SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s a strategy that helps you rank higher in search results, so when people search for what you offer, they find your site.
It’s important to have a good SEO strategy because it can help increase your traffic and conversions—and if you don’t have a good SEO strategy, or know how to use it well, then you might find yourself being buried by competitors who do know what they’re doing.
But how do you get started? What tools can help? We’ve put together a list of some of the best free SEO tools for WordPress Quicken. These tools will help you optimize your content and make sure everything is set up correctly so that Google knows about your site—and wants to show it off!
Free Seo Tools For WordPress Quicken
Often we’re asked about what are the best WordPress SEO plugins and tools that we recommend.
That’s because search engines are a major source of traffic for most websites on the internet. Optimizing your website for search engines can help you rank higher in search results and significantly grow your business.
In this article, we will share the best WordPress SEO plugins and tools that you should use. Some of these tools offer similar functionalities, so we will also highlight which ones are the best for specific use-cases.
Best WordPress SEO plugins and tools
Things You Must Know About WordPress SEO Plugins & Tools
When reading SEO tips or searching for “best free WordPress SEO plugins”, you will come across articles that feature several dozen tools.
This can be quite overwhelming for beginners and non-techy users.
The truth is that you don’t need dozens of top SEO tools to get higher search rankings.
While most blog posts (including ours) will share the top most popular SEO plugins, it is extremely important for you to understand the use-cases of each tool.
For example, you never want to use more than one WordPress SEO plugin on your website. We will mention All in One SEO, Yoast SEO, SEOPress, and Rank Math. You need to pick only one to avoid plugin conflict.
We’ll mention SEMRush, Ahrefs, and few other powerful tools, but you don’t need them all when you’re first starting out since they have a similar feature set. We will share what tools we use in our business, and which features are the best among each tool.
With that said, let’s take a look at our expert pick of the best WordPress SEO plugins and tools.
- All in One SEO for WordPress (AIOSEO)
All in One SEO for WordPress (AIOSEO)
All in One SEO for WordPress (AIOSEO) is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market. Used by over 3+ million users, it is the most comprehensive SEO toolkit that helps you improve search rankings without learning any complicated SEO jargon.
It comes with the easiest setup wizard that automatically helps you choose the best SEO settings for your business. AIOSEO shows you TruSEO on-page analysis with an actionable checklist to optimize your posts and pages.
The on-page SEO checklist includes a smart meta tag generator where you can use dynamic values (current year, month, day, custom fields, author info, and much more) in your SEO title and descriptions. This means you don’t need to update a post just to change SEO titles.
All in One SEO (AIOSEO) dynamic meta title and description
AIOSEO also comes with Rich snippet schema markup, smart XML sitemaps (with advanced controls), SEO health check, and other useful features to grow your search engine visibility.
There is a built-in social media integration to add Open Graph metadata as well. This means you can choose which image or thumbnail you want to show when your pages are shared on social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc.
All in One SEO for WordPress (AIOSEO) social media profiles
AIOSEO also comes with built-in WooCommerce SEO tools for eCommerce sites. This include features like dynamic optimizations, individual product page optimizations, product image SEO, and other handy features to bring more organic traffic to your online store.
For more SEO savvy users, it includes full control of RSS feeds, Robots.txt editor, local SEO, Google News sitemaps, video SEO, advanced redirect manager, 404 tracking, IndexNow integration, and more.
For business owners, it comes with SEO user roles, so you can manage access to important SEO features without handing over control of your website.
Update: Recently AIOSEO added a Link Assistant which is a game-changer for internal linking. It helps identify link opportunities and help you bulk-add internal links with just a few clicks.
Overall, All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is the most beginner-friendly and comprehensive WordPress SEO plugin on the market. It eliminates the need to install multiple plugins to do things on your website and works perfectly for all types of businesses, eCommerce, blogs, news, and other websites.
- SEMRush
SEMRush
SEMRush is the best overall SEO tool on the market. Used by professional SEO experts, marketers, bloggers, and businesses of all sizes, it provides a comprehensive set of tools to grow your traffic.
You can use it to find organic keywords and search terms that you can easily rank for. It also allows you to do competitive research and see which keywords your competitors rank for, and how you can beat them.
SEMRush SEO Writing Assistant tool helps you improve your website content to beat the top 10 results for your focus keyword. It integrates with WordPress, and this will help you write more SEO friendly content.
To learn more, see our complete guide on how to do keyword research for your website.
We use SEMRush for our websites because of their competitive intelligence and SEO rank tracker features.
