WordPress is an awesome free tool to put your blog together and it has a variety of tools and settings for you to use. However, when it comes to SEO, WordPress does not offer many options to help you look pleasing in the eyes of search engines like Google.
Since SEO is important to your WordPress blog, I want you to have SEO options. So I will go over four awesome SEO plugins that you can use to help you improve your blog’s SEO. I don’t want you to use all four of these plugins. Just choose one that seems most suited to your needs.
And, at the end of this article, I will give you some additional tips and tricks to improve your WordPress blog’s SEO.
I know there are many WordPress plugins that will provide you SEO options, but these are the four in particular that I think are the best. And I will explain why I think they are the best throughout the rest of this article, so let’s get going.
1. Yoast
Out of all the SEO plugins, I think Yoast is perfect for your SEO essentials! And there are many amazing features that Yoast has which can tremendously improve your blog’s SEO. Here is a list of some of those features:
- You can change a blog post’s SEO title and description through a special box right underneath the post editor.
- You can input your Google Search Console tracking code into your website using Yoast.
- You can see how many links are going out from your articles (outbound) and how many links are going to your articles (inbound).
- You can generate a sitemap that search engines can read.
- You can see if your blog has any major SEO problems.
Yoast SEO is free to use and have access to many of their great features. But they do offer a premium version of their plugin for a one-time payment of $89. The premium version gives you bonus perks like automatically notifying you if your content is outdated for SEO, access to their customer support team, and help to optimize your content for more than one keyword.
But, even if you stick to the free version, Yoast still gives you a lot of value with no money upfront. And, out of the free SEO plugins out there, I think Yoast wins over them all. Yoast even has a blog on their website where you can learn additional SEO tips and tricks for free.
No wonder Yoast is the number-one WordPress SEO plugin, installed in over 5 million WordPress websites! (The WebCents Blog happens to be one of them) So why not join the Yoast squad?
2. Rank Math
Rank Math comes packed with many different features that are overlooked in SEO. Here are three examples:
- Optimizing your content for snippets, which are featured search results at the top of Google.
- Tracking the search trends on Google so you can think of content to create in order to attract more visitors (using Google Search Console)
- Adding stars on your search result to show what you think of certain products you reviewed in your article
And, out of all the WordPress SEO plugins, this is the most advanced plugin I have ever found. Honestly, it has a ton of great SEO features not found in Yoast, so I do think that RankMath is an outstanding alternative to Yoast.
And what’s even more amazing is that all the features in the RankMath plugin seem to be 100% free! There is absolutely no premium version of the plugin that I could find anywhere.
The only downside to RankMath is that there is no way to disable their SEO analysis tool inside your post editor, whereas Yoast does have that option. I was actually going to switch to RankMath for my SEO plugin, but I found its SEO scoring annoying since it’s not exactly accurate. Since there was no way to disable this analysis, I decided to switch back to Yoast.
Other than that, RankMath is a great SEO plugin to use. But, with so many excellent features, the plugin is advanced, so I would only recommend it for professional bloggers. If you’re an amateur or beginner, you may want to stick with Yoast.
3. SEOPress
If you want to take your WordPress SEO options to another level, SEOPress is a great WordPress SEO plugin to use. SEOPress does have most of the features found on Yoast, but it also has some pretty cool features, such as integrating your site to Google Analytics as well as giving you an ad-free experience.
The downside to SEOPress is its premium plugin, SEOPress Pro. It costs you $39 every year to keep the premium plugin on your blog. SEOPress Pro allows you to add robots.txt, see your Google Analytics stats on your blog, check for and redirect broken links, monitor your website speed, and other cool features.
Overall, SEOPress can be a little overwhelming when you start using it, but I would recommend SEOPress if you would like to run a professionally optimized website or blog.
4. All in One SEO Pack
This is probably the best SEO WordPress plugin for beginners. All in One SEO has been around since 2007, having been downloaded millions of times. However, it does not seem to be as popular because of its lack of useful features. As a beginner, though, you might find this SEO plugin’s ease of use handy and convenient for your needs.
Like many WordPress SEO plugins, All in One SEO can perform basic SEO tasks, such as find SEO errors on your website and automatically create SEO titles and descriptions for your content.
However, most of its features can only be found in its premium version, All in One SEO Pack Pro. By upgrading to the pro version, the plugin can generate sitemaps, robots.txt, integrate your site with Google Analytics, and allow you to optimize your content for social media platforms like Facebook. You also get support and resources to help you take your SEO to the next level.
But, if you’re looking for a simple solution to your SEO problems, All in One SEO can serve as a good plugin to suit your needs.
GET STARTED WITH ALL IN ONE SEO
Conclusion
WordPress SEO Tips
Well, that’s it for the list. Hopefully, at this point, you have an idea of which SEO plugin you are going to install for your WordPress blog. Once you install your plugin, here are some things you can do to help improve your blog’s SEO.
- Use Google Search Console to help you see how many people saw your site on search (impressions) and how many people clicked to your site from search (clicks). Then take the tracking code from Search Console and put it into your blog using your SEO plugin in order to verify that you are the owner of your blog.
- Make sure you have a good SEO title and description for each of your blog’s articles. Choose a title that will make search traffic want to click on your content.
- Create content based on keywords that people are searching for. Make sure your keywords are not too competitive as it will be much more difficult for you to rank. You can learn more about how to find good keywords here.
- Share your blog with others on social media networks like Facebook and Pinterest and other places like forums and Q&A sites. By getting more traffic to your blog and encouraging people to like and share it, search engines will love it and decide to rank your blog higher.
- Don’t ignore your blog. Even after months or even a year down the road, always make sure you’re doing something to keep your blog fresh and active as much as you can.
Final Words
Again, I hope this gave you ideas as to what plugins and tips you can use to help improve your WordPress blog’s SEO. Always remember that it takes a while to make SEO work for you instead of against you, so don’t give up and instead keep going, even if you don’t see any noticeable results.
If you’d like a recap on how to apply good SEO to your blog, check out my complete guide to SEO for beginners.
Now take action and make your blog better! The more you work on improving your blog, the higher your chances of your content ranking on Google. All the best to you on your blogging and your SEO success!