WordPress SEO Plugins: 5 Top Options

Search Engine Optimization is perhaps the most important part of website promotion and maintenance. Without proper SEO, your project is not likely to be successful in the longer run. Thankfully, there are several WordPress SEO plugins that can help us do the job in no time.

With that said, which of the numerous WordPress SEO plugins is a worthy pick?

WordPress SEO Plugins: 5 Worthy Options

In this article, we will be taking a look at some of the top WordPress SEO plugins.

Yoast SEO

The de facto leader in the world of WordPress SEO plugins, Yoast SEO is one of the most powerful plugins for websites written in WordPress. Yoast SEO is a plugin of incredible scale for WordPress, which is fully focused on optimizing your content for search engines. The plugin has been installed more than five million times and translated into 40 languages. For the most part, Yoast SEO does its job fairly well and is often the first WordPress SEO plugin of choice for many.

Major Features of Yoast SEO

• Generate XML sitemaps
• Configure robots.txt files
• Manage breadcrumbs
• Set canonical links to avoid duplicate content
• Handle meta tags (title, keywords, description) based on ready-made or custom templates
• Provide SEO analysis for content
• Visualize the appearance of snippets in search engines and social networks
• Optimize the site feeds for SEO
• Quickly remove or add the prefixes from content for better optimization.

All in One SEO Pack

If we consider the best SEO plugins for WordPress, this particular plugin can safely be put on the second rank in terms of popularity. It is actively used on 2 million websites and is available in 57 languages. The functionality is by and large the same as the previous plugin, but if Yoast SEO is more focused on beginners, then All in One SEO Pack is designed to be used by experienced professionals.

All in One SEO Pack comes with all the general bells and whistles that you might expect from a WordPress SEO plugin — it offers automatic search engine pings, XML sitemaps, custom meta information, and a lot more. Most importantly, you can also turn off selective features of this plugin that you do not require. This makes it apt for use on shared hosting packages as you can save server resources by optionally disabling certain plugin functions.

Major Features of All in One SEO Pack

• Support for AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages
• Connection to Google Analytics
• Help with implementing markup based on Schema.org
• Easy setup of redirects
• Seamless integration with WooCommerce.

Rank Math

Rank Math is a relative newcomer in the world of WordPress SEO plugins. It offers pretty much the same set of features as All in One SEO Pack and Yoast SEO, but comes with an added obvious advantage — most of the features that are otherwise available as premium upgrades in other plugins can be found in Rank Math for free. This makes Rank Math the perfect WordPress SEO plugin for users that are low on budget.

Major Features of Rank Math

• 404 Monitor. Rank Math can actively monitor for broken links and pages on your site.
• AMP support
• Native support for bbPress
• In-built Link Counter
• Local SEO and Google Knowledge Graph
• Support for Rich Snippets.

Slim SEO

Slim SEO is a full-featured WordPress SEO plugin that provides a complete SEO solution for WordPress for absolute beginners. The USP of Slim SEO lies in the fact that it comes with a preset configuration of settings and does not have a lot of tweaks and settings to configure. This means newbie users that are otherwise not fully aware of technical aspects of SEO can utilize Slim SEO in no time.

Of course, this also implies that Slim SEO may not be a good fit for advanced users. However, for folks looking for a no-nonsense solution sans any complex and semantic options, Slim SEO is perfect. It is also ideal if you are looking for an easy-to-use WordPress SEO plugin for your clients.

Major Features of Slim SEO

• Meta Tags Optimization
• Support for Schema (Structured Data)
• In-built Auto Redirection
• Image Alt Text support
• Support for XML Sitemaps
• Ability to insert custom Header and Footer code.

SEOPress

SEOPress is a WordPress SEO plugin for internal SEO optimization on the site. To be honest, it is an equally robust and much cost-effective alternative to the Yoast SEO plugin.

The SEOPress plugin has a clear interface; all settings are grouped into sections. For quick configuration, the plugin comes with a Configuration Wizard and the main screen that draws the user’s attention to the major points of optimization. A paid version is also available with enhanced features.

Major Features of SEOPress

• Step-by-step setup wizard
• Import data from Yoast, All In One SEO, The SEO Framework, and Rank Math WordPress SEO plugins
• Header and description settings for all post types, archives, and taxonomies
• Indexing settings for all post types, archives, and taxonomies
• Canonical URLs
• Removing /category/ from permalinks
• Creating and configuring an XML sitemap and an HTML sitemap
• Google Knowledge Graph settings (individual or organization, social media profiles)
• Support for Google Local Business;
• Checking for broken links.
• Support for Open Graph.

The SEO Framework

The last entry on our list, The SEO Framework is available in 16 languages as of now. It is a simple and straightforward plugin, albeit it lacks some of the intuitiveness and eye-candy appeal that can be found in other WordPress SEO plugins.

The SEO Framework comes loaded with all the features that one might need from an SEO plugin. However, it does lack a bit of clarity in terms of interface and absolute beginners might find the learning curve a bit too steep.

Major Features of The SEO Framework

• Generating “breadcrumbs” for Google Search
• Creating an XML sitemap and automatically notifying search engines about changes on the site
• Automatic creation of title and description according to Google recommendations
• Support for Open Graph markup to improve the appearance of pages when reposting in social networks
• Auto-generation of canonical pages to avoid problems with duplicate content
• Disabling indexing of empty categories.

Summary

Now, the big question: which SEO plugin should you be using?

If you are looking for a simple and powerful solution, SEOPress gets our vote. It is a low-cholesterol but insanely powerful SEO plugin that gets the job done with ease. Initially, we’d have gone with Yoast SEO. However, the free version of Yoast SEO of late has become bloated with adware and nag messages. SEOPress is slick and free from excessive adverts and as such, is a worthy alternative to Yoast and others.

However, if SEO plugins seem too confusing for you, look no further than Slim SEO. It comes with out of the box settings and offers minimal settings for you to work with, thereby ensuring that even the most basic users can master this particular plugin within minutes.

Which SEO plugin do you use and why? Share your views with us in the comments below!

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