Best WordPress SEO Plugins 2020
SEO plugins play a big role in boosting your website’s rankings on search engines. They mainly work by targeting the important keywords in your blog posts and product pages. Since image size affects SEO too, most of these plugins also handle image optimization for anything you upload.
Installing a solid SEO plugin is one of the simplest ways to help your WordPress site rise above the competition. Here are some of the best WordPress SEO plugins worth considering:
#1 Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO is one of the most-used WordPress SEO plugins around, with over 4.5 million downloads. It covers nearly every aspect of on-page and technical SEO, and its wide feature set makes it close to an all-in-one solution.
The snippet preview helps you write better titles and descriptions, the readability analysis checks your content page by page, and it generates an XML sitemap automatically.
#2 SEOPressor
SEOPressor is another popular option, built to track the latest Google algorithm trends. Its Keyword SEO score lets you monitor how well your target keywords are performing, and the automatic smart-linking feature helps you build internal links around them.
Dynamic crawler control gives you real authority over how search engines crawl your site, and custom permalinks work across different custom taxonomies. It can feel a bit complex if you’re just starting out with SEO, though.
#3 Rank Math
Rank Math is a genuinely flexible SEO plugin. It lets you import and export data from other SEO plugins, and its code inserter lets you drop custom code into the header, footer, or around your content without touching theme files.
It also tracks 404 errors on your site, its rich snippets option helps pull in more clicks from search results, and it covers social media optimization too. The Author Highlighter shows the author’s name directly in search results.
#4 All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO Pack is one of the longest-running SEO plugins in the WordPress space, and its feature set backs that up. Image optimization, social sharing, and SERP tracking are all built in, giving you most of what you’d need to optimize a site.
The backlink builder helps you submit your site to relevant directories, and the built-in W3C validator checks the markup on your posts and pages. Image optimization runs automatically in the background.
#5 The SEO Framework
The SEO Framework markup pages and posts with all the SEO fundamentals covered – rich snippets, structured data, and the rest. It’s built to help your pages rank without a lot of extra fuss.
Setup is genuinely quick, though it doesn’t give you as many customization knobs as some of the others on this list. It optimizes every image you upload automatically, using ALT and TITLE attributes appropriately.
#6 Slim SEO
Slim SEO is a fully automated plugin built to handle SEO with almost no manual setup. It’s a lean, complete solution aimed at getting your site more search traffic without a bloated settings panel.
It handles category, product, brand, and block placeholders automatically and claims to make sites 50-70% faster than heavier SEO plugins. It’s free, quick to set up, and includes a video sitemap plus a search engine reporting tool.
#7 Squirrly SEO 2020
Squirrly SEO leans into content optimization specifically, handling rich snippets and social snippets while keeping an eye on your broader content marketing strategy.
It checks your site’s progress on a weekly basis and includes social-intelligence features to help you shape better content. The plugin bundles a set of digital tools focused on keeping your site visible on the major search engines.
#8 Premium SEO Pack
Premium SEO Pack focuses on automation – tracking 404 errors, handling 301 redirects, and tying up the loose ends that tend to pile up on a WordPress site. It’s especially handy if you’re changing your WordPress install’s directory or migrating a site.
The Quick Snippet Editor makes editing search snippets simple, and it also handles Open Graph and Twitter Card images.
#9 AMP for WP
AMP for WP makes your site mobile-friendly by adding accelerated mobile page functionality automatically. That makes pages load noticeably faster for mobile visitors, and you can turn it on for your whole site in just a few clicks.
The Custom AMP Editor lets you add different content types to your AMP pages, and mobile redirection and unlimited color schemes are both included. It also connects with Google Analytics, and none of it requires touching any code.
#10 SmartCrawl
SmartCrawl is a useful pick for marketers who want their site’s SEO and uptime handled together – it helps drive more traffic while keeping your site stable, in part through CDN integration that speeds up delivery for visitors.
It also ships with AMP and SSL support and detailed documentation for every feature, though the interface takes a little longer to get comfortable with than some of the other plugins here.
Picking an SEO Plugin
That covers some of the best SEO plugins available for WordPress right now. Any one of these can move the needle on your site’s traffic – it’s really about matching the feature set to how much control you want over the details versus how much you’d rather have handled automatically.
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