WordPress is now a well-known tool and is crucial for the development of a particular website. Of course, not all of the websites are based on WordPress, which isn’t bad, as there are those who like and dislike WordPress. We’ll leave that topic for you to research, and we’ll focus on WordPress plugins for SEO. When you create a website, you want more traffic on your website and search engines are here to provide you with that. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which usually means using keywords, good readability and all that’s needed to improve your SEO. Today, we are going to take a look at the 10 best WordPress plugins and tools for SEO, so keep reading.
What is an SEO Plugin?
An SEO plugin is a WordPress plugin that is indented to improve the search engine optimization factors of your website. A normal SEO plugin will provide various tools and features for your WordPress posts to rank better in the search results. They also provide features for sitewide SEO optimization. It will completely depend on what plugin you are using and what features they provide.
SEO plugins will not come by default with WordPress. So you will have to manually install them based on your preference. Even though WordPress itself provides some functionality to make your website rank better in the search results, that is not enough to outrank your competitors.
Why should you use an SEO Tool?
An SEO tool is an easier way to manage the search engine optimization of your WordPress website. You can build your own tools. But it will be extremely difficult to keep developing it based on the latest search engine requirements. As they say, why should you re-invent the wheel?
Most SEO tools provide functionalities such as the option to set titles, focus keywords, meta descriptions, and similar factors on every single WordPress post. These are essential for the ranking of every individual post on your WordPress website.
In addition to providing such basic functionality. The premium versions of many SEO plugins also come with various analytical and factual features that you can use to rank better in the search results. Because everyone else is using and benefiting from them, it is essential for every single webmaster to use an SEO plugin, whether it is free or premium, to make their WordPress websites search engine friendly.
10 of the best SEO Plugins and Tools for WordPress
Based on our experience, we hand-picked some of the most popular and best SEO plugins available on the WordPress repository combined with SEO tools we have been using for our websites –
1. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is the most downloaded plugin for WordPress at the moment. What is it that makes Yoast SEO so special? Well, aside from taking care of your SEO and improving it, Yoast SEO comes with other great features for improving the technical optimization of your website. This plugin will help you create better content by introducing a Snippet Preview where you can see how well your page looks in search results.
Aside from that, Yoast SEO is here to constantly check your page in terms of the length of the content, meta description, or presence of a keyword, and you can also decide which page will be displayed by Google in search results and which won’t be. Yoast SEO comes in free and paid variants and for the most part, you’ll be good with a free version.
2. SEMrush
SEMrush is a professional tool for improving SEO by gathering analysis from other websites. As such, SEMrush is a paid subscription that is better used for high-quality and serious websites, because of the info you can get here. SEMrush will help you in your keyword selection by selecting the most organic keyword to use, based on your content.
Because SEMrush is all about being better than your competition, it will give you some info about advertising strategies from other websites, and with its starting price of $99, SEMrush is a great tool not just for WordPress and SEO, but for the overall improvement of the website.
3. Google Keyword Planner
Want to know what people are searching for on the internet? Well, who knows that better than Google! Google Keyword Planner is a tool that will provide you with some insight into what people are searching for, thus being a great tool for inspiration for your keywords.
This is a pretty advanced tool and aside from showing you what are people searching for, it will show you an estimate of search volume, number of results, and difficulty level, making it great for improving your SEO. Google Keyword Planner is free for those who want to take their website content to the next level.
4. SEOPressor
SEOPressor is a great plugin for WordPress with some cool features regarding your SEO. You can now check your SEO score of the targeted keyword, check if you overuse the keyword, calculate the semantic quality of the website, and much more.
SEOPressor also supports automatic smart linking, which means that links and keywords can be added automatically to lower bounce rate and increase time on-site. SEOPressor, however, isn’t free, but its price isn’t that expensive, considering that it’s one of the most important plugins for WordPress, which we highly recommend.
5. SEO Friendly Images
SEO Friendly Images is a free WordPress plugin, dedicated to optimizing images on your website by adding proper ALT and TITLE attributes for SEO purposes. If you didn’t know, image search engines are also important when it comes to a website, and by inserting proper ALT and TITLE attributes, you’ll surely gain a good amount of traffic from these search engines. The only downside here is that the free version of the plugin isn’t supported, unlike the premium one, which has full support.
6. Redirection
When creating and editing a website, things can get a little tricky and sometimes complicated, with famous 404 errors. Thankfully, Redirection is here to help you fix that and handle 301 redirections with ease.
Redirection monitors your website at any given time to prevent 404 errors and will allow you to redirect all of your URLs easily. However, as Redirection scans your website constantly, you may notice some slowdowns that can occur here and there. Nevertheless, Redirection is a great tool for any website and it’s free!
7. LinkPatrol
LinkPatrol is here to control all the links on your website, and it’s a premium WordPress plugin. With LinkPatrol, you can monitor all of the outgoing links on your site, clear anchor text, and spammy links very quickly and easily. Although it’s a paid plugin, LinkPatrol isn’t that demanding like some of the tools mentioned and will work just fine for every type of website.
8. KeywordTool
KeywoordTool improves your SEO by suggesting which keyword should you use based on the content of the website. You can also type your desired keyword and get the info about how often is the keyword used in the search. This will help you in improving SEO and overall traffic on your website in a traditional manner just by using proper keywords.
9. Broken Link Checker
Broken Links happen very often and can affect the website’s SEO in a negative way. That’s why it’s good to check for the broken link once in a while with Broken Link Checker. This is a free WordPress plugin that will help you find the broken links and fix them without any changes to your post or webpage. Broken Link Checker is a very useful plugin, but it’s resource-hungry and may slow down your server.
10. SEO by SQUIRRLY
SEO by SQUIRRLY is a great plugin for the overall optimization of your content on the website. It will check some important factors like the content, URL, and the effectiveness of the keyword in your content. This plugin also shows a green light if you are doing something right, letting you know about your SEO at any given time. Unfortunately, for a full experience, you’ll need a premium version of SEO by SQUIRRLY, but if you are a newbie to SEO, the free version will do just fine.
Which SEO plugin do we use?
At WP Thinker, We make use of several SEO plugins and tools in order to ensure that we stay at the top of the search results.
Yoast SEO definitely takes the cake as the most important SEO plugin that we use on our website. Not only does it provide the best functionalities on its free version itself, but also it is extremely user-friendly and has a lot of advanced features.
The ability to edit files such as robots.txt, a bulk SEO editor tool, link counter, and many more makes it the perfect solution for anyone getting started with their WordPress website. You can read our Yoast SEO review to learn more about this plugin.