WordPress offers some nice native features but also SEO plugins. WordPress is the most popular CMS (content management system) for now. And it has some good reasons to be the leader. It is quite easy to set up a website and offer many different plugins to answers your needs. While some developers would prefer building their own functionalities, there are some nice options out there. And especially when it comes to SEO.
We are going to introduce 5 of the most popular SEO plugins for WordPress and give our feedback. Any suggestions are of course more than welcome!
- Wordpress SEO by Yoast
- All in one SEO pack
- SEO by Squirrly
- SEO Wizard
- Greg’s High Performance SEO
[Case Study] Driving growth in new markets with on-page SEO
Choosing the best SEO plugins for WordPress
This article is a guide to help you choose the best SEO WordPress plugin regarding your SEO needs and expectations. Actually, you might be looking for a plugin for different reasons:
- Page analysis
- XML Sitemaps
- Editing .htaccess, robots.txt files
- Breadcrumbs
- Social media integration
- WordPress version compatibility
- Importing and exporting settings
- Integration with WordPress ecommerce sites
- Theme compatibility
- Built-in API
- and more…
The best plugins for WordPress will help you with all of that. Here they are:
1# WordPress SEO by Yoast
WordPress SEO by Yoast is the most famous SEO plugin for WordPress. Developed by Joost de Valk and his company Yoast, it offers great and actionable SEO features. The plugin checks your posts based on a focus keyword. It looks at the URL, title, description, content, and more to make sure your post has a clear SEO focus.
It includes:
- Meta value for homepage
- Meta value for each post
- Robot.txt and .htacess edition
- XML sitemap access
- Breadcrumbs
- Head section cleaning
- Different languages
- Indexing control
- rel=”next” and rel=”prev” adding
- Open graph implementation
- Easily do 301 redirects
- Easily add canonical URL
- and more
As you can see, that plugin is pretty complete and covers most of SEO needs.
2# All in One SEO Pack
All in One plugin offers nice features to optimize your SEO. Created by Micheal Torbert, a WordPress developer, All in One includes:
- Google Analytics support
- Sitemap support
- Duplicate content highlighter
- SEO integration for ecommerce websites
- Meta tag generation
- Social media details
- System status box
All in One does not have as much features as WordPress SEO but it offers an easier approach.
#3 SEO By Squirrly
SEO by Squirrly is focusing on content and keywords. They have shared a video presentation where they explain how to use their plugin.
It includes:
- Keyword analysis and research
- SEO audit report
- Green indicators about content
- Compatibility with other plugin
- Content marketing tracking
4# SEO Press
SEOPress is a powerful plugin to optimize your SEO, boost your traffic, improve social sharing, build custom HTML and XML Sitemaps, create optimized breadcrumbs, add schemas / Google Structured data types, manage redirections 301 and so much more.
This short video introduces the main functionalities offered by SEO Press.
The SEO Press plugin focuses on optimizing all the facets of your website. The free features include:
- Installation wizard to quickly setup your site
- Titles (with dynamic variables: custom fields, terms taxonomie…)
- Meta descriptions (with dynamic variables too)
- Open Graph Data
- Google Knowledge Graph
- Google Analytics
- Twitter Card
- Canonical URL
- Content analysis
5# Greg’s High Performance SEO
This plugin helps you develop your content visibility on major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. It includes:
- 100 on-page SEO characteristics
- Conflict analyser
- Secondary descriptions and titles
- Duplicate content remover
Those 5 SEO plugins cover major SEO needs. Pick your plugin regarding where your SEO priorities are. If you need assistance to pick between Yoast and All in One for instance, the website Mad Lemmings has written an article on that subject.
[Case Study] Driving growth in new markets with on-page SEO
I have had excellent results with All in One SEO. It takes a lot of tedious work to use the plugins because it does not do it for you. There are default aettings that can be used, but I do not use them. SEO seems to be the one we all want to improve on. I think this year I may try a different one on just one site to see what features effect SEO and learn new methods. I will look for one with similar and definitely different features than I have. I actually have never built a WP site without using the ALL IN ONE SEO plugin. The support for this plugin if using the Pro (paid) version is excellent. I feel after spending quite a bit of time I can confidently feel I will have good success if I put the time in and utilize all the tools and do my research on the industry I am working with.
Its great article really helps to all bloggers thank you very much sir,
[…] implantation est un peu fastidieuse. Heureusement, il existe des plugins WordPress comme All in One Schema.org Rich Snippets qui peuvent vous simplifier la […]
WordPress SEO is indeed the top #1 plugin. For the sake of this article you should mention that the feature “Easily do 301 redirects” are premium (paid) features. The redirect manager is a convenient way to do 301, 302, 307 and 410 but this is a $69 license fee. IMO worth it.
Thanks for putting best plugins page its was an insightful article. Give SEO post content links a try we use it on our web site and i think it has control baked its flipping awesome
Yoast is the best. I use it since when I started blogging. It is simple yet powerful to optimize our contents for the search engines.
I use yoast to SEO … i thinks is one of the best
Amazing article. I’ve been using yoast seo for more than 5 years now. There are tons and tons of things I love about the plugin. But there are some things I love the most. Such as how the company keeps updating every now and then by adding new features in their updates. I also love how the plugin does the job of multiple plugins like making sitemap, adding verification code, and much more.
I love the plugin. Tried multiple SEO plugins but yoast takes the prize to be best wordpress seo plugin for me.