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Updated on September 2019.
WordPress is the world’s most popular CMS (Content Management System), with between 50 and 60 percent share of the CMS market and over 70 million websites using the system to manage their web content.
That’s a lot of competition in the realm of SEO.
In order to stay ahead of the pack in the digital world, it is important that you employ a good SEO strategy to your website. Luckily, there are tons of great plugins for WordPress to help you do just that!
In fact, there are over 40 thousand plugins built for use in WordPress. That’s an overwhelming amount of features for you to choose from.
Fear not, however, as we’ve narrowed it down to the 10 best and most beneficial SEO plugins for WordPress.
Yoast SEO
Next up is an extremely popular plugin by Yoast. This is a fantastic plugin that helps you manage many different aspects of your WordPress site’s SEO.
Many users consider it the mightiest of all SEO plugins. Whether you’re a freelance blogger or working in a marketing agency, this plugin has something for everyone to love.
And, best of all, it’s free!
What’s so great about Yoast SEO?
• Snippet editor to edit titles and meta descriptions on the fly and tell you if they are too short or long
• Built-in XML sitemap functionality takes away the pain of producing one yourself
• Feedback on keyword optimization with focus keyword testing
All in One SEO Pack (with WooCommerce add-on)
All in One SEO Pack has similar capabilities to Yoast SEO with the main difference being its stellar integration with E-commerce sites. Along with the WooCommerce add-on, this plugin combo is a powerful tool for your web store.
If you use WooCommerce for your store, the All in One SEO Pack add-on functionality will leave you delighted. The All in One plugin is also a must- have for SEO newbies since it can automatically generate meta descriptions and keywords and optimize your titles.
What’s so great about them?
• Automatic metadata generation
• Notifies you of duplicate content
• Easy integration with Google Analytics
• With WooCommerce add-on, your All in One dialog will be displayed on the Add/Edit Products window in WooCommerce
All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets
You may have heard the term ‘Rich Snippets’ being thrown around once or twice in SEO circles. This is a basic term referring to extra data such as review stars, images and video thumbnails that can be added to your website’s search result summaries.
While these things don’t necessarily have any impact on your search rankings per se, they certainly help your site look relevant and boost click-through rates. All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets is the go-to plugin for this.
What’s so great about All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets?
• Gain major visibility in search results
• Increase chances users will click your website
• Display your information properly on Facebook
Imagify
Another must-have image plugin is Imagify. This one is for optimizing and resizing your website’s images in order to make the site run as fast as possible.
Image compression is an extremely important part of making sure your website’s visitors aren’t faced with long, sluggish load times. This in turn makes them stay longer and perform the actions you want them to.
What’s so great about Imagify?
• Extremely easy to use
• Resize images directly inside WordPress
• Maintain the quality of images while speeding up your site
SEO Friendly Images
As you may or may not be aware of, Google and other search engines are basically blind when it comes to images. For this reason, they need a friendly push in the right direction with what’s called an “alt-tag”.
Alt-tags are short descriptions that tell search engines what they are looking at. Many people often forget to define these tags to the detriment of their site.
In comes SEO Friendly Images to the rescue.
What’s so great about this plugin?
• Automatically add title and alt-tags to every image on your site
• Pro version automatically creates image sitemap
WP-Rocket
You didn’t think we’d do this article without promoting our own plugin, did you?
Shameless promotion aside, if excessive load times are a concern for you, WP Rocket includes many great caching and optimization features to make your website a speed machine. This plugin is perfect for those who find programming puzzling and want an easy solution for a faster website.
What’s so great about WP Rocket?
• Seamless integration with CloudFlare
• Instantly activate page caching
• LazyLoad feature makes webpages load significantly faster
• HTML, CSS and JavaScript minification
Broken Link Checker
Broken links are a detriment to the user experience of your website. Checking for broken links one-by-one is a laborious task that, let’s face it, no one wants to do.
Luckily, there exists a rapid solution for checking your site’s broken links with Broken Link Checker.
What’s so great about it?
• Find broken links with ease
• Discovers missing images
• Fix links from the plugin window
WP Social SEO Pro
One thing never to be neglected in the success of your website is how you integrate with social media. For everything needed to be social-friendly, WP Social SEO Pro has got you covered.
What’s so great about WP Social SEO Pro?
• Optimize for Facebook and integrate with Open Graph
• Improve local SEO with tools like Google Local
• Extend your tweets with better content and calls-to-action
DuracellTomi’s Google Tag Manager
Sigh. No list of SEO tools would be complete without a mention of Google. DuracellTomi’s Google Tag Manager is a great tool for those with little no knowledge of programming code.
Adding code snippets to WordPress can be a nightmare for many WordPress users. Google Tag Manager allows you to add and manage code snippets like Analytics, PPC, and others from one centralized location.
What’s so great about this plugin?
• Easily implement and update tags no matter your technical proficiency
• Better load times achieved by only launching the required tags for each page
• Capable of adding Google tags as well as third-party tags
• Greatly simplifies tag customization for those with no coding experience
• Works with Google Analytics, enabling the installation of a basic implementation
SEOPress
Born in 2016, SEOPress is quickly scaling the top of the most used WordPress SEO plugins. SEOPress is an all-in-one freemium plugin, that allows to optimize your SEO, improve social sharing and boost your traffic.
What’s so great about this plugin?
• Save space on your plugins list: no need to install Google Tag Manager, Broken Link Checker, or All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets plugin
• Ads-free, even in its free version: white label option, no footprints nor anonymous data sent.
• Most affordable freemium SEO plugin on the market: with $39 per year, you can use it on unlimited sites and receive 1 year of support and updates.
Conclusion
Choosing the 10 best SEO plugins for WordPress was no simple task but with our picks, we are confident that even the most novice of SEO strategists will be able to rank well on search engines.
The plugins presented range from the analytical to the practical and will meet the SEO needs of everyone from hobbyist bloggers to e-commerce start-ups.