- Google Search Console
Google Search Console
Google Search Console is a free tool offered by Google to help website owners monitor and maintain their site’s presence in Google search results.
It alerts you when Google is unable to crawl and index pages on your website. You also get helpful tips on how to fix those crawl errors.
Most importantly, it shows which keywords your website is ranking for, anchor texts, average position, impressions, and more. You can use this data to find keywords where you can easily rank higher by simply optimizing your content. You can also use this keyword data to come up with new blog post ideas.
For more details, see our comprehensive Google Search Console guide for beginners.
Tip: You can use MonsterInsights to track your keyword rankings inside WordPress admin area using Google Seach Console data.
MonsterInsights, another tool we’ll mention later, helps you bring the Search Console reports right inside your WordPress dashboard for easy access.
- Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is a popular WordPress SEO plugin that allows you to optimize your WordPress website for search engines.
It lets you easily add SEO titles and descriptions to all posts and pages on your website. You can also use it to add Open Graph metadata and social media images to your articles.
Yoast SEO automatically generates an XML sitemap for all your website content which makes it easier for search engines to crawl your website. It also helps you easily import your SEO data if you have been using another SEO plugin.
For more details, see our complete guide on how to install and setup Yoast SEO plugin in WordPress.
- Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner
Google Keyword Planner tool helps you generate your own keyword ideas from Google itself.
No one on the planet has more insights into what people are searching for than the search giant Google. This free tool is offered to Google’s advertisers for free and anyone can use it. Its main purpose is to show advertisers the keywords they can bid on for their advertising campaigns.
It also helps advertisers choose the right keywords by showing them an estimate of search volume, number of results, and difficulty level.
As a content marketer or blogger, you can use this data to find keywords with high search volume, high advertiser interest, and more importantly keywords where you can easily outrank all other sites.
Bonus: See these 103 Blog Post Ideas that your Readers will Love (Cheat Sheet).
- Ahrefs
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO tool for marketers, bloggers, and businesses. It is a popular alternative to SEMRush and offers a lot of similar tools and features.
It allows you to do keyword research, competition analysis, backlink research, monitor keyword rankings, and more.
It also offers a detailed content analysis tool that helps you improve content while targeting specific keywords.
While there’s a huge feature overlap, what Ahrefs does really well is backlink analysis. We can use it to see which sites are linking to multiple competitors, but not us. This helps us get more backlinks and build more partnerships.
They also help us identify which content multiple of our competitors are ranking for that we aren’t, so we can create content on those subjects to get more exposure.
Last but not least, Ahrefs helps us better identify duplicate content and keyword cannibalization which helps us merge and upgrade the right content to boost our rankings.
For the reasons above, we pay for both SEMRush and Ahrefs because they’re both good for specific use-cases.
- SEOPress
SEOPress
SEOPress is another simple yet powerful WordPress SEO plugin. It includes all the features you would expect from an SEO plugin like meta title, description, open graph support, image and content XML sitemaps, redirects, and more.
It comes with a straightforward setup for beginners and advanced controls for more experienced users. It is comparable to other top WordPress SEO plugins on the market in terms of features and options.
The paid version of the plugin is cheaper than some other premium WordPress SEO plugins on the market.
Note: SEOPress is a WordPress SEO plugin. Remember, you only need one WordPress SEO plugin on your site.
- Rank Math
Rank Math
Rank Math is a fast-growing user-friendly WordPress SEO plugin that allows you to optimize your website for search engines and social media. It comes with a setup wizard and allows you to import data from other SEO plugins during the setup.
You can use it to easily add meta title, description, and Open Graph metadata to your blog posts. The plugin also allows you to generate an XML sitemap, connect Google Search Console, and control access to plugin features based on user roles.
Note: Rank Math is an AIOSEO alternative. Remember, you only need one WordPress SEO plugin on your site.
- Schema Pro
Schema Pro
Schema Pro allows you to add rich snippets to your website which makes it stand out in search results.
Rich Snippets allow you to make your website stand out in search results by showing star ratings below a review, prices below a product, image or video next to the description, and so on.
Top WordPress SEO plugins, like All in One SEO (AIOSEO) already add structured rich snippets data to your website. However, if you need more schema types or want to extend the functionality of your existing WordPress SEO plugin then Schema Pro is the way to go.
Schema Pro also allows you to use it alongside your existing WordPress SEO plugin by mapping the plugin data to Schema Pro fields.
