7 Best WordPress Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Plugins (2022)

Today we will show you seven WordPress Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugins that we think are the best combination to make an SEO-friendly website. Whether you’re making an eCommerce store, an affiliate marketing website, an agency, or listing websites, these are the plugins you want on your website to be your competition on search results.

So let’s go. What’s up, everyone?

The WordPress SEO plugin gives your content the best chance of beating your competitors on search engines. Now, when it comes to search engine optimization, there are only two types of optimization, on-page, and off-page.

For on-page SEO, we are really looking at optimizing the Meta titles, description, internal linking, readability, and basically how you structure your content.

Another subsection of on-page SEO is Technical SEO, which covers optimizing for site speed, crawlability of your website, sitemap, redirects, structured data, and many other things.

Now, we will not be talking about off-page SEO because those are the optimizations that cannot be controlled on the website itself, like backlinking, guest posting, keynote speaking, etc.

Those are the things you do out of your website to build authority.

So we will only be focusing on plugins that will help with on-page SEO.

But here’s the problem.

If you go to the WordPress repository and you search for SEO, you will find thousands of plugins and it is really hard to know which are the ones that will do the best job for you and your website.

So we have tested lots of plugins to find the best combination for you.

So let’s start with the first plugin.

Honestly, Rang Math is my number one SEO plugin regardless if I’ve worked with them or not.

I’m a blogger by trade and in the past, I’ve used All-in-One SEO and Yoast SEO Premium version. But once I learned about Rank Math, I tried it on one of my sites and immediately something sparked. If you just go to the link in the description, you will see the feature comparisons between all these popular SEO plugins and you will probably understand why I love Rank Math and why I decided to join them. A lot of things that you have to pay for in other SEO plugins, you can get free with Rank Math and you’re not losing out on the quality as well, even though it is free.

I’m not the only one who loves Rank Math.

These people love them too.

If you have been following some WordPress tutorials on YouTube and blogs, you will probably know about Rank Math. But I don’t want to make this into a promotional video.

So let’s talk about the stuff you can do with Rank Math.

Now let’s say that I’m writing a piece an article titled Best WordPress Hosting and under the Rank Math tab on the top right, you can type in the focus keyword and it will give you a score out of 100 based on the best SEO practices as you can see here.

So our recommendation is to complete your article before optimizing your content.

And what I need to be clear about here is that all of these are best practices.

It is not a guarantee that your content will rank highly, but it gives the content the best chance of beating your competition. Furthermore, these are best practices that are constantly updated.

As you know, Google’s algorithm is continually updating so we have to keep up with time.

Additionally, you can add and optimize up to five focused keywords to rank for a tangent of keywords similar to Google Autofill.

If you type in a keyword, there will be keyword suggestions that are super helpful.

Another cool feature I want to show you about Rank Math, but this is in the pro version is that you can directly see Google trends on the focus keyword you have entered.

You can select the location, it can be worldwide, the United States and all these cool countries, and you can select up to twelve months’ worth of data.

So you know the focus topic you’re targeting is currently trending.

And here’s a tip.

If you see a graph here whether it is trendy or not, it means the keyword or topic has search volume. Another awesome feature Rank Math has for its free users is the Content AI.

It is the only WordPress SEO plugin that uses artificial intelligence to analyze your content.

If you couple this with the On-Page SEO analysis, it will supercharge your content and give your article the best chance of ranking.

The On-Page SEO analysis makes sure that your content is SEO-friendly while the Content AI analyses the data on the web to give you smart suggestions to further improve your content.

So to use the Content AI, all you need to do is to select a country where your target audience is.

Let’s say that it is worldwide. You enter a focus keyword and you click on Research.

The AI will analyze all the content on the web based on the location and the focus keyword you have entered and it will compare it to your article to give you some intelligent suggestions and recommendations. It would suggest to you the approximate words you should write on your content. This is helpful for you to note if a topic requires long-form content or just a short article will do. It will also recommend the number of internal and external links you should add to your content, what headings to be used and how many to use, and the number of images and videos to use. Not sure what keywords to be used on your content?

