Search engines are a major source of traffic for most websites. That’s why our users often ask us for SEO tips and plugins that can help improve SEO of their WordPress sites. In this article, we will share 9 best WordPress SEO plugins and tools that will improve SEO of your website.
1. WordPress SEO by Yoast
It is one of the most downloaded WordPress plugin of all times. Yoast’s WordPress SEO is a comprehensive solution for all your on-site SEO needs.
It allows you to add SEO title, meta description, and meta keywords to each post and page of your site.
You can also write custom title for your main site, archives, category and tag pages. It also adds Open Graph meta data, Twitter Cards, Sitemaps and ping search engines whenever you update your site.
The list of features for WordPress SEO is extremely long. Check out why we use WordPress SEO on WPBeginner and all our websites. After that, head over to learn how to install and setup WordPress SEO plugin.
Once you do that, then look at our tips for optimizing your blog posts.
2. SEMrush
SEMRush is a tool that Pros use to gather analytics and insights from their competitor’s to help improve their own SEO.
You can learn about organic keywords to rank for, places where you can get backlinks from, insights into your competitor’s advertising strategies, and so much more.
SEMrush is a paid subscription and is used by thousands of SEO professionals all over the world. It can provide you an enormous wealth of data.
3. Google Keyword Planner
No one on the planet has more insights into what people are searching for than the search giant Google.
Did you know that you can get your own keyword ideas from Google itself by using the Google Keyword Planner tool.
This free tool is offered to Google’s advertisers for free and anyone can use it. It’s main purpose is to show advertisers the keywords they can bid on for their advertising campaigns. It also helps advertisers choose right keywords by showing them an estimate of search volume, number of results, and difficulty level.
As a content marketer or blogger, you can use this data to find keywords with high search volume, high advertiser interest, and more importantly keywords where you can easily outrank all other sites.
4. KeywordTool.io
Keyword Tool is one of the best free keyword research tool available right now. It allows you to simply generate keyword ideas by typing in a keyword. These keyword suggestions are gathered from Google’s auto suggest feature.
These keyword suggestions are a treasure of information. Google autocomplete suggest keywords based on how often a keyword is used for the search. This means that the top most results are the most frequently searched terms on Google for that particular keyword.
Keyword Tool is amazingly fast, and most importantly it is completely free for anyone to use. You can use it to optimize content on your WordPress site. It also allows you to get keyword suggestions from YouTube, Bing, and App Store as well.
5. Open Site Explorer
Developed by Moz, this free tool allows you to check data for any domain name. You can see who is linking to that domain and what anchor texts they are using. Apart from that, Open Site Explorer offers a wealth of information like top pages, linking domains, which pages are linked on your site, etc.
This tool is free, but has daily search limits for each person.
To unlock the full power, you would need a Moz Pro Subscription which also gets you access to their other tools as well.
6. OutreachPlus
OutreachPlus is the best email outreach software to crush your marketing goals. It comes with powerful features like smart personalization, automated responses, email insights like open, replied, links clicked, and more.
It is super easy to use and has built-in email client which ensures that your emails don’t end up in spam. You can add multiple email accounts, follow up prospects, and get a 360 degree view of your campaigns. This is a great tool for reaching out to get backlinks, press mentions and connecting with influencers. This will help you grow authority and bring traffic for your website.
7. Broken Link Checker
Broken links can not only create bad experience for your users, but they can also affect your site’s SEO. If you have been running a blog for sometime, then you should check your site from time to time for broken links and fix them.
Broken Link Checker is a free WordPress plugin that allows you to find broken links on your WordPress site. You can then fix those links without even editing your posts. See our tutorial on how to fix broken links in WordPress with Broken Link Checker.
It is a highly useful plugin, and its totally free. The only downside is that it can become resource intensive and may slow down your server. Some hosting providers like WPEngine has already blocked this plugin on their servers.
8. Rel NoFollow Checkbox
When you link to an external site, you are giving away some of your site’s authority to that link. If you don’t want do that, then you can add a nofollow attribute to that link.
