Best SEO Plugins for WordPress

Looking to get your WordPress SEO off on the right foot, but feel overwhelmed by the number of SEO plugins available? Keep reading.

1. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is one of the most popular WordPress SEO plugins, with more than five million active installations to date.

It’s also the “main” SEO plugin we use on the Ahrefs Blog.

What can you do with it? Lots of things.

• XML Sitemap support
• Easy Google Analytics integration
• Support for custom post types
• Canonical URL support
• Local SEO
• Video SEO
• Internal link recommendations

But that’s all sitewide stuff. What about at the page-level?

Yoast adds a meta SEO box to all posts and pages. Here, you can set custom title tags, meta descriptions, Open Graph Tags, canonicals, and meta robots tags.

2. All in One SEO Pack

After Yoast, All in One SEO is the second most popular WordPress SEO plugin. Its official “active installs” number is actually higher than Yoast’s, though it’s not nearly as talked about.

I’m still running All in One SEO on one of my older sites and I greatly appreciate it’s slim, bloat-free interface.

There’s a lot to like about All in One SEO. It has:

• XML Sitemap support
• Easy Google Analytics integration
• Support for custom post types
• Canonical URL support
• Free WooCommerce integration (most plugins make this a premium feature)
• Automatic or manual meta information

Another thing I like is that it doesn’t enable every feature by default. You can go in and turn on or off modules so that you only use resources on the features you care about.

If you go pro, you’ll get:

• Advanced support
• SEO options for taxonomies (shame this isn’t in the free version)
• A video SEO module

In terms of interface, I much prefer All in One SEO. To be honest, I’m trying to remember why I changed from All in One SEO in the first place. I think it was that peer pressure!

Despite its slimmer interface, All in One SEO is still pretty dang beginner friendly. So this is another SEO plugin that should be fine for both beginners and power users. If you’re not a fan of Yoast’s aggressive recommendations, give it a try for sure.

3. Rank Math

Rank Math is perhaps the most powerful WordPress SEO plugin on the market.

It pulls off the rare feat of being feature-packed and user-friendly. There’s even a setup wizard that guides you through the installation process, and it has the nicest UI of the bunch.

So what does it have that Yoast and the other competitors don’t have?

• Article Rich Snippets
• Course Rich Snippets
• Event Rich Snippets
• Job Posting Rich Snippets
• Local Business Rich Snippets
• Product Rich Snippets
• Review Rich Snippets
• Service Rich Snippets
• Software/App Rich Snippets

It also has a 404 error monitor, which looks for visitors hitting 404 (dead) pages and then lets you know the URLs and number of times they’ve been hit.

4. The SEO Framework

The SEO Framework is yet another strong alternative to Yoast and the All in One SEO Pack.

Functionality-wise, it doesn’t have much that the others don’t have, although it is more lightweight.

5. Easy Table of Contents

Google recommends breaking long pieces of content into logical sections with associated on-page anchors.

Ensure that long, multi-topic pages on your site are well-structured and broken into distinct logical sections. Second, ensure that each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name (i.e., not just “Section 2.1”), and that your page includes a “table of contents” which links to the individual anchors.

That’s what this plugin does—it adds a table of contents to your posts and pages to make them easier to navigate.

Here’s what it looks like in action:

Because a table of contents makes long pages less daunting, it can have a positive knock-on effect on SEO and improve things like time on page, bounce rate, and dwell time.

It can also help you win jump links in the SERP, which may increase your CTR.

6. Broken link checker

The Broken Link Checker looks for broken links on your website—both internal and external.

If it finds any, it tells you the HTTP status code (e.g., 404, 410), anchor text and source of the link. That makes it easy to find and fix.

Because the plugin runs in the background all the time, it can continuously check for broken links and alert you by email should any pop-up.

But perhaps the best feature is that you can fix links in a couple of clicks, and in bulk.

7. Shortpixel

Shortpixel compresses and optimizes the images on your website.

Because images are usually the slowest files to load when someone visits your site, image optimization can have a noticeably positive effect on page speed—which is a ranking factor as of 2010.

It’s super easy to use. Just install, choose your settings, and then it will automatically optimize and serve any images you upload in the future.

Compression options available are lossy, glossy, and lossless, and it supports Retina 2x images.

It works with JPG, PNG, GIF, PDF documents. There’s an option to convert to WebP, although that seems a bit hit and miss currently.

For existing images, there’s a bulk image optimizer. Run that, and it’ll optimize all images already on your site in line with your settings.

Shortpixel gives you 100 free credits per month.

EWWW Image Optimizer is your best bet if you’re looking for a completely free alternative.

8. a3 Lazy Load

A3 Lazy Load is a simple plugin for enabling lazy-loading of images.

Enable this, and images outside the viewport (visible area on the screen) won’t get loaded until they become visible upon scrolling. This improves page speed, which, to reiterate, is a ranking factor.

For the most part, it works out of the box. Just install and activate.

If you want to exclude certain pages from lazy-loading images, that’s possible in the settings.

You can also exclude certain types of images from lazy-loading.

For example, images in Gravatars.

I know this wasn’t a huge list with double-digit plugins…but honestly, you only need one SEO plugin. And I think these are your best options