It would suggest quite a number of them here as well as the related keywords.

What about the keywords in the headings?

You will get these suggestions; keywords in the SEO title.

SEO description. The AI analyses the web and tells you what should be included and it’s up to you to decide if you want to follow their suggestions. With this question tab.

It will suggest some FAQ questions to be added to your page and with a click of a button, you will have a schema-ready FAQ section all you need to do is to add your answers and you will get a chance to have these FAQ tabs on your search results.

Plus, this Smart Link suggestion tab will give you some suggestions to add credible citations to your content to increase your article’s visibility on the search engine results page.

This cool content AI feature runs on a credit system for Rank Math free users, you will get a complimentary five free credits.

One credit allows you to analyze your content once and the data from our AI server will be stored on your website server.

And as you continue to write and upgrade your content, you can continue to use that data as a point of improvement. A credit will only be used when you are getting new data from our AI server and when you run out of credit, you don’t need to upgrade to Pro to get more credits.

Even when you are a free Rank Math user, you can still utilize this content AI feature through credits. 50 credits cost $19 and if you divide it out, one credit is about $0.38. To give you an intelligent analysis of your content is so much better than hiring any SEO experts for a couple of hundreds or thousands.

The Pro plan comes with 15 complimentary credits, the business plan comes with 125 credits, and the agency plan comes with 600 credits.

So go ahead and give the content AI a try and we are pretty sure it is worth your while.

On top of that, you can edit the Meta title, the permalink, and the Meta description of your article. Even if you don’t amend this, it is totally fine because these are automatically filled so you don’t have to waste your time optimizing for the best snippets.

You can also add different schema data to a page or post depending on what you’re working on.

If it is an affiliate review, you can select if the product you are reviewing is a book, a course, a product, or software. These schema markups will give you a star rating on the search engine. In the pro version of Rank Math. If you have custom post types like real estate or used car listing, you can create custom schema markups. Plus, you can control the look of your article when it is shared on Facebook or Twitter.

Now, to help with internal linking, which is an important part of SEO, you will receive link suggestions as long as you Mark a couple of your posts as pillar content.

For example, I have quite a few categories on this website, but because I have not marked any pieces of content as a pillar post, there aren’t any link suggestions.

However, if I go to one of my articles, which is the most important content on my website because it answers a lot of questions about my niche and I mark this article as pillar content and save it. When I head back to the previous article, I will see some link suggestions.

It really depends on the categories and tags you’ve selected for your article. This link suggestion feature will really be helpful for you to build internal links as your volume of content grows. Not only that, Right Math does a lot of heavy lifting in terms of on-page and technical SEO, such as providing your website with a sitemap. Allowing for Redirections gives your local SEO where you can add information related to your local business, like opening hours, and a 404 monitor feature to see if there are any missing pages on your website.

Both of these features I’ve mentioned other than Google Trends and Custom Schema Markup are all in the free version of Rank Math, so you don’t need an additional plugin for 404 Monitor, 301 Redirects, and many other separate plugins for search engine optimization.

All you need is one. That’s why I love Rank Math. If you are thinking of switching to Rank Math, it provides you with a simple way to migrate all of your data from other SEO plugins.

So if just one click all the schema data will be imported to Rank Math with ease. So, no manual work and no data lost. The number two plugin I recommend is Pretty Links.

Pretty Links is quite an important plugin that is good for both SEO and business operations.

It will save you a ton of time. Let me explain.

Firstly, suppose you are an affiliate marketer.

In that case, you’ll probably come across extremely long affiliate links and although messy links do not hurt SEO in general, it’s a good practice to keep your links organized and easy for search engines to crawl and understand what that link is about.

This is an example of what Pretty Links can do. You will have your domain name as the base.

You add a target URL which could be an affiliate link or a link to your product promotional page and you will specify what it goes after. For example, your domain name slash promotion and this link that you have created.

When somebody clicks on it will redirect them to the target URL.

Let me walk you through an example.

In this case, we are promoting an affiliate product in this article called Best WordPress Web Hosting.

Do you want to insert an affiliate link to this text? Check out my top recommended web hosting so instead of adding the full affiliate link you can go to the pretty link.

