Best Free SEO Plugins For WordPress
SEO is vital for online content and the best way to optimize your content is to use free SEO plugins on a WordPress website. These plugins, with the added advantage of being free, help you speed up your work, remove mistakes, and help organize your content for better SEO delivery.
Be it Yoast SEO, or best plugins for the WooCommerce website, we’ve brought you all in this article.
There are many all-in-one SEO plugins for WordPress websites, but these are mostly good for beginners. These simple plugins should be replaced by specific SEO plugins when you become an expert.
That helps you customize your optimization better. To help you in your journey in SEO, we’ll list down the best SEO plugins for your WordPress website.
Make sure that you understand how to use these best SEO plugins for WordPress otherwise your efforts won’t bear fruit.
Why SEO is necessary
That’s important to understand because you may end up spending a lot of money if your content optimization is not done right. SEO is essential as it helps rank your website through Google’s algorithms.
This generates organic traffic and helps build an audience that lasts a long time without further investment.
Without SEO, you’ll need a good amount of marketing and that too will be short-lived. It’s a kind of a continuous struggle situation where you’ll need continuous spending to stay on top of search results.
That’s why SEO is necessary for digital marketing.
Why use SEO plugins for WordPress?
Next, we have this question, why use SEO plugins for WordPress websites. The answer is simple but must be understood and effectively implemented. SEO plugins for WordPress help your tasks a great deal.
For instance, the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress helps you optimize your on-page SEO settings. This would otherwise cost you a lot of time and effort that Yoast SEO plugins have automated.
Other SEO plugins for WordPress websites help you spot and fix on-page and off-page SEO errors. They help you automate the processes and provide valuable analytical and quantitative insights. Considering the importance of the best free SEO plugins for WordPress, we’ll advise you to get them right away and learn to use them ASAP.
5 Best Free SEO plugins for WordPress website
Free SEO plugins don’t cost you money and yet, they are super effective and highly valuable.
1. Yoast
Its features are numerous and help people in their SEO settings immensely.
Its major tasks include on-page SEO settings such as H1 title optimization, image alt text settings, keyword density, SEO titles, Meta descriptions, Meta tags, and text optimization for better SEO rankings.
Apart from that, it also helps in XML site maps, faster loading times through effective data management, and overall site health checking.
Pros
- Accessible and user friendly
- Helps in SEO proofreading
- Checks your readability score and makes rectifications in your writing
- Yoast suggests you for right keywords
Cons
- Yoast doesn’t always understand the intent of your content and suggests irrelevant changes
- One might find it challenging to increase the scores
2. W3 Total Cache
Over time, your website accumulates data and cache that become useless, and indeed harmful, for your website. W3 Total Cache helps in website rankings by helping speeding up the website and decreasing loading time. Particularly effective is its optimization for mobile-friendly websites.
It helps accelerate a mobile-friendly framework and reduces load time significantly. The conversion rate increases too as users have a better experience on-site.
It improves overall site performance and helps you automate these settings. For a WordPress website, this is a must-have free SEO plugin.
Pros
- Reasonable and affordable pricing
- Under WordPress Cache plugins
- Has mobile detection
- The core products are 100% free
Cons
- Not user friendly
3. The SEO Framework
The SEO Framework is another time-saver and utility maximizer-free SEO WordPress plugin that helps your work a great deal. Loaded with free features, no ads, and no premium advocacy, this is a great plugin to have on your site.
This plugin is preconfigured and you only need to install it to start benefitting from it immediately. There are no complicated settings and for beginners, this is one of the best free SEO plugins for WordPress.
Your website will improve right after you install and activate this SEO plugin.
Pros
- It helps in generating critical SEO meta tags in different languages
- SEO settings are highly customizable
- AD-Free
- The whole plugin free along with its features
Cons
- The free version won’t give access to features like on-page SEO content analysis
4. RankMath SEO
RankMath is another amazing free SEO WordPress plugin that helps you rank better on SERPs. In terms of automation, its features top many charts and have garnered positive feedback from the majority of users. With Google Search Console integration, it’s a great find.
Its setup wizard is easy for newcomers and beginners in the SEO world and it configures without any problems. One of its great features is Google Schema Markup and Snippets integration that conforms to modern trends in SEO.
With many default settings optimized for the great first experience, this is a must-have plugin for WordPress.
Pros
- Easy to use
- Settings can be imported from other plugins too
- The plugin along with settings are free
- The plugin can customize up to 5 keywords
Cons
- It is difficult to move from RankMath to other SEO plugins later
5. AllinOneSEO Pack
This is another one among the Best free SEO plugins for WordPress and has been around since 2007. Over the years, this plugin has developed a reputation of its own and now is trusted by millions of WordPress users.
Its features include XML site maps with rich snippets, SEO tools for social media and website integration, page optimization for better SEO results, easy-to-start interface, local SEO, WooCommerce setup, and much more. It’s a must-have plugin for your WordPress website.
Pros
- Editing the title along with title and description is much easy
- Access to other plugins happens in a hassle-free way
- Helps in optimizing the title of the site for different search engines
- Easy to use and set up
Cons
- Content score and SEO analysis is difficult
- Importing data from search console is tough
- Simple SSL
Google recently made a change for visitors to access the websites using the Google search engine. Googles prioritize the rankings of such websites that have SSL certificates for a secured connection (HTTPS). But Google, at the same time, doesn’t show non-secure sites.
Indeed, you can purchase an SSL certificate via hosting providers. Still, one needs to configure the entire domain setup, which will be recognizable on the SSL address in WordPress, which is an easy task and isn’t a tough one for beginners.
One can skip learning the strict codes of HTACCESS file’s configuration by using the Simple SSL plugin in the WordPress interface.
All you need is to download the plugin, make the web domain’s HTTPS version the default address and leave the plugin to do the rest.
The plugins take care of the encryption behind SSL, and encryption protocols, as they are continuously updated for protecting against cyber-attacks.
Pros
- Provides premium email facility for its customers
- Checks websites for an SSL certificate
- The plugin works for all kinds of SSL certificate
- Handles common issue with SSL on WordPress
Cons
- Need to keep the plugin active all the time
- Slight performance impact is visible
- Easy Table of Contents
A table of contents is excellent for one as they provide user-friendly articles, but it is also a good one for your SEO.
The Easy Table of Contents SEO plugin provides a table of content that helps the readers redirect to the key content.
This is an automatic feature that adds an HTML to the web page or web post, creating a hyperlink internally within the page.
One can skip the hard-code coding links of the editor, and this plugin automatically generates all the links relevant to the content headings appearing on the page.
If you want to change the style of your table, you can do it via the plugin’s dashboard settings.
Pros
- Provides a simplified version of the content
- Increases readability score
- Generates links
Cons
- A bit time taking
- WP Super Cache
Maintaining a good page speed is a real difficult task now a day. And finding the suitable method to support it is imperative. The WP Super Cache plugin helps one to improve the page speed on the site.
So, you need to install the plugin and start the caching feature. Wait for the plugin to do the rest work.
The plugin allows you to test and check your loading speed among all the web pages on your website, using tools like GTMetrix and Pingdom tools.
Pros
- Easy to use and setup
- CDN supported
- Provides email notifications
- Page compression and Custom Caching
Cons
- Late updates for Premium Functionalities
- WP Internal Link Juicer
The WP Internal Link Juicer is a plugin that helps you optimize the website’s internal link structure. This plugin allows you to internally link phrases and keywords to your comments and posts with relevant pages, categories, tags, and blog posts.
To summarize, it helps you to create internal links, but on the contrary, it avoids practicing fraud SEO techniques that can cause you to pay hefty penalty charges.
Pros
- Quick and easy internal links
- AI chooses relevant keywords
- Provides detailed reports
Cons
- Anchor text is not prefect
- MonsterInsights
All the SEO efforts will go in vain if you cannot track your website’s performance and analytics, where MonsterInsights is the best.
This plugin makes your Google Analytics data show on your dashboard but in a user-friendly interface.
Via this plugin, you can check the people’s traffic and the engagement on your website. Also, it has a content reporting feature that helps you to monitor the traffic on your website. You can track the most visited page on your website.
It mi9ght happen that Google analytics feels very complex to you, and hence you can install the plugin MonsterInsights as a great alternative. This plugin helps you select and improve your data without logging in to your Google Analytics account.
Pros
- Easy for installation and setup
- Easy customization
- No third-party interference
- Imports and exports report quickly
Cons
- Free version gives very limited access
- Comparatively costly
- Redirection
You can have the plugin Redirection for free from the plugin repository of WordPress. Using this plugin, one benefits from forced direction from a retired URL to a new one preventing visitors from getting a 404 error message.
Why going for tough coding 301 redirects into the HTACCESS document on your website while you can manage all of it just by using one plugin. You can control it via a simple user interface just through your WordPress dashboard.
Through the Redirection plugin, one can use it helpful, gets timely updates, and is very safe. Not just the 301-redirect function, but the plugin also helps one report errors on the other servers, like broken links (404 errors) that include information about how the access to the error occurred.
Pros
- Features good quality content
- Necessary to remove all the middle redirects
Cons
- It can direct to null or invalid pages
Our best pick from free SEO WordPress plugins
Now is the time to choose the best one among the list of best free SEO plugins for WordPress websites. Our choice is the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress.
In our opinion, if you’re going to use only one plugin on your WordPress, it must be Yoast. And if you’re not using any plugins on your website, then you must get Yoast and start using it from this moment.
Harmful SEO plugins that you need to take care of-
While you want your WordPress SEO plugins to work for your site, you will find many options to choose among which some would be harmful. Selecting one of those plugins might-
- Make your website easily vulnerable.
- Make outdated and unsupportive.
- Crash your site as the existing site code might not match your new one.
- Might not go through enough testing
- Or very rarely, but the plugins can turn out to be a scam, and can the fraudsters can have easy access to your site.
This is why you should always have a developer for your website whose approval should be considered before installing them.
Final word
The final word for this article on best free SEO plugins for WordPress is this; always use plugins and use them effectively. With time, you’ll understand why we emphasize using plugins for WordPress websites. The traffic that you’ll get on your website will be a testament to the effectiveness of these plugins.
Make sure to explore other options as well. And let us know in the comments below if you find any other plugin more useful than these above ones. Or, if you think any of these plugins do not deliver on the promise they make, let us know as well. Share this article with others and help them learn better
