No matter what type of website you are building, you need to ensure it is visible in search engines. The best way to do this is by using plugins that help you with on-site optimization. One of the biggest problems you will face is knowing which ones to use.
There are hundreds available, but this article will give you a great starting point for picking the best SEO plugin for your website.
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is another top WordPress SEO plugin that lets you optimize your WordPress website for search engines.
This plugin allows you to easily add SEO descriptions and titles to your website’s posts and pages. And it even lets you add Open Graph information and social media images to your WordPress content.
With the Yoast SEO plugin, you can automatically generate XML sitemaps to make it easier for search engines to crawl your content. You can also import SEO data from other SEO plugins you’ve used previously.
SEOquake
SEOQuake is a useful SEO tool for website owners. It is available as a browser add-on for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Safari web browsers.
It provides SEO related information for any website. This data includes page health, age, last updated, Alexa rank, and many other parameters. It is one of the most downloaded browser addons by SEO professionals.
Apart from that, the SEOquake toolbar can show you all the same data search results when you type in a keyword. This information can be extremely useful if you are gauging competition for different keywords. You can even download search results in CSV format and prepare your own excel sheets of search data.
Alternative: Ahrefs SEO Toolbar
Bonus Plugins for WordPress Website Owners
These tools give you the additional advantage when optimizing your website for SEO. They do not advertise themselves as SEO tools but they are essential for every website and play a significant role in your website’s search performance.
All in One SEO (AIOSEO)
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At the very top of the list of our must-have SEO plugins for WordPress is All in One SEO (AIOSEO).
It’s the most powerful SEO plugin available, and if you pick just one on this list for SEO, this would be the smart choice. It’s an extremely beginner-friendly plugin that can replace multiple search engine optimization plugins.
Features:
- Well-loved and used by millions to grow web traffic organically.
- Offers a powerful free version.
- User-roles to manage access to your SEO.
- Automatically generate XML sitemaps to submit to search engines so they’ll index your site and you show up in search results
- Get rich snippets schema for more traffic.
- Built-in social media integration.
- Easy-to-use setup wizard to customize SEO for your small business website.
- Edit your robots.txt files.
- Run an SEO Health Checker.
- Use dynamic values (current year, month, day, custom fields, author info, and more) in your SEO title and descriptions.
- On-page analysis with an actionable checklist to optimize your posts and pages.
- Optimize your page and post SEO by adding meta-titles, keywords, and descriptions.
- Discover related and additional keywords you can rank for with the SEMRush integration.
- WooCommerce SEO tools for eCommerce sites helps you optimize your store for better rankings.
WP Rocket
Site speed is a major factor in search rankings. That’s why you need to monitor your website speed & performance to make sure it’s not affecting your SEO.
The easiest way to boost your website speed is by enabling caching. WP Rocket is the best WordPress caching plugin on the market, which allows you to set up caching without diving into any technical stuff.
Alternative: WP Super Cache
SEMRush
SEMRush helped us write this post. It’s a very effective marketing tool and SEO plugin for WordPress.
It really is a strong SEO tool that’s wildly popular with SEO professionals. And, it’s packed full of useful features to help you move up in search engine rankings.
Features:
- On-Page SEO Checker helps you quickly super-charge your content marketing by looking at details for different pages and posts.
- Broken link checker scans your site for dead links.
- Search your competitor’s URLs to check for their highest-ranking keywords and work to outrank them.
- Analyze keywords for search volume so you can plan your content ahead and know which keywords to add that will boost rankings.
- Position Tracking helps you see (and track) where you and your competitors rank with specific keywords, so you can easily optimize those keywords.
- Build an outline for your posts by running a keyword through SEMRush and getting content suggestions.
MonsterInsights
Many beginners rely on their best guess to make their marketing decisions. You don’t need to do that when you can easily get the insights you need to improve your website’s SEO strategy.
MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It allows you to easily install Google Analytics in WordPress and shows human-readable reports inside your WordPress dashboard.
It tells you where your users are coming from, your top content, what users do on your website, and more. It also allows you to track your eCommerce SEO by seeing which products are popular and where you are losing customers.
Bonus tip: See what other marketing data you must track on your website to grow your business.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a great, free tool to use to learn important insights about your search result rankings.
