There are thousands of free and paid plugins you can add to your WordPress website to help achieve a variety of goals. However, adding too may plugins to your website can slow it down. This is why every website owner should revisit their plugins on an annual basis to see if there are any more powerful options to choose from. When it comes to organic optimization, these are the best SEO plugins for WordPress.
Yoast SEO
SEO Yoast is available in a free and paid version. This tool provides you with quick and easy suggestions on how to optimize each page and post with keyword density, heading tags, layout, word count, meta description, link building, and more. It is a perfect guide for DIY website operators, as well as a quick-check for tenured online marketers. If not SEO Yoast, the All in one SEO pack has advanced features for ecommerce websites.
Broken Link Checker
Adding internal and external links is an important part of organically optimizing your website. However, over time, links go bad. Either the external content is removed, or you delete a page or post from your website, resulting in an internal link to nowhere. These bad links can ding your performance, but who has time to go in and check every link? With Broken Link Checker, you don’t have to! It checks your links for quality and lets you know when one needs to be replaced. Even better, this plugin is free.
Jetpack
This is one of the few plugins designed by WordPress. It is a dual-purpose plugin that offers a variety of features, but to benefit, you need to upgrade to a paid version. Security scans, website performance, backups, image optimization, and a variety of analytics are included. In terms of optimization, Jetpack allows you to customize your content titles, site names, and taglines for ultimate keyword optimization.
SEO Friendly Images
This powerful plugin allows you to optimize your images and media easily, which is an underutilized method of organic SEO. It automatically fills in Alt tags and descriptions with relevant page and post information, organically boosting image and media traffic by up to 70 percent. You can fill out this information manually, but this paid plugin will do it for you automatically.
Google Analytics
You should have Google Analytics set up for your website, but you can also add it as a free WP plugin for at-a-glance and in-depth analytics. This is a powerful tool that allows you to dig into your website traffic, including what cities/country your traffic is coming from, traffic to each page, traffic by time of day, multipage visits, sitewide keyword performance, and an endless option of custom reports.
While you can find several plugins for any type of feature and function, you must avoid the temptation to upload multiple plugins that perform the same or similar functions. More is not always better, and many plugins will essentially compete with one another, or at the very least, slow down your website performance. Instead, update your website annually with the best SEO plugins for WordPress.