If you are running a website made with WordPress, you probably want the best SEO plugin. And as earlier said, since search engines are the most trusted source of traffic, in order to make your website SEO-optimised, you will need a very good WordPress SEO Plugin to back you up.
It should be noted that just having a good SEO plugin may not suffice to rank higher in search results since you will need to know how to use them. Also, you will have to structure well your articles and distribute well your keywords.
In this post, we will be discussing some of the best SEO Plugins for WordPress website owners to use this 2020. So, if you were having a hard time deciding which SEO plugin is good for you, read this post till the end.
What is SEO?
SEO (Search engine optimization) is the process of growing the quality and amount of website traffic by increasing the visibility of webpages on the site to search engines.
Search Engine Optimisation refers to the improvement of unpaid or "organic" results which excludes direct traffic and paid traffic as well as traffic from other social media platforms and backlinks.
Additionally, it may target different kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links is another SEO tactic.
You can read more about SEO from this article on Wikipedia.
What to take note of
Note that there are many good SEO WordPress plugins. But you cannot use more than one SEO plugin at the same time on a single website.
And as we mention above, although and SEO plugin is good, you will also have to master its usage in order to get its full potentials.
4 Best WordPress SEO Plugins 2020
1. Yoast SEO
This is the #1 most used WordPress SEO plugin and it is very easy to understand and use. The plugin is free but also has a premium version (Yoast Premium) which offers you further ways of optimising your website.
With this plugin, you can easily add SEO titles, meta description and keyphrases to your posts and pages. Also, you can use it to add Open Graph metadata and social media images to your articles.
By connecting it to Google search console, it helps optimise your contents and if well used will help you rank well in search engines. Yoast SEO plugin generates an XML sitemap for your site which is required to set up your site in Search Console. Then sitemap is needed for Google to easily crawl all the URLs on your website.
The free version of Yoast SEO may be enough to rank well on search engines, but with the premium version which allows you for example to use multiple key phrases, you could even make your website rank further higher in search engines.
Some features you get if you purchase the premium version of Yoast work $89 includes;
- Optimisation of your site for the right keywords for your users
- Avoiding dead links in your site
- Get previews for sharing on Twitter and Facebook
- Content quality and link suggestions as you write
- And much more.
2. Rankmath
The second in our list of best WP SEO plugins is Rankmath. This plugin is completely free and also very easy to use.
Once installed and activated, it will auto-generate the SEO title and meta description. But you can always modify the meta description since Rankmath will automatically choose the first 160 words in the first paragraph. In situations where your meta description isn't part of the first paragraph, you will have to provide it yourself.
Another aspect we love about Rankmath is the keyword suggestion it has. Each time you write a post and wants to add keywords, it will scan the contents and makes some suggestions while you are typing the keyword.
The plugin comes with a setup dashboard and during configuration, you can import SEO details from other SEO plugins.
To use it properly, you will also have to connect it to Search console as well as other SEO webmaster tools.
Once installed and activated, it will auto-generate the SEO title and meta description. But you can always modify the meta description since Rankmath will automatically choose the first 160 words in the first paragraph. In situations where your meta description isn't part of the first paragraph, you will have to provide it yourself.
Another aspect we love about Rankmath is the keyword suggestion it has. Each time you write a post and wants to add keywords, it will scan the contents and makes some suggestions while you are typing the keyword.
The plugin comes with a setup dashboard and during configuration, you can import SEO details from other SEO plugins.
To use it properly, you will also have to connect it to Search console as well as other SEO webmaster tools.
This plugin is one of the closest to Yoast SEO and offers many add-ons to help you optimise your website. And what is good about it is that its premium version is more affordable than Yoast.
It comes with a set of tools that will help you easily add SEO title and meta tags, open graph meta tags, XML sitemaps, image sitemaps, and more.
And just like Rankmath, the free version allows you to add multiple SEO keywords.
Get Pro Version
Download free version
It comes with a set of tools that will help you easily add SEO title and meta tags, open graph meta tags, XML sitemaps, image sitemaps, and more.
And just like Rankmath, the free version allows you to add multiple SEO keywords.
Download free version
4. SEOpress
SEOpress is one of the popular WordPress SEO plugins and it comes in both and free and a paid version. The premium version is significantly cheaper than Yoast SEO and seems to be good to go choice for those who things Yoast SEO Premium is costly.
The premium version of SEOpress will cost you just $39 for unlimited sites.
It has all the key features you will find in other SEO plugins for WordPress like meta title, description, open graph support, image and content XML sitemaps, redirects, breadcrumbs, etc.
So, guys, that will be all about our list of best WordPress plugins we recommend you choose from. We are actually using Yoast on one of our websites myviptuto.com and the results are pretty good so far since the site is still less than a year.
Yoast may not be the best for you, but at least we advise you go in for any of the above.