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Ensuring your WordPress website integrates all critical search engine optimization recommendations can seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be with the best SEO plugins for WordPress.
We have already explored the best WP marketing plugins to supercharge your website, and we thought it would be an excellent time to examine some of the best SEO Plugins for WP.
Optimizing your WordPress SEO will help you rank higher than your competition and stand out in SERPs.
3 Key elements to successful WordPress SEO
Your website integrates in-depth keyword research.
Keyword research might seem obvious, but keyword research and integration are one element of successful on-site SEO. Without properly researched keywords matching a person’s search intent, search engines will never find your content and website.
Solution: Install a plugin such as Yoast SEO or Rank Math to properly set up SEO metadata and integrate keyword research into your website.
Your website solves common user problems
You can try to stuff your pages with as many keywords as you want, but if you are not producing informative content or selling a product designed to solve a problem, you will struggle to rank your website in the long term.
Content or Products designed to solve problems get higher conversion rates and increase engagement with your brand. When people engage with your website, it sends positive signals to Google, indicating you solved the user’s problem and ranking you higher.
Solution: Rethink your content or product strategy, solve real-world user problems, and provide genuine value.
Your website provides a good user experience
In May 2020, Google announced they would start measuring a user’s page experience when determining how to rank a website, but what does this mean for you and your website?
This means that Google now measures user experience statistics about your website, such as speed, visual stability, and interactivity. They packaged these metrics into three key stats;
- 1. Largest Contentful Paint—LCP Measures the perceived loading time of a webpage or website by examining how long it takes for the most significant element on the page to appear.
- First Input Delay (FID) – Measures how quickly a user can interact with your page. It’s an accurate measure of when your website is fully interactive.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) measures the visual stability or “shifting of elements” on a page when the website is loading.
Solution
You can install W3 Total Cache to optimize WordPress.
By caching your commonly loaded assets such as CSS, Javascript, Images, and your WordPress database, you can decrease your loading times by reducing your LCP and FID.
If you suffer from Cumulative Layout Shift, you must assess your website’s advertising units or images. Bad CLS is typically caused by images, logos, and videos ‘shifting’ their height as the website loads.
Let’s look at the best free SEO Plugins for WordPress that will skyrocket your SEO
11 SEO Plugins for WordPress to Catapult Your Rankings
There are thousands of plugins available on the WordPress repository that claim to optimize your WordPress website. Still, only a handful of SEO plugins for WordPress are worth their salt and installing on your blog.
W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache is a plugin for WordPress Speed optimization. It speeds up your website by caching commonly used files and assets.
- Browser Cache
- Object Cache
- Page Cache
- CDN Cache
- Support for multiple memory caches such as Red or Memcache
It is an all-in-one WordPress speed optimization plugin that will handle every aspect of caching on your website, such as browser caching (gzip), object caching, page cache, integration, and also support multiple memory caches.
Broken Link Checker
The broken link checker for WordPress works in the background, searching and scanning your website for broken or dead links.
It works on both your internal links and links out to other websites. It’s always on and runs anytime someone comes to your website.
Broken Link checker is the perfect way to ensure all of the hyperlinks on your website are valid.
Yoast SEO
This plugin is one of the longest-standing and best SEO Plugins for WordPress. It has a vast, die-hard following, including myself.
Yoast Key Features
- Optimize every aspect of your website SEO
- Set Meta Titles
- Set Meta Descriptions
- Integrated Sitemap Generator
- Schema Markup for Organisation
- Manage Robots.txt from admin
- Manage HTACCESS from the admin
The plugin Yoast SEO provides extensive SEO functionality that is free out of the box. Yoast does offer premium features for a small monthly cost, but they are not essential to get the most out of this plugin.
Rank Math
This plugin is very similar to Yoast in terms of its functionality, but I think it’s a little more powerful and also easier to use for the average WordPress user.
Rank Math Key Features
- All of the features included in Yoast
Keyword Suggestions when writing posts - Suggested Internal Links
Optimise Articles for Multiple Keywords
SEO Health Scanner from WP Admin
I recently switched to Rank Math and am still using it as of writing this article. It has impressed me, and I will likely continue to use it over Yoast.
Optimizing content for multiple keywords and getting relevant suggestions without leaving my dashboard is like bread and butter, making producing SEO-optimized content much easier.
All-in-one SEO
In the spirit of giving you plenty of choices, All-in-one SEO is similar to Yoast and Rank math and provides almost identical functionality to Yoast. However, I still feel like Rank Math takes the lead.
Still, it’s worth checking out.
All-in-one Rich Schema Snippets
If you frequently post how-to’s, recipes, or reviews and are not leveraging Schema.org markup on your website yet, you may miss out on a stream of organic traffic.
Rich Schema provides search engines more context about your content, allowing them to provide relevant results to users, thereby increasing your click-through rate (ctr) from SERPs.
Rel NoFollow Checkbox
Rel NoFollow checkbox allows you to control where your domain authority is flowing by providing a checkbox to NoFollow all links on a page.
Wait, What is nofollow?
In SEO, there are two main link attributes called Follow and Nofollow. These attributes control where the flow of link equity goes (or doesn’t in this case)
1. A follow attribute, known as DOFOLLOW, tells search engines to follow the link and pass link juice. Follow-attributed links are what everyone wants.
2. A nofollow attribute tells search engines to ignore a link, meaning that search robots will ignore these links and continue to crawl the page.
I am not saying you should install this plugin and follow every outbound link you have – no. Instead, use this plugin carefully to control the flow of domain rank, especially when linking to less savory websites.
Sucuri
While not strictly related to WordPress SEO, getting hacked can get your website penalized by
Google because you didn’t catch it in time.
If Google detects a hacked website, it warns users to enter from search and, in extreme circumstances, will remove your website from search.
Key Features
- Security Activity Auditing
- File Integrity Monitoring
- Remote Malware Scanning
- Blocklist Monitoring
- Effective Security Hardening
- Post-Hack Security Actions
- Security Notifications
- Website Firewall (premium)
Sucuri will analyze your website files, checking for changes or variations. If it finds malware on your web server, it will alert you and offer ways to clean it up and quarantine the files.
Image SEO Optimizer
I know I am forgetful. What about you? I tend to forget alt tags when writing late at night, which is where Image SEO Optimizer comes in handy. It takes the hassle out of optimizing my images for search engines.
This plugin will optimize your images’ alt tags and ensure none are left empty. Image alt tags are a vital ranking and accessibility feature you shouldn’t overlook when optimizing your WordPress SEO.
If you have existing images needing optimizing, Image SEO Optimizer will allow you to bulk process your image library for free.
Redirection
It can be tedious to edit your HTACCESS file whenever you want to redirect a post, page, or custom post type on your Website.
With just a few clicks, the redirection will allow you to set up permanent 301 and 302 redirects from the WP admin dashboard.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
Over the years, SEO has changed, moving away from stuffing keywords and correctly measuring a user’s page experience. A part of a user’s page experience is ensuring they always have somewhere to go or something to do on your website after reading an article.
Yet Another Related Post Plugin, or YARPP as it is more commonly known, allows you to add highly relevant content right below your blog posts.
You can insert related posts automatically or manually via PHP, allowing you to make sure your readers always have something to read next.