Imagine a scenario: You have set up your website on WordPress. You have officially launched it. Now you are waiting for your website to reach your target audience. After some days, you are shocked and anxious that despite the creation of your website, your business's sales or outreach is not taking place. What could be the reason behind this?
This is because the website's visibility and relevance are ultimately in your hands. You must take essential measures to ensure that your target users find your website and browse through it. For this, you need to build a SEO strategy.
Using SEO plugins is essential to your well-thought and planned SEO strategy. These plugins are a sure-shot way to help your website achieve its full potential and bring you adequate returns and conversion rates. Let us learn what SEO plugins are and how these can help WordPress websites.
What Are SEO Plugins For WordPress?
WordPress caters to SEO optimization by having a content management system that ensures that your website is intuitive and the website's content is of high quality. You can pick themes from WordPress to make your website relevant to search engines. Additionally, WordPress has SEO plugins, which are features you can add to your website to improve its ranking.
WordPress SEO plugins are softwares that add new functionality to your website. These are curated specially for SEO optimization. The plugins also impact web analysis and the digital marketing strategy of your business in the long term.
You can easily install and use a free SEO plugin for WordPress because its programming interface allows the plugins to extend the functions of yourwebsite. You can use plugins for caching, image optimization, key optimization, crawling, etc., WordPress has a lot of options in its directory. You just need to know about each plugin to choose the best one.
Why do you need SEO plugins for WordPress?
Why do we need SEO plugins if WordPress already has in-built features to ensure that your website is optimized in the best possible manner? The answer to this question is simple. Competition to rank higher on search engines is fierce among businesses. Improving your SEO strategy by incorporating plugins, will help your website stand out in your niche and give you a competitive edge.
The best SEO plugin for WordPress is a guiding tool to ensure your website and its content remain search-engine friendly. The plugin offers a cheat sheet that helps you keep track of your WordPress website's content relevance and quality. It can allow you to track your website's performance and identify how you can improve your website's content management.
Do Plugins Help SEO ranking?
Yes, plugins help in SEO ranking by driving organic traffic to your website. These also allow you to rank high on SERPs by allowing your business to grow organically. The SEO plugins provide additional features like content insights, audit checklists, sitemaps, keyword optimization, etc., which boost the rankings of your WordPress website on search engines.
The plugins optimize your website's overall structure and code making it crawlable. Additionally, they help generate metadata for your website, ensuring that search engines know what your website is about and can rank you accordingly. Some plugins enable sharing content on social media, enhancing your website's visibility and SEO ranking. Therefore, plugins are geared toward bolstering SEO rankings and engagement of your WordPress website.
The 26 best SEO plugins
Now you know how SEO plugins can be a great addition to your WordPress website. But how do you go about choosing one out of the many available in the WordPress directory? Do not worry. Here we list the best SEO plugins that everyone must use in 2023.
1. Yoast SEO
For beginners and professionals alike, Yoast SEO is the best SEO plugin for WordPress that one can install. It has multiple features to take care of your website's technical SEO. It has a free version as well as a premium version that you can install at your convenience.
The features for which Yoast SEO is famous are:
- It helps in keyword optimization by recognizing keyphrases and synonyms of keywords in various languages like English, French, Italian, etc.
- It helps preview your search engine results so that you can adjust the metadata to improve your ranking.
- It conducts a readability analysis of your content.
- It allows you to generate an XML sitemap.
- It has a redirect manager to avoid dead-ends and 404 errors.
- It detects duplicate content on your website.
With Yoast SEO, you can make your content SEO-friendly, save time and resources, improve your internal linking structure and add data to get search engines to notice your website.
Does Yoast SEO Really Work?
Yes .This WordPress SEO plugin has more than eleven million downloads and a 5-star rating. It has been in the market for more than 11 years now. Such presence and influence show that Yoast SEO benefits websites and their ranking.
2. Schema Pro
Adding structured data (creation of schema markup) can get overwhelming, especially if you are a beginner and know very little about website coding. Schema Pro can make this task of creating a schema markup hassle-free. It helps create a schema that will allow search engines to understand your website's content and provide rich snippets and results to your target audience.
So what does the Schema Pro plugin offer?
- It has more than 20+ schema types, like articles, books, person, FAQs, etc., that one can use.
- It can help you set the schema for the entire website or specific custom pages/posts.
- It also allows you to map data like featured image, author, date, page title, etc.
