- This article covered what SEO is and how it works, showed you how to get started with WordPress SEO and then covered how to optimize your site content, hierarchy, images and speed for better ranking. We even looked at the importance of having a responsive website along with the need to avoid practices that will hurt your SEO.
- An SEO strategy is all about creating a plan with ways to increase SEO for WordPress. That way, you’re well organized. It will help you carry out your strategy much more efficiently because you’ll know exactly how to optimize SEO in WordPress. You can follow along with your strategy and make sure you don’t miss any opportunities.
- 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.
Search engine optimization (SEO) aims to increase traffic to your website through organic search engine results. Therefore, it encompasses many tasks and strategies that might be difficult to implement without help from WordPress SEO plugins.
A decent SEO plugin should help you generate meta tags and descriptions based on your chosen keywords. Some of the candidates in this list also provide content analysis with actionable tips for improvement. Furthermore, it’s crucial to create XML sitemaps so that search engine crawlers can index your site.
WordPress makes it easy to structure, manage and publish your content in an SEO-friendly way. That’s why it’s considered the best CMS for search engine optimization. Improving your WordPress SEO is crucial for getting more traffic to your website. Sadly most WordPress SEO guides are too technical for new users to get started. If you are serious about increasing your website traffic, then you need to pay attention to the WordPress SEO best practices.
In this article, we’ll give you an overview of six of the best WordPress SEO plugins. Conveniently, they all offer free solutions. Let’s go!
Six best WordPress SEO plugins in 2021
Now that we’ve discussed why you should use an SEO plugin, let’s look at six excellent alternatives. The one that’s the best fit for you will depend the depth of features you need, but they all offer a budget-friendly way to implement your SEO strategy.
1. Yoast SEO
Yoast SEOCurrent Version: 16.1.1
Last Updated: April 6, 2021
Yoast SEO is one of the most popular WordPress SEO plugins, and it’s easy to see why. It comes packed with excellent features out of the box to help you produce search-engine-friendly content that is easy to read.
For instance, Yoast SEO adds a meta box to all your pages and posts, which enables you to easily set your focus keyword, meta description, canonical URLs, and more. Also, its readability analysis will help you optimize your posts with practical suggestions for copy improvement.
Other features include:
- Advanced XML sitemaps
- Schema markup
- Breadcrumbs control
- Support for ‘noindex’ content
- Title and meta description templates
- Language support
- Access to free Yoast courses
Pricing: Free.
The premium version also includes advanced functionality such as internal linking suggestions, content insights, and a redirect manager. Pricing starts at $89 per year for one website.
2. All In One SEO Pack
All in One SEO – Best WordPress SEO Plugin – Easily Improve Your SEO RankingsCurrent Version: 4.1.0.1
Last Updated: April 21, 2021
The All in One SEO Pack plugin is an excellent alternative to Yoast. With it, beginners won’t have to worry about complex settings as it works well immediately upon activation. For example, it automatically generates meta tags and optimizes your titles for Google and other search engines.
That said, advanced users will be able to customize their experience and override automatic features. Additionally, you can use the Robots.txt editor to instruct web crawlers about the contents of your site. All In One SEO Pack will automatically notify search engines about changes to your site as well.
Besides that, it also includes features such as:
- XML and RSS Sitemap support
- Image SEO
- Schema markup
- Advanced canonical URLs
- AMP support
- Duplicate content detection
- API support
- Ecommerce SEO
Pricing: Free.
The premium version gives you access to more advanced features and support for unlimited keywords starting at $39.60 per year.
3. Google XML Sitemaps
XML SitemapsCurrent Version: 4.1.1
Last Updated: March 11, 2021
If getting your site indexed by search engines is your only concern, Google XML Sitemaps could be an excellent solution. This plugin enables you to automatically generate a sitemap so that crawlers can easily assess your site. Also, you can save your settings and re-apply them each time you publish new content.
It also gives you more control/flexibility than the built-in XML sitemap feature that WordPress added to the core in WordPress 5.5.
This tool’s sole focus is on providing complete XML sitemaps, so you won’t get as many features as you would with other SEO plugins. Still, it’s an excellent no-frills option that supports all WordPress generated content without overloading your site.
Pricing: Free.
