To start off the list, we’ll talk about SEO plugins for WordPress. These are often easier to understand and install, and you can choose from a wide range of plugins with different features. The best plugins show you SEO projections and recommendations on your page and post editors, while others are limited in their feature-sets, but they have unique assets like options for checking broken links or minimizing the file sizes of images.
- Yoast SEO
- All in One SEO Pack
- The SEO Framework
- SEOPress
- Rank Math
- SEO Squirrly
- Broken Link Checker
- Rel NoFollow Checkbox
- All in One Schema Rich
The quick list of recommendations is shown above, but we highly recommend scrolling through the more thorough reviews we’ve completed on the best SEO WordPress plugin options below.
SEO Tool #1: Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO reigns supreme as the king WordPress SEO plugin, and is what we use here on the Kinsta blog. With an astounding 16,700 5-star ratings at the time of this article, Yoast continues to wow the WordPress world with impressive updates, a beautiful interface, and the most user-friendly option for making your blog posts and product pages stand out.
What’s more is that Yoast SEO has its own website with premium support options, a thriving community in the forum section, an informative blog to learn more about SEO, and SEO courses for beginners, intermediates, and advanced users alike.
You can also gain access to Yoast SEO premium from that website, which offers more advanced features like keyword optimization for five keywords on a page, previewing what your page will look like on Twitter and Facebook, and internal link suggestions for sending users to other locations on your website. Keep in mind that that’s a small portion of the premium features provided.
The premium plugin sells for $89 per site, making it a desirable deal for anyone. However, those on a budget still receive the free plugin, which beats out most other SEO WordPress plugins by a long shot.
Features That Make Yoast SEO a Great Choice:
- Type in keywords and analyze how well you have optimized for those keywords on pages and posts.
- See exactly what your Google search engine result is going to look like. With this, you can adjust the meta description and title to make it more appealing and keyword rich.
- A readability check is completed on all pages for you to understand if you need to break up paragraphs or add elements like numbered lists or headers.
- The plugin detects if you have duplicate content in your page or post.
- Yoast has some of the best resources and support we have ever seen from a plugin developer.
- They also update the plugin every two weeks.
- The premium plugin provides a redirect manager, free support, content insights, and an ad-free interface on the backend.
Yoast SEO is officially recommended by Kinsta and we even have an automatic installer for the plugin when you add a new WordPress site.
To learn more about this awesome plugin check our in-depth tutorial: How To Use Yoast SEO On WordPress: Complete Tutorial
SEO Tool #2: All in One SEO Pack
The All in One SEO Pack plugin is the closest competitor to Yoast SEO, and it’s a perfectly viable option for those who want an almost complete suite of SEO backend tools. Furthermore, All in One SEO has offered premium features and support for a longer period of time, so you might find that paying for this plugin will get you more in return. However, that’s all speculation.
That said, the primary All in One SEO pack plugin is free, but you can pay $57 for that premium support. The developer also provides a business license (up to 10 sites) for $97 per year and an agency license (unlimited sites) for $419 per year. One of the main reasons you might want to go with the premium version is because of the advanced support for WooCommerce. You’ll find all sorts of other great tools like a video SEO module, and SEO for categories, tags, and custom taxonomies.
However, most startups and bloggers will at least start with the free plugin, which works right out of the box for beginners and also has an API for developers. It can get a little intimidating and clunky at times, but in general, most of the common features like sitemap support, Google Analytics support, and advanced canonical URLs are set by default.
SEO Tool #3: The SEO Framework
The SEO Framework plugin does the trick for those who want a fast, lightweight SEO plugin for WordPress without any ads or upsells. It strips some of the bells and whistles you probably don’t need and focuses on helping out those who are more concerned about keeping site speeds high while also spending less time with confusing SEO articles. It’s often considered as the greatest alternative to Yoast or All in One SEO, and that has much to do with the visual nature of the SEO ratings–along with more flexible options for targeting keywords (like with slightly off words or synonyms).
The post SEO settings are controlled with a few tabs, one of which uses a colored scale to show exactly how close you are to making your post search engine-ready. With the scale, you can instantly tell where you need to put in some work for your SEO, unlike some of the more cluttered versions of Yoast.
As you may have already assumed, the interface is perfect for beginners. The API is also open for advanced users to get their hands dirty. The plugin began as a project within the WPMUDEV community, but it was eventually released to the masses for free. The SEO Framework plugin is all-inclusive, and it offers more advanced functionality with the help of extensions.
SEO Tool #4: SEOPress
SEOPress is a freemium All In One SEO plugin for WordPress with no ads. It’s completely white labeled with no footprints even in the free version. It’s simple, fast, and powerful, letting you manage all of your titles and meta descriptions for posts/pages/post types/terms.
Create XML and HTML sitemaps, track your visitors with Google Analytics (with RGPD compatibility), and optimize tags (Open Graph and Twitter Cards) for sharing your content on social networks. The free version also provides content analysis to help webmasters write better SEO optimized posts. Developers can use more than 75 hooks to set up the plugin as they wish.