In fact, you can even make all external links nofollow in WordPress. But this might not be a great idea. Sometime you may want to give a dofollow link to truly helpful sites.
Rel NoFollow Checkbox is a simple WordPress plugin which adds a checkbox in the insert link popup of WordPress post editor. This popup already has a check box which allows you to open links in new tab. Now whenever you are adding an external link you can easily make it nofollow by simply checking a box.
See our tutorial how to add a nofollow checkbox to insert link section in WordPress for detailed instructions.
9. SEOquake
SEOquake is a SEO tool available as browser addon for Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and Safari web browsers. It provides SEO related information for any website. These information parameters include page rank, age, last updated, alexa rank, and many other parameters. It is one of the most downloaded browser addon by SEO professionals.
Apart from that, SEOquake toolbar can show you all these parameters for all the search results. This information can be extremely useful if you are gauging competition for different keywords. You can even download search results in CSV format and prepare your own excel sheets of search data.
Bonus SEO Tips for WordPress Site Owners
Site speed is one of the many important factors in search rankings. Fast loading sites can easily outrank slower websites. While you are spending a lot of time improving your content strategy, give some of that time to improve your site speed.
Make sure your WordPress site loads fast. You can check your site speed on tools like Google Page Speed and Pingdom.
Always install and setup a caching plugin on your WordPress site. We recommend using W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache. To give your site speed even more boost, you can set up a CDN service to work with your caching plugin. At WPBeginner and on all our websites, we use MaxCDN. It greatly improves our page load times.
You should also upload optimized images only. Images can affect your site’s speed and by optimizing them you can significantly improve your sites performance.
Lastly, if none of these tips are improving your page speed, then its most likely your web host’s fault. You need to move to a better WordPress hosting provider. We recommend using Siteground because they have fully optimized servers to run WordPress sites. If you want managed WordPress hosting, then we recommend either Pagely or WPEngine.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Google+.
Yoast Seo is a sensational SEO optimization plugin. Over the past 4 years, it has taken on the All In One Seo Pack. However, there are some elements that Yoast Seo, although it is more specific, does not have all the skills of All in One Seo Pack. It overcomes Yoast with Open Graph Meta and Bat Bot Blocker (quite useful SEO optimization).
From the theme of my blog to my first post i was always visiting your site and i always have a reason to check back. You are doing great job. Please are there any negative sides to the Rel No Follow plugin?
Hi Sorison,
Thanks for the feedback, we are glad you find WPBeginner helpful. There are no negative impact of the Rel no Follow plugin. You just need to make sure that you only nofollow links to external sites and not your own.
Hey! Is the No Follow plugin still relevant? I read that the “juice” is “evaporated” so you still lose the juice when external linking, but it goes nowhere.
Hi Richard,
Yes it is still relevant.
Thank you for making this list, I have gathered so much information and pointing the best plugins from this article. This is awesome!
Are all these to be used together? They all communicate together?
Hi Phillip,
No these are different tools and each one of them does different things.
Sir, can google AdWord’s free keyword research tool be used completely over Semrush or other paid keyword research tool to make a WordPress website completely seo freindly? I asked this question because at present I could’nt afford the price of semrush or other paid premium services.
how about ALL in ONe SEO ?
It is a great plugin and you can use it. Please check out our comparison of Yoast SEO vs All In One SEO Pack.
Great! I installed all of these on my wordpress site.
Thanks for the info
nice information any special security blog that help and protect site from attackers ?
Grate Post Really Awesome
Hello,
Thank you for sharing this awesome collection of SEO WordPress plugins.
Yoast SEO is one of my favorite plugin. It helps you to optimize your meta tags without entering into coding. I use this plugin in my website.
I use it in my blog website.
Keep updating!!!
Decent list, but I came here by searching for some plugin I just saw in a YouTube video called “Easy SEO WP”. This is what it looks like (SS from part of vid)
Video is from 2014. Does this plugin exist? Anyone have a link to it?
