The Best WordPress Plugins for SEO

The evolution of WordPress is nothing short of amazing. It started out as a blogging tool and became a powerhouse for building websites. WordPress can also be used to create a robust content management system, or CMS for short.

To exponentially grab the attention of your target audience, you can utilize a variety of SEO plugins that are available on the WordPress plugin repository. People already depend on search engines, like Google, to find the solutions and products they need, so why not have your company listed at the top to grow your business?

If your website is built on WordPress and you want to enhance your site’s SEO capabilities, there are a few great SEO plugins that you can leverage. We’ll tell you all about them too! Keep on reading for the scoop.

The Best SEO WordPress Plugins

SEO plugins are available to complement the features that you already have on your website and blog. They add numerous functionalities that are not available from WordPress straight out of the box.

Users can customize their pages with the options and functions that these SEO plugins offer. This can help you better meet the requirements of the digital strategy you already have in place. This includes SEO analysis and improving your digital marketing.

Here are a few highly recommended SEO plugins for you to work with.

SEOPress

Since 2017, over 230,000 WordPress sites trust SEOPress. This plugin is easy to use, lightweight, yet jam-packed with features.

SEOPress is a “core” SEO plugin that facilitates the setup and configuration of critical on-page SEO components.  Using SEOPress, you can add page titles, and meta descriptions, build  custom HTML and XML Sitemaps, improve social sharing, integrate Google Analytics and Google Ads, create optimized breadcrumbs, manage 301 redirections, add Google Structured data types and schemas, and much, much more

There is a beginner-type setup that is super user-friendly. If you are a more experienced user, there are also advanced features you can take advantage of.

SEOPress has a premium version available for an affordable price. You can save time by importing and exporting metadata from a CSV file when you use SEOPress Pro.

The plugin also adds a content analysis feature, so it assists you with writing content to better optimize it for search engines.

Good SEO depends, in part, on two important factors: meta descriptions and title tags. Behind that, SEO relies on the slug of a webpage’s URL.

The SEOPress plugin adds metaboxes to let you manage titles and meta descriptions directly in your page builder. It also lets you manage meta robots for each page, archive page, post, and custom post type.

The backend and frontend have no footprints and no advertising. Also, you do not need any background in SEO or marketing to use this plugin. Many of the parameters are ready for you.

Schema Pro

Another fantastic plugin to use is Schema PRO. How does it work?

Schema Pro will help you create markup code for various entities on your website.  Schema Markup is essentially HTML code that you can leverage to create rich snippets, which appear around the site’s link in search engines with extra pieces of information.

Rich snippets will not technically affect your website’s ranking with Google’s search results. Even with that said, you can still rank higher on Google with them. You do this by increasing your click-through rate.

Schema Pro supports all the important schema types you will ever need, including: Local Business, Articles, Books, Products, Recipes, Reviews and Services.

The easy-to-use wizard allows you to select the schema type, the pages and posts to display the schema on and finally you are presented with a screen to tweak the information you want included in the markup code.

By creating helpful schema such as FAQ, Reviews and Services you help improve the odds of someone clicking on your links in search engine result pages.

301 Redirects

If you are replacing the design of an old site with a brand-new design, if your content is expiring, or if you are overhauling and re-organizing WordPress content, 301 Redirects is a plugin for you.

When content expires, you don’t want to send someone to a 404-page error. Creating a redirect is a much better option. This is where a 301 redirect rule comes in.

301 Redirects improves SEO and the experience of your site visitor. You don’t want your website linking to dead links or content that no longer exists. Using the 301 Redirects plugin, you can add rules to point to the new content. Remember that some people might have bookmarked your old content and might try to access that content directly.  Having 301 rules in place ensure visitors are seamlessly redirected to the new content.

The Pro version can automatically redirect 404 pages to content with similar URL.  The Pro version also includes a link checker tool to help you identify all the pages and links that need to fixed.

This plugin manages 301, 302, and 307 redirects. It’s simple to use. Creating a redirect is a straightforward solution for re-routing traffic that arrives via a “Requested URL” or a different “Destination URL.”

