Elevate Your Online Presence With The Best WordPress SEO Plugins

We are going to be taking a look at what WordPress SEO plugins are, why they are useful and which are some of the best WordPress SEO plugins on the market to enhance your SEO performance.

If you work in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), it’s likely that you will have come across a WordPress CMS (Content Management System) whilst making changes to the backend of a website.

More importantly, you’ve probably had a look around the official WordPress plugin directory to see what’s on there, and if there’s anything you can install to help improve your SEO performance.

At Embryo, our SEO team is always looking for ways to utilise the best WordPress SEO plugins to enhance the functionality and performance of our client’s websites. If your website is built on a WordPress CMS and you’d like to learn more about the SEO plugin features, feel free to get in touch by phone at 0161 327 2635 or email [email protected].

What Are WordPress SEO Plugins?

A WordPress SEO plugin is a software extension that can be installed and added to the WordPress CMS to provide extra functionality and features. 

SEO plugins can be either free or paid for depending on which plugin you are looking to install. Predominantly, the paid SEO plugins tend to provide extra features, however, there are still plenty of high-quality free plugins you can utilise to improve performance.

WordPress SEO plugins are created by third-party developers and can be downloaded in multiple ways. The most common and easiest method of adding one is by installing it from the WordPress plugin directory. Alternatively, you can manually add them from other sources which are usually done when the user is interested in a premium SEO plugin.

You can easily activate and manage your plugins from the dashboard in WordPress. However, it’s important to review which plugins you have installed as using too many can cause performance issues, such as slowing your website down and causing conflicting errors between plugins.

Why Are They Useful?

If you work in SEO or are just starting out a career in digital marketing, you’ll know that SEO plugins can make your job a lot easier.

Some of the best WordPress SEO plugins provide many benefits for helping you make various edits to either the front or back end of your website, and ultimately carry out your SEO strategy.

They are great for providing basic SEO optimisation improvements for your page, such as making changes to your page titles, URL, meta descriptions, headers, images or overall readability of your content. SEO plugins will provide you with easy-to-follow guidance to improve your chances of ranking highly on the search engine results page, and ultimately bring more traffic to your website.

They can also be used to carry out more technical SEO tasks, such as making changes to your website’s sitemap, and robots.txt file, adding redirects, compressing images or implementing relevant schema markup to your pages. 

However, when you install new WordPress SEO plugins, it’s important to configure them so they are customised to suit your specific needs.

The Best WordPress SEO Plugins

We’ve taken a look into what WordPress SEO plugins are and why they are useful, now it’s time to have a look at some of the best WordPress SEO plugins you can use to take your SEO performance to the next level.

Rank Math

Rank Math is an SEO plugin favourite at Embryo – it comes with four pricing plan options, all offering added features depending on the price plan you choose. 

Price plans range from a ‘free’ version, then a ‘pro’ plan which is ideal for bloggers looking to kick start their own website. This is followed by a ‘business’ plan which is useful for agencies or freelancers that have multiple clients. The most expensive option is their ‘agency’ plan. This offers similar features to the popular ‘business plan’ but gives you a higher volume of options, such as supporting more client websites, tracking a higher number of keywords and accessing more content AI credits.

Overall, Rank Math is a fantastic all-in-one WordPress SEO plugin that’s ideal for helping to carry out on-page SEO optimisations and all other things SEO related. Whether you are experienced in SEO or trying to learn the basics, this SEO plugin is definitely one to consider.

Popular Rank Math Features

• Easy-to-navigate user interface
• On-page optimisation recommendations based on content AI
• Ability to change meta tags on pages of your site
• Integrates with Google Search Console
• Ability to add redirections, schema markup and more
• Make changes to XML sitemaps and robots.txt files
• Track and monitor keyword performance and rankings
• SEO analysis tool options to track performance
• Auto-configuration and setup

Smush

If you work in SEO you’ll understand the importance of image optimisation for site speed performance. Smush is one of the most popular image optimisation plugins on the market. It comes in either a free version or a paid version called ‘Smush Pro’.

If you are a WordPress user looking for a quick and efficient way to optimise your images, then simply install Smush. Once installed allow it to make image optimisation improvements to your existing media library and new images that you upload to your site.

Smush can bulk compress, resize, remove metadata and convert image file types with ease making it a great SEO plugin for anyone that doesn’t want to manually optimise their images.

Popular Smush Features

• Activate lazy-loading 
• Bulk optimise your images
• Uses lossless image compression
• Automatically resizes images
• Optimise existing images in the media library
• Image file type conversion
• Compatible with multiple image file types

Redirection

Redirects are an important part of SEO which allow users to pass on any page strength from one URL to another if a page has been moved or deleted. It is important to keep your redirects in check to avoid users landing on non-existent pages that cause poor user experience.

Thankfully there are SEO plugins out there that allow users to manage and implement redirects. If you use Rank Math or Yoast it’s likely you’ll already have this covered, but if you don’t, then a plugin tool called ‘Redirection’ is a great one to help you get started.

Redirection is completely free and provides lots of ways to effectively monitor your redirects.

Popular Redirection Features 

• Setup redirects based on certain conditions
• 404 error tracking
• Automatic redirect creations from permalink changes
• Exportable redirect logging information 
• Apache and Nginx support
• Simple installation & easy to use of the plugin

Yoast

Yoast is another brilliant WordPress SEO plugin that’s ideal for both beginners and experienced SEOs. Yoast shares many similarities with Rank Math, meaning a lot of people in the industry are tied over which SEO plugin they prefer, as both provide a very useful all-in-one SEO experience.

Yoast is great for helping users to optimise their content for SEO. The SEO plugin allows you to enter a target keyphrase that you’d like to rank for, and then their content ranking score will provide you with information on how optimised your content is for the focused keyword.

Not only that, Yoast provides useful advice on improving the readability of your content so it’s suitable for your audience and not just search engines. 

As well as this, the plugin can provide technical support to help with those tricky SEO tasks that require more technical knowledge.

Popular Yoast Features

• Keyword density analysis
• Schema markup integration
• Content readability support
• Redirect manager support
• Meta title and meta description implementation
• Google SERP previews
• Breadcrumb navigation setup

All In One SEO

All In One SEO is a very popular WordPress SEO plugin that is great for users with little SEO experience. This plugin is great at providing useful information about on-page SEO improvements, as well as highlighting important errors that need fixing through their site auditing feature. 

There is a free version of All In One SEO that provides some great insight that’s perfect for small bloggers and small site owners. If you’d like to access their extra features, then All In One SEO has four pricing plan options that are all great for helping you to carry out your SEO changes.

Popular All-In-One SEO Features

• On-page analysis support
• Schema markup support
• XML sitemap generation
• Social media integration
• Internal link suggestions

Interested in Learning More?

Hopefully after reading this, you’ll feel a lot more comfortable with understanding what WordPress SEO plugins are, why they are useful and what are some of the best WordPress SEO plugins around.

If you feel like you still require a little bit of help and guidance with your plugins, then the team at Embryo would be more than happy to support you. Feel free to get in touch by phone on 0161 327 2635 or email [email protected].