Fahim Ahmed
Search engine optimization can be a bit overwhelming if you are just starting out. But if you are using an open-source CMS like WordPress, there are free SEO plugins that make your job a whole lot easier.
If you know how to use those SEO plugins, optimizing your content and getting traffic to your website will be a walk in the park.
If you are a blogger or a website owner you’re probably familiar with a lot of these plugins. Sometimes it can get a bit confusing as there are many of these SEO plugins.
Even though there is no absolute list of best WordPress SEO plugins and it can be subjective, we have managed to create a list of amazing free SEO plugins that have helped us skyrocket the traffic of our website.
These SEO plugins will give you insights on how to properly optimize your content and website.
There are other powerful features like SEO analysis, XML sitemaps, internal linking suggestions, and much more.
Even if you have an awesome website with amazing content, chances are you won’t be getting any website traffic unless you put some effort into SEO.
If you are looking to drive organic traffic to your website there is no alternative to SEO. And to help you ace your SEO strategy, you will need these SEO tools.
Here we have listed 12 free WordPress SEO plugins that have helped us optimize our content and get thousands of free organic traffic to our website.
What Does An SEO Plugin Do?
SEO plugins are used to make the content of your website more accessible for web browsers. Search engine optimization is very important for any online business as it can help gain more exposure and increase user interaction and conversion.
The purpose of using SEO plugins is to optimize a website’s content and certain elements, as well as give it a structure that will make it easier for search engine spiders to crawl.
If you are using a CMS like WordPress, SEO plugins are recommended. It is an easy solution for users who are unfamiliar with coding and don’t want to deal with all the backend stuff.
SEO plugins are especially helpful if you don’t like coding, don’t want to tweak your HTACCESS files, or have no idea what robots.txt is.
So if you just want to ignore all the hassle and get straight to optimizing your website for search engines you should use these free SEO plugins.
Now that you know why SEO plugins are important and why you should use them, let’s look at the list of SEO plugins that we have used to grow our site.
Most Popular SEO Plugins
There are a lot of free SEO plugins for WordPress and some of them are really good. Even though it’s debatable which SEO plugin performs better and other SEOs might differ with this list, one thing we can say for sure is all the plugins that are listed here will do the job for you.
This is sponsored post, and all of the plugins listed here have been individually tested by us.
We hope that you will benefit from these free plugins as well and that if used properly, they will help you deliver thousands of free organic visitors to your website.
1. Yoast SEO
This is undeniably hands down the best SEO plugins we have used for WordPress. You’re probably already familiar with the Yoast SEO plugin if you’re not new to WordPress.
With over five million active installations, Yoast SEO is one of the most popular WordPress SEO plugins right now.
We’ve been using the Yoast SEO plugin on our website since our inception, and it has served us remarkably well.
Yoast SEO plugin has a lot of elements that will help you optimize your website and give recommendations to improve your content quality and optimize it for search engines.
It also does SEO analysis of pages to show the problems and improvement opportunities.
Yoast automatically creates a sitemap.xml file for your website once you activate the plugin. This can be helpful for publishers who don’t know how to create an XML file for their website.
You can also verify and integrate your webmaster tools for multiple search engines (Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, etc).
Another useful element of Yoast is the “no-index” tool. Sometimes we don’t want search engines to index and show some specific part of our website.
You can use the “no-index” option if you don’t want specific content to be indexed in search engine results.
Furthermore, it allows publishers to create a template for titles and meta descriptions for all their pages.
This plugin will give you insights into your content so you can optimize it well without learning any of the technical stuff.
Optimization With Yoast
Aside from these site-wide optimizations, you can also optimize each individual page and post.
Yoast automatically adds a meta SEO box to all of your posts and pages.
You can individually add custom title tags, meta descriptions, Open Graph Tags, canonicals, and meta robots tags on all your posts and pages.
There’s also a feature that shows how well your post is “optimized” for your target keyword.
Yoast also provides a readability analysis which shows you how easy or difficult it is to read your content (Flesch Reading Ease score). It also grades your sentence lengths, subheading distribution, and other factors.
There is a paid version of Yoast that contains some additional features. But the free version is good enough to improve your SEO and online visibility.
2. All-In-One SEO Pack
If you are a newbie and have no experience with SEO whatsoever, you can get started with the All in One SEO plugin. This plugin is very user-friendly with interesting visual data and analysis.
It offers many of the same features as Yoast SEO with some additional elements. The All in One SEO plugin is very powerful in terms of SEO yet very easy to use and understand.
This plugin can handle almost every aspect of SEO. It has developed some extremely useful features throughout the years and is now going toe-to-toe with Yoast.
It will take less than 10 minutes to configure all the options once you activate the plugin. This SEO plugin can be used by both blogs and online stores.
The All in One SEO plugin’s biggest feature is that it continually audits your website and gives simple optimization tips and recommendations. Apart from site-wide optimization, troubleshooting, and fine-tuning your content from there is a piece of cake.
This plugin has over 2 million active installations and even the free version is loaded with helpful features.
Here are some of the free features that are included in The All in One SEO plugin:
- XML sitemaps
- Titles and meta descriptions
- Basic schema markup
- Custom titles and meta descriptions
- Bad bot blocker
- Basic WooCommerce SEO
- Search engine notification
If you want additional features to help you with your SEO you can upgrade to AIO SEO Pro.
3. Rank Math
If you are looking for a power-packed SEO tool with a minimal interface, you might go for Rank Math. Rank Math is another popular WordPress SEO plugin that has helped a lot of publishers with their content optimization.
With Rank Math, you will get all the necessary SEO tools to optimize your website. It will help you rank high on any search engine and bring in more organic traffic to your website.
This SEO plugin is user-friendly and is designed for people who are just getting started with SEO. The smart automation feature can help you optimize your content with just a few clicks. If you don’t want to waste an entirety on hiring an SEO team, you can simply use this plugin.
Rank Math SEO Plugin will do all the optimization work for you without wasting any money.
If you’ve never used an SEO plugin before and are feeling a little overwhelmed by all of the features, there is a setup wizard to walk you through the entire process.
So, what makes it different from Yoast and the other competitors?
- Rich snippets markup
- Card previews for Facebook and Twitter
- Redirection (301, 302, 307, 410, 451)
- Google Search Console integration
ThisSEO plugin also includes a 404 error monitor, which detects users who land on 404 (dead) sites and reports the URLs and number of times they’ve been visited.
