As a WordPress Theme maker, we have examined many of the top WordPress SEO plugins and other WordPress SEO tools and are also using many SEO plugins for WordPress at the same time to make sure our articles get read. In this article, we will discuss the best SEO plugin for WordPress.
No WordPress plugin can guarantee a high ranking on Google if you are not implementing them correctly but we are sure they definitely will help you at least, narrow the gap on the way toward the top Google Ranking. Are you ready to get started?
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Why use WordPress SEO plugins?
To increase your website’s visibility and search engine rankings, you must use WordPress SEO plugins. They provide a simple method for users to improve on-page components like titles, meta descriptions, and keywords, increasing the likelihood that search engines will find your website.
Additionally, these plugins include useful capabilities like XML sitemaps, canonical URLs, and schema markup, which aid search engines in properly understanding and indexing your material.
With their intuitive user interfaces and automated features, WordPress SEO plugins make it possible for website owners—even those with little technical expertise—to implement the best SEO strategies and drive more organic traffic to their WordPress sites.
10 Best WordPress SEO Plugins To Improve Your SEO Ranking
Rank Math SEO
Rank Math is an SEO plugin for WordPress that helps to optimize the sites for search engines. It’s designed to be user-friendly, making it suitable for both beginners and experienced users.
One of the main reasons people choose Rank Math SEO is its comprehensive set of features. It offers advanced on-page SEO analysis, helping you ensure that your content is optimized for your target keywords. The plugin also supports rich snippets, which make your content stand out in search results by adding extra information like star ratings or product details.
Rank Math’s Content AI feature is particularly useful if you want to optimize your content for search engines without relying on guesswork.
Rank Math also automatically generates XML sitemaps, which are essential for search engines to crawl and index your site. If your website ever has broken links, Rank Math’s 404 monitor and redirection manager can help you fix them, keeping your site healthy and user-friendly.
Another great thing about Rank Math is how easy it is to use. When installing it, a setup wizard guides you through the basic settings, so you don’t need to worry about missing anything important.
In terms of cost, Rank Math is quite generous. The free version of the plugin includes many features that other SEO plugins only offer in their paid versions.
This makes it an excellent choice for those who want powerful SEO tools without spending a lot of money.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
Google does not randomly pick articles and promotes them to the first page, first position. To give yourself a chance to stay in the top positions in SEO, on-page SEO by optimizing your content is very important.
According to WPThemeDetector, Yoast SEO is the second most installed WordPress plugin and also the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress. It helps us solve the basic problem of all copywriter: examine our articles and decides if it’s too complicated to read if it is SEO optimized or not.
As you are typing your post, you will not pay attention to your keyword and post format in most cases. That’s when YOAST jumps in. It checks your context and gives recommendations to help you improve your article instantly.
Besides, it claims to give you the ability to generate XML sitemap in just one click and gives you full control of your site’s breadcrumb, canonical URL and Title, and meta description. Using SEO by Yoast is very simple. Just type your article, select a Focus keyword and it will start examining your article. You can also edit preview snippets of how your content will look in Google’s search results.
The best thing is, you can do all of that for free. Yoast’s premium empowers you with even more control and automation over the internal linking suggestion, redirection management, and focus keyword management.
All-in-One SEO Pack
For those who thought Yoast is the only tool you need: SEO is not just about optimizing your content. The name ‘All in One’ kind of explains everything about the plugin.
It sort of does everything related to SEO to help you best SEO your WordPress website. Ranging from complex content analysis, social media preview (with a lot more extensive settings for social media than Yoast SEO), and XML sitemap generation. All in one SEO pack even help you with many other features such as:
- Optimizing performance
- Block bad bots
- Editing and generating robot.txt, .htaccess file.
This most used WordPress plugin also helps you save a lot more manpower regarding optimizing your site toward a better Google ranking.
One of the drawbacks of this WordPress SEO plugin is that its configuration can be quite complicated. Once you installed the plugin, it requires putting some time and effort to correctly configure the system. After that, everything will run smoothly to SEO your site.
Many people may review All-In-One SEO vs Yoast and try to pick one as the best WordPress SEO tool. However, I find this really too close to call. Both work perfectly and helped us all gain so much organic traffics.
Google Keyword Planner
How do you know for sure which keyword is better than the other? Do you do keyword research or are you just typing whatever you had in your mind?
One thing that’s more important than having a high ranking on Google is having a high ranking for the correct keyword.
Most of the time, we had an idea of which keywords, and niches are being searched on Google but we do not know exactly the volume of searches or people’s demand for that keyword. We cannot distinguish which keyword is actually better. All of that can be solved swiftly with Google Keyword Planner. Nowadays, using Google Keyword Planner for Keyword research is an indispensable part of the copywriter’s job.
Even though this is a Google tool and you will need an Adword account to do it, we feel the need to mention the tool in this article due to its importance. There are many ways to work with Keyword Planners:
- You can brainstorm a list of keywords you already had in your mind to see which one fits your idea the most.
- You could also use Keyword Planner to suggest the related keyword of a niche that you do not have many ideas about it.
- Besides, Keyword planners can partially help you with SEO localization by forecasting the number of monthly searches for each territory.
Applying the massive insights from Google Keyword Planners can help you find the top niches easily. The only thing about it is that you must have an active Google AdWords account to see the forecast data exactly.
However, considering you are a webmaster and you are selling something, running an active Adword account might not be an issue.
Google Analytics by MonsterInsights
Unless you are new to the Internet, or you own an analytic firm, there is no reason for any web marketer to not use Google Analytics for their website.
