Why do you need WordPress SEO Plugins to run your blog? How do these SEO plugins aid your site in optimizing your content and rankings?

These are the major questions I hear these days about SEO plugins. So here I have come up with this article about SEO Plugins that will help your WordPress site and I have also listed the top most plugins for you in the below article.

So, coming to the topic! WordPress is the topmost CMS used by billions of customers to power their websites. If you are a beginner you can definitely start your site with WordPress, as it gives feasibility to add different features through the plugins. 

WordPress is the most used Content Management System (CMS) worldwide.  with a 60.7% share of the CMS market and more than 70 million websites created on this platform, it opens up a panorama with a lot of competition in the field of SEO.

For this reason, it is important that you use a good SEO positioning strategy on your website, for this, I have compiled a list of the 20+ best SEO plugins for WordPress that will help you rank your search engine rankings.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

SEO is a set of techniques that have the main objective to make the sites more friendly to the search engines, working with selected keywords in the site content so that it is better positioned in the organic results.

Search engine optimization is usually defined as a practice for optimizing website content based on various factors to improve the ranking of your website on Google.

SEO’s ultimate goal is to eventually show your website at the top of the results page, which in turn will bring you more organic traffic from search engine users.

But you might think, what does the term “Organic Traffic” mean?

Traffic is typically referred to as organic when no advertising traffic is paid for and comes from Search Engines

What are the latest SEO trends in 2020?

Use the keyword in the title, slug (URL) and in the description

Placing our keyword or keywords on our page or post is the best way to start the SEO Onpage on the right foot, at the same time they must be concise, well-formatted, and should catch the reader’s attention.

1. Content: Surely you have heard that content is king, yes, Google loves new and constant content, and above all that provide value to users. Write quality content and its length should be no less than 1500 words.

2. Optimize speed for mobile: Today 70% of web traffic comes from mobile users, surpassing desktop users. Google prioritizes this in its algorithms by changing the rules of the game. This is how AMP (accelerated mobile pages) was born, focused on optimizing the speeds for these devices.

3. Loading speed: Google has made it clear that page speed is one of the key factors in getting a higher ranking in its search SERP. It is not an easy task but basically, it requires an investment in quality Hosting and tools that allow reducing load times.

4. Structured data: Structured data is a code that makes it easy for search engines to track, organize, and display content in the search SERP. It helps Google’s algorithms to understand and index your content in a better way and includes elements that improve the visibility of your website (for example, a star ranking).

5. Image optimization: For better relevance, images should always have a title, alternative text, and description, and also ensure that they are saved in legacy web formats.

6. Internal links: Internal links improve the metrics of your site and generate a better user experience, consider having at least 5 links that redirect to an authority page of your website. 

7. Robots.txt: This file allows you to block any internal aspect of your website from being indexed by search engines.

8. Sitemap: It is a map of how a web page is organized. It is one of the easiest and most effective ways to inform search engines about the pages, entries, categories, tags, etc. of the files that our website contains.

9.  Monitor error 404: Error 404 (page not found) negatively affects your SEO positioning, generates a high bounce rate, annoyance to users, and a penalty from Google.

10. 301 redirects: This permanent redirect tells search engines that one URL has been permanently moved to another.

11. Facebook OpenGraph, Twitter Cards: It is very valuable that a user shares your website content, so you should consider including a personalized image for each page or entry created.

What are WordPress plugins?

WordPress plugins are the specially coded small files, which enhances the WordPress site functionality and its look. If we install more than one plugin gives a better user experience dramatically. To use these plugins, additional coding skills are not necessary. 

Plugins are programs that are installed in WordPress and that allow you to extend their standard functionality.

There are more than 50,000 plugins that you can add to your WordPress site for better functionality of your website. The quality of the plugins is very different, few of the plugins improve the functionality and some might slow down the site speed. So the choice of the plugins is very different and it depends on the site demands.

Most of the plugins in the WordPress directory are completely free. Few of the plugins are available in paid versions with efficient coding and quick support. Premium plugins mean which comes with additional features that are not available in free plugins. These are available out of the free WordPress plugin’s library. 

How to Install An SEO Plugin in WordPress?

To use the WordPress SEO plugins is very easy. Most of the plugins are available in both the WordPress plugin directory and third-party developers. You can install these plugins in different methods. They are

Useful tip: Before uploading the plugin, you have to back up your entire site. If anything is wrong in the installation process or plugin coding, the site may be broken. So better to choose the best web hosting service, which is providing the regular backup feature.

