Are you doing enough for the search engine optimization of your website? Here are the top WordPress SEO plugins and tools that you must use.
Optimizing your websites for search engines isn’t an option. You must pay attention to the Visibility and Search Engine friendliness of your website if you want to survive the competition of the internet.
When using WordPress for your website, you already have an advantage because WordPress is an SEO optimized CMS. And the cherry on the cake is – the availability of SEO WordPress plugins that help you optimize your website even more.
To use these WordPress plugins, you don’t have to be an SEO pro. Even beginners with little to no prior knowledge about Search Engine Optimization can use them to manage their site’s SEO. They are intuitive and come with guidance to help you make your website/content more SEO friendly.
Yoast is the most popular and one the best WordPress plugins for SEO optimization. With more than 5 million installs, this plugin helps you easily take care of the search engine friendliness of your content.
This plugin lets you control the content of individual pages and posts. It allows you to write the content and then optimize it with clear instructions provided by the plugin.
First of all, it lets you specify the main keyword as well as the related keywords so that it can help you optimize your copy for those keywords.
To be specific, Yoast SEO plugin points if your page/post has enough internal/outbound links. It also helps you keep a watch on the keyword density and it’s use at important positions, i.e in the introduction part, slug, etc. It also tells you about keyword density based on the length of your post.
And one of the other important features that can help you add value to your page/post is the readability analysis. There are different factors that can contribute to make your page easy to process for the end users like page structure, length of the statements/paragraph, subheading distribution,etc. The readability analysis points out how easy to read and understand is your content on the page.
The Yoast SEO plugins has both: a free and a paid version. The free version comes with all the basic features you need to take care of the search friendliness of your website. With the premium version, you get some advanced features like focus keyword export, redirect manager, Internal linking suggestions, etc. While there’s no support for the free version, with the premium Yoast subscription, you get one year worth expert support.
As the name suggests, this plugin is a complete SEO solution for your WordPress websites. The plugin has a bundle of features, that you can use to improve the search friendliness of your content.
This plugin, just like Yoast SEO, is easy to use and comes with intuitive options to manage the SEO of your content. You can use the defaults or change the value in the settings panel. This WordPress SEO plugin can be used without any technical or SEO expertise.
This plugin is an alternative for the Yoast SEO for overall content optimization to see that the pages and posts you create are properly drafted and have a higher chance or ranking by following the SEO rules. You might not know them all, therefore, these plugins help you check your content step by step to make sure that you are following them.
There are two versions of All In One SEO pack too. The free version has some very useful features like XML Sitemap support, Google AMP, Google analytics support, SEO optimization for the custom post types, URL and redirection management, automatic meta tags, etc.
While the very affordable and neatly priced premium version has the features like Advanced Support for WooCommerce support for your eCommerce websites based on WordPress, SEO for Categories, Tags and Custom Taxonomies, premium support and access to the useful knowledge base and videos.
For taking your content on social media, this advanced version also has the features to manage how your content will look on the social media so that you can manage and make it more effective.
When we talk about the SEO of a website, we cannot/must not forget the snippets. Snippets in the SERP (search engine result page) tell people why they should click your page. So they are too important to be ignored for the better optimization and ranks of your website.
The All In One Schema Rich snippets plugin allows you to define the content to let the search engines as well as your readers to know more about your page. By using this plugin, you get a chance to express yourself the best by using the summary of your page shown in the search engine.
Proper summary and rich snippets have an effective impact on the Click through rates of your websites, which will ultimately help you rank better. This plugin lets you define those rich snippets/summary.
This plugin supports different types of schema such as Reviews, books, events, people, products and software applications, recipes, videos, articles, etc. It works well with any other SEO plugin you might be using and is quite light weight. It is free to download and very easy to use.
When your site is indexed well, the chance for your individual pages to rank improves too. This plugin we are talking about, helps you submit your sitemap to Google, so that it is indexed.
The Google XML SiteMaps is free and has more than 2 million active installs. It is a simple plugin that generates a SiteMap for your WordPress website/blog, automatically. So with this plugin, the search engine can easily know the structure of your website and track it better. This Sitemap plugin for WordPress also notifies the search engine about the new posts and custom URLs. It even supports custom URLs.
