In most cases, search engines provide the majority of traffic to newer websites. Even if you are utilizing advertisements or other means to direct paid traffic, you should still be capitalizing on SEO traffic however you can — and you can do that with the help of good plugins.
There is a huge catalog of plugins for WordPress that webmasters can take advantage of, and many of these can help you capitalize on that search engine traffic. These plugins help by optimizing your blog for search engines, allowing them to crawl your website easier and get you more traffic.
What is the Best SEO Plugin for WordPress?
The truth is, there isn’t a specific plugin anyone can say is truly the best SEO plugin for WordPress. It really depends on your type of blog, the features you want to utilize, and the traffic you’re trying to reach.
The truth is, there isn’t a specific plugin anyone can say is truly the best SEO plugin for WordPress. It really depends on your type of blog, the features you want to utilize, and the traffic you’re trying to reach.
With such a huge catalog, it can be hard to figure out which plugin is best for your WordPress blog — and if you’re new to WordPress, don’t make the mistake of thinking you can just load up your site with SEO plugins to boost traffic.
You should try to use as few SEO plugins as you can, otherwise they can conflict with each other and have a negative impact on your rankings. There are some cases where you may just want to use one feature of a certain plugin that your primary SEO plugin is missing, which is fine. Just don’t add every single plugin mentioned below and think it will work some magic.
Now, let’s take a look at some of the best SEO plugins for WordPress, and help you figure out which is best for your blog.
Yoast SEO
If there were a definitive “best” SEO plugin for WP, it would probably be Yoast SEO. There are some blogs that would benefit more from a plugin that caters more to their specific niche, but as an overall plugin Yoast is unmatched. Yoast was introduced in 2008, and is still regularly updated and in use by over 5 million sites.
There is a huge list of features, including important ones like XML sitemaps and schema implementation — both of which are extremely easy to do with Yoast and are incredibly useful for search engine rankings.
Yoast also offers analysis for your articles, helping you create content that is more search engine friendly, utilizes proper keywords, and it also measures the readability of your content. Of course you also get the basic SEO plugin features like title and meta description templating, but with some nice bonuses like bulk editing.
All of the features mentioned above are free, but Yoast also offers a premium package with even more advanced SEO tools for $89.
SEOPress
Another great plugin for most of your general SEO needs is SEOPress. As far as features go it is quite similar to Yoast, you’ll get metadata templating, XML sitemaps, content analysis, and plenty more. This should be seen as an alternative to Yoast if you’re not happy with the accessibility, but there’s no need to add SEOPress in addition to Yoast.
Both of these plugins have import/export options for all of your SEO settings, so feel free to try SEOPress if you’re already using Yoast (or vice versa) and see if you notice a difference in results or usability. The premium version for SEOPress is quite a bit cheaper than Yoast at $39, and it offers a lot of the same features.
The SEO Framework
This is another alternative to SEOPress and Yoast, with similar features. It offers a lot of different pricing options which might come in handy depending on your budget. This plugin is also known for its simplicity, which creates appeal for those just getting into SEO. It may not have 5 million+ active installations like Yoast SEO, but it does boast 233 five star reviews out of 241 total.
There’s not much else to say about The SEO Framework, but you should look into this as an all in one SEO plugin alternative.
Google Search Console
Next we have a great tool to use in addition to the above mentioned all in one plugins. Google Search Console caters specifically to Google search results, as you may have guessed from the name. This will show how your site ranks for specific keywords on Google as well as impressions and other analytics.
In addition to all of that, Google Search Console will let you know if Google is getting errors when attempting to crawl your blog, and will assist you in fixing the problem. This feature alone is a great reason to start utilizing this tool.
Bonus: Google Keyword Planner is another plugin for WordPress offered by Google to assist with finding the best keywords for your niche. This goes hand in hand with the Search Console plugin, and is another must have for your blog.
Broken Link Checker
Good SEO isn’t all about keywords and metadata. Although those things are important, you also want to be aware of other things that may be negatively affecting your SEO rankings that you don’t even know about — like broken links. If you have a lot of links on your site that don’t work, it can really hurt your rankings.
Broken Link Checker is an incredibly useful tool that will monitor any links in your posts, pages, comments, and everywhere else on your WordPress blog. If it detects any links that don’t work it will immediately alert you so you can fix the link and reverse any negative impact it may have on your SEO.
Put them to use!
Now that you’ve got a few of the best SEO plugins for WordPress at your disposal, it’s time to take action and put them to use. It’s a good idea to learn all the ins and outs of these plugins, and if you don’t understand a feature or what its used for — research it and make sure you’re getting the most out of your plugins.