- KeywordTool.io
Keyword Tool
KeywordTool.io is one of the best free keyword research tools available right now. It allows you to simply generate keyword ideas by typing in a keyword. These keyword suggestions are gathered from Google’s autosuggest feature. It also shows you keyword suggestions from Bing, YouTube, Amazon, and more.
These keyword suggestions are a treasure of information. You can also get search volume, cost per click, and other data for each keyword by upgrading to their paid plan.
- Redirection
Redirection
Redirection helps you set up SEO friendly redirects in WordPress. It is one of the most handy WordPress plugins that helps you easily fix 404 errors in WordPress by setting up redirects.
Broken links can affect your site’s SEO and create a bad experience for your users. If you have been running a blog for some time, then you should check your site from time to time for broken links and fix them.
There are multiple ways to easily find broken links in WordPress. Once you find a broken link, you may need to fix it by pointing users to the correct link or removing the incorrect link.
For more details, see our step by step guide on how to find and fix broken links in WordPress.
- SEOquake
SEOquake
SEOQuake is a useful SEO tool for website owners. It is available as a browser add-on for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Safari web browsers.
It provides SEO related information for any website. This data includes page health, age, last updated, Alexa rank, and many other parameters. It is one of the most downloaded browser addons by SEO professionals.
Apart from that, the SEOquake toolbar can show you all the same data search results when you type in a keyword. This information can be extremely useful if you are gauging competition for different keywords. You can even download search results in CSV format and prepare your own excel sheets of search data.
Alternative: Ahrefs SEO Toolbar
Bonus Plugins for WordPress Website Owners
These tools give you the additional advantage when optimizing your website for SEO. They do not advertise themselves as SEO tools but they are essential for every website and play a significant role in your website’s search performance.
- WP Rocket
WP-Rocket
Site speed is a major factor in search rankings. That’s why you need to monitor your website speed & performance to make sure it’s not affecting your SEO.
The easiest way to boost your website speed is by enabling caching. WP Rocket is the best WordPress caching plugin on the market, which allows you to set up caching without diving into any technical stuff.
Alternative: WP Super Cache
- MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights
Many beginners rely on their best guess to make their marketing decisions. You don’t need to do that when you can easily get the insights you need to improve your website’s SEO strategy.
MonsterInsights is the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. It allows you to easily install Google Analytics in WordPress and shows human-readable reports inside your WordPress dashboard.
It tells you where your users are coming from, your top content, what users do on your website, and more. It also allows you to track your eCommerce SEO by seeing which products are popular and where you are losing customers.
Bonus tip: See what other marketing data you must track on your website to grow your business.
Other Powerful Growth Tools:
Aside from the above plugins, we also recommend the following tools to increase your traffic and conversions from SEO visitors:
PushEngage – connect and engage with SEO visitors after they leave your website with web push notifications.
OptinMonster – convert abandoning visitors into email subscribers & customers.
Constant Contact – stay in touch with SEO visitors through email marketing.
WPForms – get more leads from your SEO traffic with #1 WordPress form builder.
SeedProd – create SEO friendly custom landing pages with drag & drop WordPress page builder (no coding needed).
We hope this article helped you find the best WordPress SEO plugins and tools for your website. You may also want to see our proven tips to easily increase your website traffic, and our comparison of best chatbot software to boost conversions.
automatic seo plugin for wordpress
WordPress SEO plugins can boost SEO efforts, plus augment your site’s security, page loading speed, and overall performance. But how do you tell the difference between plugins that deliver on their claims and those you should avoid?
Choosing the right SEO plugin can make all the difference to your site’s optimization, while bad plugins can negatively impact a website’s search engine effectiveness and performance.
To avoid your site turning into an SEO disaster, you need to understand why you need SEO plugins in the first place. Then we’ll get into nine of the best SEO plugins we recommend for your website.
Contents
- Why do you need SEO plugins for your WordPress website?
- The 8 Best SEO Plugins for WordPress
- 1. Yoast SEO
- Page Optimization
- Configuration Of Google Search Console
- Automatic XML Sitemap
- Robots.txt
- 2. Redirection
- 3. Really Simple SSL
- 4. Easy Table of Contents
- 5. WP Super Cache
- 6. WP Internal Link Juicer
- 7. Rank Math
- 8. MonsterInsights
- 9. Weglot
- 1. Yoast SEO
- Be Aware of Harmful WordPress SEO Plugins
Why do you need SEO plugins for your WordPress website?
