There are tens of thousands of plugins for WordPress users. Knowing them all is impossible – some of them are over-hyped and do nothing special, while others are underhyped and probably the must-have plugins.
Achieving success with SEO is not easy, and with the regular Google updates, there are too many protocols to follow. Using plugins on your website can help reduce the hassles. You need to know what plugins help and how they make SEO easier or better.
Knowing where to start looking for the best plugin recommendations has often been a problem online. You cannot be too sure if the recommendations have been tried and tested. Therefore, we at SI Global are here to give you an honest recommendation on the right plugins to try. In this article, we will highlight 5 must-have WordPress plugins for SEO which every good SEO agency should use for its clients.
Our List of 5 SEO Plugins for WordPress Sites
Yoast SEO
This is one of the most famous and most used plugins on WordPress sites. It is also the main SEO plugin used by Ahrefs. Here is a list of things that you can do with it:
Create XML sitemap
Exclude certain content (no-index)
Verify Webmaster Tools (e.g. Bing, Google, Yandex, etc.)
Optimize your AMP pages
Create title and meta descriptions
It also helps optimize the content for target keywords
All-in-one-SEO Pack
This plugin is like Yoast SEO. It offers almost everything Yoast has but proves to be a bit more improved. It is better in terms of customization. It has some extra features like:
Add site links
Autogenerate meta descriptions
Edit robot.txt file
Edit .htaccess file without FTP*
Block referral spam and bad bots
Rank Math
Perhaps this would be the most powerful WordPress plugin for SEO. It is user-friendly and full of very useful features such as:
Redirection (301, 302, 307, 410, 451)
Rich snippets markup
404 error monitoring
Google Search Console Integration
Card Previews for Facebook and Twitter
It makes redirecting and fixing errors so much easier. It also tells you who is referring to your site.
Shortpixel
This tool compresses images and optimizes for the website. Large images slow the website’s loading speed which is not good for visitors. Optimized images have a very positive effect on the page speed so this tool is a must-have to improve your SEO.
It offers three options for pixel compression – lossy, glossy, and lossless. It also supports Retina 2x images. This tool is compatible with PNG, GIF, JPG, and PDF files.
Anti-spam
This plugin filters spam comments without the need for a captcha. Having spammy comments is bad for your SEO, and removing them is always the best thing. With this plugin, you can avoid spammy comments without hassle. No need to worry about making links no-follow or manually deleting comments.
These are our recommendations, but there are numerous other alternatives out there. If you have any recommendations that can help our readers do feel free to share them in the comments below.