In this modern age, search engines are like Yellow Pages. They are the major sources of traffic for online business on the Internet. Thus, it only makes sense to optimize your site for search engines, ranking you higher on search results and growing your business.
To help you with that, we share some of the best WordPress SEO plugins that you should be using right now:
- Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is perhaps the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress that you can find. It’s the best place to start if you wish to create better content and optimize your site for search engines.
There are several features it provides, such as XML sitemaps functionality, technical WordPress SEO, and page analysis tools. Yoast SEO makes sure that your SEO efforts are always on track, scanning images and alt tags to content length and meta description and everything in between.
It’s simple yet very detailed that it’s favored by both newbies to advanced SEO specialists.
- All in One SEO Pack
This one’s a great alternative for Yoast SEO. Beginners don’t have to worry about complicated settings as it works instantly upon activation. For instance, this plugin automatically generates meta tags and optimizes your titles for search engines. With that said, advanced users can customize the settings and override the automatic features.
In addition, you can use its Robots.txt editor so that web crawlers can access your site’s contents. Also, it can automatically notify search engines about changes to your website. Other than that, the All in One SEO Pack also offers a bunch of features such as e-Commerce SEO, AMP support, RSS, and XML Sitemap support, schema markup, image SEO duplicate content detection, and advanced canonical URLs.
- Rank Math
Rank Math is yet another powerful WordPress SEO plugin and a competitor to the two previous plugins. It’s feature-packed and user-friendly, loved by many WordPress users. There’s even an easy-to-follow setup wizard guiding you through the installation process, and it offers a pretty neat UI.
It showcases key features that Yoast and other plugins don’t have, including Rich snippet markup, redirections, integration to Google Search Console, and Card previews for Twitter and Facebook.
It even has the 404 error monitor, searching for visitors experiencing the 404 pages and letting you know the URLs as well as the number of times they’ve been hit. Rank Math even shows you the referrer so that you can see where the link was clicked.
Plus, if you think you’d have enough of Yoast and migrating to Rank Math, this plugin allows the importing of your existing settings from Yoast.
- Google XML Sitemaps
If you want to focus on getting your website indexed by search engines, then this is the best plugin you can get. Google XML Sitemaps allow you to generate a sitemap automatically. This way, crawlers can easily assess your website. It’s also convenient as you can save and re-apply your preferred settings every time you publish new content.
Furthermore, it gives you more flexibility and control over the standard XML sitemap features of WordPress 5.5. Take note, that this plugin solely focuses on providing complete XML sitemaps. So, don’t expect to get as many features as with other SEO plugins. Still, this plugin is an awesome no-frill choice supporting all WordPress-generated content without website overload.
- Broken Link Checker
This plugin is what it is called searching and checking for broken links on your site— both external and internal. If it finds any, it shows you the HTTP status code, source of the link, and anchor text, making it easy to find and fix.
Because the plugin runs in the background, it continuously checks for broken links, alerting you by email should it find any. But, perhaps its best features are that you get to fix links in just a couple of clicks and doing so in bulk.
It easily unlinks and removes the broken links. Then it also suggests replacement links, swapping the dead links for a working one with just a few clicks. All this without searching for the post itself.
- W3 Total Cache
Site speed is a ranking factor. Google already made that clear. So, it’s not something that you should overlook. If you’re having trouble in this department, then install the W3 Total Cache plugin.
It helps in improving the speed of your website as well as optimizing overall user experience. From “minification of 3rd party CSS and JavaScript to caching posts and pages, you never have to wonder why you’re ranking lower or why your audience is clicking the back button.
Conclusion
These are just some of the top WordPress plugins for improving your website SEO. Regardless of what your SEO needs, there’s a WordPress plugin that can help you there so that you can step closer to higher rankings.