Five best SEO plugins for WordPress websites
You might be an SEO expert, but an SEO Plugin for WordPress websites is an incredibly useful search tool to make sure that you’re optimising your web content correctly – and to tell you if you’re not! It helps you take your SEO from basic to advanced to boost your search engine rankings and increase traffic to your website.
What is an SEO Plugin?
An SEO plugin is a tool that you can download and install to a CMS (content management system) like WordPress, or to a browser or software solution. It helps your website rank higher by identifying SEO-related errors and aiding SEO maximisation.
Although WordPress already has the basic tools to create and customise aspects of SEO, like meta descriptions and alt text, an SEO Plugin such as Yoast SEO or Rank Math is useful for adding other attractive features to your website.
You can run more than one SEO Plugin on your website as long as they all have a distinct and relevant purpose. This purpose could range from:
- Installing third-party services for analytics, tracking, marketing,
- Chat functions
- Implementing security scans, vulnerability reports and safety recommendations to your website to protect your customers’ data.
Like with SEO courses, there are a range of paid and free plugin options to choose from, but it’s important to know the features of each tool to decide what works best for your website.
Yoast SEO
(Source: Yoast)
Yoast SEO is the most well-known WordPress Plugin to help you manage how your website ranks on the SERP (search engine results page). It boosts your website’s SEO through relevance, readability, and accessibility.
With a wide array of useful features, Yoast SEO can be used to influence your whole website, or simply to optimise individual web pages. Using content SEO analysis, this plugin determines how your content scores on different ranking factors, such as keyphrase length and use of internal links.
Yoast uses a traffic light system to indicate how your web page is scoring for each factor, so that you can focus on improving each element of your content including keyword distribution, image descriptions and meta links, to achieve the most advantageous SEO for up to 19 languages.
Semrush
(Source: Semrush)
Semrush is one of the leading plugin tools because of the way it scores your content based on readability, tone of voice, originality, and SEO. It’s useful for finding organic keywords and search terms to improve your SERP rankings.
This plugin also includes an SEO Writing Assistant tool to make your web content seem more natural and appealing to your desired audience. You also have the option to make use of SEO templates and get advanced SEO recommendations.
With the integration of All in One (AIOSEO), Semrush also helps you to find additional keyphrases to enhance your focus keyphrase. It does this by showing you the search volume of related keyphrases right from WordPress so that you can integrate the keywords into your content seamlessly.
WPBeginner Keyword Generator
(Source: WPBeginner Keyword Generator)
If you’re after something more simple and beginner-friendly – and the clue really is in the name here – WPBeginner Generator analyses the best keyword combinations to implement the best SEO practice into your website.
This plugin lets you generate more than 300 keyword ideas through a simple search engine format. These keywords are then organised alphabetically into three sections and are downloadable, in case you need to refer to them for future market or SEO research.
The WPBeginner Keyword Generator also includes an SEO topical entity graph that boosts your SEO by finding the relevance of specific keywords and offers other useful tools like Headline Analyzer, Website SEO Analyzer, and Keyword Density Checker.
Google Search Console
As the world’s leading search engine, Google has the largest impact on your SERP rankings as its search engine crawlers identify how relevant your webpage is against other online competitors. Luckily, as well as setting the standards to strive for, Google also gives you the tools to achieve maximum SEO with Google Search Console.
Not only does this plug-in let you know when Google is unable to crawl and index pages from your website, but it also offers helpful tips on fixing errors such as a lack of internal links or instances of keyword cannibalisation.
One of the most important features of Google Search Console is presenting the data for which keywords your website is ranking, including anchor texts, average position, and more. This allows you to identify keywords and alter them in order to optimise your content. It’s also a nifty way of developing new web page ideas to create more high-quality content.
Rank Math
As the self-professed “Swiss Army Knife of WordPress SEO”, Rank Math prides itself on making it easy for anyone to optimise their content with built-in suggestions based on widely accepted best practices. It enables you to tailor important SEO settings to your website to obtain the best SEO results and integrates with other popular platforms such as Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Bing.
Rank Math also comes with a setup wizard which means that you can import data from other SEO plugins during the setup process with easy one-click imports. This allows you to take advantage of the most beneficial features for your website’s content.
As a convenient plugin, Rank Math can be used to add meta titles, descriptions and Open Graph metadata. It also makes use of Rich snippets such as star ratings below a review, prices below products and services, and images or videos next to the description on Google. All of this contributes to SEO and entices more customers to click on your website.
With this tool, you can also generate an XML (extensible markup language) sitemap to implement structured data management and connect to other plugs such as Google Search Console.
Plug in with Embryo
The right selection of plug-ins can help enhance your website’s capabilities and performance.
At Embryo, our team have a fantastic knowledge of which plug-ins work best. For more on this contact us today.