4. Squirrly SEO
SEO 2021 by Squirrly (Smart Strategy)Current Version: 11.1.01
Last Updated: April 23, 2021
Squirrly SEO is a beginner-friendly SEO tool that generates recommendations in real-time. It enables you to optimize content for your chosen keyword as you’re writing your content. Also, it provides a competitor analysis with suggestions of what you can improve to outrank similar pages.
Besides that, Squirrly SEO comes with innovative features to help with your marketing efforts. For instance, it measures your audience engagement and offers actionable advice to improve your click-through rates (CTRs). Plus, it will transfer all your pre-existing settings if you switch from another SEO plugin.
Other features include:
- Schema markup
- Free coaching sessions
- ‘Noindex’ options
- Advanced eCommerce features
- Google Analytics integration
- Custom Robot.txt for site crawlers
- Sitemap XML
- Social media monitoring
Pricing: Free.
If you want to access the advanced features, pricing starts at $20.99 per month.
5. SEOPress
SEOPress, on-site SEOCurrent Version: 4.5.1
Last Updated: April 8, 2021
SEOPress is a powerful plugin that’s completely white-labeled and free from ads. It comes with comprehensive features that enable you to fully optimize your site. As such, you can build your custom XML sitemap, manage redirections, analyze content based on keywords, and more.
The plugin is fully integrated with Google Analytics, enabling you to track your SEO efforts. Additionally, its content analysis tool will provide optimization tips to help you write better posts. Developers will be able to apply additional hooks to customize the plugin fully as well.
Beyond that, it also provides features such as:
- Intuitive setup wizard
- Support for unlimited keywords
- Image SEO
- Social media monitoring
- Dynamic titles and meta descriptions
- Custom canonical URLs
- ‘Noindex’ support
- Free SEO tutorials
Pricing: Free.
The premium version costs $39 per year and is suitable for multiple sites. It comes with advanced features for WooCommerce, breadcrumb optimization, and more.
6. Rank Math
Rank Math SEO – Best SEO Plugin for WordPressCurrent Version: 1.0.62
Last Updated: April 14, 2021
Our final recommendation is Rank Math, a feature-rich SEO plugin that’s easy to use. It comes with an intuitive setup wizard and smart automation features that will help beginners optimize their content in a few clicks.
Rank Math is also integrated with Google Search Console and keyword ranking tools, which is useful if you want to stay ahead of your competitors. Besides that, its built-in 404 monitor helps you resolve errors for a better user experience. Plus, its module-based system enables you to pick the features you need without overloading your site with unnecessary functions.
Some other key features include:
- Schema markup
- Support for unlimited keywords
- Advanced SEO auditing
- Redirect manager
- Local SEO
- Breadcrumbs optimization
- Internal linking suggestions
- XML sitemap
- Image SEO
Pricing: Free.
There’s also a premium version, which starts at $59 per year. It lets you track up to 1,000 keywords and adds other advanced SEO features.
Improve your SEO with these plugins today
SEO is an essential activity for any site owner. Fortunately, this is now an easy task for WordPress users thanks to the vast array of SEO plugins. The right tool can help you stay on top of your meta descriptions, optimize content to rank for your chosen keyword, create XML sitemaps, and more.
In this article, we’ve discussed six of the best WordPress SEO plugins to help you with these tasks. Yoast SEO is the go-to solution for many, but All In One SEO and Rank Math include comparable feature sets.
For some tips on how to get started with your chosen SEO plugin, check out these articles:
Do you have any questions about WordPress SEO plugins? Let us know in the comments section below!
Free guide
5 Essential Tips to Speed Up
Your WordPress Site
Reduce your loading time by even 50-80%
just by following simple tips.
You may have optimized your website and content with SEO, but did you optimize your SEO for WordPress?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is also referred to as natural referencing, and it refers to strategies you can implement to help search engines find your site’s content, and see that it’s relevant enough for users to rank higher in search engine results.
There are several ways to increase SEO that WordPress website owners implement. But, there are many pitfalls that aren’t avoided which reduce the effectiveness of the SEO strategies.
The solution is to optimize SEO for WordPress. But, it can be tricky to know where and how to start.
That’s why today, I’ll share how to optimize SEO in WordPress by avoiding common SEO mistakes in practical ways.
