One of the biggest misunderstandings about WordPress is built perfectly for SEO. However, the truth is that the WordPress core provides basic SEO services. That is why WordPress users are advised to download appropriate SEO plugins for WordPress to improve it further, which is what I will be doing for this article.
These plugins listed below are considered among the best in the WordPress community. They help optimize your website’s content so that it can be crawled by search engines, which boost your site’s visibility and attract lots of traffic. So here are the best SEO plugins for WordPress:
WordPress SEO Plugins
Yoast SEO
Downloads: 5+ million
When it comes to the best SEO services, Yoast stands on top of other SEO plugins for WordPress. This is proven with the plugin being installed over 5 million times with a five-star average rating. It is created by Joost de Valk and his team to boost your site’s SEO in every way possible.
Here are some of Yoast’s most notable features:
Write Better Content
The plugin’s snippet preview allows you to view a rendering of your web page or post and see how it appears on search results. Yoast checks if the title of your post too short or long and also checks to see if your meta description is appropriate for a search result. Doing this ensures your website or blog post get a boost in search engine rankings and CTR for organic search results.
Technical WordPress SEO
Yoast provides you with a couple of extra tools that the WordPress core doesn’t come with. For instance, the plugin reminds you to enable pretty permalinks, as well as optimize and insert meta tags and link elements that search engines love.
Page Analysis
The function checks to see if your posts have images, whether they have an alt tag featuring the focus keyword, they are long enough and if they have a meta description among others. Yoast also lets you write meta titles and descriptions for your tags and categories and give you options to further customize them.
XML Sitemaps
By checking its XML Sitemap box, Yoast automatically creates XML sitemaps which immediately inform search engines of their existence. The sitemaps also include the images that you have on your web pages and posts so that search engines can find them easily.
RSS Optimization
This feature allows you to add a link to your RSS feed that directs search engine visitors back to the article written by you instead of scraper sites. This increases the ranking of your chosen keywords and put an end to scrapers as well.
Jetpack by WordPress.com
Downloads: 5+ million
Jetpack is regarded as one of the best SEO plugins for WordPress that not only improves your site’s SEO but also keeps it secure and engages your readers. Its features include the following:
Traffic and SEO Tools
- Website analytics and stats
- Related posts
- Automatic sharing on social networking channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Tumblr, and WhatsApp.
- Advertising program which includes the best of Facebook Ads, AdSense, Amazon, Yahoo, and AOL. (paid)
- SEO tools for WordPress.com, Facebook, Twitter, and Bing. (paid)
Content Creation
- Slideshows, carousels and tiled galleries.
- Fast CDN for your website’s images
- Quick embeds from Google Docs, YouTube, Spotify and more.
- Sidebar customization for Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds.
- Video hosting that’s high-definition, very fast and ad-free. (paid)
Security and Backup Services
- Uptime and Downtime monitoring
- Protection against brute force attacks
- Code and malware scanning and threat resolution (paid)
- Two-factor authentication and secure logins
- Site migrations, backups and restores. (paid)
Discussion and Community
- Fully-customizable contact forms
- Email subscriptions
- Infinite scroll for posts
- Comment login using Twitter, Facebook and Google
All in One SEO Pack
Downloads: 2+ million
All-in-One-SEO-Pack is yet another widely used plugin that helps optimize your WordPress site for SEO. It includes out-of-the-box features that are essential for beginners and advanced features that are great for developers. The plugin also provides the following features:
- XML Sitemap support in which you can improve your SEO by submitting your sitemap to Google and Bing.
- Advanced canonical URLs.
- Custom Post Type SEO support.
- Google AMP and Analytics support.
- Automatically generates meta tags.
- Optimizes your titles for search engines automatically.
- Prevents content from being duplicated.
- Override any title and set any meta keywords and descriptions you want.
Google XML Sitemaps
As the name of this plugin suggests, special XML sitemaps will be created to aid search engines to index your WordPress website better. Google, Bing, and other search engines find it easier to understand your website’s structure and efficiently retrieve it.
Every WordPress generated page and custom URL is supported by the plugin. Additionally, major search engines are notified when you publish a new post. Your website will not break, slow down, or even annoy you.
W3 Total Cache
Downloads: 1+ million
W3 Total Cache boosts your website’s speed and performance with its integrated CDN services. This as a result improves your website’s SEO, SERP rankings, conversion rates as well as user experience. In fact, when the plugin is fully configured, your website’s overall performance will increase 10 times.
Some of W3 Total Cache’s key features include:
- Caching of posts, pages, Javascript, CSS, feeds and search results pages in memory or disk.
- Minification of posts, pages, feeds, inline, embedded or 3rd party CSS and Javascript.
- Performance insight caching statistics.
- Extension framework for customization or extensibility.
- Reverse proxy integration via Varnish or Nginx.
Conclusion
You wanted the best SEO plugins for WordPress sites and blogs, you can’t get any better than the ones listed above. These plugins are just what you need to give your WordPress related content the notice from target readers and users to boost traffic, leads, and conversions. If there are any that I have missed out on, please let me know in the comments below.
