Search Engines are not a new thing for the internet. They were created decades ago. The data today on the internet that lies in trillions of links had made them the most used internet tool these days. Search Engine Optimization or SEO is all about making a search engine show your product out of huge data over the internet. In this article, we will be discussing 10 best SEO plugins for WordPress and importance of SEO in this globalized era.
Why we need SEO?
We all are using the internet in our daily lives. Google, Yahoo and Bing are the widely used search engines. According to some statistics, Google has over 30 trillion links indexed with it. Other search engines also have a huge amount of indexed links. When we search for something on the internet it is a simple query. What a search engine does is that it tries to map your query with available sets of data from indexed links. All documents or pages that show relevant data are shown in search results.
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Importance and benefits of using WordPress SEO Plugins
How many times have you searched for a term and have visited 2nd or 3rd page of search engine results? Probably only a few times. This is where SEO comes in, there are many websites that might be having data similar to your website. Only websites with good SEO are able to make to the first page of Search Engines. In WordPress doing SEO is quite easy as there are several plugins that allow you to configure your website or blog with best SEO practices. Below are the 10 best SEO plugins for WordPress.
Best SEO plugins for WordPress
Yoast SEO
For years Yoast SEO has been providing free SEO services to WordPress users. It is the most used SEO plugin around the world. With more than 5 million Active installations Yoast SEO is a complete kit for WordPress SEO. The plugin has premium as well as free version.
In the free version, you would be allowed to configure a post on your website for one keyword. While if you want to optimize your post for more than one keyword then you will need a premium version. Yoast SEO keeps you updated by the SEO quality of your post by showing three different lights. Where red is for bad and green is for good. It keeps a track of your keyword density and notifies you if it exceeds the required limit or it is too low.
Other features include:
- Generate XML sitemaps with one click
- Configure your website with webmaster tools
- Connect your website to Google Search Console in one click
- Fetches on regular basis for your website index-ability and gives notification if website is not index-able by search engines
All In One SEO Pack
With more than 3 million active installs All In One SEO Pack is also one of the best SEO plugins for WordPress. It is easy to use and can be used by a beginner as well. Comes with a lot of features including:
- Support SEO configuration for posts
- SEO for images and submission of XML sitemaps as well as images sitemaps to google.
- Provides Google analytics supports
- AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) support that allows you to provide a better service to mobile users
- Works with WooCommerce, so in case you are having an E-commerce website, it allows you to do SEO for your store as well
It too has a premium version that provides you following features:
- Advance features for WooCommerce
- SEO for categories, tags, videos
- Provides you access to premium support forums
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SEO Ultimate
SEO Ultimate is a great SEO plugin with more than 100,000 active installs. It provides a great interface to optimize your website. It is free for its users though it has a premium version as well, that provides the users additional functionalities. The number of active installs of SEO Ultimate has decreased in the past year. As there has been no update for the plugin from more than a year.
Still, it is one of the best SEO plugins for WordPress because of the features it provides. Features include:
- Title tag writer helps a lot when it comes to search engine optimization
- Monitors your website for 404 errors
- Allows you to edit and create SEO friendly meta descriptions for posts
- Supports plugins like WordPress Plugin Translation and All In One SEO Pack
Broken Link Checker
It a simple but quite handy plugin. Thus this list of best SEO Plugins for WordPress would be incomplete without this plugin. It keeps a track of your website links and stays in the hunt for any broken links. Once a broken link is found it notifies you so you can correct it preventing you to lose you traffic.
- It monitors your website for broken links
- Allows you to discourage search engines to index any broken links
- You can get broken link notifications via emails as well as on your dashboard
- Plugin is totally free for use
The plugin has not received any update from last several months and several much-needed changes are pending.
Smush Image Compression and Optimization
Image compression is an important factor for optimizing your website. As it decreases the load time of your website making it fast and user-friendly. It has been an award-winning plugin. The functionality of plugin is simple it lets you compress image size. It has the ability to compress images of up to a size of 32MB.
All In One Schema Rich Snippets
When we search for a website in Google or in any search engine some meta text is shown in search results. These search results play a vital role in driving traffic to your website. All In One Schema Rich Snippets is one of the best SEO plugins for WordPress as it lets you customize the text to be displayed in search results.
It makes a schema of your website so it can be easily indexed in search engines. It provides important text to search engines from your website. Which improves search appearance on your website.
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Rankie – WordPress Rank Tracker
Keeping a close look at your website ranking is a necessary practice in the internet world. As these rankings keep on changing you have to monitor your positive and negative points. There are many ways of tracking these rankings though not all of them are good and accurate. Rankie is one of the plugins that lets you track your website ranking. It gives you a detailed analysis of ups and downs of your Google rankings.
There is no free version of the plugin and you will have to get a License worth 21$ to use this plugin.
SEO Squirrly
SEO Squirrly is a handy plugin that is totally designed for users who have a minimum or no experience in SEO. It is an upvoted plugin by SEO experts like Neil Patel and Brian Dean. The plugin includes following features:
- Lets you write content that is users as well as search engine friendly
- Analyzes your content and pages and suggests you how it can be improved in rankings
- Provides you copyright free images for use
- Allows you to engage users from social media platforms with quick sharing options for social media platforms
- Controls the schema of your website appearance in Google
- Above all the plugin is free for use
The SEO Framework
One of the best SEO plugins for WordPress that address needs of beginners as well as experts. Give you a lot of features that let you climb to the top of search engine results.
The SEO Framework provides you following features:
- Shows you suggestions to improve SEO in a beautiful sidebar
- Improve search appearance of your website
- Allows you to do SEO for all the stuff on your website available for public
- The plugin has no premium version and it is totally free for use
W3 Total Cache
Cache is a small thing that can take your website to a next level. Search engines prefer those websites that take less time to load a website. W3 total cache performs caching that saves your bandwidth up to 80%. This is not a complete SEO plugin still it helps a lot in improving the search results ranking and user experience.
Conclusion
If we look at the list of the best SEO Plugins for WordPress all of them have their own worth. Yet All In One SEO Pack and Yoast SEO would be the two plugins we would recommend our user for best SEO. Both plugins have a complete set of tools that are needed for SEO. Also, both are getting updates on a regular basis and are up to date with the best SEO requirements.
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