Start with Setting up Your SEO Strategy
An SEO strategy is all about creating a plan with ways to increase SEO for WordPress. That way, you’re well organized.
It will help you carry out your strategy much more efficiently because you’ll know exactly how to optimize SEO in WordPress. You can follow along with your strategy and make sure you don’t miss any opportunities.
Keep reading for ways to increase SEO that you can include in your strategy.
Common mistake: Many site owners create an SEO strategy without analyzing their entire site and content first. This prevents you from knowing where there are weak spots in your website in terms of SEO.
Solution: Do an SEO audit of your site. Without one, you could plan to implement strategies that aren’t helpful, or just make problem areas worse.
After you have identified where you need to improve SEO for WordPress, you can devise a plan. Instead of masking those problem areas or making them worse, you can actually fix them.
Once that’s done, you’re on your way to figuring out how to optimize SEO in WordPress.
Get Your Post Structure up to Snuff
One of the ways to increase SEO for WordPress is to start with your website and its content.
Make sure your blog posts and page content includes headings. With HTML, you can indicate which text on the page should be titles and subtitles with h tags.
Not only does this make your content easier to read, but it also helps search engines know what your content is about.
The more time visitors spend on your website consuming content, the more it signals to search engines (read: Google!) that your content is actually helpful.
It demonstrates that your blog posts and pages are answering the question that the user had when they started their search. If your content is organized well with the help of headings, it will also help visitors stay on the page to keep reading.
Common mistake: At times when headings are used, they’re used in the wrong order. It’s confusing for users, but it’s also confusing search engines. It makes it difficult for them to know what your content is about.
Solution: Be sure to use headings in proper order. The title of the page should be heading one with the <h1> tag. The heading should be a heading two using the <h2> tag. If you need to use additional tags, you can use the <h3>, <h4>, and <h5> tags after that.
While you can use another <h2> tag before using an <h4>, or <h5> tag, you should only do this if the content demands it.
For example, when you have explained the topic of the first section on the page, and you’re moving onto a new thought, you can use another heading.
If your new thought isn’t completely correlated with the previous one, you can use an <h2> tag. Otherwise, you can complete your thought with an <h3> tag, and so on.
(Key)word is the Bird
You may have heard of optimizing SEO for WordPress through including keywords in your content. It’s a common practice.
According to Moz, “Keywords are ideas and topics that define what your content is about. In terms of SEO, they’re the words and phrases that searchers enter into search engines, also called ‘search queries.’ If you boil everything on your page — all the images, video, copy, etc. Ssd toolbox for mac. – down to simple words and phrases, those are your primary keywords.”
Keywords are often considered as being about one to about three or four words. They’re used to describe a word, or string of words, that are related to a specific topic.
For example, “SEO for WordPress” and “ways to increase SEO” can be considered as keywords.
Keyphrases longer in length and are phrases rather than a word or two. For example, “how to optimize SEO in WordPress.”
Traditionally, a keyword is a single word, but as the internet has grown over the last couple decades, the definition has been commonly expanded to include more than one word.
It’s also common to more specifically refer to keywords that are longer than one or two words as mid-tail, or long-tail keywords.
These types of keywords often don’t have as much search volume, but can still be popular enough to use. Although, this isn’t always the case.
Keyword Research
You can do research with tools such as Google’s Keyword Planner to find keywords that a lot of users are searching for, and that are relevant to your topic for your page, or blog post.
A popular keyword helps ensure that there’s a potential for more visitors that will come to your website when they search for that term if you add that keyword to your page (or post) multiple times. This is another one of the ways to increase SEO for WordPress.
The idea here is that when a search engine scans your content and finds that keyword several times, it will deduce that’s what your content is about and that it’s relevant to show in search engine results.
It’s worth noting that you don’t want to add the keyword too many times since it’s considered as “keyword stuffing” and search engines will assume the page is spam.
Getting the right ratio of keywords to the rest of the text on the page is called keyword density.
Typically, a keyword density of 0.5% to 2.5% is acceptable.
Common mistake: Beyond keyword stuffing, a lot of site owners and business don’t diversify their keyword strategy.
They try to add keywords searched in high volumes in search engines, but as a result, have intense competition. This means that so many other websites are trying to target that same keyword. This makes it more difficult for your site to rank higher in search results.
