Top 11 SEO Plugins for WordPress Website & Blogs

To make an identity among 200+ million plus blogs in the blogosphere, your WordPress blog should be well equipped with SEO plugins.

Unlike earlier, SEO is not a taboo subject for bloggers now. Off late, bloggers are taking more interest in SEO to drive more traffic by ranking their blog posts higher in the SERPs.

For newbie as well as seasoned bloggers, Search Engine Optimization by a manual method is not a simple task. Unless and until she is an SEO practitioner with at least a few years of experience. Here, the WordPress SEO Plugins come to the rescue.

Don’t: The other day, one of my blogger friend was asking me “ Why I am not getting traffic on my blog, although I am using All-in-One-SEO-Pack WP Plugin?”

I simply asked her “ Do you use this plugin regularly while publishing your blog posts? And, the answer was ‘NO’. She simply installed the SEO plugin, and busy in dreaming that it will send huge traffic every day to her blog! What a blunder…

Basic knowledge of SEO is mandatory along with the plugins for optimum results.

I am listing 11 SEO Plugins, which I recommend you to use on your WordPress blog for better SEO. The choice of Plugins to use is completely up to you, depending upon the usability and comfort factor.

1. WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast:

Yoast SEO Plugin the #1 WordPress SEO Plugin. The only appropriate word for this plugin is ULTIMATE!!! Besides all the basic SEO features, this plugin adds a great set of functionalities.

• Click and Submit Advanced XML Sitemaps.
• Full control on breadcrumbs.
• Edit robots.txt
• Modify .htaccess files
• Clean up the head section
• Avoid Google penalties: Set canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content.
• Better Branding with title and meta description templating.
• Snippets in the search results.
• Support AMP with Glue for Yoast SEO & AMP Plugin
• Expand Yoast SEO with the News SEO, Video SEO, Local SEO, and WooCommerce SEO extensions. [Premium]
• Need help? Yoast SEO Premium users get 1-year free access to our awesome support team. [Premium]

2. All in One SEO Pack:

Mother of all SEO Plugins for WordPress blogs. Most downloaded SEO Plugin so far, with 50,000,000+ downloads so far. It’s easy to use User Interface attracts mostly newbie bloggers. With all the basic SEO features, this plugin is the darling of all WordPress users..

I personally use this Plugin (All-in-One-SEO-Pack) on my coupons site successfully, with numerous blog posts ranking on the 1st and 2nd SERPs of  Google for different keywords. Thanks to Michael Torbert 

• XML Sitemap support – Improve your SEO by submitting your sitemap to Google and Bing.
• Submit Image XML Sitemap
• Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) support
• Redirect attachment pages to the parent post
• Advanced Canonical URLs
• Automatically optimizes your Titles and Generates META tags automatically
• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
• Avoids duplicate contents.
• SEO Integration for e-Commerce sites, including WooCommerce (FREE)
• Nonce Security built into All in One SEO Pack
• Support for SEO on Custom Post Types

3. The SEO Framework

The SEO Framework is a fully automated, reliable, accessible and optimized SEO plugin for your WordPress website.

This plugin delivers a time-saving SEO solution that truly helps your website rank, no ads, distractions, and nonsense functionality.

• Preconfigured WordPress Plugin for beginners
• Improves search presence for Google, Bing, Yandex, and all connected search networks.
• Improves social sharing
• Helps you optimize your metadata, title and tags
• Automatically optimize your website pages
• Performs faster, accurate, and more sustainable

4. SEOPress

SEOPress is a powerful plugin to boost your traffic, optimize your SEO, improve social sharing, build custom HTML and XML Sitemaps, create optimized breadcrumbs, add Google Structured data types/schemas, manage redirections 301 and so much more.

• Titles & Meta descriptions(with dynamic variables: custom fields, terms taxonomies…)
• Build your custom XML Sitemap to improve search indexing.
• Image XML Sitemaps to improve search indexing for Google Images.
• Canonical URL
• Meta robots (noindex, nofollow, noodp, noimageindex, noarchive, nosnippet)
• Redirections in the post, pages, custom post types
• Remove stop words and /category/ in URLs
• Google Analytics with downloads tracking and much more(GDPR compatibility)
• Improve search indexing with building your custom HTML Sitemap to enhanced navigation for visitors.
• Link your social media accounts to your site.

5. RankMath

Rank Math SEO Plugin is new but with great & premium features in a free plugin. You can easily import setting and meta tags from the most popular plugins.

