In this blog post, we are going to share a list of the best WordPress SEO plugins 2023 that you can use to enhance the search engine presence of your website and generate more traffic organically.
Search engines are the major source of traffic for websites, and if you are not optimizing your website accordingly, you are leaving a lot of stuff on the table. Therefore, if you are a website owner, I will highly recommend you give some time to optimize your website for search engines.
The best thing is that the WordPress SEO plugins mentioned in this list make it extremely easy to optimize your website for search engines.
So, without any further ado, let’s get started –
The 5 Best WordPress SEO Plugins In 2023
1. Yoast SEO
Link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/
Yoast SEO is arguably the most popular SEO plugin, packed with dozens of amazing features that make optimizing your website for SEO like a cakewalk. It currently has over 5 million active installations with a superb 25,770 5-star ratings on WordPress.org.
Yoast SEO boasts a very simple yet beautiful, easy-to-use interface that makes it a user-friendly SEO plugin, even for people with no technical knowledge. Optimizing your website’s pages and blog posts for SEO is quite simple and easy with its on-page SEO checklists.
While the free version of Yoast SEO seems quite sufficient for most users, Yoast SEO offers a premium version of the tool that unlocks advanced functionalities. If you are a complete beginner in SEO or have doubts about the plugin, you can go to the Yoast SEO community forum to ask your questions.
Yoast also has a blog where you learn about SEO, case studies, find courses, and SEO tips for beginners, intermediate, and even advanced users. Most articles on the Yoast SEO blog are quite thorough and can help you have a better understanding of SEO and help you kickstart your SEO journey.
The premium version of Yoast SEO is available just at $89 for a website, making it a very budget-friendly option for anyone. However, if your budget doesn’t allow you to spend $89 on the premium version, you can go with the free plugin. The free version of Yoast SEO is quite powerful, and it easily beats so many other SEO WordPress plugins.
Notable features:
- Checklist-type on-page SEO optimization makes it extremely easy to optimize your web page for SEO, even without prior knowledge of SEO and more.
- This plugin lets you optimize your web page’s snippet for search engines. This allows you to see how your webpage will appear on search engines, and you can also adjust meta description, permalink, and others to make your page’s snippet SEO rich and engaging.
- Yoast SEO features a readability check function that lets you understand how easy it is to read your website’s content. It also suggests tips such as breaking your paragraphs, including bullet lists, headers, and more.
- Yoast SEO also scans for duplicate content on your webpage or web post to help you avoid duplicating content and interlink your webpages.
- The premium version of the Yoast SEO plugin allows you to access redirect manager, interlinking content, content insight, ad-free experience in the backend, and prioritized customer support for any sort of issues.
- Yoast SEO is one of the most frequently updated SEO WordPress plugins on the internet.
- Yoast SEO also has a strong knowledge base and blog that can help you kickstart your SEO journey and achieve great heights. This is the only SEO plugin developer that offers its users such an extensive knowledge base.
2. Rank Math SEO
Link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/seo-by-rank-math/#developers
Despite being a newcomer, Rank Math SEO has gained the trust of millions of people all because of the features and functionality it offers. It was launched in November 2020, and within a year, it has reached a mark of over 1 million active installations.
Plus, the plugin holds superb 5-star ratings from over 3,831 reviews on WordPress.org. This shows how many people trust the plugin for its reliability. Plus, the thing that makes Rank Math SEO the best WordPress SEO plugin is how easy it is to use.
Rank Math SEO combines the power of multiple plugins and brings everything into a very easy-to-manage plugin dashboard. This plugin comes with Google Schema Markup, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics.
Additionally, you also get access to a powerful LSI keyword tool that gives you a detailed list of relevant keyword variations of your focus keyword to help you optimize your pages carefully for search engines. Even though you can find such keyword suggestions using a simple Google search, this just makes the entire process smooth.