A. Plugin installation from Plugin Upload:

This method is helpful to install the premium or paid plugin. Because these plugins are not available in the free directory. So you have to use the Plugin upload option from the WP dashboard. 

B. Plugin installation from WP Dashboard:

Installing Plugin from the WP dashboard is a very simple method. 

Why do you need an SEO Plugin anyway?

There are also many SEO Plugins available in the WordPress directory which will help in different aspects of SEO for your website.

List of Top SEO Plugin for WordPress

After fine research and consulting many top bloggers, I have come up with the below plugins for SEO which you can refer to and use on your WordPress site.

If you are a newbie blogger these Free plugins are somewhat enough for SEO and as your site grows you can opt for premium ones based on your need.

1. RankMath SEO

Rank Math is an SEO plugin that takes care of all the on-page SEO concepts. This is an all in one SEO tool as it contains many other features like 404 monitoring and Rich Snippets. XML sitemaps are the additional feature in the RankMath SEO plugin.

Time to time updates on SEO analysis done on your site to make changes in your site for better rankings. Social sharing from the pages itself is enabled in this plugin which will help you in sharing your posts as soon as they are published. This is the best WordPress SEO plugin 2019. To know the settings, learn how to configure the RankMath SEO plugin in a WordPress blog?

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2. Google Sitekit

Google site kit is one of the best WordPress plugins which is developed by Google. This plugin is helping every WordPress platform user from small business to a developer and from newbie to advanced. It is a free, open-source, and comes with a one-stop solution to insert ads, manage and get insights from Google tools. This is the simple and easy to use, and lightweight plugin for easy to set up.

Of course, the Google site kit WordPress plugin is a great choice for WordPress users. It has more than 3 lakhs active installation from the WordPress plugin directory. 

The site kit gives complete insights of the google products on your WordPress dashboard. It saves more time to log in multiple google tools. This is the best option for every WordPress webmaster and new bloggers.

The Google tools come with this plugin to get the complete insightful reporting, they are Search Console, Google Analytics, Adsense, Page Speed Insights, Tag manager, and Optimize. This is the best plugin to display Google ads on your WordPress Blogs.

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3. Yoast SEO 

Yoast SEO is another complete WordPress SEO Plugin, which handles most of your site’s technical SEO and content Optimization, with more than 5 million active installations. The plugin is developed by the WordPress Blog’s elite developer “Joost De Valk ”.  This site helps you to create an XML sitemap, search engine verification feature and helps you to create meta tags (title, description) for every single post. 

When you are updating the content in your blog the plugin will instruct you on how to optimize your content for the search engines in three tabs. They are SEO, Readability, Social and Advanced tabs. The official page is having the complete Yoast SEO tutorial to perform better on the WordPress search engine.

Simply, using this WordPress Yoast plugin in your WordPress blog is a good option for better results. 

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4. All in one SEO

All in One SEO Pack is another most popular WordPress SEO plugin with more than 3 million active installations. The functionalities of this plugin are similar to Yoast SEO. It is a little bit customized with additional features like Robots.txt and .Htaccess editing, Sitelinks adding features to search box markup and other. 

This is a simple plugin for beginners to optimize your WordPress site for SEO and it comes with advanced features along with an API for developers. The plugin has all the supportive features for better SEO like XML sitemap support, Schema.org Markup, integration feature for e-commerce sites, and support in 57 languages.

If you are a beginner, It is a perfect free WordPress SEO plugin. 

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5. The SEO Framework

The SEO Framework plugin is a fast, lightweight SEO plugin without any ads. It is the greatest alternative to the Yoast plugin. This is another SEO plugin that implements the White-hat guidelines and rules imposed by WordPress and search engines in this development.

The post settings of the SEO framework plugin give complete information by its color scale to show how you are close to making your post SEO friendly. It has some additional features to add best SEO WordPress settings including Local SEO, AMP integration, Uptime monitorization, Redirection, Comment spam protection, and incognito mode.

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6. All in One Schema Rich snippets

All in one Schema Rich Snippet is another WordPress blog SEO plugin to implement schema types like Review, Recipes, Article, Products, Events, and Services, etc. Of course, this plugin has good WordPress SEO plugin reviews. This plugin adds content to your page which is essential to show Google rich snippets. 

This plugin is used to include structured data on a page or post (blog). It provides search engines with accurate and important information to display in the SERP of search results. This will help you differentiate yourself from your competition.

