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Skyrocket Your Website: 7 Best SEO Plugins for WordPress
Last updated on Feb 13, 2024 by Southie Williamson
Struggling with SEO for your WordPress site? Explore the best SEO plugins for WordPress to enhance your site’s visibility.
WordPress, with its user-friendly interface and extensive customization options, has become the go-to platform for website development. However, ensuring your WordPress site ranks high on search engine results pages (SERPs) requires more than just engaging content and an attractive design. This is where SEO plugins come into play.
In this article, we’ll share the best WordPress plugins for SEO to help you rank better on search engines, improve your content, and unlock your website’s potential.
Does WordPress Need an SEO Plugin?
Although WordPress doesn’t technically need an SEO plugin to function, using one can greatly enhance your site’s visibility on search engines. SEO plugins offer advanced SEO strategies that go beyond what WordPress provides by default. They provide user-friendly interfaces that allow for more granular control over your site’s SEO elements, such as keywords, meta tags, and structured data. You can even automate many SEO tasks to ensure your website rankings continue to climb.
Top SEO Plugins for WordPress
- All in One SEO (AIOSEO) – Overall best SEO plugin for WordPress.
- Yoast SEO – Best free alternative to AIOSEO.
- WPBeginner Keyword Generator Tool – Best free keyword generator.
- Semrush – Best for keyword research.
- MonsterInsights – Best for SEO analytics.
- Broken Link Checker – Best for finding and fixing broken links.
- Envira Gallery – Best for image compression and SEO-friendly galleries.
Ready to boost your SEO and get your website seen? Let’s dive in!
1. All in One SEO (AIOSEO)
Overall best SEO plugin for WordPress
AIOSEO stands tall as a comprehensive solution for WordPress SEO. Its intuitive interface and feature-rich toolkit make it a go-to for novices and experts alike. With a plethora of features, AIOSEO empowers you to enhance your web page rankings and cultivate organic traffic easily.
Let’s delve into the features that make AIOSEO the leader of WordPress SEO.
Seamless Sitemap Generation
AIOSEO takes the hassle out of SEO by automatically generating XML sitemaps for your website. These sitemaps are promptly submitted to search engines, ensuring that crawlers efficiently find and index your website content.
TruSEO Score for On Page Optimization
Every page on your site will have a TruSEO score by AIOSEO, offering a swift overview of potential problems and solutions. It helps you improve meta titles, descriptions, keywords, and more. The plugin offers generative AI tools and a built-in robots.txt editor, so you can guide Google and other search bots on how to crawl your site efficiently.
Redirection Manager and Link Assistant
AIOSEO’s included redirection manager allows you to create and manage redirects for broken links to avoid confusing search engines or losing valuable backlinks. The link assistant feature helps you build a robust internal linking system by providing relevant suggestions for adding internal links to older content as well as finding any orphaned posts that have no internal links.
More Features that Make AIOSEO the Best SEO Plugin
- Local SEO to rank higher on Google Maps.
- Rich snippets schema.
- Advanced sitemaps for videos, news, and RSS content.
- Image SEO to add metadata to photos.
- WooCommerce SEO to optimize product pages, product categories, and more.
- Author SEO to improve your E-E-A-T ranking.
- Social media integration to control how your content and thumbnails look on social networks.
- And more!
Who It’s For: All in One SEO is a reliable and easy-to-use plugin that’s been a staple in the WordPress community for years. It’s perfect for website owners of all levels looking for a one-stop-shop for all their SEO needs. While All in One SEO Pack shares similarities with other plugins, its unique combination of features and simplicity set it apart.
Price: Plans start at $49.60 / year (Free version available).
Alternatives: Yoast SEO, SEOPress, Rank Math
Get started with AIOSEO today!
2. Yoast SEO
Best free alternative to AIOSEO
Yoast SEO is another one of the most popular and feature-rich SEO plugins for WordPress, designed to optimize your WordPress website for search engines and enhance your online presence.
The plugin’s on-page SEO feature provides information on how SEO-optimized your articles are and what you can do to improve your content. The plugin also lets you create and submit a Google XML sitemap to ensure your website is indexed and visible in search results.
Yoast SEO’s Key Features
- Title, meta description, and focus keyword optimization.
- Entire site SEO analysis with suggestions for how to improve.
- Ability to set canonical URLs to avoid being penalized by Google for duplicate content.
- Control over site breadcrumbs
- And more!
Who It’s For: Yoast SEO’s user-friendly interface caters to both beginners and advanced users. If you’re looking for a free SEO plugin that still offers many helpful features, Yoast SEO is a great choice.
The plugin also offers a premium version, which includes more advanced features like redirects, internal link suggestions, automated SEO audits, and more. However, we found AIOSEO to be a more robust option if you’re opting for a paid plugin.
