I wrote this article on the best WordPress SEO plugins I have used over the years. SEO plugins are a must if you actually care about your SEO. There is a lot of myths on SEO, and if you’re unsure about SEO, I would recommend you read this SEO beginner guide created by Moz.
Since I use WordPress for all my sites, I figured there are some plugins you should be aware of. Please do read this post on choosing a good WordPress plugin, too. The below plugins are in no particular order. So, please take a second to view all the SEO plugins I feel are beneficial to your site, regarding SEO.
Yoast
This is perhaps the most widely used plugin for WordPress. This is a free plugin that provides you with virtually all the features to help you optimize your website and XML sitemaps. There is a premium version of this plugin, too. The plugin has an on-page analysis where any WordPress user can understand how a post can be optimized before being published. Yoast comes with a complete optimization panel where any user can manage every element hassle-free. It uses colors, green means good and orange and red mean needs improvement or consider fixing. With Yoast plugin, you have an allowance of managing social optimization with Twitter and Facebook. I did write a post on Yoast here.
All in One Search Engine Optimization Pack
With Hundreds of millions of global downloads, All in One SEO Pack is among the widely-used SEO plugins for WordPress. This plugin provides you with all the resources you need to come up with a user-friendly SEO website. On the upside, it is a beginner friendly plugin that may help you optimize your website without using any customized settings since default installation settings are enough. Once you are acquainted with the settings, you can set it up consistent with your requirements.
This SEO WordPress plugin is designed to automatically optimize titles of blog posts for search engines.
Premium SEO Pack
Just as the name suggests, this is a premium WordPress Plugin which will enable you to optimize your website and make more money. The product comes with a minification tool that helps you make your code friendly. It is a comprehensive SEO plugin which provides you all the features and options you need to customize and optimize your site. It will help enhance internal link building in your site, which is actually necessary from an SEO perspective. The plugin will help you optimize images, which is a unique feature to any website. Well optimized images can draw a lot of traffic to a website.
The plugin handles the rich snippet functionality, so your blog posts stand out in the search engine results. It will manage the 301 redirections so you can redirect any page to others. You can monitor 404 not found pages. Also, it integrates with Google Analytics, provides social stats, ranking tracking, page speed insights, manages htaccess and robot.txt, sitemaps, etc.
SEOPressor
This is another plugin that can improve organic traffic to any site. It helps optimize blog posts with guided approaches. The plugin offers several options to help you optimize your content. SEOPressor stands out from other plugins owing to its keyword analysis. It is designed with a built-in keyword research option that enables you to find long tail keywords relevant to your topic and incorporate them while creating your content. This makes your posts search engine friendly and comprehensive.
The plugin also helps to optimize images by checking whether the images have the necessary tags. Above all, SEOPressor manages internal linking, which is important for search engine results.
Rankie
While Rankie might not actually be an SEO plugin, it does help with tracking your keywords. Rather than using Ahrefs or Mondovo this inexpensive plugin will allow you to put your keywords and track them. I have actually written an article which shows what Rankie does. You can view your rankings in the WordPress dashboard and also have your rankings emailed to you.
SEO by Squirrly
This plugin helps you create content for your website. The content will be optimized for both bots and people. It does provide SEO rated sites, and you do get weekly SEO audits. Squirrly does provide real-time advice to help you optimize your articles. It’s based on a color indicator. Green means your content is 100% SEO friendly. You can monitor and change your SEO settings in bulk all from one easy to use panel and the plugin does integrate with Yoast. Squirrly also has something called focus pages that allows you to solve clear tasks to help improve your chances of ranking better in Google.
SEO Friendly Images
This plugin is good for optimizing your images. It’s important to use the ALT and title attributes so people can find your images. People will be able to find your images on Google image search if you use SEO Friendly Images. Lots of SEO’s do not properly optimize their images which leave them missing out on lots of traffic.
Remove Query Strings
This is a simple WordPress plugin that has a very simple SEO advantage. One problem in the “SEO world” is using CSS and JavaScript. It creates a “?” or “&” in the URL. This usually doesn’t get cached by different proxy servers. This plugin simply removes the query strings. This helps improve your loading speed for your WordPress site.
Redirection
Let’s face it editing your .htaccess file is a pain. I know because I have edited this files lots over the years. You can completely break your site when you edit it. That was before I started using Wealthy Affiliate’s managed WordPress hosting, though. But, if you don’t have managed WordPress hosting you can install “Redirection.”
This helps with pages that are showing as 404 errors. You can easily cut and paste the broken link and 301 the broken link to another page on your site.
SEO Internal Links
Internal linking is a very good SEO strategy. Neil Patel has pointed this out in his article he wrote on Kissmetrics.com.
But, SEO Internal Links automatically links your internal pages and posts. You can set the limit of links per posts, nofollow links, create a custom keyword list, open links in new windows, etc.
