Nowadays, WordPress is a very famous tool for creating and editing your website’s content. Basically, WordPress can help you effortlessly do various stuff on your website like writing content, adding videos, images, and keywords to improve your SEO rating. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which means that better SEO score equals more traffic being driven to your website, which can further mean more earnings from your website or blog. So, optimizing your website for the search engines is a necessity. The WordPress plugins make it easier.
What is the use of an SEO Plugin?
Like already mentioned, optimizing your website for search engines will let you rank higher in the SERPs and get more traffic to your website. WordPress plugins simply provide an opportunity to easily optimize your overall website as well as individual pages for the search engines. Here are few things that you can do with a WordPress SEO plugin.
- Use focus keywords to optimize your article for those certain keywords
- Edit the meta title to showcase the content of the page
- Maintain keyword density to avoid over optimization
- Add meta description to give users a quick review of your article
- Structure your content to provide high-quality to the users as well as the search engine bots
- Internally link your articles for better search engine crawling efficiency
- Avoid accidentally linking to your competitors
- Find critical SEO problems like blocking search engine bots or problems in your Robots.txt file
- Optimize your website’s load speed
- Maintain the length of your article
- And almost everything to keep your website search engine friendly.
Don’t think that all these features will be available in all the SEO plugins. But it is just an overview of the overall functions of a search engine optimization plugin for WordPress. It is up to you to choose which plugin suits your needs. The below list may help you with it.
Most Popular WordPress SEO Plugins
A WordPress site without plugins, standalone WordPress isn’t that good so you’ll need to get some plugins if you want those advanced features that WordPress can offer. No problem, then. Today, we are going to take a look at 20 best SEO plugins for WordPress.
1. Yoast SEO
Like almost every list of SEO plugins for WordPress, this one also begins with Yoast SEO, but why? Well, for quite some time, Yoast SEO is by far the most popular WordPress plugin for optimizing the content of web pages on WordPress websites. Yoast will offer you a complete SEO analysis of the page, telling you the overall SEO score, based on the usage of a keyword, which is amazing. Also, Yoast will inform you if your page is well optimized, giving you the red color on SEO indicator if it’s bad, and green if it’s okay. WordPress SEO by Yoast is available for free download, and if you decide to go premium, you can add multiple keywords to your website and gain access to more advanced options.
2. SEO Ultimate
SEO Ultimate is another great SEO plugin for WordPress, following the same working principle from the Yoast SEO, but adding some additional features. These are various meta descriptions and title tags that you can use to improve your SEO score, as well as tons of linking functions, like putting a link in a draft, that activates itself when it’s published. Aside from that, SEO Ultimate is completely free.
3. All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack offers the user all tools he needs in order to create a perfect, SEO-friendly website using WordPress. I like this plugin because it’s very simple, and even beginners will quickly learn how to use it. All in One SEO Pack will automatically optimize the titles of your posts for the most popular search engines, and this is all by default settings which are enough for many users. You can also edit those setting if you want to tweak more stuff, but for one free plugin, All in One SEO Pack packs quite a punch.
4. Premium SEO Pack
Premium SEO Pack will offer you premium tools to construct your website using WordPress. Of course, it’s not free. This plugin is focused on many things; for example, you can improve your internal linking, which is very important for a website, and it will let you optimize the images, as images can bring you a LOT of traffic if optimized properly. Rich snippet functionality is also here, and some advanced tools like SERP also found their place in this plugin. If you need an advanced SEO plugin for WordPress, this one is probably the best choice at this time.
5. The SEO Framework
We once again return to free SEO plugins with The SEO Framework plugin for WordPress. This plugin will help you build an enhanced SEO value for your website and is good for both beginners and experts. As it’s unbranded, The SEO Framework doesn’t contain any annoying ads, so you work freely and without distraction. Overall, this plugin will let you optimize images, fix 404 errors, prevent duplicated content and much more.
6. WP Meta SEO
WP Meta SEO is an amazing plugin, which relies on its simplicity and great features. It will always keep you updated on your SEO status with its advanced dashboard. WP Meta SEO supports bulk SEO processing feature, which means that you can now edit your content in bulk, rather than editing every single content one by one, which is time-consuming and pointless. Definitely a must-have!
7. SEOPressor
For premium users, we present you SEOPressor, which is a paid plugin for WordPress. Being a paid plugin, SEOPressor focuses on every aspect of SEO, making it ideal for experts in this matter. SEOPressor will not only take care of your keywords in terms of richness but will make sure that the words are scattered throughout the website equally. This is a great plugin for bloggers, but it costs $47 for a single-site license.
8. W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is more of a performance enhancer than SEO tool, but it can be both if you want to, as SEO and performance of your website go hand to hand. Thanks to W3 Total Cache you can now create an SEO-friendly and user-friendly environment that Google search engine will take advantage of, as Google also filters by user experience. Having in mind that it’s free, it’s great to have W3 Total Cache in your WordPress arsenal. Plus it’s very fast and you won’t even notice when it works.
