One of the greatest benefits of using WordPress as a CMS is that there are so many free plugins available for WordPress that will totally beef up and streamline the SEO of any site. When looking for plugins to boost your SEO, it can be a bit overwhelming because of the sheet amount of free plugins available. If you need help narrowing down the options in terms of which SEO plugins to add to your site, take a look at this list we’ve curated of 5 of the absolute best WordPress plugins for SEO.
Yoast is one of the most popular (if not THE most popular) WordPress plugin for improving your SEO. It’s popular for a reason…this plugin is packed with features and is completely free. Yoast does so much more than allow you to input keywords and meta details. It gives you a rundown of the SEO quality of each page and post that you publish, it allows you to set social media sharing settings (how you want it to look on Facebook or Twitter when your content is shared, etc), and generates XML sitemaps and so, so much more.
If for whatever reason you don’t want all of the extra features that come with Yoast and are just looking for a plugin that allows you to optimize your pages and posts with keywords and meta descriptions, then All in One SEO Pack is a great option. If it weren’t for Yoast, it would probably be the most popular SEO plugin available for WordPress. It’s easy to use even if you don’t have any knowledge or expertise in coding.
Again, if you don’t have Yoast and need to generate a sitemap, this plugin is a great way to do it. Sitemaps optimize your SEO because it makes it easier for search engines like Google to index your site because they can plainly see and access the way that content is structured on your site. A sitemap is pretty much mandatory if you want to have great SEO, and Google XML Sitemaps will generate one for you without you having to do anything other than install and activate the plugin.
This one’s not technically a plugin, but it’s an undeniably valuable resource when it comes to SEO. This is a great tool to use to find which keywords have the highest search volume, which keywords advertiser’s are interested in, and which keywords you can use to outrank other sites, so you can try to tailor your content to fit within these parameters.
If you’re a web developer or work in SEO, then you probably know that broken links are not great for your search engine rankings. This plugin, the Broken Link Checker, checks all your content — posts, pages, even comments — for broken links an alerts you to them so that you can either delete the broken link or change it from a broken link to a live link. It also gives you the option to have broken links show up differently (usually with a line through the link, crossing out the text) within your content, signaling to your user that the link is bad in the hopes that they won’t try to use it.