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WordPress is one of the most popular websites in use today, WordPress is powering one-third of the top 10 million websites.

The primary reason being its accessibility and open source feature. Apart from that the ease of customization, the search engine friendliness and security, etc contribute to its fame. But only launching a WordPress website is just not enough to make it known on the internet.

When a user searches for a particular topic on the internet, the search engine robots or spiders crawl through various websites to bring up the most relevant results. So, a website’s visibility will depend on how easily a search engine bot can crawl through it. Since there are millions of WordPress website users, it is thus essential to do something more to make your website crawlable, and an SEO plugin does just the thing.

The Need for SEO Plugins

SEO plugins empower webmasters to make improvements in website coding elements and structure to make it easily crawlable for the search engine bots. When you use an SEO plugin in WordPress sites, you can enhance specific SEO elements and thus increase the visibility of your website. For example, if you are using a plugin like Yoast SEO, then you will be able to work on the meta description templates, optimize AMP messages, etc. Similarly, there are many other aspects that SEO plugins can help you with like social media sharing, XML site map and other canonical elements.

Now, the real problem is when you have to choose from hundreds of plugins, the one that suits you. There are more than 50000 plugins in WordPress.org. And if you are new to plugins in SEO, you are just sea-fishing. Further using plugins of similar kinds creates complications in your website and can harm your website rankings. So, you have to be prudent when it comes to choosing the right plugin for your WordPress website.

Here we have given the 7 best SEO plugins that stem from the long-running experience and success of users over time:

1. Yoast SEO

A five million active user base makes it the most popular SEO plugin of the time. Now, when it comes to Yoast, there’s a lot to tell about as it has the makings of a comprehensive SEO plugin. You can create an XML sitemap, double-check your Webmaster Tools like Google, Bing, Baidu, Yandex, develop the exciting title and meta description templates, optimize AMP pages and much more.

It adds an SEO box to all your website pages including your posts. There is also an option to customize the title tags, meta descriptions, Open Graph Tags, canonicals, meta robots tags. The optimization feature though in its nascent stage adds to your analytical capability by deciding on how well the target keyword fits well with your current SEO work. It also checks for the readability of your content and its usefulness by providing a Flesch Reading Score, in addition to evaluation of sentence lengths, subheadings etc.

2. Rank Math

A one plugin solution fitting all websites is a Utopian idea. Analyzing your needs is the best way to arrive at the right plugin. If you are managing one of those websites that needs more effort on the SEO side and yet cannot spare time for it, then Rank math is the right plugin for you. Smart automation is a compelling feature of this plugin that brings the entire power of an SEO team at your fingertips. The outstanding features of Rank Math are that it helps in Google Search Console integration, supports redirections (301, 302, 307, 410, 451), packs rich markup of snippets (about 14 types) and card previews for social media site like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Further, the intelligence of Rank Math is such that it monitors the 404 error hitting the visitors close enough to tell you about the URLs and the number of hits as well.

3. All in One SEO Pack

It looks quite similar to Yoast SEO in functionality yet packs a host of exciting features that are wanting in Yoast.

Some of those features include a very user-friendly interface that helps you edit robots.txt file, editing, blocking the “bad bots”, referral spam, site links search box markup feature, generating meta description automatically, etc.

4. Easy Table of Content

Google updates are one of the driving factors in determining the content in the SEO game. The latest update, the Google Bert update is already setting new benchmarks for content simplicity and clarity.

The utility of Easy Table of Contents comes in making your blogs and large content sections more readable to the users. It adds a table of contents to your pages and posts and makes them super navigable. Hence, users can peruse long passages with ease and increases the SEO metrics like time on page, bounce rate and dwell time, among other factors.

Besides being highly customizable, it can also jump the links in SERP to push up your clickthrough rate (CTR). Further, it helps you insert headers at the right places all depending on your preferences.

5. Broken Link Checker

It is one of the finest tools in WordPress that checks for broken links in your website. It keeps an eye for both internal and external links. And in case it finds any such bad links it alerts you on the HTTP status code, the anchor text, the source of that link and much more.

The Broken Link Checker runs in the background all the time and keeps on parsing for broken links in real-time. Whenever it finds any broken link, it immediately raises the flag through e-mail. Its most stunning feature is the ability to fix links in a few seconds, no matter how extensive the number of bad links. Just an “unlink” button press delinks the dead link from your post, that’s how easy it is. And in case you want to supplement the dead link with a fresh one you need not go into the post at all, it can be easily swapped.

6. Shortpixel

Shortpixel is one of the best tools to compress and optimize images on your WordPress website. It is an indispensable tool because images can slow down your site if they are not appropriately optimized. Image loading speed is a notable ranking factor; hence ShortPixel is a must-have tool.

Easy to use and install, it optimizes your images that you update now and also those that come up in future. Supporting Retina 2X images and other compression options like lossy, glossy and lossless it carries many capabilities in a plugin of its size. Compatible with JPG, PNG, GIF, PDF documents it also converts files to WebP.

7. Redirection

Life was never comfortable fixing 301 redirects, especially when you are migrating to a new domain and have to be very particular about nourishing the new site with all the previously built links.

But Redirection comes as heaven send a gift to the SEO managers around the world. It is a simple plugin that makes 301 redirects, and it is also straightforward to use as well. All you have to do is enter the source URL and the target URL and hit the “add redirect” button.

Besides providing advanced users with regex matching for redirects, it is free to use.

These are the best SEO plugins which you need to consider for your new WordPress website with an eye for duplication of efforts. The plugin market is a vast ocean today, from plugins that are capable of creating a mobile app from a WordPress website to those that check the health of your website. In order to stay ahead in the SEO game you need to keep track of the latest additions. And always remember when it comes to plugin “easy is right.”