With the stylesheet, that this Google XML SiteMaps adds, it becomes easier for you too to understand the structure of your website.
It is clear that Google and other search engines prefer perfection. It is because of the competition out there and you must know that each website that competes with yours is doing their best in every way to be chosen by the search engines.
The sites with broken links, doesn’t just disappoint the readers but also the search engines. This plugin checks for the broken links in your posts, pages, custom post types and even the comments. You can configure it to notify you through email or by dashboard notification.
With broken links on your website, the search engine cannot crawl further and therefore your ranks suffer. Therefore, for better performance, you must use this plugin to check the broken links.
The SEO plugin looks for the broken links, images and redirects to make sure that everything is up to date and the crawlers don’t reach a dead end. Moreover, it also has the feature to let you update the links right through the plugin’s page. So you don’t have to individually change them.
Besides, there are other link management features for you that will make it really easy to manage the links on your website. The Broken link Checker plugin can be downloaded for free.
All the plugins I’ve mentioned in this earlier work to somehow help you curate your content, optimize your content through keywords, etc. This one is slight different.
The Google Analytics by MonsterInsights helps you plan your SEO strategies (whereas the others in this list help you implement it) This SEO WordPress plugin helps you by providing very insightful reports and statistics to decide the keywords and plan the SEO strategies around it. And the statistics is derived through the most reliable source – Google Analytics.
It is one of the most popular WordPress plugins with more than 2 Million active installs. It basically builds a bridge between your WordPress website and Google Analytics. This plugin in fact is Google Analytics simplified and gets you the reports right into your WordPress dashboard.
The plugin is easy to use and helps you effortlessly setup Google Analytics in your WordPress dashboard. The plugin is regularly updated to keep up with the Google Analytics update. Some of the customized reports that Google Analytics with MonsterInsights are the audience report, content report, behavior report, eCommerce report, forms reports, search console report, etc.
The Google Analytics by MonsterInsights has additional features for eCommerce tracking and analytics. The WooCommerce reports gives you insight about the events like the number of add to carts, removed from cart, and sessions to purchase, etc. There is an addon for Easy digital downloads to be used with digital goods.
Besides there are features for Google AdSense Tracking and Affiliate Link Tracking. It works even in multisite environment. There’s a pro version of this plugin too.
The SEO framework is an SEO plugin for all your WordPress requirements. This plugin is really easy to use and manage. This plugin allows you to create better content and optimize it to help the visibility of your website.
The settings panel of this plugin has a clean interface. It helps optimize your pages for the focus keyword and add meta description. Moreover, it has features to help you improve social media sharing, title management and other features to help you ensure that your content follows the best SEO practices for your website.
It will Automatically notify the popular search engines about the updates on your website with sitemap enabled. To do more with this plugin, the SEO Framework plugin supports an add-on called the extension manager.
The multiple features of this plugin give you more than 100 site options, to manage the visibility of your website. The SEO plugin is free to be downloaded from the WordPress plugin repository.
Since they’ve described themselves as the Swiss Army knife for the SEO, it tells us that this plugin too, comes with a package of essential SEO features to make your website SEO friendly.
In fact, Rank Math comes with many interesting features to optimize your website. It does the work of two or three WordPress plugins. First of all, it lets you optimize each piece of content on your website with 5 keywords.
Besides, there are so many SEO features like: Included rich snippets, Google Search Console integration, LSI indicator, redirection manager, dead link manager, Internal link suggestion, and role manager. There are also features for Automatic image optimization, XML sitemaps,.htaccess & Robots.txt Editor, etc.
Moreover there are all the advanced SEO tools and features you might need to perform the SEO analysis of your website. The plugin comes with a one click data import from all the WordPress SEO plugins like Yoast SEO, All In One Schema rich snippets, All In One SEO pack, etc.
Compared to the other SEO plugins, Rank Math has to offer a lot of features for free. The plugin is ideal for almost any kind of website. It’s free, all inclusive, and really easy to use.
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Images are a big part of the performance of your website and subsequently, they contribute to the SEO ranking too. The main reason you should optimize the images on your website is because un-optimized images can slow down your site, which is not good for SEO since speed is a ranking factor too.