The ready-to-use schema markup provided by this SEO plugin helps you save time. You can even test in real time whether your webpage is eligible for rich snippets or results on search engines.
3. Broken Link Checker
Broken links on your WordPress website can create a bad reputation among your users In fact, search engines also associate broken links with poor user experience. With the broken link checker, you can find broken links, fix them and avoid 404 errors. This plugin helps you manage your old website content and ensures that search engines do not follow broken links.
This free SEO plugin tool for WordPress helps with the following:
- It continuously monitors internal and external links.
- It notifies you of broken links and missing images via email or its dashboard.
- It allows you to edit directly from its page without manually fixing errors on every page.
- It changes the appearance of broken links on posts.
4. Rank Math
Rank Math is a popular WordPress SEO plugin that leverages the power of artificial intelligence. It has an in-built setup wizard allowing the plugin to configure itself and effectively set up your website's SEO. It has the option of importing data from other SEO plugins. Its user interface is also extremely simple and clear.
Things you can do with the assistance of this plugin:
- You can add meta titles and descriptions to your web pages and posts.
- You can generate an XML sitemap.
- You can keep track of 404 errors on your website.
- You can measure your website's performance and understand the statistics because this plugin integrates with Google Search Console.
- You can use the rich snippet feature to rank better on search engines.
- You can use the breadcrumb feature to improve the user's navigation experience on your website.
5. W3 Total Cache
Your WordPress website's speed should be highly prioritized to offer exceptional user experiences. Only when your website can load with speed can search engines identify your site, align it with the users' queries, and rank your site accordingly.
W3 Total Cache is an SEO plugin that targets website speed specifically. This plugin is perfect if your website contains many images, videos, and GIFs. It makes the website load faster through the following:
- Minifying.
- Caching.
- File compression.
- Lazy loading.
- Eliminating unnecessary CSS (cascading style sheet)
- Content delivery network integrations.
Without hampering your content process development, your WordPress plugins or themes, W3 Total Cache will enhance page rankings and conversion rates. It will also maintain consistent traffic on your site and boost web server performance.
6. Squirrly
Beginners looking for a complete suite associated with SEO can conveniently opt for Squirrly. This plugin is considered the best SEO plugin for WordPress and beginners. It has around 200 features, and the plugin is regularly updated.
The features of Squirrly that make it the finest SEO plugin for WordPress are:
- Continuous keyword optimization while writing the content.
- Analysis of competition in the market, along with suggestions to improve ranking.
- Creation of content reports for your SEO marketing team.
- Weekly monitoring of progress.
- Blogging tools that help add relevant images, tweets, and references to your website blogs.
Those beginners who want customized SEO solutions for your website can install Squirrly. Based on AI technology, the guidelines offered by Squirrly are reliable and envelope content optimization, keyword search, rank tracking, site audits, etc.
7. WP Meta SEO
WP Meta SEO is a powerful plugin with a complete dashboard containing information on your SEO strategy and your website's rank analysis. The representation of data on the dashboard is visually attractive. This plugin is also easy to use for beginners because of the tips it offers for SEO optimization.
Here are its key features:
- A bulk meta content editor tool that handles all metadata of your website.
- A built-in content analysis tool.
- Keyword suggestion feature based on Google Search Console.
- XML and HTML sitemap generator.
- Image optimization and resizing tool.
- Redirection manager.
- Google Analytics feature.
- Breadcrumb generator.
The on-page SEO analysis and dashboard of the plugin help save time and help you avoid any SEO-related mistakes. Its meta content editor is fast and simple. Its redirection manager helps avoid 404 errors.
8. Premium SEO Pack
Premium SEO Pack is yet another WordPress SEO plugin that focuses on website speed. It also helps in image optimization and internal-link building. Some more of its features are:
- 404 monitoring.
- Minifying Javascript and CSS.
- SERP tracking.
- Rich snippet generation.
- Statistics generation related to website and keyword ranking.
- On-page image optimization.
With this plugin, you can generate a sitemap for your videos and images and use Google Analytics to monitor your progress. It also helps monitor website speed and optimizes your website to provide an enriching experience to your audience.
9. Redirection
Redirection should be an essential component of your SEO strategy because users that land up on a broken link need to be redirected to another webpage immediately. Redirection is an SEO plugin that can help in this regard. It is a free SEO plugin for WordPress that has been around for more than ten years.