You can use it to see how your content is doing and get a bunch of really amazing data about your website and your content across the web. Plus, combine this tool with MonsterInsights and you can watch your rankings explode.
Features:
- Submit a sitemap and new content for indexing.
- Helpful tools to come up with new blog post ideas.
- It’s insanely easy to connect your WordPress site with Google Search Console.
- View your Search Console Report in your WordPress dashboard using MonsterInsights.
- Alerts you when Google is unable to crawl and index pages on your WordPress site.
- Instructions on how to fix common crawling errors.
- Use it in combination with MonsterInsights to see your site’s top Google search terms and average search results page position, plus clicks, impressions, and CTR.
- Hide specific content from Google (by noindexing) to prevent duplicate content.
- Find and fix malware and spam issues.
- Learn which keywords your pages and posts are ranking for.
- Check inbound links and find out which websites are sending you traffic.
- Check your website to see how mobile-friendly it is.
Slim SEO
A FAST & AUTOMATED SEO PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS
Currently there are many SEO plugins for WordPress in the market. But these plugins often have too many options and are very complicated for ordinary users. Access to their configuration section, you will easily get lost in a maze of explanations and options that you sometimes don’t understand. Besides, there are ads!
So how can an ordinary user use an SEO plugin?
SEO should be an integrated part of WordPress, where users don’t need or need very little effort to configure for SEO. The main reason is that not everyone understands the terms of SEO and how to configure them optimally.
So, we made Slim SEO.
Slim SEO is a full-featured SEO plugin, that’s done right! It provides a complete SEO solution for WordPress where the configuration has been done automatically. Users do not need to care about their complex and semantic options.
So what does Slim SEO do?
SLIM SEO FEATURES
Slim SEO helps you do the following jobs automatically:
1. META TAGS
The following meta tags are auto-generated and optimized for the best SEO scores.
- Meta title tag: display your title in a SEO-friendly way.
- Meta description tag: auto generate from posts/pages excerpt or content.
- Meta robots tag: decide which pages are indexed and which ones not.
- Facebook Open Graph Tags: share your posts on Facebook beautifully.
- Twitter Card Tags: share your posts on Twitter beautifully.
2. XML SITEMAP
Slim SEO automatically generates XML sitemap (at domain.com/sitemap.xml) to submit to search engines. With XML sitemaps, your website are indexed fast and completely.
3. BREADCRUMBS
The plugin allows you to output a breadcrumb trail on your website easily. It automatically fetches the information from the current post and output a hierarchy for you. You can also style the breadcrumbs to match your theme style.
4. SCHEMA (STRUCTURED DATA)
Schema is a way that describes structured data for search engines. Based on the data provided, search engines can show the content in the search results page in a more appealing way.
Slim SEO automatically adds the some structured data to the website via JSON-LD which makes your website more SEO-friendly. Not only schemas are created by the plugin, there are also meaningful connections between them. For example, an article (single post) is the main entity of the current webpage. Slim SEO does that all without any configuration.
5. AUTO REDIRECTION
- Auto redirect attachment page to the attachment file URL.
- Auto redirect author page to the homepage if the website has only one author or the author doesn’t have any posts.
6. OPEN SOURCE
Slim SEO has different contributors which help make Slim SEO a quality product. Join us on Github!
Google PageSpeed Insights
As mentioned earlier, your site loading times play a role in how well it ranks in search results. Slow website loading times impact user experience and can increase your website’s bounce rate.
With Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, you can see how fast your web pages load. If the online tool detects any issues with your speed or performance, it suggests steps for fixing them.
Google PageSpeed Insights works seamlessly with the MonsterInsights Google Analytics plugin. This means you can check your page speeds right inside your WordPress dashboard, removing the need to access multiple tools outside your website.
Broken Link Checker
Our final solution is Broken Link Checker. This free WordPress SEO plugin monitors your website for broken links and helps you fix them easily.
You may not have the time to manually check your content for link issues, so a plugin like this is super-useful. It automatically checks your archive of published WordPress content, notifying you about broken links and images.
Conclusion
Every business that uses the WordPress platform wants their website to rank on top of Google. For that, they need a plugin that helps them rank higher and drives traffic to their business. There are many SEO plugins available in the market, and the one we like the most is Yoast SEO Plugin.