9. SEO Squirrly
SEO Squirrly makes sure that your content is well optimized, not only for SEO purposes but also for readers. This SEO plugin is, however, for an average WordPress user, as it doesn’t boast that many features like some of the premium products. It’ll give you a simple indicator, telling you if the SEO is good by turning on the green light and the overall performance of the site will be affected too.
10. WooCommerce – All in One SEO Pack
WooCommerce is known to be one of the most popular E-Commerce plugins for WordPress, but this one is different. The WooCommerce – All in One SEO Pack is a great SEO plugin, aimed towards website shops and blogs. WooCommerce – All in One SEO Pack will let you add SEO-rich descriptions to your products, whether it’s a digital or physical product you want to sell, increasing the chances of your success. For those owning a digital store, this is a must-have plugin, plus it’s free.
11. SmartCrawl
WPMUDEV is a well-known company for creating amazing WordPress plugins, and now we got the premium SmartCrawl plugin, which is focused on sitemaps, Title and Meta tags customization, Moz integration and Automatic links. I like its simple interface and because it’s fairly easy to use, saving you a lot of time when creating or publishing various content on your website or blog. The price to pay for this pleasure is $49.50 a month, so it’s better for those more experienced users.
12. Rankie
Being a premium SEO plugin for WordPress, Rankie will let you know the rank of your website on Google, so you can more efficiently keep track of your keywords. Rankie also boasts a great research tool that creates various keywords that you can implement, based on the Google search engine, to increase your website’s traffic and download reports in PDF format. Generally, Rankie is a very useful tool for gaining some serious info about your website and its regular license costs $21 at the moment, which isn’t that much.
13. Redirection
404 errors and 301 redirections can sometimes be annoying if you don’t use the right tools to remove those errors and speed up redirections. Redirection is another free WordPress plugin for SEO that will allow you to fix these issues. It works by supporting a traditional “pass-through” redirection, so you can pass your URL to another page, or website. Redirection will also allow all of your URLs to be redirected, and you can even include 301, 302 and 307 redirections and can give you an info about redirection in terms of location, time and who tried to redirect the link.
14. Smush Image Compression and Optimization
As we said earlier, images play a huge role in a website’s optimization, but also overall traffic on the website. Images always attract a lot of attention from people, and Google search also has its own Google Images service. Thanks to Smush Image Compression and Optimization, you can now optimize your images for free. It will let you resize the image by setting the maximum width and height and can also resize the file size without losing the quality. Not only that, but this plugin will also speed up your website, removing the unnecessary features from your images and other content. All in all, it’s a great tool for any kind of website.
15. Broken Link Checker
Broken Links are a common problem for many websites, as some of the links you put in there might not be available anymore, or they are too old. Broken Link Checker’s role is to fix those errors by constantly checking your website for broken links and notifying you when it’s found. You can then decide whether to remove the link or insert the other link in that place. However, Broken Link Checker can be deceived, so it may appear that some links that aren’t broken, this plugin show that it’s broken. In that case, carefully check all of the results and do what you think is the best.
16. Google Analytics WD
Google Search is the most popular search engine, and all of the SEO scores are based on this engine. So, who can help you better than Google? Google Analytics WD is here to give you some insight into your website’s traffic, helping you make certain decisions to make it even more popular. This might sound very simple, but wait; Google Analytics WD gives you all of the data you need in shape of line graphs and pie charts. There are other advanced features of this plugin which I’ll leave for you to check in a free or paid version of the plugin.
17. SEO Internal Links
If you are a little into this topic, you’ve probably heard about internal links and their importance for a website. They are there to improve the overall optimization, guiding the search engines to visit and index various important posts on your site. SEO Internal Links is here to automatically highlight and link keywords and phrases with the particular posts and pages. All in all, SEO Internal Links will provide you with a good set of tools to create an SEO and user-friendly website and make more traffic each day.
18. SEO Optimized Images
Title attributes and alt attributes are of high importance when adding a photo or photos on your website. SEO Optimized Images will let you add appropriate and SEO-friendly alt and title attributes to your images on the website. It works very simple, and will automatically switch title and alt tags without changing the whole database. On top of that, SEO Optimized Images will let you add some advanced info about the photo like image name, post title, alt title attributes to image and post category. Of course, this one is free, so you might as well give it a try next time you are uploading some images.
19. Simple 301 Redirects
As its name says, Simple 301 Redirects is here to make your job easier, when trying to request the redirection of one of your web pages or websites. This is great if you are trying to move your website to WordPress, and are unable to hold your URL structure. The Simple 301 Redirects is also here to ensure that your data is retained during the redirect. Generally, being a free SEO plugin for WordPress, Simple 301 Redirect is enough to make your redirects more safe and secure.
20. WordPress Ping Optimizer
When you publish something using WordPress, it has an internal mechanism that will automatically ping your newest post. Sometimes, this isn’t the smartest thing to do as some posts can be registered as a spam, so unnecessary pinging can just do bad for you. WordPress Ping Optimizer will prevent your website or blog from being registered as a ping spammer, which is good to have more traffic and being noticed by Google search engine. For example, WordPress will ping your post every time you click on Save or Save and Continue Editing, and you’ll want to avoid that unnecessary pinging using WordPress Ping Optimizer, which is free to use.
