Best SEO Plugins for WordPress in 2020
By Jonathan Calderon
Published March 17, 2020
With millions of blogs and businesses competing for attention every day, it’s important to have a plan for bringing traffic to your WordPress site. And since search engines dominate the online marketplace (far outstripping social media marketing), SEO needs to be part of the equation.
What is SEO?
SEO, or search engine optimization, is the practice of gaining more qualified traffic to your website by increasing your visibility on search engines. You do this by optimizing your user experience, strategically incorporating keywords into your content, building links, creating strong meta descriptions, and making your site otherwise attractive to search engine algorithms.
WordPress and SEO
WordPress is an awesome platform for building search engine optimized sites, because its code, URLs and themes are designed to be easy for bots to crawl and algorithms to read.
In addition, WordPress also offers a wide variety of SEO plugins you can use to optimize your content. These plugins not only make it easier for you to adhere to SEO best practices, but they also increase the likelihood that your content will rank on major search engines.
However, to be successful with SEO, you need to find the best option for your business. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of 8 SEO plugins you can choose from to take your SEO strategy to the next level.
Best SEO Plugins to Use With WordPress
- WordPress SEO by Yoast
- HubSpot
- Premium SEO Pack
- WP Meta SEO
- All in One SEO Pack
- Redirection
- SEO by Squirrly
- All In One Schema Rich Snippets
1. WordPress SEO by Yoast
A heavy hitter on this list, WordPress SEO by Yoast is a popular SEO plugin for mom and pop businesses and famous brands alike.
Designed to help you optimize your content for Google, Pinterest and Bing, WordPress SEO by Yoast offers a wide variety of tools to create, manage and publish it. For instance, you can create templates for meta descriptions and titles to keep every piece of content on your WordPress site consistent.
You can also tap into its content optimization features to make sure everything you write is up to par. You can use its SEO analysis tool to double-check your content for keywords and leverage its readability tool to make sure all content is easy for visitors and search engines to read. You can also view your content using its preview options to see exactly how the content will look on social media and in search results before you publish it.
Best of all, many of the features in WordPress SEO by Yoast are free, so you can take advantage of a lot of its functionality without paying a dime.
2. HubSpot
HubSpot’s WordPress plugin is overall great for marketing, but one area the HubSpot product shines is its SEO capabilities. With HubSpot you not only can create marketing campaigns that are search engine optimized, you can also build a content strategy that will drive traffic to your WordPress site. You can access topic suggestions based on search engine data, and create pages and content clusters to target those topics.
HubSpot has some pretty unique features when it comes to creating optimized content, though. When working on your site, HubSpot can give you on-page advice to improve your rankings. It can also provide you with tasks and to-dos, so you don’t miss out on opportunities to optimize.
With HubSpot, you can even monitor and track your organic traffic to see what’s working and what parts of your SEO strategy need some work. That way, you know exactly how to improve your content strategy and can start working on it.
3. Premium SEO Pack
Premium SEO Pack is a solid option for businesses that are looking for an SEO plugin without all the bells and whistles. With this plugin, you can create patterns for your page elements and customize pages based on where it will be searched and found. This includes everything from social media to standard search engines.
One really cool feature Premium SEO Pack has is the ability to pull search engine rankings for keywords and site pages. This enables you to clearly see what your competition looks like, so you can make decisions for your own WordPress site. Premium SEO Pack will also give you an SEO score while you’re writing content, so you know how you stack up against your competitors before you click the publish button.
While Premium SEO Pack doesn’t come with any premium support for users, all of its features and functionality are free.
4. WP Meta SEO
Another solid option on this list, WP Meta SEO is great for businesses that need a fast, easy way to manage their SEO.
With WP Meta, you can create meta titles and meta descriptions at lightning speed. Simply open the bulk editor, enter your meta description and move your cursor to a new field. The metadata is automatically saved to your pages and immediately available online, so you don’t have to waste time reentering, repeatedly saving and checking back to make sure everything was published correctly.
Once everything is online, WP Meta SEO also gives you the ability to view the SEO of your pages and identify potential problems from a single dashboard, including your image sizing, URLS, link titles, XML sitemap, and duplicate meta descriptions or titles. This makes it possible to identify areas of improvement and update your WordPress site, without spending hours doing so.
And you can direct WP Meta SEO to index broken links, so you can maintain a good reputation with your customers and avoid embarrassing situations.
5. All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack was supporting WordPress businesses before it was cool. Not only is it one of the most downloaded WordPress plugins of all time, but it’s also got the functionality to back it up.
Once you create content around a set of keywords, All in One SEO Pack can create titles and meta descriptions automatically. It can also optimize the crawling of your site, by submitting your XML sitemap and video sitemaps to major search engines and updating those search engines whenever you make changes.
However, All in One SEO Pack is not exclusive to beginners. In fact, many of its features can be modified or customized, making it a great choice for advanced users. You can create your meta tags and descriptions, modify thumbnails to work seamlessly on social media and build custom features on the existing API.
Best of all, All in One SEO Pack is designed to support WordPress e-commerce businesses of all sizes and shapes.
6. Redirection
No one likes to click a link and get a page error, but making sure there are no broken or redirect links on your WordPress site can be quite an ordeal. Using a plugin like Redirection can decrease the number of backlink issues and make it a lot easier to correct them.
You can set up Redirection to automatically route 301 redirects and 404 errors to the proper URLs, keeping site visitors and search engine bots happy. And Redirection doesn’t have a cap, which means it will continue to work as your business grows.
7. SEO by Squirrly
SEO by Squirrly is a great plugin to use if you need a little help getting your pages to rank at the top of Google’s search engine. Instead of giving you a list of generic things you can do to help your pages rank, Squirrly customizes the approach page-by-page, enabling you to focus your attention on the most important aspects of each page.
All you have to do is tell Squirrly which pages you want to focus on, and Squirrly will map out a unique plan for each page to increase its ranking. This can include anything like improving interlinks, fixing image SEO, incorporating keywords, and optimizing semantic context. Once your page is fully optimized, your roadmap tasks will turn from red to green–indicating that everything is good to go.
SEO by Squirrly isn’t only useful in specific industries or to certain company sizes, though. In fact, businesses of all shapes and sizes have found benefits from using it for their WordPress sites. And Squirrly can be integrated with other SEO plugins on your WordPress site, allowing you to capitalize on all powerful tools out there to increase your traffic.
8. All in One Schema Rich Snippets
When your blogs or WordPress site pages pop up in a search engine results page (SERP), you only have a few seconds to convince people to click on your link and visit your site. That means you need to stand out. All in One Schema Rich Snippets helps you do that, by enhancing your snippet with valuable, stand-out information.
Depending on the page, All in One Schema Rich Snippets can pull reviews, images, ratings, prices, thumbnails and other relevant information to encourage qualified visitors to pick your WordPress site over a competitors’ site.
Conclusion
To pull traffic into your WordPress site, you need to be visible on search engines and attractive to visitors. The best way to accomplish both is with SEO.
By finding an SEO plugin (or a set of plugins) that suits your needs, you’ll be able to optimize your site content and move closer to your business goals.
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