Other than that, you can use the plugin to manage the on-page SEO of your posts, pages, product pages, and other stuff. Rank Math SEO also features additional functions such as creating XML sitemaps, smart redirection manager, local SEO, interlinking suggestions, and more.
Notable features:
- Rank Math SEO is a feature-rich WordPress plugin that reduces the need to install multiple plugins on your website. This makes it one of the must have WordPress plugins on this list.
- Each post, page, or product that you publish on your website will undergo a thorough SEO analysis that tests that page for over 30 SEO factors. This supercharges your website’s SEO and helps you rank higher on SERPs.
- The user interface is pretty simple and easy to use. Even if you don’t have any technical knowledge, you will be able to use this plugin very easily.
- Even though manually updating alt and title tags for images is a great practice, if you forget to do so, Rank Math SEO automatically adds those tags to images if those images are missing them.
- The 404 redirection manager is great to find pages that are not working or loading properly. You can also redirect all those empty or deleted pages to a different page with updated information.
- You can use the plugin to create XML sitemaps, but the more impressive thing is that whenever you update any of your dated posts, Rank Math SEO pings the changes to search engines automatically. This is a great feature for those who work on niches that need to be updated frequently.
- The latest version of Rank Math SEO comes with the Rich Snippets feature that currently supports six different snippets, including Article, Product, Recipes, Video, Events, and Local Business.
- Rank Math SEO also features breadcrumbs feature that reduces the need to install any additional plugin for breadcrumbs.
3. All In One SEO
Link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
All In One SEO is another great contender to be on the list of best WordPress SEO plugins, and for a good reason. It is a strong rival of Yoast SEO, and it is tough to say which of these plugins is better in comparison.
The one major thing that makes AIO SEO stand out amongst others is the simplicity and easiness of this plugin. This plugin is so easy to use that even a novice with no technical knowledge can install it and optimize their website’s SEO like a professional in no time.
However, that doesn’t mean that AIO SEO lacks anything. It is one of the most comprehensive WordPress SEO plugins out there. It considers so many on-page SEO ranking factors and then recommends all of the possible optimizations that you can make to improve your search engine rankings.
The best thing about AIO SEO is that it automatically detects most of the information and optimizes settings accordingly. For example, if you are a beginner, you don’t need to get into complex stuff such as optimizing meta tags, titles, and more for Google or other search engines.
However, we recommend you learn a bit more about meta tags, titles, metadata, and other stuff and optimize your posts on your own to get the most out of it. This plugin also lets you manually optimize the Robot.txt file to enable web crawlers to crawl the content of your website.
Notable features:
- It is a very comprehensive plugin that tests your pages for over 30 SEO ranking factors and then suggests possible optimization for better search engine rankings.
- It supports XML and RSS sitemaps.
- It boasts the schema markup function that can help you get better CTR, help search engines to understand your website’s content better, and improve your overall rankings.
- TruSEO on-page analysis tool helps you automatically add title tags, meta descriptions, keywords, and other stuff that are needed for the proper on-page SEO optimization.
- If you own an eCommerce WordPress website, its advanced WooCommerce SEO function will help you optimize product pages, categories, and more very easily.
- AIO SEO also lets you optimize your website’s content and thumbnails for social media sites so that you can improve the overall CTR of the website.
- The premium version of the plugin also allows you to create Google News sitemaps for a better ranking on the Google News section, which can ultimately help you drive more traffic.
4. The SEO Framework
Link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/autodescription/
For those of you who are very concerned about the speed of your WordPress website and looking for a lightweight SEO plugin, The SEO Framework is going to be the perfect choice for you. The only drawback of this plugin is that you need to do most of the tasks independently, which can be an issue for beginners.
But if you hold a basic knowledge of SEO and understand how it works, this will be a solid WordPress SEO plugin for you. This plugin currently has over 100,000 active installations with superb 5-star ratings on WordPress.org.