Now, it’s not possible to optimize every single image while you create your post/website. Therefore, using such plugins help because they automatically optimize the images to improve the speed of your website.
What this plugin does, is three important tasks for image optimizations: Image resizing, Automatically inserting the title for the image, and auto managing the alt tag for the uploaded images.
The features of this plugin are simple. It works well in the multi-site environment too. It is multi-language and translation ready. The SEO Image Optimizer plugin works well with most of the WordPress themes. The plugin is easy to use, but you can use their detailed documentation to setup and use the plugin.
SEO image optimizer has a free and a paid version. With the paid version, you get the priority support. The pro version also has features like Woo-commerce Support, features to remove delimiter characters from the title and Alt tags, support for custom Image Text for every single image, etc.
Only a website that loads fast, has the chance to rank well. This is due to many reasons, first of which is the fact that Google uses Site speed as a factor to rank. A fast websites provides better user experience and therefore improves the session times and reduces the exit rates.
This Caching plugin, obviously helps you to improve the performance of your website by making it faster. This SEO friendly WordPress plugin has more than 1 million active installs and is one of the most popular and best Caching plugins.
This plugin is designed to improve the performance of your website by increasing website performance. It also allows integration of CDNs(Content Delivery Network) for faster delivery of the content.
W3 Total Cache supports Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), SSL, and minifying and caching of the CSS and javascripts in memory on disk or CDN. It allows caching of page, posts, database objects, CSS and JavaScript, search results pages, etc.
The W3 Total Cache Plugin has combination features of caching as well as minifier. It also helps you integrate CDN for efficient results.
There is no doubt that creating engaging content is important to retain users on your website. With Ultimate Blocks WordPress plugin, you can create engaging blog posts easily.
It is a Gutenberg blocks plugin that comes with 18 awesome blocks that include a schema-enabled review block, call-to-action block, content filter bock, content toggle with FAQ Schema, and more.
The biggest reason why Ultimate Blocks helps with SEO is that it has a schema-enabled review block that helps you display rich snippets on search results.
The plugin gives you an option to enable schema for the review description as well as review image which will result in a proper rich snippet that can help you get more visitors to your website.
So, if you write a lot of reviews on your website, you can take advantage of this block available in Ultimate Blocks WordPress plugin.
Another important feature of this plugin is its table of contents block. This block lets you easily add a table of contents to your posts.
This can help you a lot in appearing in increasing your CTR as it enables you to ‘Jump To’ quick links in the search results snippets.
Ultimate Blocks offers other additional benefits with its various blocks. You can take advantage of their content filter or content toggle block to make your content engaging to the users. This can boost the average time on site which will result in a lower bounce rate and better rankings.
What’s great about this plugin is that it’s completely free and it cuts down on the number of plugins you use on your website.
Ultimate Blocks is also very lightweight so you don’t have to worry about this plugin affecting your website speed.
Google loves mobile friendly websites and you must not ignore this especially when you have a plugin to do that easily.
This plugin is designed to automatically add a mobile theme to your WordPress website. With this, you website will start looking great, not only in the computers but also in the mobile devices.
WPTouch Mobile plugin to make your website mobile friendly comes with a settings panel and advanced options that is intuitive and very easy to use. With the available options, you can customize your site, and easily edit the mobile friendly version of your website. All of this can be done, without touching a line of code.
There is a paid and a free version for this plugin. The pro version comes with advanced options and more themes for your mobile sites. There are advanced themes for blog websites, business sites and even WooCommerce based stores.
The plugin is simple and helps SEO by creating a mobile friendly version of your website.
You create a website and optimize it for speed and SEO, but what about the mobile version of your site? AMP does this.
This WordPress SEO plugin adds AMP to your WordPress website. This improves the speed of your website when viewed through mobile devices.
It comes with default and pre-designed pages for your business websites. Supports WooCommerce and Gravity forms.The Accelerated mobile pages support advertisements as well as Email Opt-in Subscription forms.
It has recently added a drag and drop content builder to easily edit and manage your Mobile pages. Besides, there are a lot of customization features for a Mobile friendly and super-fast website.