Implementing Google Analytics to WordPress is easy. It is even easier to manipulate Analytics data directly from your WordPress backend with the use of Google Analytics by MonsterInsights. Whoever you are, whatever you do, this plugin should always be in the top 10 WordPress plugins for SEO to install on your site.
What makes it unique?
- Quick and easy setup
- Universal tracking and analyze your site’s data at the page level
- Real-time stats reporting is also available
- If you are familiar with Google Analytics, you could track your e-commerce, create custom dimensions, custom event tracking, and do many other things right from your WP dashboard with this plugin.
How you can improve your SEO with this WordPress SEO plugin?
Basically, with page-level analysis and keyword analysis, you can see for yourself which page is performing better. Real-time reporting provides ample information for how your site and SEO campaign and even other advertising campaign is doing. You could also connect with the Google webmaster tool to check Google search console’s data about your website to do better further analysis of your site’s keyword strategy
With Google Analytics implemented in your site, you can get to know every aspect of your site.
SEOquake
SEO Quake is another third-party extension that is not quite a WordPress plugin. However, it is an essential tool that has been of great help to a large number of WordPress webmasters.
It boasts to be a powerful SEO toolbox for your browser by letting users do on-page SEO audits, examine internal or external links, and many other features.
To better support webmasters, SEO Quake provides a set of tools for us to do all-in-one SEO like:
- SEO bar with a summary of any web page’s SEO index to give you an overview of how well this page is performing.
- SEO dashboard: The dashboard provide further analysis of the page’s performance.
- SERP overlay: an excellent tool to help you with Google search and diagnose search results.
You can then quickly do analysis and export data to Excel to do further analysis. Best yet, SEO Quake can run on all the most popular browsers like Firefox, Opera, Chrome, and Safari.
Broken Link Checker
As you have more content every day, you may also remove more content, and managing all the articles, all the pages will become much more impossible. Some images may go missing. Some pages may disappear. You may have removed a post but still link to it on many other articles.
There is so much stuff going on with your site after a long period of running. Broken Link Checker is an effective plugin to help you deal with all the annoyances. Broken Link Checker keeps an eye on every page, every post, or anything that is published on your site and makes sure nothing is 404.
In case something goes missing, you will be informed instantly to fix it. If you remove some pages, the plugin will also make sure it conforms with the best SEO practices regarding removed pages. Installing and using Broken Link Checker is quite simple and it is a must-have plugin to maintain your site to make sure it is always in the best condition with no penalty from Google.
W3 Total Cache
You may wonder about the relationship between WordPress SEO plugins and Cache plugins. It’s very simple. One of the deciding factors Google uses to measure pages’ SEO level is how fast it loads, on both Desktop and Mobile.
For that reason, website speed plays a crucial role in ensuring a high SEO score as it creates cache versions of your website and instantly speeds up your site. To help cache your site at the most efficient level to optimize Speed, W3 Total Cache provides several Caching options. Most advanced caching methods like object cache, CDN, etc, are all available with this one of the best WordPress cache plugins.
The only drawback is that upon using caching plugins, you need to have a certain knowledge about your website to prevent any issues. Otherwise, you could still apply to cache at a general level to your site. To learn how to leverage W3 Total Cache to speed up your website, you can check this video tutorial from the owner of the plugin
W3 Total Cache is one of the best WordPress plugins and it is recommended by so many WP bloggers so it undoubtedly will provide a great SEO improvement for your wp website.
Rel NoFollow Checkbox
It is common knowledge that WordPress editors tend to add plenty of outbound external links to their blogs. Meanwhile, they often forget to give those links a NoFollow link rel, creating potential SEO juices to other people’s sites and unintentionally reducing their site’ rank.
Having said that, do follow links is not the main driving force toward a low ranking. Having all Nofollow external links does do better than having plenty of do-follow links but excessive do-follow links can get your site back. That is the purpose of the Rel NoFollow Checkbox – to make sure you keep in mind which links to no follow and which ones to do-follow.
This one of the most popular WordPress plugins is an amazingly simple SEO WP plugin that you should not miss on your site.
SEO Optimized Images
When was the last time you pay attention to giving your images a title and an alt tag? Did you know that even Facebook use an Alt tag for every one of their images?
Image Optimization is like a forgotten power, it is very important but is often underrated by most marketers. Sometimes, it is just because we are lazy adding tags to images but perhaps this optimization, along with many other optimizations can truly help you boost your site’s SEO score. With SEO Optimized Images, you are always reminded to make sure images are also optimized.
SEO Redirection Plugin
It is an unspoken rule that anything that has to do with inbound or outbound link has to be taken great care of in SEO.
SEO Redirection Plugin is a great plugin to help with WordPress SEO by controlling 301 redirections on your site. Migrating pages from an old website might not be as difficult using this plugin.
Imagine all traffic to your site is a water stream going to a bucket. If your bucket has many holes, the water will leak outside and you may lose potential leads (you know, the ultimate goal of all marketing efforts is to acquire leads). SEO Redirection can help you fill all the holes in your traffic bucket.
Conclusion
Finally, now that we have examined some of the top WordPress SEO plugins, it will be even harder to choose just one of the nine. Choosing the best SEO plugin seems meaningless given that you must use many of them simultaneously.
One piece of advice that can tremendously aid your SEO efforts is to ensure that you fully comprehend the plugin you use to get the most out of it. It could port your site more than help it if you simply install the plugin without configuring it. Try to pay close attention to every instruction. Look for supporting documents and, if necessary, contact help.
Read More: Advertising In Search Engines: Is There Life Beyond Google?
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