Want to learn about the top WordPress SEO plugins for sites to optimize your content for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? It’s needless to say plugins for SEO play a crucial role in optimizing your content in various aspects, such as adding meta titles, and meta descriptions, targeting focus keywords or focus phrases, maintaining keyword density, inserting internal links properly, suggesting content improvement, etc.
The topmost WordPress SEO plugins for WordPress sites are RankMath, AIOSEO and Yoast. There are many other plugins for WordPress SEO but I have chosen these three plugins because of their salient features, easy-to-use interface, excellent service, and compatibility with other third-party services. Using such a plugin is a must-have for the overall optimization of your site including its content in terms of SEO specifications.
- What Is an SEO plugin?
- How to Use an SEO plugin?
- RankMath
- AIOSEO and
- Yoast
Page Contents
What Is an SEO Plugin?
Want to learn about WordPress SEO plugins? A WordPress SEO plugin is an add-on tool that lets you manage your site including its content for search engines for better crawling, indexing, displaying in search results, and best performance in all aspects. It makes your content easier to access, crawl, and index for several search algorithms.
WordPress SEO plugins let you make your site SEO-friendly and well-optimized for search engines. With it, you can add attractive headlines, and meta descriptions, insert exact links, and more.
How Do WordPress SEO Plugins Work?
WordPress SEO plugins work with their built-in functionalities to make your site and content crawlable, indexable, and easily accessible. The plugins are so developed that once they are installed and configured properly, they can measure different aspects of your content. The plugins show how well-optimized and SEO-friendly is your content. It can gauge keyword density and its inclusion in meta titles, meta descriptions, sub-headings, the body of the content, and even in the textual description as ALT text in the block built for uploaded images.
Based on how optimized your content is, the plugins suggest focus keyword inclusion in the headline, meta description, URL, Sub-headlines, image text description as ALT, and in the body of the content. Some SEO plugins can analyze your content’s headline, such as the length of the headline, emotional words inclusion, power words, number, etc.
The most important advantages of using WordPress SEO plugins are that you can manage your content, and make them accessible, indexable, and crawlable from within your post even though you don’t have any coding experience. Each plugin has built-in sections labeled Basic SEO, Advanced SEO, Headline Analyzer, Title Readability (analysis), Content Readability or analysis, etc.
There is a built-in box to add a focus keyword or a keyphrase. Once you add a focus keyword, it displays a number of scores on various aspects of your content. Some advanced plugins suggest API keys that let you choose similar keywords.
Another important thing that WordPress SEO plugins make for users is that they create an XML sitemap and add your new content to it dynamically. The plugin does that automatically, you do not need to do anything in the sitemap.
It lets you create an XML sitemap, add this to search engines, and add verification codes to the built-in sections. You can do all that hassle-free from your >>wp-admin>>SEO plugin>>Webmaster Tools even though you don’t know how to code.
WordPress SEO plugins control and manage many aspects of your site to make your site appear in the search results that search engines display.
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RankMath
RankMath is one of the most important WordPress SEO plugins with a lot of features like post optimization specifications, advanced Robot, Schema markup, built-in sections to paste verification codes or tags for several search engines, breadcrumb separators, XML sitemap generator, instant indexing, image & video SEO, 404 Error monitoring, third-party tools integrations, Google Analytics integrations and more. Indeed! it continues to be one of the best WordPress SEO plugins in the world.
RankMath has both the free and premium versions for WordPress sites. More than 1.3 million people use this plugin, and now it is rapidly growing. Recently, it has added API with its functioning to suggest and improve SEO scores but this feature is available only for the pro version. The free version does not include an API facility.
Not only this but also it has integrated with Google Analytics tools(GA4) that let you see your analytics insights from its dashboard, no need to go to your GA account separately. Thus when you log in to your WordPress, you learn what’s happening on your site, how visitors interact with your site, and more from your>>wp-admin>>RankMath>>Data Analytics.
RankMath Features
- Mata Title
- Sub-headings
- Meta Description
- Focus keyword analyzer
- Focus keyword counter in the post title, sub-heading, meta description, URL, ALT text, Body of the content, and in the first 100 words.
- Focus keyword density checker
- Post title analysis and score
- Readability analysis and score.
- XML Sitemap
- Breadcrumb configuration
- Image SEO
- Video SEO
- Knowledge graph
- Webmaster section to add code snippets for site ownership verification
- Instant indexing
- 404 Error monitor
- AMP Enable/disable
AIOSEO
AIOSEO is another SEO plugin for WordPress that has come with a bunch of essential features for making your site and content SEO-friendly and well-optimized based on a number of essential metrics such as post headline, keyword, ALT text, readability analysis, content analysis, etc. In addition, it has built-in sections to paste code snippets or tags for verifying site ownership. These sections let you add codes for Google webmasters, Bing webmasters, Yandex, Yahoo, Pinterest, etc.
Like other WordPress SEO plugins, AIOSEO too has both free and premium versions. The free version has many easy-to-use features but it lacks certain features, which are available only for the paid versions.
AIOSEO Features
- Headline analyzer
- Emotional words count
- Power words count
- Focus phrase analysis in several places, such as post headline, sub-headlines, meta description, the body of the content, ALT text, and URL of the content.
- Keyword density analysis
- Readability analysis
- Active and passive voice count
- Breadcrumb setup
- XML Sitemap
- Link Analysis
- Basic SEO
- Advanced SEO
- Robots meta
- Schema markup
- Social sharing
- Image SEO
- Video SEO
- Local SEO etc.
Yoast
Yoast is one of the most popular and the best WordPress SEO plugins, which comes with many SEO features for WordPress users. It has gained the trust of the users and continues to be one of the top plugins for search engine optimizing specifications in many aspects. Like other plugins for WordPress SEO, it too has included many common features, advanced features for content optimization, and webmasters.
Yoast too has both the two versions, namely, the free and the premium. You can use any of the two, based on your needs and applicability. Yoast free version has the common SEO features that you can use hassle-free on your WordPress. Nevertheless, if you want to unlock the more advanced features, you have to purchase the Yoast premium which has three packages.
Yoast Features
- General SEO
- Keyphrase in Headline, sub-headlines, the body of the content, URL, and image description as ALT text.
- Keyphrase density optimization
- URL characters length
- Meta description and keyphrase
- A readability analysis of content
- Optimized content analysis
- Schema settings
- Knowledge graph
- Webmaster tools include built-in sections to paste or add codes to verify site ownership for Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, etc.
- Integration with third-party tools
- Breadcrumbs
- Social accounts integration
- Cornerstone approach
- SEO extensions
What Is the Best SEO Plugin for WordPress?
Many readers ask, “What is the best SEO plugin for WordPress?”. This is a common question that deserves answers. In fact, all the SEO plugins work to make your site easy to crawl, index, and access for search engines, however, there exist differences in their quality of service, support, and pricing. You can use any SEO WordPress plugin but for best performance, I recommend only the popular, top-rated, and best plugins that have millions of users.
So, when comparing the SEO plugins in different aspects and specifications, to my opinion, the best SEO plugin for WordPress is RankMath.
However, Yoast and AIOSEO too are on the list of the best WordPress SEO plugins and people have been using them for the last 15 years.
