- Looking to make your WordPress site search friendly?
- Wondering which are the best SEO plugin for WordPress that you should install?
Well let's dive into this guide and see how these SEO plugins can help grow your WordPress blog.
I had already shared most of WordPress plugins which is beneficial to every WordPress user on AaveHypes. For today’s post, I have something new – a compiled a list of the best WordPress Plugins for SEO.
Why bother to listen to what I've to say?
As a professional blogger, I keep an eye on new SEO techniques that are working and let go of those, which does not work. Using the plugins listed below, I’m able to drive more than 100K page views every month.
In this list, you will find the best free SEO WordPress plugins and some premium plugins that you can use for your blog. We will talk about:
- Rank Math SEO
- Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin
- Broken link checker WordPress plugin
- Rich Snippet WordPress plugin
- SEMRUSH
- SEO Image Optimizer
- Easy Table of Contents Plugin
- Image Compression plugin
- Cache plugin
Do read the descriptions carefully to understand what the plugin does and use it if you are not using any other plugin for the same purpose.
You can learn about these WordPress SEO plugins, but before that, lets look at some of the frequently asked questions:
Which is the best WordPress SEO plugin?
In 2022, Yoast SEO does the maximum heavy lifting when it comes to WordPress SEO. However, there are other SEO plugins that help in completing every aspect of WordPress SEO.
Can WordPress have two SEO plugins?
It is ok to have two SEO plugins from different categories. For example, one for On-site SEO and others for speed or image SEO. However, it is not recommended to have two plugins that do the same job. For example, there is no advantage of using Rankmath or All in one SEO along with Yoast SEO. In fact, it may create SEO issues for your WordPress website. When in confusion, use the comment section below to resolve your query.
Is WordPress best for SEO?
WordPress by default is quite search friendly in comparison with other platforms. However, using these WordPress SEO tools and plugins, you could aim for the first page of Google search.
Does Google favor WordPress?
This is not true, as Google is impartial to any CMS or blogging platform.
If you think any WordPress SEO plugins are missing from our list, do let us know, and we would be happy to review them and possibly add them to our list.
1. RankMath SEO
RankMath SEO is a young SEO plugin for WordPress, which has gained immense popularity for it’s features. This standalone plugin is good enough for all your WordPress SEO needs. It took me a while before I could start recommending RankMath SEO plugin to AaveHypes users, as the plugin was new. Now, since this plugin has proven itself to be worthy, now it is recommended as #1 SEO plugin for WordPress.
RankMath plugin is free to use at the time of writing, and it incorporates many features which are typically offered in the paid version of SEO plugin.
The plugin is light weight, and let you enable/disable modules to ensure it doesnot add unnecessary load on your web-server.
With a strong community-driven approach and a pro version coming out soon, this plugin should be your first SEO plugin for any WordPress based website.
2. Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin:
With over 5+ million downloads, Yoast is the first SEO plugin that every WordPress user should be installing. This single plugin takes care of many aspects of your WordPress site SEO.
In fact, if you have been using a separate WordPress sitemap plugin, redirection, and a few other features, you can stop using them with Yoast SEO.
These are the benefits of using the Yoast SEO plugin:
- You can Add meta value to the homepage
- Add meta value to a single post
- You can set canonical tags
- Set custom breadcrumbs
- Optimize your article for social media sharing (image, title & description)
- Generate sitemap file
- Edit robots.txt and .htaccess
- Control indexing of your WordPress website
- Set focus keyword and optimize for on page SEO
- Let you add Q&A in Google SERP
- Add FAQ Schema
Note: Meta values are meta title, meta description.
Here is a detailed tutorial on how to set up Yoast SEO plugin. Do you know what is even better?
You can download this plugin for free from WordPress repo. There is a pro version of Yoast SEO as well which adds a few extra features such as :
- Redirection
- Yoast Internal linking (Helps in better linking of your blog)
- Incoming and outgoing internal links (Video)
Here at AaveHypes, I mostly recommend Yoast Premium and if you have the budget and need these extra features, opt for the pro version. If not, the free version is pretty good too.
Here are a few popular alternatives for Yoast SEO:
- All in one SEO pack
- Rank Math
Even though these alternatives are popular, Yoast SEO is still the best SEO plugin for WordPress in 2022.
