A well-established WordPress site is more than finding a great host for it, is sure to speed it up and boost your SEO rankings however, there’s much more that goes into it; which keywords you target for product pages and blog posts, the size of your image files, and whether or not your content is readable. That’s why a good SEO plugin for WordPress is required. Otherwise, you’re stuck trying to fight against a competition that is probably utilizing some of these tools.

Several WordPress SEO plugins exist, and most of them are completely free. You can find some SEO tools for bringing up powerful stats, keyword rankings, and backlink information. SEO is confusing, even for experienced website owners; finding posts and pages with high potential, fixing broken links, reorganizing site structure or conducting a complete SEO audit is not easy for most website owners, but when you’re equipped with the right tools and know how to implement those tools, you’ll be well on your way to search engine success.

The Best SEO Plugins for WordPress

These SEO plugins are often easier to understand and install, and you can choose from a wide selection of plugins with different features. The best ones will show you SEO projections and recommendations on your page, and post editors, while others are rather limited in their feature-sets, although they have unique assets like options for checking broken links, or minimizing the file sizes of images.

Our list of recommendations is shown below, yet we highly recommend browsing through the more thorough SEO WordPress plugin options.

1. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO dominates as the king WordPress SEO plugin, and is what most people use their blogs. With an astounding 5-star ratings, Yoast continues to wow the WordPress world with impressive updates, a beautiful interface, and the most user-friendly option for making your blog posts and product pages stand out. Yoast SEO has its own website with premium support options, a vivid community in the forum section, an informative blog to learn more about SEO, as well as SEO courses for all levels alike.

From that website you can also gain access to Yoast SEO premium, which offers more advanced features; keyword optimization, previewing what your page will look like on Twitter and Facebook, and internal link suggestions for sending users to other locations on your website. That’s only a fraction of the premium features provided.

The premium plugin sells for $89 per site, a desirable deal for anyone no doubt. However, the free plugin, beats out most other SEO WordPress plugins by a long shot.

Features That Make Yoast SEO a Great Choice:

• Type in keywords and analyze how you have optimized for those keywords on pages and posts.
• See what your Google search engine result is going to look like; this allows you to adjust the meta description and title to make it more appealing and keyword rich.
• A readability check is executed on all pages for you to understand if you need to break up paragraphs, or add elements like numbered lists or headers.
• The plugin also detects if you have any duplicate content.
• Yoast has probably the best resources and support we have ever seen from any plugin developer.
• They plugin updates every two weeks.
• The premium version of the plugin provides a redirect manager, free support, content insights, and an ad-free interface on the backend.

2. The SEO Framework

The SEO Framework plugin is for those who want a fast, lightweight SEO plugin for WordPress without any ads or upgrades. It focuses on helping out those who are more concerned about keeping site speeds high, while also spending less time with confusing SEO articles. It’s considered as the greatest alternative to Yoast, and that has much to do with the visual nature of the SEO ratings along with more options for targeting keywords.

The post settings are controlled with some tabs, one of which uses a colored scale to show exactly how close you are to making your post search engine-ready. With this, you can instantly tell where you need to put in some work for your SEO.

The interface is perfect for beginners, the API is open for advanced users to get their hands on. The plugin began as a project within the WPMUDEV community, but was eventually released to the public for free. The SEO Framework plugin has it all, and it offers more advanced functionality with the help of some extensions, which include:

• Local SEO
• An AMP integration
• Article enhancement
• Monitoring for SEO and uptime
• Incognito mode
• Redirects
• Comment caching for spammers

Features That Make the SEO Framework a Great Choice:

• The SEO framework matches most of the needed features you find in Yoast, however you’re not required to pay for extensions or premium features.
• The visual, colored meter/scale provides a more user-friendly dashboard to see how well your post is going to perform on Google.
• It has a local SEO extension for companies that need to display important local business information.
• A comment spamming extension which removes the need for an additional plugin.
• Most SEO settings are preconfigured, so there’s little to set up after installation.
• While other plugins use a focus keyword, The SEO Framework focuses on the subject to encourage more natural writing, and remember that Google sees synonyms in SERPs as the same thing.

3. SEOPress

SEOPress is a free SEO plugin for WordPress, it’s completely white labeled, no footprints even in the free version. It’s simple, fast, and powerful, allows you to manage all of your titles and meta data for posts/pages/post types/terms.

You can create XML and HTML sitemaps, track your visitors with Google Analytics, and optimize tags for sharing your content on social networks. This free plugin also provides content analysis to help webmasters write better SEO-optimized posts. Developers can use more than 75 hooks to set up the plugin according to their needs. The premium version includes advanced features like:

• Local business SEO.
• Breadcrumbs optimized for SEO.
• WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads optimizations.
• Video and Google News XML sitemaps.
• Google-Structured Data Types; product, article, event, local business, recipe, review, FAQ, course and video.
• Backlinks from integration with third-party API.
• Google Page Speed v5 integration to quickly check the quality of your pages.
• Redirections and 404 monitoring.
• Google Analytics on your WordPress dashboard.

Features That Make SEOPress a Great Choice:

• Editors will not see ads or reference to SEOPress metabox with no . Same for the admin bar.
• Add Google Analytics tracking to your site. You can control user roles; tracking, setup custom dimensions, enable remarketing, demographics and interest reporting, tracks PDF, DOCX, XLSX, downloads, IP Anonymization, cross-domain tracking and more.
• Quick and easy Twitter meta tags, and Facebook graph data.