Hosting your WordPress site with a reliable hosting service is a surefire way to boost your site’s speed and SEO rankings. But that’s just the start.
Research shows that 75% of people who use Google Search never go beyond the first page of search results, making it imperative to optimize your site for the SERPs. This is key to getting relevant and organic traffic, and ultimately driving conversions.
Other elements that contribute to excellent performance in the search results include the keywords you use to drive relevant traffic, your understanding of search intent, the size of your image files, and your content’s readability.
This is where the right WordPress SEO plugin can help you. It can bring up backlink information, keyword rankings, and influential stats – tactics that can help improve your rankings. Furthermore, SEO plugins allow you to find pages and posts with high potential, reorganize your website’s structure, fix broken links, conduct a comprehensive SEO audit, and more.
Google processes up to 3.5 billion searches per day, so using proven-effective SEO plugins can effectively optimize your site, while helping you stay ahead of your competitors and increasing your brand’s online visibility.
With an SEO plugin helping to make your optimization tasks quicker, more efficient, and even automated, that frees up time to focus on improving communications and collaboration between your SEO, marketing, and sales teams.
From there, you can implement software with features that allow your team to stay on top of the latest SEO data, implement strategies quickly based on the results, and boost productivity. This will make all the difference when it comes to implementing a successful SEO strategy.
Now you know why you need SEO plugins, and how they can help you enhance SEO performance and implement effective strategies. Here are our top picks when it comes to WordPress SEO plugins for your new website.
The 8 Best SEO Plugins for WordPress
1. Yoast SEO
Yoast is a brilliant, comprehensive plugin that is quite beginner-friendly and provides various SEO features. Here are some of the great features this tool has to offer.
Page Optimization
You can easily manage meta descriptions, URLs, page titles and more by using Yoast on WordPress.
With the tool’s user interface, you can create a customized (and optimized) title for your web page, a unique meta description, and an SEO-friendly URL. When enabled, it will give you an SEO report card on your blog posts to help you improve optimization. You can also manage the discoverability of your post or page by switching the robot tags on or off.
Configuration Of Google Search Console
You can authenticate your website with Google Search Console and harness its powerful SEO data by simply copy-pasting some HTML code into the Yoast user interface.
When added through the plugin, your code will be safe from accidental overwrites. This saves you from having to add the code again after modifications to your site code, like theme and WordPress updates that aren’t carefully handled by web developers and SEO specialists.
Automatic XML Sitemap
Sitemaps provide search engines with a list of pages to crawl on your site, and are important for SEO. Yoast has an auto-generated dynamic XML sitemap that gets updated whenever you publish new content on your website.
With the user interface, you can choose to make your website sections more accessible to search engines through the XML sitemap.
Robots.txt
Robots.txt is a file that tells search engines which pages they can and can’t crawl. You can change your robots.txt via the Yoast SEO plugin. This is easy to manage via the tool’s user interface, instead of installing, modifying, and then uploading the robots.txt file each time you want to make a change.
Additionally, your robots.txt file is protected from accidental overwrites due to updates to your site theme, WordPress themes, or other plugins.
Want to learn more about Yoast? Check out our guide to Content Optimization Using Yoast SEO!
2. Redirection
You can download the Redirection plugin for free from the plugin repository of WordPress. It helps manage your redirects – forced direction from a retired URL to a new one, which prevents visitors from getting a 404 error message.
Instead of hard-coding 301 redirects into the HTACCESS document on your WordPress website, you can manage them through the plugin’s simple user interface right in your WordPress dashboard.
The Redirection plugin is easy to use, receives regular updates, and is secure. Apart from the 301 redirect functionality, the plugin also helps you report errors on other servers, such as broken links (404 errors) including information about how it was able to access the error.
3. Really Simple SSL
Google has recently made significant changes to how visitors access websites using their search engine. Websites with a secure connection (HTTPS) via an SSL certificate will dominate the rankings, while Google doesn’t have to show non-secure sites at all.
Even though you can purchase and configure an SSL certificate through hosting providers, you need to configure the whole domain-recognized setup of the SSL address in WordPress – this is no task for beginners.
Instead of learning to hard-code the HTACCESS file’s configuration, the Really Simple SSL SEO plugin streamlines the process by configuring it in the WordPress interface. You need to download the plugin, make your web domain’s HTTPS version the default address, and the plugin will take care of the rest.
This plugin will also ensure that the encryption behind SSL, and encryption protocols, are being continuously updated to protect them against cyberattacks that are carried out.