The best thing about this plugin is that it is completely free. There is no premium version of this plugin. Therefore, the team behind this treats this plugin as a premium plugin already. This is the main reason many professionals consider The SEO Framework as a perfect alternative to Yoast.
There are some premium add-ons, though, that you can get if you want to extend the functionality. But the fact that you will have the ability to pick what functionality you want makes this plugin an ultimately great choice.
The SEO Framework is more like a streamlined and clutter-free version of Yoast. The user interface of the plugin might look a bit intimidating to beginners who are shifting to the plugin from Yoast; if you are willing to spend some time learning, it can be the perfect companion for the SEO of your website.
Notable features:
- This plugin is completely free and doesn’t sell anything to you. You can use the plugin on as many websites as you want without worrying about anything.
- The SEO Framework features almost all essential functions that one might need for SEO. Even after that, if you want to enhance functionality, you can go for premium extensions.
- It features a visually colored meter that provides an easy way to understand how your posts will perform on SERPs. It is quite similar to Yoast’s SEO score function.
- The SEO Framework features a local SEO extension that can help you optimize your website for local businesses.
- The Comment Spam extensions protect your website from spam comments. Enabling this extension can be a solid way to replace the need of using comment spam protection plugins such as Akismet and others.
- Most SEO settings have been preconfigured to perform better in SEO, making it a great choice for beginners. Even if you are an intermediate, you will not need to modify any of the settings.
- One of the things that help The SEO Framework stand amongst the competition is that instead of using a focus keyword, it uses the focus subject function. This thing protects you from writing spammy-looking content and encourages natural writing.
5. Broken Link Checker
Link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/broken-link-checker/
Search Engine Optimization isn’t only about writing thorough articles, optimizing interlinks, headings, images, and more, but it also requires you to actively track all the broken parts of your websites, including broken links.
Even though a few SEO plugins such as Rank Math SEO or others come with inbuilt broken link checkers, those features are not fully designed to find broken images and other things. Manually fixing this issue can take days to complete, and in such a scenario, plugins like Broken Link Checker come into play.
This plugin thoroughly scans your website, finds all the broken links, and shows them to you in a list format. From that list, you get the ability to either delete those links or replace them with updated links.
The thing that makes it one of the best WordPress plugins is its ability to run completely on the background on its own. You just need to activate the plugin and start scanning, and it will keep the plugin running in the background and notify you whenever a new link breaks.
However, due to constant scanning functionality, this plugin can put some load on the performance of your website, and it might make your website slow. To avoid such issues, we recommend you disable this plugin in the dashboard and enable it only to fix broken links.
Notable features:
- The Broken Link Checker is the fastest and easiest way to identify and fix broken links.
- The plugin eradicates the need to go to each page to see broken links. You can have the list of all the broken links right on the dashboard.
- This plugin also allows you to search and filter links using a variety of settings, filters, and keywords.
- Along with finding broken links and images, this plugin constantly monitors external and internal links in the comments, custom fields, the blogroll, and more.
- If you want to keep the text intact but want to remove the links, you can do that too and even that in a single click.
- You can also configure this plugin to show broken links differently on posts. Plus, this plugin also allows you to block search engines from following broken links.
Closing Comments
There you have a list of the best SEO plugins for WordPress 2023.
SEO is one of the most important activities for a website, but it can be very overwhelming and complicated for many beginners and even for intermediate users. However, if you are just starting your journey to SEO, you should stick with the basics, and once you gain more and more knowledge, you can proceed with the advanced techniques.
If you are just in the initial phase, using the best WordPress SEO plugin can be more than sufficient. If used correctly, it can improve the quality and quantity of organic website traffic within a couple of weeks.
If you are not sure which WordPress SEO plugin will be the best for you, I recommend using Rank Math SEO as that offers some really great features and functionality. You can also go with Yoast, as that is one of the oldest and most trusted WordPress SEO plugins out there.
With that said, here I am wrapping up this article. I hope it has helped you pick the right WordPress SEO plugin for your website.