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The 9 Best WordPress SEO Plugins for Your New Website

LenaH June 29, 2021

In the modern world of SEO, everyone is looking to increase their search rankings. Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing your website’s presence in the search results pages. This also goes for WordPress sites. Luckily for us, WordPress offers everyone a plethora of tools and plugins to track and improve our SEO rankings. These can also improve your site’s security, increase loading speeds, and overall performance. The trick is to research end choose the right combination of plugins that fit your needs. Making the right choice can mean the difference to your site’s optimization. Bad or simply inadequate plugins can have a negative impact on your website’s performance and search engine result page rankings. In this article, we will go over some of the best WordPress SEO plugins and tools. We will also go over their pros and cons so you can make an educated choice.

Yoast SEO

Yoast is a comprehensive plugin that is beginner-friendly. It provides us with various SEO features. With this plugin, you can easily manage meta descriptions, URLs, Page Titles, and much more. The user interface allows us to create customized titles for our web pages and SEO-friendly URLs. We can enable a function within it that provides us with an SEO report card. These provide us with adequate data to help improve optimization in future iterations. You can authenticate your website with the Google Search Console very easily. Simply copy and paste the HTML code into the Yoast user interface. Yoast also protects your code from accidental overwrites. Sitemaps are also very important for SEO. Yoast has an auto-generated dynamic XML sitemap. This gets updated every time you publish new content. Through this XML sitemap, you can choose to make certain sections of your website more accessible to search engines. 

AIOSEO

This stands for “All in One SEO for WordPress” and is one of the best SEO plugins currently available online. It is used by over 2 million users worldwide. It is one of the most comprehensive SEO toolkits out there. It helps us improve search rankings without learning a bunch of new stuff. The setup wizard is also beginner-friendly. Right from the get-go, it helps us choose the best SEO settings for our business. AIOSEO shows us the analysis with actionable checklists on how to optimize posts and pages. It includes a smart meta tag generator that combined with dynamic values can create SEO titles and descriptions. This translates into not having to update entire posts in order to just change SEO titles. This plugin comes with a lot more useful tools. It would require a whole article in order to cover everything. Give it a check.

SEMRush

Continuing on with the best WordPress plugins, SEMRush is amongst the top contenders on the online market. It is used by professional SEO experts, bloggers, and businesses of all sizes. It also has its own comprehensive set of tools to optimize your content and increase traffic. This tool is best used to find organic keywords and search terms. These need to be easy to rank for. SEMRush also allows us to do competitive research. By knowing which keywords our competitors rank for, we can extrapolate the data in order to compete with them. The Writing Assistant Tool helps us improve our website content. SEMRush integrates seamlessly with WordPress and helps us built SEO friendly content. As with most tools that will be mentioned in this article, there are many more features that can be covered. Give SEMRush a try and see how it can help your website rank better.

Google Search Console

This is a free tool offered by the biggest search engine, Google. It helps website developers monitor and maintain their site’s presence in the Google search results. This tool gives alerts when Google is unable to get into the webpage efficiently in order to index pages. Not only that, but it also offers actionable suggestions on how to remedy the situation. It shows us which keywords the website is ranking for. The Google Search Console offers much more data that we can use to find keywords to use. These keywords we can use to more efficiently rank higher by optimizing our content. Such data can also be used to generate new ideas for blogs or content, in general. Since Google is the main player in the search engine game, most local SEO professionals use this tool. Since it is free, anyone can use it. It does take little getting used to.

Ahrefs

This is another AIO tool for marketers, bloggers, businesses, etc. It offers a similar toolset as SEMRush. Many consider it the alternative for the latter. This plugin allows us to do keyword and backlink research, competition analysis, keyword rankings, etc. With Ahrefs, we can also do a detailed content analysis with the integrated tools. With this tool, we can improve our content while targeting specific keywords. SEMRush and Ahrefs have a big overlap in the offering of features. But what Ahrefs really excels at is backlink analysis. This means we can determine which sites are not linking to us while doing so for the competition. In turn, we can use this data to build more partnerships and get backlinks. Lastly, this plugin helps us identify duplicate content. Also, keyword cannibalization can be spotted and remedied. All in all, Ahrefs is a great all-around tool for WordPress websites. 

Rank Math

This tool is one of the new, fast-growing plugins for WordPress that is user-friendly and does the job. It enables us to optimize our website for search engines and social media alike. The setup wizard allows us to import data from other SEO plugins. This can come in very handy. It certainly makes the switch very easy and practical. It makes it effortless to add meta titles, descriptions, and other data to your blog posts. Just as the Google Search Console, allows us to generate an XML sitemap. This plugin enables us to control access to plugin features based on user roles. Rank Math is another very popular choice that is expanding on its features. It will be interesting to track their progress as the software becomes more mature. New features and performance improvements are a perpetual goal for any piece of software, so keep an eye out.

SEOPress

As with most SEO tools, this is a freemium-model SEO plugin for WordPress. It has no ads. Yes, even in the free version of the software. It is a simple, fast and powerful tool that enables us to manage titles and meta descriptions for our content. As with the previous tools it can create XML and HTML sitemaps. SEOPress also can track website visitors with Google Analytics and can optimize tags for sharing content on social media platforms. The free version can analyse content to help webmasters write better posts. For developers, there are more than 75 hooks they can use to set up the plugin according to their personalized needs. There are also plenty of advanced features. Local business SEO, Breadcrumbs optimized for SEO and accessibility, and redirections and error 404 monitoring are just some of them. For many, the paid version is well worth the investment. 

Broken Link Checker

Sure, SEO is about many things. Having relevant, regular content with certain keywords is just scratching the surface. It is also about readability and making sure your content stays up to date over time. That means fixing broken links. When search engines spot a broken link (the dreaded 404 error) they react accordingly. This means your ranking on the search results page will drop significantly. It is simply not a desirable user experience. The customers are there to seek answers to their inquiries, not to land on empty pages, so it makes sense. The problem is, it can take us days to manually go through all the content ever created to find broken links. This is where tools such as the Broken Link Checker comes into play. It does the dirty work for you. It scans the content and reveals all the broken links so you can deal with those.

ShortPixel

This is one of the best SEO plugins for WordPress aimed at something a little different. It is aimed toward optimizing images. Multimedia content is very important when it comes to SEO rankings. Images are one of those, right next to video and audio content. This plugin compresses the images without loss of quality (lossless compression). It also does some other optimizations that can get technical. The smaller the footprint of the images the better. Multimedia content can get quite heavy on the resources. And remember, speed is everything in the online world. The search engines that we take this into account as well. Put your images through this tool, optimize them and enjoy the shorter loading times. With those come much better SEO rankings.

In your quest for the best WordPress plugins, beware of the harmful ones. These can cause a large number of issues. Some might be unsupported or outdated. Others might have easily exploited vulnerabilities. Do your own research and check online reviews. Ultimately, only you know which plugin is going to be right for your needs.

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