugin can keep a watchful eye on your website, notifying you of any broken links. This allows you to focus on what you do best, such as creating content, while never having to worry that broken links are working against you.
All in One Schema Rich Snippets
Rich snippets are a Google feature that displays search results in a more attractive way to boost click-through rate. They are often interactive and can display photos, star ratings, price, author, etc., so earning placement in a rich snippet is important because you’d be standing out from the competition.
All In One Schema Rich Snippets is a schema markup plugin that lets you create eye-catching search results with rich snippets. This plugin allows you to compete for more of these snippets by implementing schema codings such as Review, Events, Recipes, Article, Products, Services, and more. The best part is that you don’t have to be a web developer to use it.
Rich snippets benefit all websites, but they are especially important for eCommerce sites. Users won’t have to go through as many steps to read a review of your products. They can see the star rating from the search engine results page. Adding rich snippets will tell search engines exactly what information to include in the search results.
The SEO Framework
The SEO Framework bills itself as being the fast WordPress plugin. Available for free from WordPress.org, this plugin allows users to use SEO in an automated and accessible way. It’s easy to transfer SEO data from another plugin instead of starting from scratch and the plugin is simple to set up.
Its interface blends naturally when integrated with WordPress, so it feels as though it’s supposed to be there, as opposed to appearing obtrusive. Some features of this SEO plugin include preconfigured settings, easily sharing content to social media, supporting custom post types, and there are no advertisements. In addition, the plugin works to prevent 404 errors, automatically updates search engines with sitemap changes, and much more.
The post SEO settings are controlled with a few tabs, one of which uses a colored scale to show exactly how close you are to making your post search engine-ready. With the scale, you can instantly tell where you need to put in some work for your SEO, unlike some of the more cluttered versions of Yoast.
As you may have already assumed, the interface is perfect for beginners. The API is also open for advanced users to get their hands dirty. The plugin began as a project within the WPMUDEV community, but it was eventually released to the masses for free. The SEO Framework plugin is all-inclusive, and it offers more advanced functionality with the help of extensions.
Conclusion
We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress SEO plugins and tools for your website. There are a wide variety of SEO plugins available, but the key is to find the best plugin that fits with your business, products, or services so you have the most success.
A good quality WordPress SEO plugin is a must for any WordPress site. You may find that your framework comes with SEO settings built-in. However, it’s best to use a plugin instead of the built-in theme SEO functionality because you may lose those SEO settings if you change your theme in the future. Just watch how many plugins you install because you don’t want to cause bloat in your WordPress site.
If you have a WordPress website, there are countless plugins at your disposal. However, I think it’s best to focus on the top eight that I’ve covered above. There’s something for everyone on this list. Some of these plugins are for specific SEO features, while others encompass a wider range of SEO elements.