Optimizing your WordPress site’s SEO is not to be taken lightly.
Fortunately, one of the advantages of WordPress is its incredible number of plugins available, both free and paid.
However, faced with this abundance of solutions, which plugins should be favored for your site?
Are WordPress plugins enough for good SEO?
Unfortunately, the answer is no! The objective is to help you choose the best SEO plugins for WordPress.
Although it can help you improve different aspects of SEO, the optimization process is more complex than installing a few extensions.
Beforehand, it is, therefore, necessary to know the basics of SEO by familiarizing yourself with the many criteria.
However, the advantage with WordPress is that it is very “blog” oriented, and as we (almost) all know, content is ROI if it is qualitative and targets the right keywords! Even if you leave with a particular advantage with a site on WordPress, be aware that it is essential to have the right methods to learn SEO by reading for this article.
Fortunately, WordPress is considered one of the best CMS while remaining easy to use. With perseverance, you will quickly learn how to optimize your site and attract traffic.
Returning to our topic, a host of SEO plugins can be used to optimize your WordPress correctly.
these is a selection of the best 10 plugins that I use for my website.
1. Rank Math SEO
Constantly optimizing your posts can sometimes consume more time than writing the content itself. If you’ve always thought you could do more on the SEO front of your website, but you’re short on time, Rank Math SEO is for you.
Its plethora of intelligent features puts hitherto unreachable SEO capabilities into your hands. With just a few clicks, innovative automation features give you the power of an entire SEO team.
Rank Math SEO is a game-changing SEO plugin with a thoughtful design, powerful features, and years of development by the MyThemeShop team. It will level the SEO playing field and help you increase traffic.
Main features:
- Setup wizard (easy to follow)
- Built-in rich snippets
- Optimization of an unlimited number of keywords
- Integration with Google Search Console
- Ranking for keywords on Google
- Google Analytics integration
- Pre-selected optimal settings
- Integrated LSI keyword tool
- Added overlay icons on social images
- Smart redirect manager
- Listing of local businesses, etc.
2. Yoast SEO
With over 5 million downloads and thousands of positive reviews, Yoast SEO is undoubtedly one of the best WordPress SEO plugins available today.
This extension allows you to perform many on-site technical optimizations to improve the SEO of your website.
Main features:
- Analysis of your content to optimize it according to your keywords (keyword density, appearance in tags, text length, etc.).
- Management of Title and Meta description tags.
- Page Analysis: This feature checks for tiny things like the length of posts, the presence of meta description, if it contains the targeted keyword, etc.
- Generating the sitemap.xml file.
- Allows you, to editing your htaccess files and robots.txt .
- Insert breadcrumb.
- Integration with social networks.
- Multi-site compatibility.
3. All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack it will be suitable for beginners or those who do not want to worry too much. Indeed, the advantage is that it works automatically, and you won’t need to touch the settings too much for it to work correctly.
Main features:
- Automatic administration of Meta description tags and Title.
- Generating the sitemap.xml file.
- Google AMP support.
- Integration with Google Analytics.
- Content optimization for SEO.
- Notifies search engines of changes.
- API available for developers.
- It helps avoid duplicate content.
4. SEOPress
SEOPress is an SEO plugin for WordPress. It’s lightweight with many features and has some established names like Yoast to compete with.
SEOPress is simple to use because it can be added directly from the WordPress directory, which I like the most. I also like all SEO proposals to rank the website in search engines faster. In addition, all titles and posts can be managed.
Main features:
- Set up your site quickly with the setup wizard.
- Unlimited content analytics by keywords to help you create search engine optimized content.
- Desktop and mobile preview to see how your article looks on Google.
- Twitter and Facebook Social preview to see how your post looks on social media to increase conversions.
- Titles (dynamic: custom fields, taxonomy terms, etc.).
- Meta description (with dynamic variables as well).
- Open Graph and Twitter cards (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, WhatsApp, etc.) to improve social media sharing.
5. WP Rocket
Even if a site’s speed is not a direct factor for your SEO, it helps to avoid having an alarming bounce rate on your site. Who wants to stay on a slow site?
WP Rocket is, therefore, a cache optimization plugin that allows you to boost your site’s performance with your server.
Available only in premium, it does much better than its other free competitors and is well worth the investment if your site is your livelihood.
Main features:
- Page caching
- Cache preloading
- Compression of static files
- Gradual image loading
- Browser cache
- Database optimization
6. Google XML Sitemaps
As its name suggests, Google XML Sitemaps can generate a sitemap for your site and allow search engine robots to crawl it better.
This allows your website to be indexed more quickly by sending a push to search engines. If you install this plugin, be careful to deactivate the Yoast SEO plugin (less optimized for my taste), which can be duplicated.
Main features:
- Allows you to generate a complete sitemap of your site
- Notify search engines
- Ability to configure the types of pages you want to integrate or not
7. All In One Schema.org Rich Snippets
Rich snippets improve your post’s appearance in search results by providing more information about the content.
These are interactive elements and can display images, stars for reviews, prices, etc. These are, therefore, handy features to highlight your pages on Google results.
Main features:
- Allows you to generate rich snippets such as reviews, authors, events, products, recipes, applications, or videos
8. Redirection
Well, on this one, they didn’t go too far for the name. Redirection is an extension that nevertheless does its job very well by allowing you to manage your various 301 redirections.
In particular, it avoids having 404 errors which are penalizing but also redirects to new pages. Essential for redistributing the “juice” of your site and having total control of your internal linking.
Main features:
- 404 error monitoring.
- Custom transient redirects.
- Automatic addition of 301 redirects when the URL of an article is modified.
- Redirection history.
9. Broken Link Checker
The leading utility of Broken Link Checker is to notify you by email or via your dashboard as soon as this plugin finds a broken link.
Once the broken link has been detected, you will be able to repair the link directly via the interface.
Main features:
- Detects broken links, and missing images, and redirects.
- Dashboard or email notifications.
- Links can be edited directly from the interface.
10. Simple SSL
Another format will become a standard as long as you monetize your website. Indeed Google strongly encourages us to switch our sites to HTTPS (secure connection) so as not to be penalized in the future.
To switch to HTTPS, I advise you to follow this excellent article from WP Marmite. Know, for example, that it is necessary to obtain an SSL certificate which is generally offered free of charge by hosts.
Then, Simple SSL will do all the rest of the work for you by automatically detecting your server and configuring your website in HTTPS.
Main features:
- The plugin handles most issues that WordPress may encounter with SSL.
- All requests are redirected to HTTPS via internal redirect or .htaccess.
- Site URL and Home URL are changed to HTTP.
- Your site appears as “Secure” on different browsers.
11.WP Backlinks
WP Backlinks is a freemium plugin that allows you to analyze your new backlinks directly from your WordPress dashboard.
For this, the device uses the resources of Majestic, while the data is usually very limited without a subscription. A premium version at only $20/month allows you to monitor new backlinks from 3 of your competitors.
Main features:
- Track your new backlinks directly from the WordPress dashboard
- Monitor new backlinks from your competitors (paid)
So here are most of the extensions I use, and I recommend optimizing SEO on WordPress. Be aware, however, that this list is not exhaustive and that everyone can have their preferences.
However, be careful not to have too many plugins installed that could be duplicated so as not to affect your site’s performance.
And you, what plugins do you use on your WordPress?