I took a WAG and deleted the 404 log since I was fairly confident that the real urls needing redirecting had been done. I find this plugin confusing and it’s possibly because I don’t have a deep understanding yet of the entire process.
I use Analytics, GTMetrix, Screaming Frog, Yoast SEO plugin and other reliable programs to test various aspects of my site. While I certainly want and need to make sure any incorrect urls are redirected, I certainly don’t want to redirect unnecessarily.
Do you have any thoughts and/or suggestions about this?
Also, since Broken Link Checker seems to be a resource guzzler, can it be used on a periodic basis to check links vs. being activated full-time?
Thanks so much for your assistance.
Yes you can use Broken Link Checker periodically. For redirects, if you are not seeing any 404 errors that you would like to redirect, then there is no need to setup unnecessary redirects.
Your SEO plugins are really very well done and thus i got more interesting information it is very well nice and awesome.
That’s great post….
What are your thoughts on all in one SEO?
Please see our comparison of Yoast SEO vs All in One SEO Pack.
If you are talking about plugins then Yoast is my first choice. And when it comes to tools, each tool mention here has their own advantages.
I would like to use Yoast SEO for my wordpress site. I think this is the best wordpress plugin.
Great Post.
Hey,
Could you recommend me a tool that has real updates on the regular basis? Lots of services just CLAIM to have that, but if you check yourself, many of them (SEMrush, for example) received last update of their bases in Dec, 2015! I KNOW, RIGHT!
I’ve used Serstat for some time. So far so good. But I quess they should put more effort as their share on the market is raletively low.
Hello Admin, Are you using PRO version of Yoast SEO Plugin For Adding multiple Meta Keywords In your Posts.
I read this article couple of months ago and followed most of these plugins & tools.
After recent WP update, i found that “8. Rel NoFollow Checkbox” is not working properly.
Is there any good alternative of this plugin except “making all external link noFollow”?
Hello,
Thanks for the awesome article about tools that help bloggers optimise their blogs and website. I have a question, can these tools be used to help a free wordpress.com blog/website?
I just started blogging about a month ago, and I would like to see the number of visitors of my blog increase but I am having trouble doing so, not sure if it’s because I have a free wordpress.com blog.
Thanks for the help!
Some of them can but some of them are WordPress plugins and cannot be used on WordPress.com. Please see our guide on the difference between self hosted WordPress.org vs free WordPress.com blog.
hello
thx for good guide
i work in a travel agency
for making better that in seo i need to use the best one , would you please guide me?
i dont know yoast,premium seo pack, all in one or other?
thx
Start by setting up Yoast SEO on your website.
thanks admin for great information about SEO plugin
Well, thanks very much for insightful post. Would it be wise if I use more than one of these plugins on my WordPress site?
can these tools be helpful with arabic websites ?
Keyword Tool as mentioned in your post is no longer free.
For me, SEMRush and Google Keyword Planner are doing most of the work. At least when we talk about tools from this list. Thanks for the post!
this post is important for new blogger which is new in blogging Market..This plugin help for seo for google and analysis of post..
I have been with Yoast SEO for years but recently I found problems on indexing at google webmaster. I have tried to resolve this but no avail.
With the changes of new template and new version WP, I also update the plugin to a new one. But alas, all my meta descriptions were washed away within weeks due to changes on robot.txt.
I changed to allinoneSEO and all chamged the robot.txt with its default. Within 3-4 days everything went normal again and even data in google webmaster also looks good, where all my pages are indexed well.
Despite Yoast full of bell and whistles, I will stay with allinoneSEO plugin for all my webs…
Yoast SEO is now pushing something called OnPage. In your SEO checks it states that your site is not indexing and then leads you to OnPage to fix it. The OnPage requires you to sign up with an account to “Fix” the problem that never existed to begin with.
I turned off Yoast SEO on my sites. I no longer have this issue.
Great post and very insightful. I use Yoast on my website, and besides Google, I haven’t used any of the rest.
Another great informative post…thank you.