WP Rocket

SEO is much more than just page titles, meta descriptions and redirects.

Your SEO performance also depends on other factors such as page loading speed and user engagement. One way to improve loading speed is by utilizing a WordPress caching plugin.

WP Rocket is a top choice when it comes to caching plugins. It’s extremely powerful for improving your website’s performance.

A caching plugin will generate HTML pages that are static on your website. Those static pages are then saved to your server. When a new user attempts to access your website, the caching plugin serves the lighter HTML page versus having to process a heavier WordPress PHP script.

The WP Rocket plugin will reduce the site’s load time and boost the Core Web Vitals scores and Google’s PageSpeed scores.

Unlike free caching plugins, WP Rocket includes all the features you need to fully optimize your website’s loading speed.  In addition to minimizing the size of CSS and Javascript files, WP Rocket can also preload pages, lazy load images, defer the loading of JavaScript scripts, and generate critical path CSS.  WP Rocket has also recently developed a feature to remove unused CSS, although this feature is still in beta.

EWWW Image Optimizer

Another way to improve the loading speed of pages on your website is through Image Optimization.

Image Optimization is the process of delivering high-quality images in an ideal format, resolution and size. This helps boost loading speed and user engagement. Another part of image optimization is when you label an image accurately through the ALT text tag. This allows search engine crawlers to read and comprehend them.

The free version of the EWWW Image Optimizer plugin offers a long list of useful features that include image compression, bulk image resizing, adding missing width/height attributes, lazy loading, automatic image scaling, and WebP image format conversion.

The subscription-based version adds premium features that improve website performance further yet.  Some of the more notable features include page caching, Google font optimization, asynchronous CSS loading and an even better image compression API.

Internal Link Juicer

An important component of SEO on a website is the internal linking that it has. You always want to link internally because it keeps a user on your website longer. This helps your website with its overall search engine exposure.

An internal link points to one link from a website and directs it to another link that lives in the same website. The link that it goes to can be a post, page, document, or image.

The challenge is that internal linking can be a tedious task to complete. Internal Link Juicer allows you to build internal links easier versus having to create them manually. This plugin accomplishes this task with an intelligent built-in per-post configuration based on the keywords that you desire.

The plugin will essentially automate the process of inserting internal links throughout your content. The automation process, however, is smart enough to diversify the anchor text ensuring natural linking behaviour.

You also have full control over the way the plugin works – pages and posts can be excluded from the automation process, and you can indicate the number of links that can be generated on any particular page.  A dashboard keeps you well informed of various metrics and statistics so you can make any necessary tweaks to optimize the performance of the plugin.

MonsterInsights

Tracking progress is an important aspect of any SEO strategy. Afterall, the whole point of installing and configuring all of these SEO plugins is to boost website traffic, generate more leads and improve keywords rankings.

But how do you know if your efforts are making a difference? If you’re like most other businesses, you’re most likely using Google Analytics.

MonsterInsights simplifies the process of integrating Google Analytics into your WordPress website.  This plugin is ideal for website owners looking to leverage the powerful Google Analytics metrics and reports right inside their WordPress dashboard.

Having this plugin installed on your website will not necessarily improve your SEO directly.  However,

MonsterInsights makes this an effortless task. You get advanced Google Analytics features, and it only takes a few clicks, and without having to edit any code.  You get detailed stats for each post and page on your website, and see real-time stats on visitors and traffic.  The MonsterInsights Behaviour Report helps you understand how people are finding your website, who refered them and what keywords they searched for.

Top global businesses like Bloomberg, FedEx, Microsoft, and Yelp leverage MonsterInsights.

Wrapping Up – Top SEO Plugins for WordPress

Your business needs superior SEO rankings to grow and thrive. Luckily, WordPress has many plugins that will greatly improve your website’s SEO.

WP Assist has an extensive experience working with most of the popular SEO WordPress plugins and can offer you valuable insight about them.

If you need help managing your WordPress site, WP Assist can provide the needed support to keep your website running optimally. Book a call with our team today to learn more.