Price: Free.
Alternatives: AIOSEO, WP Meta SEO
Get started with Yoast SEO today!
3. WPBeginner Keyword Generator Tool
Best free SEO keyword generator
The WPBeginner Keyword Generator is a a free, user-friendly tool that simplifies keyword research by allowing you to generate over 300 keyword ideas for your WordPress blog with a single click. Just type in your keyword, hit “Analyze,” and watch as the tool organizes the results into three sections: alphabetical order, prepositions, and questions.
You can leverage this data for blog post ideas, market research, and more. Plus, the tool conveniently lets you download all the generated keywords as a CSV file.
A standout feature of the WPBeginner Keyword Generator is the inclusion of an SEO topical entity graph. This visual representation helps you gauge the relevance of a particular keyword, contributing to a more strategic approach to your website’s SEO.
More Free SEO Tools from WPBeginner
Aside from the Keyword Generator, WPBeginner offers other free SEO tools like:
You can see all of WPBeginner’s free business tools here.
Who It’s For: WPBeginner’s Keyword Generator and suite of tools are a testament to the power of simplicity. All of the tools are completely free, making them an excellent choice for those looking to optimize content and perform keyword research on a budget.
Price: Free.
Alternatives: Google Keyword Planner, KeywordTool.io
Get started with the WPBeginner Keyword Generator Tool today!
4. Semrush
Best SEO tool for keyword research
Trusted by professional SEO experts, marketers, bloggers, and businesses of all sizes, Semrush offers a comprehensive suite of tools that are unparalleled for keyword research and rank tracking.
Semrush provides in-depth analysis of your website SEO, keyword rankings, organic traffic, and more. It’s incredibly helpful for finding keywords, tracking your positions, and more. Furthermore, you can use competitive research to analyze the keywords your competitors rank for and strategically position yourself to outperform them.
Although Semrush is its own platform, it integrates seamlessly with with All in One SEO (AIOSEO). You can use it to find additional keyphrases for your focus keyword, see related keywords along with their search volume, and add them to your content with 1-click.
Semrush also offers a WordPress plugin called SEO Writing Assistant. The addon will provide additional help with analyzing and optimizing content within WordPress. It includes a plagiarism checker, real-time SEO and readability score, tone of voice analysis, and linking recommendations
Semrush’s Key Features
- In-depth keyword research to discover new keywords.
- Organic traffic tracking.
- Keyword gap analysis to see what your competitor’s are ranking for.
- Keyword position tracking.
- Backlink analysis.
- AIOSEO integration and a WordPress writing assistant.
- And more!
Who It’s For: Semrush dominates when it comes to keyword research for SEO. It’s often considered an essential for professional marketers, but the vast amount of features may be overwhelming for some beginners. It’s impressive features also result in a higher price tag, making it best suited to business owners who are ready to make a larger investment in their content strategy.
Price: Plans start at $129.95 / month.
Alternatives: Ahrefs, Google Search Console
Get started with Semrush today!
5. MonsterInsights
Best WordPress plugin for SEO analytics
MonsterInsights is the hands-down best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It revolutionizes the way you use Analytics by setting up advanced Google Analytics tracking in minutes and offering user-friendly reports directly within your WordPress dashboard.
MonsterInsights provides a wealth of data on website performance and how visitors behave on your site, which is crucial for refining your SEO strategies and achieving higher rankings in search results. The plugin also integrates with Google Search Console, AIOSEO, Yoast SEO, and Semrush, so you can see important SEO metrics alongside your other Google Analytics reports.
Key Metrics You Can Track with MonsterInsights
- Overall traffic, pageviews, and traffic sources.
- Outbound links.
- Form submissions.
- File downloads.
- eCommerce performance including popular products, order value, add-to-cart clicks, and more.
- Keywords your site ranks for.
- Referral traffic.
- Visitor demographics.
- And more!
Who It’s For: MonsterInsights is must-use plugin for every website. Although it’s perfect for beginners who may find Google Analytics difficult to navigate, it’s also a huge time-saver for professional marketers. You don’t have to spend hours setting up advanced tracking and finding the data you need. Just go through the handy MonsterInsights setup wizard, and the plugin will take care of all the complicated Google Analytics stuff behind the scenes.
Price: Plans start at $8.29 / month (Free version available).
Alternatives: ExactMetrics
Get started with MonsterInsights today!
6. Broken Link Checker by AIOSEO
Best SEO plugin for finding and fixing broken links
Broken Link Checker is another one of the best SEO plugins for WordPress, also created by AIOSEO. It’s designed to regularly scan your site content, identify broken links, and simplify the process of fixing them.