I updated the new yoast seo, I saw that the xml site map was changed, I updated them and found all my google ranking for many posts were lost, will I get them back
Can all these plugins be used at a time?
Yes.
Thank you once again for all your wonderful helpful posts.
I have a question which nobody seems to be able to answer…have asked many times in forum for help but nothing works…I am completely locked out of 2 of my sites, they show a 404 nothing found page…but it’s the admin that I cannot get into.
Can anyone please help?
Thanks in advance.
Please see what to do when you are locked out of WordPress admin area
Is there a way to check out if the plugin select the frequence of the keywords I use for it?
I use the plugin in my site
thanks. yoast seo plugin best for wordpress
I have used All in one SEO and Yoast for two of my blogs. Per my experience, All in One SEO is performing compared to other SEO plugins. All in ONE SEO and YOAST works very well, bloggers can choose anyone of it.
Can I use all of these plugins at the same time on my website?
Great list… I only knew 5 of them!
I´ve been using them for a while… they do work just fine!
(MozBar lead me here)
Very deep post with useful links, in my frogoff blog I had many broken links, now I’m able to fix it, but I have one question, is it linkpatrolwp free to use or not, can’t register in their site ?
It is a paid plugin.
For local business owners I would recommend the Local SEO and Business listings plugin. It is specifically for businesses that need local search engine optimization.
Great article. Personally for macro SEO needs I use the Yoast plugin and Moz is an incredible resource for staying up to date on all the latest search developments and changes.
Really nice topic, thank for great articles, I learned something important from your sites about SEO.
Nice list! I use a lot of these tools like SEMrush, Toast SEO Tool, the keyword planner and a few others. Its always good to find new tools!
Hello,
Should I use sitelock if I’m hosting with siteground this I’d mainly for shopping site. Currently Godaddy recommends sitelock.
Thank you
Thanks for the great post. I am new to blogging. Will use them for best SEO – Swetha from India
Hi. I’m already on your email list and you share an absolute wealth of knowledge that I’ve found so beneficial time and time again.
I have a 100% affiliate-based site – a huge undertaking for a first WP.org site…
I installed the WP plugin, Redirection. While I understand the concept/basics of redirects, which I corrected a number of legitimately incorrectly directed urls, I now have over 6,000 404s in the log, from many different urls. When I conducted a random url identifier, they are all coming from the same place – urbangiraffe. While I’m not sure, they may be one of the redirection plugin developers – not sure though.
I took a WAG and deleted the 404 log since I was fairly confident that the real urls needing redirecting had been done. I find this plugin confusing and it’s possibly because I don’t have a deep understanding yet of the entire process.
I use Analytics, GTMetrix, Screaming Frog, Yoast SEO plugin and other reliable programs to test various aspects of my site. While I certainly want and need to make sure any incorrect urls are redirected, I certainly don’t want to redirect unnecessarily.
Do you have any thoughts and/or suggestions about this?
Also, since Broken Link Checker seems to be a resource guzzler, can it be used on a periodic basis to check links vs. being activated full-time?
Thanks so much for your assistance.
We would recommend you to try Redirection plugin’s support forums for more help regarding 404 errors. The site you mentioned, is actually plugin author’s website which should not appear in your 404 logs.
As for broken links checker, we only recommend it to be activated only when you want to run a test. Choose a time when your site has the least traffic so that broken link checker can work properly.
Thanks for this great post!
But I have a couple of questions in my mind :
Are, SEOquake, LinkPatrol and SEMrush similar tools for enhancing SEO? If so, then which one would you recommend the most? And by the way, is it necessary to buy the Premium SEO by Yoast plugin or, the free one is enough ?
Thanks. Looking for your reply
SEOquake, LinkPatrol, and SEMrush are all different tools and they provide totally different features. The free plugin works for most site, but if you feel that you would need some features offered in the premium version then you can go for it.
True SEO golden mine! Some of them I knew (SEO by Yoast, SEOquake), and I have heard about other, thanks for putting best plugins on one page!
All are brilliant ways to stand apart from the rest and get ahead in ranking.