Add the affiliate link here.

Adjust the link URL.

Let’s say we call this best web hosting. In the URL, we cannot leave any spaces, so we have to put dashes or underscores and then we save it.

Copy this link, head back to the article and paste that link here.

Now you can use the same link and place it on many different articles where you need to recommend the best WordPress hosting.

But what if this product is not what you want to recommend in the future?

Maybe there’s another cool web hosting service that disrupted the market and you want to promote it. Imagine placing direct affiliate links on many different articles over the years.

You will have to visit each and every page of your website.

There could be thousands of articles by then and you will have to change them manually.

But if you have planned ahead and you have utilized Pretty links from the start, all you have to do is to change this target URL and all the articles using this link will be pointed to the new product you are recommending.

I don’t know about you, but to me, this is a super time saver. What do you think? Leave a comment down below. Another scenario is if you are an eCommerce store with a physical presence, you’re placing links on your van, on posters, or on billboards.

Suppose you just put a Pretty link, such as your domain name slash promotion on those static advertising mediums. In that case, you can reuse that link repeatedly even though your promotional page has changed because all you need to do is to change the target URL here.

So you save money on the cost of printing posters and banners because this is an evergreen link.

Cool, right?

But how did Pretty Link lend to my recommended list of SEO plugins?

If you go to the advanced tab of the Pretty link you are creating, you will have the option of making the link no follow or sponsored. The best SEO practice at present for affiliate links is to have a sponsored tag on them.

Google has already suggested that and it will be more and more important in the future.

So having this tag is to future-proof your website for algorithm updates.

And if you do not want to pass any SEO juice to maybe an external link because you think it is not a credible source of information, but you just have to link to it to prove a point, then you can check this no follow option.

So Pretty Link has lots of usage on top of just having some SEO benefits.

That’s why I recommend it.

Akismet is the go-to plugin for anti-spam comments on your sites.

Many web hosting companies install the Akismet plugin by default when you set up a WordPress site with them. It does one simple thing and it does it well, which is to remove spam comments for you automatically.

You don’t want people to write unhelpful comments only for sale promotion.

You don’t want other website owners to abuse your comment section for backlinking, which will hurt your site’s overall SEO if you’re linking to unworthy sites unknowingly. And many sleazy marketers use bots to spam comments across millions of websites every day to their advantage.

So instead of wasting time filtering what comments are spam and what are not, you can leave it to Akismet to do the job for you.

Akismet has over 5 million plus active installs and has a 4.7 out of 5 stars rating.

Plus, Akismet is owned by the company behind WordPress, which is automatic.

So you know this is a high-quality plugin that does the job well.

That’s why we recommend it.

Kadence Blocks is our next recommended plugin. Now, this is not exactly an SEO plugin per se.

It’s more of a plugin that gives you design options on your WordPress block editor.

But why I recommend this as an SEO plugin is because it provides you with a table of contents block.

Suppose your article is super long. Having a table of content will help to give a gist of what your content is about.

Your readers will have a better experience on your page. They will stay longer because they can click through to whichever part they are looking for in your article.

And the longer your reader stays on your page, it gives a positive signal to search engines that your article is what the readers are looking for, hence better for SEO.

On top of that, because it is a web designing tool, you can customize the design of a table of content to fit your brand colors and design.

Plus, there are many helpful blocks to make your webpage look beautiful.

Now if you haven’t realized it yet, we try our best not to recommend a plugin that provides one functionality, because the more plugins we install, we run the risk of them slowing down our website.

Hence defeating the purpose of us optimizing for site speed, which is under technical SEO.

But if we do install single function plugins like Akismet, we want to make sure that it would not hinder site speed optimization, which it hasn’t.

So what we recommend here is really the best setup for not only providing the SEO benefits but also many other functions.

Now speaking about site speed, the next few plugins we are recommending are dedicated to it.

The fifth SEO plugin we recommend is Litespeed Cache.

Now, Caching is one of the most important aspects of site speed optimization.

What it does is it will store a separate version of your website on the front end of your server.