Broken links tarnish the user experience (visitors will often leave if they encounter a 404 error), and they pose a significant threat to your site’s SEO. Search engines, including Google, interpret broken links as a negative user experience, potentially leading to lower search rankings.
As websites prioritize creating new content, the upkeep of old posts often takes a back seat. Broken Link Checker steps in to solve this problem by analyzing all the links on your website, notifying you of any that are broken, and providing in-line editing to fix them quickly. The plugin will also exclude any broken links from being crawled by search engines until you have a chance to fix them.
Broken Link Checker’s Key Features
- Analyzes both internal and external broken links.
- Shows comprehensive data on your links including the URL, anchor text, HTTP status code, and page where the link is located.
- Provides in-line editing to fix broken links quickly, without having to open the page or post.
- Offers control over what the plugin crawls when looking for broken links. For example, you could exclude certain post types.
- Automatically excludes broken links from search engine crawlers.
Who It’s For: Broken Link Checker is perfect for anyone who wants to check for broken links on WordPress. It’s an excellent tool for keeping your SEO healthy.
Price: Free for up to 200 links per month (Paid plans start at $4.99 / month).
Alternatives: Broken Link Checker by WPMU DEV
Get started with Broken Link Checker by AIOSEO today!
7. Envira Gallery
Best WordPress plugin for image compression & SEO-friendly galleries
If you’re a photographer or run a site with a lot of images, it’s important to make sure your photos and galleries are optimized for SEO. Envira Gallery is the best WordPress gallery plugin, offering built-in image compression and multiple features to improve your image SEO.
The plugin makes creating beautiful WordPress galleries with lightbox display a piece of cake. It offers tons of layouts like carousel, masonry, grid, slideshow, and more while providing built-in image compression.
Since Google and other search engines prioritize sites with faster load times, site speed is an essential consideration for search engine rankings, and uncompressed images can significantly slow down your website’s loading times.
Envira Gallery simplifies the image optimization process by automatically processing all new images. It offers flexibility by letting you process all the images in your WordPress media library or only those in your galleries. You can choose the compression level (Lossy, Glossy, or Lossless) and even automatically resize images. The plugin also offers the option to preserve metadata during compression, so you won’t lose EXIF/ITPC information like copyright, camera and lens model, etc.
Envira Gallery’s Key Features for Image SEO
- Mobile responsive galleries
- Captions and alt tags to boost SEO
- Pagination and breadcrumbs to improve navigation and load times.
- Categories and tags to and create filterable galleries and improve SEO.
- Standalone galleries let you create indexable, unique pages for your galleries.
- Image deeplinking to create indexable, unique URLs for every item in your galleries.
- And lots more!
Who It’s For: Envira Gallery is an incredible tool for any website owner who wants to display photos, videos, and galleries on their site. The plugin’s image compression, deeplinking, and other SEO features make it a must-have for media-heavy sites and those looking to rank their photos in Google Images.
Price: Plans start at $39.50 / year (Free version available, but you’ll need a paid plan to access image compression and other features for SEO).
Alternatives: For basic image compression, you can check out ShortPixel or TinyPNG.
Get started with Envira Gallery today!
What Is the Best WordPress Plugin for SEO?
After testing all the tools and plugins on our list, All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the overall best WordPress plugin for SEO. It provides everything you need to optimize your website for search engines. Its beginner-friendly interface combined with comprehensive features like the advanced sitemaps, rich snippet schema markup, on-page SEO score, full-site SEO audit, redirection manager, link assistant, AI tools, and more make it the clear winner.
Looking for more top SEO tools? Here’s a few more that didn’t make it on our main list:
- SEOQuake – Browser extension to see SEO-related information.
- Redirection – Free plugin to easily set up redirects.
- Schema Pro – Plugin for adding advance rich snippet schema markup.
- WP Fastest Cache and WP Rocket – Caching plugins to speed up your website.
- Link Explorer – Off-page SEO tool by Moz for backlink analysis.
- Smush – Simple plugin for image optimization.
Are SEO Plugins Worth It?
Yes, SEO plugins are absolutely worth it, but the features of each can vary widely. You’ll want to carefully consider the SEO tools you need when selecting a plugin. Many SEO plugins are user-friendly and offer a straightforward solution to help beginners and experts alike navigate and improve SEO, all while saving time.
It’s important to note that while SEO plugins can significantly aid in improving your site’s SEO, they are tools that complement your efforts rather than replace them. Effective SEO requires a combination of using SEO plugins, creating high-quality content, optimizing site speed, and understanding the factors that impact search engine rankings.
Well that’s it for our list of the best SEO plugins for WordPress!
If you enjoyed this article, be sure to check out our guide to the Best WordPress Instagram Plugins for Epic Feeds & More Followers.
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