If you are running a website, search engines are incredibly valuable sources of organic traffic, leads, and customers. As WordPress is widely known as an SEO friendly platform, you should use a well-optimized WordPress theme, coupled with a top WordPress SEO plugin, to reap the real benefits that optimization can offer. However, with hundreds of SEO plugins available, it may sound like a challenging task to choose the best SEO plugin for WordPress.
1. Yoast SEO:
When it comes to on-page search engine optimization, few plugins can compete with the efficacy and functionality of Yoast SEO.
Yoast’s WordPress SEO is a comprehensive solution for all your on-site SEO needs. It allows you to add SEO title, meta description, and meta keywords to each post and page of your site.
Apart from improving your website’s SEO in all aspects, this plugin goes that extra mile to take care of every technical optimization. It comes equipped with a wide variety of features that makes it an all-in-one SEO plugin.
Key Features:
• Create better content: The snippet preview allows you to see how your page or post will look in search results.
• Page Analysis: This feature analyses small things such as length of the posts, a presence of a meta description, and whether it contains the focus keyword, etc.
• Meta and link elements: With this plugin, you have the power to manage the pages which will be shown by Google in its search results and which won’t be. While WordPress only exhibits approved link elements on a page, Yoast SEO makes it available everywhere.
• Social integration: Yoast SEO comes equipped with Facebook OpenGraph implementation to link SEO and social media.
• Multi-site compatibility: Unlike some other plugins, Yoast SEO is multi-site compatible.
• Breadcrumbs: This unique feature empowers you to develop easy navigation for both search engines and users.
2. All in One SEO Pack:
One element that you’ll either like, or not like, about All in One SEO Pack is that it doesn’t come with any analysis features. That is, it gives you the settings that you need, but it doesn’t make suggestions for how you use those settings.
All in One SEO Pack also goes with a modular approach, which means that you can activate or deactivate certain features based on your own needs. Combine those two approaches, and you get a pretty lightweight, straightforward plugin.
Key Features:
• Provides XML sitemap support
• Google AMP support
• Google Analytics support
• Optimize titles and meta description automatically
• Helps you edit theaccess file or robots file right from your dashboard
• You can disable certain features
There’s also a premium version called All in One SEO Pack Pro that comes with:
• Video SEO module
• Specific SEO for category and tags taxonomy
• WooCommerce SEO plugin
3. Google XML Sitemaps:
This is another professional SEO tool for users, which is accessible for free. This will help your site by making it easy to index on the search engines. A special XML sitemap can do this.
As soon as you install and activate the plugin, it will automatically create an XML sitemap that makes it simple for search engine bots to view, crawl, and index your site, so that you can enjoy a boost in your rankings.
There are hundreds of WordPress SEO plugins available on the web; the above-mentioned top 3 plugins are some of the most widely used. Be aware that if you’re using a significant number of plugins simultaneously, there’ll be a probability of slowing down the speed of your site. Ideally, you should deactivate the plugins that you don’t use regularly and reactivate them as and when required.