WHAT IS A RICH SNIPPET?

It is basically a short summary of your page in the search results of Google, Yahoo, Bing, and sometimes in the News feed of Facebook in a nice format with star ratings, author photo, image, etc.

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7. Easy Table of Contents

Easy table of contents is a simple, basic for beginners it allows you twin factor table of content. It works very well with any type of page. After install and activate this pledging is to generate a table of content for your post automatically.

You can choose the plane of where to insect your table of contents within your article. It has excellent options to configure as per your design it supports controlling and multiple counter Bullet formats. You can hide this table anytime.

This makes life easier for the user who wants to read a part of the post or see an outline of all the content. In addition, Google loves it because it helps the user to better understand the structure of the content.

The plugin works with any type of editors like classic editor, Gutenberg, Divi, Elementor like page builders. After activating the plugin, it creates the table of the content box within the content by collecting the content’s side headings.

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8. Broken link Checker

The subject of SEO is very interesting. But this is not limited to keywords usage, filling content, and making it readable. Finding the broken links within the content is very important. This plugin comes in the part of technical SEO. Broken link Checker plugin helps you to find broken links from your site.

It helps you to find the broken links within your content. When the google detects the 404 error, they understand about the page’s user experience negatively.

Finally, the user does not show the interest to land on the empty page. So you have to find and rectify the broken link issue immediately for better user experience. This is a single purpose plugin for better SEO.

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9. HREFLang tags lite

The Hreflang tags lite allows you to tell search engines which page to display for a given region and language. You can also use it to define other variations of the same content in different languages.

If your company is considering expanding to other languages ​​or countries, the use of hreflang should be prioritized in the international SEO and content production strategy.

Hreflang is an alternate tag, included in the code of the pages of a website to indicate to Google that that content has versions in different languages and/or for different countries. Its use is important to indicate which content is most suitable for Google.

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10. WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is one of the most popular WordPress cache plugins. The plugin helps you to load your blog faster from the user side. It generates static ‘HTML’ files from your dynamic blog.

After an ‘HTML’ file is created, your web server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. 99% of your visitors will be served static ‘HTML’ files.

Those users who don’t see the static files will still benefit because they will see different cached files that aren’t quite as efficient but still better than un-cached.

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11. W3 Total Cache

W3 Total cache is another very popular tool to speed up your website’s speed. It is more than a simple plugin, it is a complete tool.

There are a wide variety of options and several methods for clearing the cache.

But, the truth is that because it has so many options, it is not so simple to handle. And if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can break your page.

That is why most users who use this plugin already have advanced knowledge on how to optimize WordPress site.

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12. Autoptimize

Most of the bloggers are spending their valuable time in online business by creating a new blog. They are working very hard to create content, developing marketing strategies, and working on the design. But they forget page loading speed. The cache plugin helps you in this aspect. Autoptimize is one of the best and simple Cache plugin for WordPress websites. It helps you to improve search engine ranking. Of course, visitors prefer fast loading websites

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13. WP Smush.it

WP Smush plugin is based on Yahoo Smush.it, a service that optimizes images and removes unnecessary bytes. This can greatly improve the loading speed of your site because it considerably reduces the size of images, which is usually one of the most time-consuming parts of loading a page.

Most tools use formats that interfere with quality, but in this, you can compress without noticing any difference.

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14. All in one WP Security & Firewall

WordPress is generally a secure platform. But adding an extra layer of security to your website never hurts. All in One WP Security & Firewall plugin will add security filters related to the account user, login credentials, database, and more. You can choose basic, intermediate, or advanced settings, depending on your needs.

If you are looking for a comprehensive set of security tools that do not require a license fee, the All in One WP Security & Firewall Plug-in. The plugin provides tools for account security and user login, database and file system security, firewall protection, and more.

Here are some additional features of this plugin:

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15. Really Simple SSL

Really Simple SSL is a free plugin to configure your website/blog to run over HTTPS. It is a lightweight plugin with minimum settings and helps you to move sites to SSL certification. After Install and activate this, your site will load with HTTPS site security mode. You have to get or activate the SSL certificate from cPanel.

It is available in both free and premium versions. The free version is enough for new blogs. If you need more additional features like a Mixed content fixer, HTTP Strict transport security, Advanced security headers, you have to upgrade to the premium version.

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16. EWWW Image optimizer

Optimizing images on your WordPress blog should not be overlooked. In addition to improving the user experience, this practice allows for increased efficiency of SEO strategies. EWWW Image optimizer is a free image optimization plugin with more than 8 lakhs active installation. It helps you to speed up your page loading time.