So whenever there is a request for your website to be displayed, the stored version will be displayed on the browser.

With no Caching, the web server would need to work very hard to fulfil each and every request, hence making the site slower.

So a Caching plugin is a must for every website to optimize for technical SEO.

Now, if your site is hosted on, for example, Bluehost, Hostinger, or a2 hosting, they are hosted on a Litespeed server.

So the best caching plugin to use is Litespeed cache.

It is free and it provides you with a ton of functionalities that you’ll probably have to pay for if you’re using other caching plugins.

But if you are hosted on, for example, SiteGround or WPX hosting, they are not using Litespeed servers.

So you can’t use the Litespeed Cache plugin to its optimal.

If that is the case, I will recommend another plugin for you in a while.

But for now, let’s see what you can do with the Litespeed caching plugin.

For caching, you can define what needs to be cached.

You can determine how long the cache pages should be stored before a new cache page replaces it.

You can really go in-depth into customizing your caching rule.

On top of that, you get a free CDN service called Quic Cloud.

If your site is hosted on a Litespeed server, you will get a free image optimization feature with the option of converting your images to WebP, which is the new gold standard of image format.

You can also optimize the CSS delivery of your site, JavaScript optimization, HTML optimization, lazy Loading of images, iframes, and even database optimization.

It is a full suite of features to optimize your website for site speed, so all you need is just one plugin. Now our recommendation ends here.

If your website is running on a Litespeed server, five plugins are all you need to make your website SEO-friendly.

WP Rocket is our best recommendation for a Caching and page optimization plugin if your website is not hosted on the Litespeed server. Although it is not a free plugin, it does the best job.

Stick with me if you want to learn about free alternatives.

I have often tested WP Rocket against other optimization plugins, and WP Rocket performed the best.

It has all the features and functions that the Litespeed Cache plugin provides, like the CSS and JavaScript optimization, preloading, defining caching rules, and database optimization.

However, WP Rocket lacks image optimization, so the team behind it has created another plugin called Imagify that allows you to optimize your images and serve them in WebP format.

Imagify is a free plugin that enables you to optimize 20 megabytes worth of image sizes, which is approximately 200 images.

But note that WordPress will create multiple versions of an image you have uploaded by default, so you’re not optimizing one image but several images at a time, hence depleting the 20 megabytes very quickly.

So to avoid that, make sure that you go to your WordPress dashboard under Settings and Media and make sure that all these are set to zero so you will only be optimizing one image at a time.

Now to recap, these are the plugins we recommend for On-Page SEO, and depending on the web hosting server you use we recommend these.

So five plugins for sites hosted on Litespeed servers and six for sites hosted on NGINX and Apache servers. Hey, that’s not a great list.

What about

Now, of course, there are so many other plugins we have not mentioned so we want to list them down briefly and share with you why they didn’t make our list.

Yoast SEO, All-in-One SEO, and SEOPress are all great SEO plugins.

I do not doubt that.

But you can only have one main SEO plug-in.

Hence we are biased for good reasons because you do not need a separate plugin like Broken Link Checker to monitor 404s on your website.

Rank Math does that for you?

We do not need plugins like 301 Redirects, Redirection, or Quick Page/Post Redirect because Rank Math also takes care of that.

Plus, there are many other functions that others do not provide.

I hope you look pass why I’m being biased here.

Also, I see many people recommending a separate plugin called Easy Table of Contents.

We don’t need that because Kadence Blocks has taken care of that. Really Simple SSL.

If you want your website to be secured with HTTPS which is kind of a requirement for a website to rank on Google nowadays you can install the really simple SSL plugin to solve that problem but I feel SSL certificates are easily obtained through your web hosting service for free.

So having this standalone plugin just doesn’t make sense.

Hence, it is not on our recommended list. Now, the other worthy mentions include

WP Total Cache or Autoptimize with Short Pixel, in case you do not wish to pay for WP Rocket. So, that’s our take on the best WordPress SEO plugins, what do you think?

Do you have SEO plugin combinations you would like to share?

Feel free to leave a comment down below and if this video has provided value to you, please do us a little favor and smash that thumbs up button.

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