I have previously shared 30 plugins which I use here at ShoutMeLoud. For today’s post, I have compiled a list of recommended WordPress Plugins for SEO. You do not need to use all of these SEO plugins, but each works in a different way, so I would suggest choosing and using the ones that best suit your needs.
In this list I have included some free SEO plugins and some premium plugins, so there is something useful here for all readers.
I will also link to my previous review of individual SEO plugins, so you can learn more about them and decide which SEO plugins are appropriate for your blog. If you think there are any WordPress SEO plugins missing from our list, do let us know, and we would be happy to review them and possibly add them to our list.
Best SEO Plugins for WordPress Blogs:
Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin:
WordPress SEO by Yoast is a best free SEO plugin for WordPress. This single plugin takes care of many aspects of your WordPress blog’s SEO. Using SEO by Yoast you can do following things:
- Add meta value for homepage
- Add meta value for single post
- All valuen for Social sharing (Image, title & description)
- Social SEO
- Create sitemap file
- Edit robots.txt and .htaccess
- Control indexing of your blog
This plugin integrates features from some of the most popular plugins like Robots Meta and RSS footer.
I have written this detailed tutorial which shows you how to setup the SEO by Yoast plugin.
You can download this plugin for free from WordPress repo over here. You can watch the video embedded below to learn how to set up the Yoast plugin:
All in one SEO pro is an alternative for Yoast SEO plugin.
Broken link checker WordPress plugin:
Broken link checker plugin is a broken link cleaning WordPress plugin. It helps in finding & fixing all internal and external broken links (404 links). 404 links are nothing but a dead end for search engine spiders, and it’s highly advisable to remove such links.
This plugin may have some issues with certain blog posts. It is possible that it could even freeze your hosting for a while. For this reason, I would suggest running this plugin on low traffic day.
Watch the above video to understand how this plugin works. Another good similar plugin is LinkPatrol plugin which let you control link juice flow to external sites.
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SEMRUSH:
When talking about SEO, how can we not include most popular WordPress SEO tool call SEMRUSH. Unlike others which are plugin, this is a web based tool. Think of SEMRUSH as a complete SEO suite for people with or without SEO skills. The most popular feature of SEMRUSH is, it let you do the complete site SEO audit which helps you to identify SEO issues that are preventing the organic growth of your blog.
Here are two detailed tutorials which will give you more insights on SEMRUSH:
- How to use SEMRUSH for SEO of your blog
- A practical guide for growing blog traffic using SEMRUSH
SEO Smart Link WordPress plugin:
SEO Smart Link WordPress plugin lets you automatically link your words to any post link. This is very useful for on-page optimization. By finding your site’s high ranking keywords using the Google webmaster tool, you can boost your site’s ranking.
Before you use this plugin, you need to be certain of your internal linking and be aware of Google’s linking algorithm.
Download SEO Smart Links
This is one plugin I’m using here at ShoutMeLoud, & a major reason for such strong interlinking of ShoutMeLoud.
Also read: SEO Smart Links Premium Plugin Review
SEO friendly Images:
By optimizing your images, you can drive a significant amount of traffic from image search engines. Even here at ShoutMeLoud, almost 1% of traffic is from image search engines, and that is a lot.
This plugin adds ALT attributes into your images, though you need to take care of the image name. If you upload images with names like image002.jpeg or DSC001.jpeg, I would suggest that you make it a point to start giving your images more useful names right away. For example, in this post I have given the name “WordPress SEO” to the image I used.
Download SEO Friendly Images plugin
If you are just researching various SEO plugins for WordPress, you may wish to simply use the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin, as it offers most of the features offered by many other individual plugins.
Here are a few examples:
- Google XML Sitemap plugin: This plugin is widely recommended for generating a sitemap of your blog, but I suggest that you ignore this plugin as you can now use the sitemap feature of the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin.
If you think I have missed any essential or helpful plugins, do let us know in the comments section.
Which other WordPress SEO plugins you are using on your blog?