EWWW Image Optimizer performs optimizations on its own server, avoiding the waste of time when transferring collections from one server to another.

The EWWW makes all the compression on its own servers, which means you do not need to sign up for an API key. 

It can also optimize images generated by other WordPress plugins and stored outside the folders of your media library. Finally, you don’t need an account to use the plug-in, but you can sign up for the API to receive additional features.

Fast loading pages are ranking well in search engines and give very good conversion rates (increase sales and signups). Basically, this plugin helps you optimize your existing images in your server and the images that you upload. 

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17. SEO Writing Assistant

SEO writing assistant tool is one of the most popular and trending content optimization tools from SEMRush. SEMRush is one of the best SEO tools in online digital marketing.  This is a premium plugin.  This plugin helps you to check your content in real-time for better improvement SEO suggestions and your content SEO score. This plugin is available on Google docs, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge browser as an add-on.

It suggests semantically related keywords add within your content, readability changes, headline optimization, article length average count, and plagiarism. 

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18. WP Review Pro

WP Review Pro is one of the high-end WordPress premium plugins which helps you to create product reviews in the right way. Of course, this is the most powerful and feature-rich WordPress plugin from MyThemeShop store.

Most of the people research the details of the products before they buy by reading their reviews on different sites. By using this WP Review Pro, you can create an attractive and informative review on your blog without any coding skills. It helps you to promote online products for better sales. It replaces the traditional review feature.

WP Review Pro is the perfect review plugin whether you are reviewing products, books, movies, games, or anything else. WP Review Pro’s powerful features do not come with complexity. The industry-leading options panel makes it easy to customize and use WP Review Pro in precisely the way you want.

WP Review Pro is a powerful, feature-rich WordPress plugin from MyThemeShop that helps you create product reviews easily.

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WP Coupons is one of the most popular, lightweight, stylish, and responsive WordPress Coupon plugins for Marketers. It was developed by affiliate marketers for affiliate marketers.

The plugin helps to increase your CTR and conversions. This is an excellent choice if you are planning to promote product coupons, this is a perfect choice.

The settings are very easy. This plugin is a huge money saver. Even newbie can use easily

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I tried different cache plugins that improve speed and without a doubt, I choose WP Rocket, mainly because it’s very easy to configure the interface and because it integrates more than 80% of the best web performance practices to reduce loading time, essential to improve SEO and increase conversions.

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The Elementor plugin is one of the most famous page builders among the WordPress community, with a free version that is quite respectable. With a direct view of the page while you edit it.

Using its Drag and Drop system, you can create pages from scratch, adding sections, and in each section a column, or network of columns you need. Inside each column, you insert the default modules.

The Elementor Pro version takes it further, unlocking more add-ons, which offer you more features and content elements, which greatly improves the design of your page and enriches it.

Elementor Pro also allows you to use the default WordPress widgets, such as text, calendar, custom menu, labels, and all the rest.

Elementor cannot be missing from this list because it has a free version, where it offers the best possible solutions for designing and building pages, but Elementor Pro takes it to the next level of professionals.

Elementor Pro extends the basic features and improves them further, such as live form design, WooCommerce widgets, very fast sliders, more templates, and other features.

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21. SEOPress

SEOPress is another best WordPress SEO Plugin, which helps you to optimize your blog SEO, to boost your traffic, social sharing improvement, and many more.

It is a freemium plugin. This is another best alternative to rank math SEO. It is featured on freemium, WCrafter, Kinsta, Majestic, SEJ, and WPBeginner sites.

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Squirrly SEO is an AI-based private WordPress SEO plugin. It has more than 300 functionalities

for better SEO. It is a premium plugin. It does more help than other SEO plugins like Yoast and Rank math. Squirrly is giving very good SEO for human and search engines.

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Final Words on SEO plugins for WordPress

In the SEO market, most of the marketers come with “This is the best WordPress SEO plugin”. Most of the newbies and bloggers are confusing. So I tested a few of the plugins and prepared this list. Every plugin is very unique according to their functionality by resolving most of our SEO-related problems. 

So if you are using a similar functioning plugin in your blog, first identify the plugin and deactivate it. It helps you to speed up your site loading time. For example, if you are using both Rank math and Yoast SEO, you must deactivate one plugin because the functioning of both plugins is the same. So you have to keep an active one and deactivate another SEO plugin.