All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets
This is a free plugin developed by Brainstorm Force. Rich Snippets are good for increasing your CTR in Google. These add stars or markup to your posts. Clearly, they stand out on Google, and this is why your CTR gets an increase. You can read this post which shows you the benefits of Google Rich Snippets.
All In One Scheme.org Rich Snippets does support these kinds of markups:
- Review.
- Event.
- People.
- Product.
- Recipe.
- Software Application.
- Video.
- Article.
Broken Links Checker
Broken links can really affect your ranking on Google. I learned this the hard way about 6 years ago. This plugin monitors your posts and pages, comments, etc. In your WordPress dashboard, it notifies you of any broken links on your site. Optionally, Broken Links Checker will send you emails whenever broken links are found. This plugin allows you to update your broken links to correct link. Therefore, you don’t have to do it manually.
Google XML Sitemap
Google XML Sitemap allows you to create a sitemap for your WordPress site. This helps search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo crawls your site. Therefore, the search engine will crawl your website more frequently. It will automatically notify the search engines every time create a new post with new content.
This plugin is 100% free and has been around for almost 10 years now.
Conclusion
It’s important to not overdo your SEO, but these plugins can drastically help your SEO efforts. Entire industries have been created around SEO, and it’s important that you install them on whichever WordPress theme you decide to use.
If there are any plugins that you believe should be added to this list, please feel free to leave a comment below. Also, if you have any experience with any of the SEO plugins, please leave your comments down below.
Morning Garen. Thanks for the article. A great amount of information held within the article. Some made sense for me, others were above my limited knowledge.
Otherwise, always good to read your stuff.
But in your opinion do you feel Yoast or All In One SEO are a better option for beginners?
I feel Yoast is much better for beginners. The reason being is because it gives you explanations of what changes you are making. All In One SEO pack does not do that, though. I’m experienced with SEO, internet marketing, blogging, etc. but I still lean towards Yoast.
Hi Garen
This is so important! Many people that develop websites don’t apply any SEO techniques or software and wonder why they hardly get any traffic. Personally I have been using the “All in one” SEO pack and find it sufficient for now. One should always be aware that plugins can clash or cause problems if you have too many.
I started a website about 2 months ago that is using the “All in one” SEO pack and currently get about 40 – 50 visitors a day, hoping to get that number to about 700 – 800 at the end of this year.
Thank you kindly for this useful information regarding SEO support Garen! 😉
Best regards,
Kamil
People often make the mistake of not using an SEO plugin which is a huge mistake. They are really so easy to use. They usually have a lot of documentation with them too. That is true plugins can have conflicts with each other. I have noticed this over the years. One good way to troubleshoot that disables them one by one and see which ones are having conflicts. Also, when there are WordPress updates, some plugins will not function correctly.
Just keep adding content to your site, and you will get to your 700 to 800 visitors a day. That isn’t a ton of traffic, but it’s a goal that can be obtained.
Hey man! I had a fun time reading your best WordPress SEO plugins because I’ve been researching lately on what other plugins I should use aside from the one’s Wealthy Affiliate has given us. Two things caught my eye, and that is the Broken Link Checker and SEO friendly images, specifically of their importance in keeping your WordPress SEO friendly and increasing your chances to rank up on Google should you do everything correctly and not violate any rules. To conclude, I’ll be looking into most of the suggestions you gave here and who knows, I might download a few of these and use them for my site for good. Thanks for the review!
Yeah, Broken Link Checker is a vital SEO plugin. Broken links can really cause your rankings to go down in Google. I have used that plugin for several years now. Also, SEO Friendly Images is great. You want to make sure the keywords you’re targeting are in you ALT tags. So many people make the mistake of not using their ALT tags correctly.
Hi, very nice article you have here on the best WordPress SEO plugins. I’ve tried many out of these plugins, but I’m currently making use of Yoast, SEO Friendly Images, and Rankie. They’re all awesome plugins that do exactly what they’re supposed to do. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us.
Just wanted to say thank you so much! I tried out the Broken Link Checker that you recommended and it saved me. Granted, I only found one broken link, but it was one that I probably would not have caught. I’m happy to have found your recommendations and I’ll make sure I continue to check back.
Ethan
Hi,
Thanks for sharing your list of great plugins. I actually have most of them installed already. Yoast is simply the best for SEOs. Broken link checker is very helpful too. You definitely don’t want missing error pages. The best thing of all is that all of the plugins that you mentioned have a free version is that pretty good already. Cheers.
I have always just used the free version of Yoast. However, they do have a paid option. I don’t have any experience with the paid option, though. True, broken links can really be bad news in terms of SEO. I made this mistake about 7 years ago. My rankings in Google dipped down a ton because of the broken links on my page. However, once I fixed those broken links my rankings shot up in about 2 weeks.