Solution: Instead of trying to only target high-volume keywords, which is also known as head, or short-tail keywords, you should try to mix it up and also target mid-tail, and long-tail keywords, and keyphrases.
If you’re planning an article that’s meant to be a focal point for your blog, by all means try to target a head keyword, but also try to target other mid, or long-tail keywords in the same post.
Other articles should also use mid-tail, or long-tail keywords, or keyphrases.
Getting Meta with Metadata
Metadata is, quite literally, information about data. This includes details such as creating a meta description which describes what your content is about.
Meta descriptions are the captions that are shown under the title of a search engine result.
It helps search engines better understand when they should show your website in results.
If you don’t include a meta description in your article such as by using an SEO plugin, search engines will draw a meta description from the content on your page.
A meta description is but one of the ways to increase SEO for WordPress, and also one type of metadata.
Common mistake: Many site owners resort to keyword stuffing in meta descriptions, or otherwise write descriptions that aren’t at all enticing to the reader.
Solution: Take an extra moment to really think about what you’re going to write for your meta descriptions.
If you’re wondering how to optimize SEO in WordPress with meta descriptions, here’s a basic rule of thumb: They should be just as exciting and informative as the blog article’s title, or introductory paragraph.
It’s also important to use a keyword only once in your description. The exception being if you’re targeting more than one keyword for that article, or page.
Wordpress Seo
Then, you may want to add one, or two more keywords. That is, as long as they’re different enough that the text doesn’t sound like you’re keyword stuffing, or doesn’t read like a hoaky, late-night infomercial.
Grow Your Site with Marketing
If you’re still wondering how to optimize SEO in WordPress, one of the possibly surprising ways is to leverage marketing. The more users that visit your website and hang around for a while, the more it indicates to search engines that your site is relevant. This results in your website being ranked higher in results.
Marketing is one of the ways you can help direct traffic to your website. More specifically, you can help generate backlinks, do some outreach marketing, and be more active on social media.
Moz explains backlinks as “Backlinks, also called “inbound links” or “incoming links,” are created when one website links to another. The link to an external website is called a backlink.”
Backlinks let search engines know that your content must be a great resource. If it wasn’t, other sites wouldn’t be referencing it. As a result, your site ranks higher.
Encouraging other blogs and websites to link to you through a message is called outreach marketing, and it can be done through email, and social media, for example.
Common mistake: While doing some outreach marketing for backlinks can certainly be one of many helpful ways to increase SEO for WordPress, it’s crucial to craft your message in a way that doesn’t just ask for a backlink.
If you cold message someone asking for something, it’s generally not well-received. It can come across as being rude at best, or as spam.
If a stranger walked up to you on the street and asked you to do them a huge favor, you’re likely to be hesitant to say the least.
Mcg: (μg) mi´kro-gram one millionth (10 −6 ) of a gram. Helping healthcare organizations confidently provide informed, collaborative and effective care. MCG’s transparent assessment of the latest research and scholarly articles, along with our own data analysis, gives patients, providers and payers the vetted information they need to feel confident in every care decision, as well as providing a means to have collaborative discussions about care. Mcg. McG, Director: Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle. McG was born on August 9, 1968 in Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA as Joseph McGinty Nichol. He is a producer and director, known for Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003), Terminator Salvation (2009) and The Babysitter: Killer Queen (2020).
Solution: Be polite, and try to offer something first. The key here is to offer something that will directly help the person who’s receiving the message.
If you ask for a backlink and offer a backlink in return, but the person you’re messaging is a consultant for other blogs and businesses, for example, they’re more likely to ignore your message.
That’s why it can also be helpful to start off with people you already know that have a blog in the same industry, or surrounding the same topic. If you ask someone who covers a totally different niche, search engines won’t view the backlink favorably.
For the same reason, it’s also critical that backlinks don’t all go to one page, there are many different sites (not just one, or two) linking to your site, and the hyperlinked text that directs to your site are varied across domains.
Wordpress Seo Plug-ins
How to Optimize SEO in WordPress: Solved
By now, you should have a basic foundation for knowing how to optimize SEO in WordPress with these practical ways to increase SEO for WordPress.
Seo For Wordpress Site
But, it only scratches the surface. For more detail on how to optimize SEO in WordPress, and ways to increase SEO, check out the SEO category of our blog or read the follwowing: