Looking to get your WordPress SEO off on the right foot, but feel overwhelmed by the number of SEO plugins available? Keep reading. Run a search for “SEO” in the WordPress plugins directory, and you’ll get 49 pages of results. There are 20 plugins per page, so that’s 980 plugins! #overwhelming Now, I’ll level with you: there’s no such thing as a definitive list of the best SEO plugins for WordPress. These things are subjective. For that reason, the ones below are merely those I’ve had good experiences with over the years, and some that we now use on the Ahrefs blog (which gets ~240k monthly visits from Google).
Let’s kick things
Off with the one you’ve probably heard of already. However, we don’t recommend paying much attention to this. The functionality is very basic and looks at company data things like the placement of exact-match keywords in titles, subheadings, and the content itself. None of these things are major ranking factors, and aiming for a perfect score will often make your content worse. The Readability analysis is slightly more useful, as this tells you how easy or difficult your content is to read (Flesch Reading Ease score). It also grades your sentence lengths, subheading distribution—that kind of thing. Ensure that long, multi-topic pages on your site are well-structured and broken into distinct logical sections.
Best SEO ensure that
Each section has an associated anchor with a descriptive name (i.e., not just “Section 2.1”), and that your page includes a “table of contents” which links to the IT Email List individual anchors. Because the plugin runs in the background all the time, it can continuously check for broken links and alert you by email should any pop-up. But perhaps the best feature is that you can fix links in a couple of clicks, and in bulk. For example, here’s a broken link that the plugin found on my website. If I click “unlink,” then the dead link will be removed from the post. So, what’s the downside? Unfortunately, the plugin can slow down your website and use a lot of bandwidth. It’s not something that we would recommend running if you have super cheap or slow hosting.