SEO Tool #5: Rank Math
Rank Math SEO is the swiss army knife of SEO tools for your WordPress website. It comes with everything you need for taking full control of your on-page SEO. Rank Math combines the power of multiple plugins you might be using on your WordPress website for SEO and brings everything into one easy-to-manage plugin that is also light-weight.
With Rank Math, you can manage the on-page SEO of your posts, pages, products or other taxonomies. You can also control noindex/nofollow/noarchive meta tags of all taxonomies in general and individual posts or pages in particular.
It tightly integrates with Google Search Console to bring you essential information right inside your WordPress admin dashboard. Information like what keywords you are ranking for, how many search impression your website is getting, what errors Google sees on your site, etc., is available in one glance.
Apart from that, Rank Math comes with an inbuilt 404 Monitor, Redirections, Rich Snippets, Local SEO, XML Sitemaps, Automated Image SEO, Internal Link Building recommendations, etc.
SEO Tool #6: SEO Squirrly
SEO Squirrly is marketed for people who aren’t SEO experts. It lives up to that claim by offering a complete SEO suite without any complicated elements. SEO Squirrly generates SEO recommendations differently than the other plugins we’ve already outlined. You start by typing in your article topic. The desired keyword is also punched in so that when you continue writing your content, a series of green lights is activated in real-time. It’s almost like you have an expert whispering into your ear as you’re writing.
Features That Make SEO Squirrly a Great Choice:
- The keyword optimization is done as you’re writing the article. This is a little easier than Yoast where you often have to save the article to see suggestions and results.
- If you plan on replacing an old SEO plugin for WordPress with Squirrly, it still keeps all of your settings from the previous setup.
- There’s a tool that analyzes your competition to see how you can outrank it.
- Squirrly includes content reports, which you can send to other people in your organization. For example, a writer might need to learn more about SEO, so you might send it to them after they write an article.
- You receive progress monitoring on a weekly basis, along with a solid tool that shows recent tweets about your topics. This provides both inspiration and ways to improve your content.
SEO Tool #7: Broken Link Checker
SEO isn’t only about filling your pages and posts with a significant number of keywords. It’s also not only about making your content readable. One way to make your way past the competition is to go through your site to remove any broken links. When Google sees a broken link (aka a link that leads to a 404 page,) it sees this as a less than desirable user experience. After all, your customers have no interest in landing on an empty page.
The only problem is that it might take you hours or days to sift through all your content to locate every single broken link. Enter the Broken Link Checker.
This gem does the dirty work for you by scanning through your blog posts and pages. All broken links are revealed within a few minutes. The list is populated with the links in question, so you can go and remove them completely or change them to better references. If you keep the plugin active it continues to search your site and notify you when a link breaks.
After the links have been corrected the list will be empty and Google sees that you maintain your site quite well.
Important: Due to the constant scanning functionality of this plugin, we recommend enabling it, going through and fixing your links in batches, and then disabling it again. This will ensure it doesn’t impact the performance of your site.
SEO Tool #8: Rel NoFollow Checkbox
When linking to other pages and websites, it’s important to realize that those links mean something to Google. The search engine wants to know the quality of those links along with the quality of the links going back to your site. The reason for this is because if you have hundreds of links leading to spammy sites, Google sees this as manipulative and unhelpful to users. This plugin is perfect for those of you with affiliate links.
One way to make sure your links aren’t hurting your rankings is to add “rel nofollow” attributes to all external links. This way, the link doesn’t influence the ranking of the external site. In short, it scares away advertisers who value those links for rankings.
Unfortunately, it’s a pain in the butt to go in and add “rel nofollow” tags to all links in your content. However, the Rel NoFollow Checkbox plugin provides an extra checkbox to mark when creating links in WordPress.
SEO Tool #9: All in One Schema Rich Snippets
Rich snippets are visual search elements such as star rankings, images, and other important details that might grab user attention by having something different than the regular search results. Rich snippets are often used for eCommerce product page results and blog post reviews. Google enjoys rich snippets because they aren’t all that intrusive, yet still able to reveal valuable information to the user.
There’s no built-in method for offering up rich snippets with WordPress, but the All in One Schema Rich Snippets plugin does the work for you.
With the plugin, your search engine results are cut down to the most important elements. In addition, users see everything from photos to star ratings to author avatars.
Features That Make All in One Schema Rich Snippets a Great Choice:
Google searches provide a more visual structure for the users. Google likes this and so do the users.
The plugin supports several types of content including events, reviews, people, products, recipes, and videos. So, for instance, a recipe might have a star rating, the number of reviews, and a photo of the food.
Your search results are easier to share on Facebook, since the proper information is already compiled.
If you don’t have reviews on your site and simply need a more lightweight plugin, we also recommend checking out the free Schema plugin.