• Setup Wizard (Easy to follow)
• Integrated Google Schema Rich Snippets
• Optimize Upto 5 Focus Keywords
• Google Search Console Integration
• Google Keyword Ranking for SEO
• Optimal Settings Pre-Selected
• LSI Keyword Tool Integrated
• Add Overlay Icons On Social Images
• Advanced SEO Analysis Tool
• Inbuilt 40 SEO Tests to supercharge your website’s SEO
• Smart Redirection Manager
• Local Business SEO
• SEO Optimized Breadcrumbs
• 404 Monitor
• Internal Linking Suggestions

Its a great plugin for Bloggers, E-commerce websites, Niche Sites, Local Businesses, Startups, The Real Estate and all WordPress Websites.

6. SEO Squirrly

SEO Squirrly SEO Plugin is a human-friendly and search engine friendly WordPress SEO Plugin, an excellent choice for all your Articles, Pages and WooCommerce products.

The only WordPress SEO plugin that offers all the on-page tools and Assisted SEO tools. You need to take your site from “Never Found” to Always Found on search engines like Google and Bing.

7. All in One Schema Rich Snippets

Are you looking for Eye Catchy Search Engine results with a high conversion rate? All In One Scheme Rich Snippets is the most popular schema markup plugin and best choice for you.

This Plugin shows a summary with author and customer review and rating. Easy implementation of schema types like Recipes, Review, Article, Products, Events, Services, etc

8. Google XML Sitemaps:

Google XML Sitemaps plugin is improved SEO by creating special XML sitemaps which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your site.

For better and faster indexing of your blog content, you need a site map. And, it's the best plugin available to perform this task efficiently. A must have plugin for every WordPress blog.

9. Broken Link Checker

Broken Link Check plugin is a must-have WordPress plugin to monitor your blog and looking for broken links and let you know if found, then you can edit, modify and redirect to another URL.

Features

• Monitors links in your posts, pages, comments, and in custom fields also.
• Notifies you either via the Dashboard or by email.
• Detects links that don’t work, missing images and redirects.
• Prevents search engines from following broken links
• You can search and filter links by URL, anchor text and so on.

10. Rel Nofollow Checkbox

Rel Nofollow Checkbox is a very simple and important WordPress plugin to add a simple checkbox in the insert/edit link popup for including nofollow attribute.

It will suggest to search engine spiders to that link is to follow or does not follow on your new site. and increase your popularity score.

11. Smart SEO WordPress Plugin

Smart SEO WordPress SEO Plugin (Premium- 20$) is for advanced users. You can set your SEO rules using this plugin. It shows a ‘Smart SEO Score’ before publishing a post, by considering all the SEO aspects, thereby prompting you for better optimization.

• Smart SEO Score
• SEO Setting with Meta Auto Complete Fields & Page Status – with Snippet Preview
• Multiple Focus Keywords
• Parse Content shortcode
• Custom SEO Rules and Setting
• Title & Meta Formats with Custom feature
• Import SEO Settings from other SEO Plugins

12. 5Sec Validator

(Premium- 11$) If you are an SEO savvy webmaster, then 5Sec Validator WordPress Plugin is definitely for you. It validates HTML and CSS errors from W3C and suggests for any correction. It validates your blog posts, pages, and taxonomies very efficiently. And, this WP Plugin is really fast, takes few seconds to few minutes to finish the job.

• validate your complete site in seconds
• validate any URL – post, page, taxonomy or custom post type
• detailed errors report for HTML
• detailed errors and warnings report for CSS
• uses industry-standard validator from W3C
• a must have for any SEO aware webmaster
• improve your site’s SEO and speed

13. W3 Total Cache:

Every webmaster knows, the importance of ‘Fast loading websites’. It makes your WordPress blog faster, thereby improves user experience by caching browser, objects, and database. If you are looking for a CDN (Content Delivery Network), then W3 Total Cache WordPress plugin is for you.

A faster site means a higher ranking on Google SERPs, thereby driving more traffic.

14. Platinum SEO Pack

A great multifunctional SEO Plugin. Covers almost all aspects of Search Engine Optimization for a WordPress blog. This plugin optimizes Post titles, Meta description, Meta tags, 301 Redirection for any changed permalink structure, Canonicalization of URLs, Add index, No index, DoFollow attribute, NoFollow attribute, etc.

You can’t use this awesome Plugin with All-in-One-SEO-Pack. B’cos almost all the features (except few) are common in both the plugins.

15. SEO Ultimate

In addition to the optimization of titles, meta description, meta keywords, index/noindex, and no-follow managers, SEO ultimate has features like Keyword research, 404 monitors, Internal link maker, and Slug optimizer.

Yoast SEO Plugin lets you import your metadata from All-in-One-SEO-Pack if you don’t want to use the later.

What is the value of a blog, if it is not read by other people. And, Search Engines are the only option, which can provide a constant source of traffic in long term. To receive more traffic from Search Engines, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of your WordPress blog is mandatory. And, SEO Plugins are the best option to do this job.

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