Features of Redirection are:
- It has a redirection manager that sets up 301 redirects.
- The manager also helps track 404 errors.
- The plugin offers conditional redirects.
- It also helps migrate permalinks.
- It eliminates unnecessary query parameters.
Find broken links and redirect them quickly and effectively with the help of the Redirection plugin.
10. Rel NoFollow Checkbox
When you link your website to other web pages, you must ensure that these web pages are spam-free. If the other web pages have a poor ranking, Google will realize that such external link-building is manipulative, and this will, in turn, affect your website's ranking. To avoid this, adding 'rel nofollow' in external links is smart.
You do not have to do this manually. Rel NoFollow Checkbox plugin can help you. It will add this attribute to all external links so that the ranking of other links does not impact your SEO ranking.
It is a crucial plugin because:
- It ensures that you do not waste time sifting through the links.
- It is a perfect plugin for people not aware of coding.
- Its installation and configuration is also quite convenient.
- It does not hamper the speed of the website due to its lightweight.
11. The SEO Framework
The SEO Framework is a critically automated SEO expert system that is ad-free and 12X faster than other plugins for WordPress. It is known for how it represents data in a visually-appealing manner making it exciting to track Google rankings. The security track record of this plugin is top-notch.
Here are its top features:
- It intelligently generates meta tags in multiple languages.
- It follows Google's webmaster guidelines.
- It has a built-in sitemap.
- When it comes to Google searches of your website, it enables breadcrumbs.
- It has a local extension for local businesses to create their presence on search engines.
- It has Honeypot- an extension that exposes comment spammers.
- It has a focus extension allowing you to create high-quality and relevant content based on well-targeted key phrases.
12. XML Sitemaps
Sitemaps provide an overview of pages and videos, images, and other files that are present on your website. Search engines read sitemaps to know which files on your website are essential according to you. According to this information, then search engines help rank your website.
A free SEO plugin for WordPress that generates sitemaps is XML Sitemaps. It can do the following:
- Automatically generate sitemaps for your WordPress website.
- It can also create HTML sitemaps.
- It will notify search engines of your website updates.
13. Ahrefs Review
An insightful and analytical SEO plugin you can choose for your website is Ashrefs Review. The popularity of this tool is based on its ability to offer SEO analysis and reports that cater to business owners' and SEO experts' needs.
What can you do with this SEO plugin?
- You can conduct keyword research.
- You can do a competition analysis.
- You can also do a content analysis.
- You can carry out backlink research and analysis.
- You can also do SEO auditing.
- You can avoid keyword cannibalization and the creation of duplicate content.
14. Slim SEO
Slim SEO is an SEO plugin for WordPress whose selling point is that it is easy to configure, allowing you to benefit from SEO optimization efficiently. You do not have to bother about SEO's complex options and configurations. Install this plugin and let it do the work for you.
What jobs can you do automatically with the help of Slim SEO?
- Whether it is the generation of meta title tags, meta description tags, Twitter card tags, or Facebook open graph tags, Slim SEO has you covered.
- To get your website indexed effectively, Slim SEO helps generate XML sitemaps.
- It helps generate a breadcrumb trail related to your website.
- It helps add structured data to your site.
- It provides support for redirection in case of broken links or 404 errors.
15. WordLift
Another AI-powered and the best SEO plugin is Wordlift, that not only automates SEO strategy for your website but also generates more traffic and helps reach qualified audiences. It is well-suited for content creators and SEO experts because of the following:
- It helps in the content writing process by providing contextual facts.
- It enriches your website content with links, images, and videos.
- It improves your website's ranking by creating schema markup.
- It also helps publish your website's metadata.
- It makes your content readable.
- It ensures that the user experience on your website remains unbeatable.
16. Internal Link Juicer
Internal linking is crucial for audience engagement on your WordPress website. If you want your users to stay on your website longer and consume more of your content, you must have an internal linking strategy. The most convenient way of internal linking is to use the SEO plugin- Internal Link Juicer.
This plugin has made life easier for SEO strategists because:
- It has automated the process of internal linking.
- It helps generate anchor texts for all posts, ensuring diversification.
- It allows you to track all internal links on the dashboard.
- It enables you to make a black-and-white list to customize the internal linkages on your website.
- Its content editor allows you to configure keywords and maintain workflow.
