WordPress is a powerful CMS (content management system) for use in both building and promoting websites of immense functionality. The platform itself has been put together very much with SEO in mind — but that doesn’t mean you can’t add further to the SEO strengths of WordPress.
After securing a WordPress site design, you can get started by implementing one of the following well-recommended options for an SEO WordPress plugin.
Yoast SEO
What is the overall best SEO plugin for WordPress? It’s a tough contest, but on balance, the accolade should probably be handed to Yoast SEO — which, like many of its competitors, is offered in ‘free’ and ‘premium’ flavours.
How good is it? The digital marketing veteran Neil Patel says: “I’m a Yoast guy and have been for years. Because I have a bunch of huge sites, I use the premium version and it’s totally worth it.”
Generally, the free version is good for helping people to dip their toes into the SEO waters for the first time, while the premium version is more suitable for established SEO enthusiasts.
Yoast SEO especially excels at content analysis, giving you something of a machine through which you can feed an existing piece of content in return for feedback about its SEO. The plugin can also assess the readability of the content to make sure its text flows well.
Patel attests that Yoast is “incredibly easy to use”. Though he concedes that All in One SEO — the next WordPress SEO plugin on our list — might be even easier for beginners to use, Patel insists that “if you are wondering which free SEO plugin is the best, I say Yoast.”
All in One SEO
All in One SEO — or AIOSEO, as this plugin is otherwise known — has tweaked and perfected its winning formula since first arriving on the WordPress SEO scene back in 2007. As a result, website owners who get initiated with AIOSEO now can really hit the ground running with it.
All in One SEO claims that it can help you to “improve your website’s SEO rankings and uncover new SEO growth opportunities in less than 10 minutes.”
This is largely on account of the plugin’s intuitive setup wizard — where, through answering a series of basic questions about your WordPress site, you can nail its SEO fundamentals. However, there’s a lot of SEO clockwork going on beneath the interface’s pleasingly simple veneer.
The free, ‘lite’ version of AIOSEO alone enables you to customise webpage titles and meta descriptions, generate XML sitemaps and take tentative steps into WooCommerce SEO. However, paying for AIOSEO Pro adds further tools, such as for on-page SEO and social media integration.
Still, as with other WordPress SEO plugins similar in scale, you get out of AIOSEO what you put in. For this reason, here at Mr SEO, we would be happy to provide you with a range of WordPress SEO services covering such potentially bewildering subjects as technical SEO and WordPress CRO.
SEOPress
SEOPress has a lot in common with Yoast SEO and All in One SEO, in the sense that it covers a lot of SEO basics — including sitemaps, redirections and content analysis. However, where it differs from competing plugins is in placing an especially strong focus on social media.
Before posting on social media, you can use the WordPress plugin SEOPress to preview how the content will look on Facebook and Twitter.
SEOPress also automatically generates Open Graph metadata to ease sharing on a range of social media sites — including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and LinkedIn. Additionally, the plugin supports Twitter Cards to help digital marketers tweet rich multimedia content.
While the basic version of SEOPress can be installed for free, you might be tempted to pay for an upgrade to SEOPress Pro, which throws in an array of additional advanced features. For example, you would be able to import meta data from CSV files and indeed, export meta data to them.
If you have created a lot of YouTube videos for embedding on your site, you could also appreciate being able to produce video XML sitemaps designed to enhance rankings in video search results.
Don’t be afraid to get in touch with us for further guidance
We definitely wouldn’t pretend that deciding on the best WordPress SEO plugins for any given website is easy — especially since individual sites can differ markedly in their objectives.
Hence, you could be indecisive about which options to choose from the immense range of WordPress SEO add-ons now available. We can assist you in making a breakthrough on this score if you phone our team on 020 34114 789.
