Are you looking to improve your SEO and run a WordPress website? Setting up one of the all-in-one SEO plugins below will help you quickly build a solid foundation for search engines. These plugins can save you a great deal of time, helping you to avoid manual technical work, or installing several plugins to get the same features.
Here’s a brief overview of each SEO plugin and their impressive features:
Yoast SEO
The Yoast SEO plugin considers itself the original WordPress SEO plugin. One of the most downloaded WordPress plugins ever at 5+ million active installations, Yoast SEO plugin provides a suite of super useful and convenient features to quickly optimize for technical and on-page SEO factors.
Key Features:
- Set custom templates for SEO titles and meta descriptions
- Set custom titles for the site, archives, category, and tag pages
- Content & SEO analysis for writing SEO-friendly text
- Configure social meta tags
- Integrates with Google Search Console
- Snippet Preview to see how a page would look in search results
- Convenient file editor for .htaccess and robots.txt files
- The plugin is updated every 2 weeks for Google’s algorithm
- XML sitemap creation and support
- Full control over site breadcrumbs
- Set canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content
- Internal linking suggestions (paid version)
- Enhanced content insights for pages (paid version)
- Redirect manager (paid version) (alternative redirect plugin)
Having to implement many of the settings above otherwise would require a great deal of time-consuming work or a range of plugins. The plugin includes a setup wizard for beginners and help options to make your life easier. While there is a paid version of the plugin, the majority of useful features for SEO are included in the free version.
All in One SEO
Second place goes to the All in One SEO Pack plugin with around 3+ million active installations. All in One SEO Pack is another comprehensive SEO plugin with similar features that will help you get your on-site SEO up and running with ease.
Key Features:
- Settings on a single page
- Set custom templates for SEO titles and meta descriptions
- Configure social meta tags
- Set canonical URLs to avoid duplicate content
- XML sitemap creation and support
- Google Analytics integration
- Helps auto-optimize titles for search engines
- Avoid typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
- Free WooCommerce integration for e-commerce SEO (usually premium feature)
- Can activate many of these features separately to save resources
- A unique, light interface design
All in One SEO also provides a paid version with additional features. Many of the free features are similar to Yoast SEO, however, you may want to try our All in One instead if you are managing an e-commerce based WordPress site.
The Best WordPress SEO Plugins
When it comes to SEO plugins for WordPress, no other plugin comes close to the popularity of Yoast SEO and All in One SEO for optimizing WordPress sites for search engines.
At HONE Digital Marketing, we primarily use Yoast SEO on the WordPress websites we maintain, and All in One SEO for a few e-commerce based WordPress sites. While there’s more to search engine optimization than plugins can help with, one of these two plugins will help you build a strong on-site SEO foundation, so you can focus more of your time and energy on publishing great content.
Avoid having to install a lot of resource-intensive plugins to get the same features, and worry less about having the right on-site search optimization in place with one of these comprehensive SEO plugins.