SEO seems complicated and a lot of hard work. Doing on-page optimization is mandatory, and it looks like you have to go into the code, make sure every title tag, h1 tag, meta description, and everything else is perfectly optimized to rank for your keyword. But SEO plugins do a lot of the hard work for you. You don’t need to be an HTML, CSS, or PHP expert just to get your SEO right. These plugins will help you optimize your WordPress website for the search engines.
To install any of these plugins, simply go to your WordPress site, go to Plugins, and search for the plugin.
Best SEO Plugins for WordPress
Yoast SEO
Yoast is the king of the roost when it comes to WordPress SEO tools. It’s easy to install, easy to use, and it’s FREE. It takes care of on page SEO at the page and post level, meaning you can customize each page and each post to optimize for different keywords.
All in all, Yoast allows you to create a fully fledged SEO structure for your website, and we highly recommend all WordPress users install it.
All in One SEO Pack
This is similar to Yoast, however it has a few more features. The main reason why you might choose this over Yoast is if you want some more advanced functionality. It also works with AMP out of the box, if that’s something you’re using.
Rank Math
Rank Math, when it comes to SEO tools, has even greater power than Yoast and All in One. However, it’s slightly less popular because it can seem more complicated to use. Despite this, if you’re serious about your site’s SEO and you want to leave no stone unturned in your competitive niche, then Rank Math is for you.
The nicest thing that Rank Math provides is rich snippets markup, which allows your SERP listing to look even nicer. You can add links, star ratings, reviews, and more.
SEO Squirrly
SEO Squirrly has similar features to Yoast’s plugin on the page and post level, however Squirrly is a bit more advanced. It shows much more ways to optimize your page or post, and it will even allow you to analyze competitors’ content! This way, you can write pages that are better optimized than the competition.
Easy Table of Contents
Do you have a long piece of content? Easy Table of Contents can create a list of sections for your long post, so that people can more easily navigate through it and find what they’re looking for. This also can increase readability by quite a bit. You could even get jump links in your SERP listing.
Shortpixel
Do you have large images on your site? You want to keep them large and high definition, but you don’t want them to harm site load speed. Shortpixel compresses your images so that they’re smaller and load faster on visitors’ computers. Works with JPG, PNG, GIF, and even PDFs. Best of all, you can use a one-click bulk image optimizer to optimize all the images and PDFs on your site.
Rel NoFollow Checkbox
Nofollow links are important for managing the passing of “link juice” to different pages and sites. However, they usually require you to specify it in the HTML code. This plugin allows you to use a checkbox to set a link as nofollow. Super easy!
All in One Schema Rich Snippets
Rich snippets can drastically improve your listing’s CTR (clickthrough rate) on the SERPs. All in One Schema Rich Snippets allows you to pass more information to the SERP listing, allowing the user to see much more than just a snippet of your website.
This is excellent for all websites, and definitely should be used to enrich your site’s SERP listings.
WordLift
WordLift is a different kind of SEO tool. It’s powered by AI to help search engines understand what you’re saying in your content. What does it do? It takes your articles and transforms the text into text that’s understandable by both humans and machines. It helps organize content and enrich it with images, data maps, and timelines. You can even use Wordlift to figure out ways to distribute and monetize your content.
Broken link checker
A simple tool that always runs, Broken Link Checker scours your website looking for broken links. It works for internal and external links, and
will alert you if it finds a broken link on your site. It will even suggest a replacement link for you.
Don’t use this plugin unless you have the server bandwidth to do so: it uses a lot of bandwidth and could slow down your site.