17. Schema - All In One Schema Rich Snippets
Do you want your search results to look attractive and make your audience curious to know more about your content? If yes, use Schema to produce rich snippets for your website content like blogs, articles, product pages, etc. Schema allows creating search results with important information only, which search engines would prefer.
The benefits of using Schema are:
- The plugin is suitable for content like software applications, product descriptions, recipes, videos, etc.
- It provides the necessary information to the search engines and thus improves your ranking.
- It makes rich snippets that are interactive.
- It improves the click-through rate (CTR) of your website content.
18. Rankie
Are you interested in tracking your website's performance on SERP analysis? Rankie is the best SEO plugin for WordPress if you want to make strategic decisions by checking your website's ranking and analysis reports. It has an action log that keeps you updated on the plugin's actions to improve your ranking.
Keys features of this plugin are:
- It has a keyword research tool to help you recognize relevant keywords.
- It automatically adds keywords to the dashboard which users commonly search.
- It provides daily progress reports via email.
- It offers a graphical representation of each keyword being tracked.
19. Automatic Image Alt Attributes
As a person with some SEO knowledge, you must know that alt texts are needed for images so that search engines can read and understand the context of the images and help align search results according to user queries. With Automatic Image Alt Attributes, you do not have to sit and add alt texts for every image on your website. This plugin will automatically do it for you. While using this plugin, ensure that the image's file name is already tagged on WordPress for convenience.
20. Republish Old Posts
As the name suggests, this SEO plugin on WordPress allows you to share old posts again with users by updating the date of the published content to a current date. This ensures that new users can find these old posts conveniently and share them, as posts with current publication dates are considered more relevant. Use Republish Old Post if you have a vast repository of genuine information on your website.
21. Analytify
Analytify is an analytical SEO plugin that supplements the work done by Google Analytics. After installation, it displays your stats like bounce rates, sessions, users, etc., while providing insights on improving your SEO strategy. With this plugin, you can focus on users and make changes to your website to create better user engagement and experience. From social media stats and page-level analysis to front-end reporting to e-commerce tracking, Analytify has covered you.
22. Really Simple SSL
HTTP websites are less popular on search engines. Google, for instance, tends to favor HTTPS, which has a valid SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate. SSL is a security feature that assures your users that your website is secure and credible. You can migrate your HTTP website to HTTPS in no time with Really Simple SSL.
It provides:
- Easy and simple SSL migration.
- Comprehensive server health checkup.
- WordPress hardening.
- Content security policy.
- Permission policy.
All of the features ensure the optimal level of your website's security. Search engines love secure websites, so this plugin helps you reach customers conveniently.
23. Anti-Spam
SEO spam can be detrimental to your website's ranking if not detected on time. Spam is any content that does not rank well on search engines but is added to your website to get a ranking and visibility. You must use the Anti-Spam SEO plugin that helps remove spam comments, users, subscriptions, registrations, orders, etc.
24. ShortPixel
Is your website full of images? Do you want your website to load faster? Do you want to optimize images on your website? If yes, then ShortPixel is the best SEO plugin for WordPress. With this plugin, you can do the following:
- Compress your image file without a hassle.
- Compress the image without compromising its quality.
- Converts JPEG files to WebP/AVIF format for better quality.
25. Link Explorer
Created by Moz, Link Explorer is an SEO plugin with many relevant features. It can help you monitor inbound links. You can research for your competitors' backlinks to understand what they are doing right and how you can learn from them. Finding broken links is also convenient with the help of Link Explorer. This plugin also helps tackle spammy links. It also provides detailed metrics on page authority, domain authority, etc.
26. WP Rocket
You do not have to bother about your website caching needs because WP Rocket is there for you. This caching plugin enhances your website speed and positively impacts your core web vitals. It is also easy to install and does not require complex coding and configuration knowledge. Page cacher, browser cacher, GZIP compression, cache pre-loading- you name it, and WP Rocket can do it competently.
Conclusion
Now that you know the various quality SEO plugins, you can choose to install any to improve your SEO strategy and make your WordPress website a force to be reckoned with in your niche. Another way to enhance your SEO strategy is by partnering with Scalenut. This AI-based platform helps conduct SERP analysis and has a range of SEO-friendly tools that can work wonders for you.
In case you wish to become an SEO expert, read these Scalenut blogs about the best SEO tools in 2023, the best AI writing tools, and SERP analysis tools to gain comprehensive knowledge. Also, remember to sign up with Scalenut to know more.
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