4. Easy Table of Contents
A table of contents is great for the user experience, which, in turn, is good for your SEO.
The Easy Table of Contents SEO plugin creates a handy table of contents that readers can use to jump to key content. It also has an automated feature that adds an HTML table into your web pages or web posts, which creates hyperlinks internally within the page.
Rather than hard-coding the links into the Editor, this plugin automatically generates those links specifically based on the content headings that appear on the page. You can configure the style of your table within the plugin’s dashboard settings.
5. WP Super Cache
Page speed is now a critical ranking factor. The WP Super Cache plugin helps you improve web page speed across your site. All you need to do is install the plugin and turn on the caching features. WP Super Cache plugin does the rest.
This plugin lets you test loading speed across multiple web pages on your website, leveraging tools like GTMetrix or Pingdom Tools.
6. WP Internal Link Juicer
The WP Internal Link Juicer plugin is designed to help you optimize your website’s internal link structure. This plugin can automatically link phrases and keywords in your comments and posts with corresponding pages, categories, tags, and posts on your blog.
All in all, it conveniently helps you create internal links while simultaneously avoiding fraudulent SEO practices that can potentially result in hefty penalties.
7. Rank Math
Rank Math is another excellent WordPress SEO plugin that helps you with website content optimization. It provides insights in real-time about your content without requiring you to leave the WordPress dashboard.
You can also optimize meta descriptions and titles with a snippet preview, which reduces the probability of SERP display errors on search engines like Google. The exciting thing about this plugin is that it has been optimized for better speed, so it doesn’t affect your website’s loading speed.
As an added bonus, Rank Math now has IndexNow integration. This means that the plugin quickly alerts search engines to any changes you make: new content, deleted content, redirects, and more. No more waiting weeks or even months for Google to crawl your content!
8. MonsterInsights
All your SEO efforts will be wasted if you don’t track your website’s performance and analytics, and that is precisely what MonsterInsights is good for. This WordPress SEO plugin delivers Google Analytics data to your dashboard in a user-friendly interface.
You can see exactly how people search for and engage with your website. Also, it has a content reporting feature that allows you to monitor the most visited pages by audiences on your site.
If Google Analytics has always felt too complex for you, MonsterInsights is a good alternative. It can help you streamline the way you gather and interpret your data without ever needing to log into your Google Analytics account.
9. Weglot
Wait, what does translation have to do with SEO? A whole lot! Whether you’re about to go global or you already have an international presence – your website copy impacts SEO for two key reasons:
- Grammar is a ranking factor for Google and other search engines
- Copy impacts the user experience, which in turn impacts SEO through on-page signals
Unless you employ multilingual team members who manually translate your content, you need a reliable translation plugin! One that reflects the way languages are actually spoken, to correctly convey your brand story and offering. We recommend Weglot to all of our clients, as it has the most accurate translations we’ve found so far (and we work with lots of organizations that need Canadian French versions of their pages!).
Be Aware of Harmful WordPress SEO Plugins
WordPress SEO plugins can help boost the visibility and ranking of your website when used correctly. Add them to your WordPress website, configure them to improve the accessibility of your content and URLs, and watch your website’s traffic and SEO rankings improve – often within three months.
With that said, there’s always a risk when you give plugins access to your website. You have many options to choose from, which unfortunately include potentially harmful plugins that might:
- Have easily exploited vulnerabilities
- Be outdated and unsupported
- Be incompatible with your existing plugins or site code (aka break your site!)
- Not have gone through enough testing
- Or in rare cases be a scam created to gain access to your site
That’s why you should always have your website’s developer look into any plugins you’re considering, before you install them.
In order to protect your site, software developer and online marketer Gary Stevens of Hosting Canada recommends choosing a WordPress plugin that will automatically back up your site as well as protect it with the right SSL protection.
“The bottom line is you should never trust the internet not to reach out and capriciously blast your website into cyber oblivion,” says Stevens. “You need a regular backup program, and it should be free. There are plenty of WordPress plugins that can do this automatically behind the scenes with no further action from you than to set it up in the first place.”
Whether you have an eCommerce site, a blog, or something else, one of the best ways to drive “free” targeted traffic to your site is by ensuring it dominates the result page for the right queries. The SEO plugins detailed above will certainly make the job easier. They have been tried and tested by countless webmasters and developers, and proven to achieve stellar results.
With the right plugins and SEO strategies to increase search traffic, there is no reason why your site shouldn’t soar to the top of Google Search – and even get featured at the top in Google Snippets!
Conclusion
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