3. Broken link checker plugin
A simple and powerful plugin that continuously scans your WordPress site for broken links. It offers an easy to use dashboard from where you can quickly fix those broken links.
It helps in finding and fixing all internal and external broken links (404 links). 404 links are nothing but dead ends for search engine spiders. It is highly advisable to remove or fix such links.
4. Schema Pro WordPress plugin
I will talk about Rich Snippet in a few times coming, and I can’t stress enough on the importance of it. I have seen a lot of bloggers and marketers not taking advantage of easy-to-use schema markup plugins for WordPress to show rich snippets in WordPress.
In fact, by adding Schema, you helping search engine to understand more about your content and its highly recommended for On page SEO.
Using an excellent rich snippet plugin for WordPress will help you get better visibility in the search engine.
Using Rich Snippets will help you get better CTR and traffic.
SchemaPro is the most updated Rich snippet WordPress plugin and it is also compatible with Yoast SEO plugin. It supports the following schema type:
It is easy to configure and can be used on any existing or a new WordPress website. It will also help you get the Knowledge graph for your website in Google search.
5. SEMRUSH: (SEO writing assistant)
SEMRUSH is one tool I have been using for a year now, and this has been of immense help from the phase of keyword research to optimization and also for tracking keyword ranking.
SEMRush used to be a web-based tool, however recently it launched a WordPress SEO plugin called “Writing assistant“, and this plugin alone could improve your content SEO to a great extent.
Here is how this plugin works:
The plugin lets you optimize your pages for your target keyword. It scans the existing top 10 ranking pages on Google, and suggest what you are missing on your content (Ex: Words, word limit), that could boost your ranking.
6. SEO Image Optimizer
By optimizing your images, you can drive a significant amount of traffic from image search engines. Even here, at AaveHypes, almost 1% of traffic is from image search engines, and that is a LOT.
This plugin adds ALT attributes to your images, though you need to take care of the image name. If you upload images with names like image002.jpeg or DSC001.jpeg, STOP NOW!
That is a huge mistake.
I suggest you make it a point to start giving your images more useful names right away.
For example, in this post, I have given the name “Best WordPress SEO” to the image I used.
7. Easy Table of Contents plugin
This is one WordPress SEO plugin that every content based WordPress websites and blogs should use in 2022. This plugin helps you add jumplinks in Google search.
The best thing about this plugin is, after initial configuration, it automatically adds a Table of content in all existing and in new articles.
Speed Optimizer plugin for better user experience:
One of the least talked about things when talking about WordPress SEO is user experience. Apart from a robust design, the speed of your WordPress site makes a lot of difference in overall SEO optimization. Google has been emphasizing for years that user experience is one of the most integral parts of overall SEO.
They have also made it public that the site loading time is now one of the search engine ranking factors. So, for you, it’s crucial now to optimize your site for speed.
If you have never taken a speed test for your WordPress site, this is an excellent time to do so. Visit this site and enter your domain name to complete a speed test.
This is why in this section of WordPress SEO plugins, I’m sharing some of the top plugins (under various categories) to improve your blog loading time.
8. Image Compression plugin
Images are an integral part of our WordPress site. On anaverage, I use three images in every blog post which increases the page size by 400kb+.
On a desktop, this may be alright, but on a 3G or 4G connection, it’s of utmost importance to offer a fast page. Image compression is one technique that reduces the overall size of the image without compromising the quality of the image.
This technique alone (especially for image-heavy WordPress sites) can make a noticeable impact.
ShortPixel is the plugin that you should be using for this. It automatically compresses the new images and also gives you an option to compress old once.
9. Cache plugin
Caching is a well-known technique to make your WordPress site load faster. There are many well-documented case studies and research out there.
Using a cache plugin also helps in lowering the load on your server, thereby improving the overall performance of your WordPress site.
These days many popular hosting like SiteGround, and WPEngine offer inbuilt caching, and you may not need an extra plugin that I have mentioned below.
However, if you use any other hosting which doesn’t offer inbuilt cache, you can pick either of the two cache plugins that I have mentioned below. Both of them are easy to use.
- WP Rocket (Paid)
- WP super cache (Free)
I hope the information in this article helps you improve. If you think we have missed any essential or helpful SEO WordPress plugins, do let us know in the comments section.
Which other WordPress SEO plugins do you use? Feel free to recommend that should be added to this exclusive list.
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