Are you using WordPress for blogging? Are you looking for the best SEO plugins for WordPress in 2018 to skyrocket your search engine traffic? If yes, you’re in the right place.
Though WordPress is search engine friendly, you still need to make some changes by installing few best SEO plugins on your WordPress site for better results. So here’s a list of some of the best free WordPress SEO plugins which help you with more search traffic.
Let’s get started without much ado.
Top 10 Free Best SEO Plugins for WordPress Sites In 2018
#1. WordPress SEO By Yoast
Hands down, WordPress SEO by Yoast is by far the BEST SEO plugin for WordPress sites. If you’re someone who is struggling to optimize your content for more search traffic, this free WordPress SEO plugin is a treat for you.
Here’s how it looks like;
Features:
Here are some of the best features of using this free best WordPress SEO plugin in 2018.
- Easily optimize your content with keywords
- XML sitemaps included
- Shows you snippet preview to better optimize your content for search
- Content and SEO analysis
- Integrates with Google Search Console (so you can easily find and fix your crawling issues, if any)
- Gives recommendations to better optimize your content
Why is this the best SEO plugin for WordPress?
The #1 reason to use this plugin is this: it helps you easily optimize your blog posts for your primary keywords. The key to getting more search engine traffic to your sites is to find better keywords and use them within your content.
This plugin helps you with optimization part and tells you where to insert your keywords for more search traffic without getting penalized by Google.
#2. Google XML Sitemaps
If you’re running a WordPress website, you must need this plugin as it helps you better index all the pages of your site on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. This plugin has been downloaded over 2 million times and it is one of the most popular WordPress SEO plugins.
Features:
- Provides a complete XML sitemap for search engines
- This plugin is available in many languages, hence useful for worldwide audience and users
- It basically calculates priority for each post, based on the number of comments to better index your pages
- It instantly notifies Google, Bing and Yahoo about the changes on your site by pinging (so you don’t have to use any pinging sites)
- Includes a WordPress filter for other plugins which can add their pages to the sitemap
Why is this the best SEO plugin for WordPress?
Google ranks not just websites but more importantly the pages within websites so crawling your pages is essential. A sitemap is the heart and soul of any website because it makes easier for Google to find your site’s pages.
This plugin makes it easier for Google to crawl all your website’s content including pages, blog posts etc. Just activate and configure the plugin, and it will ping the search engines whenever your site gets updated.
#3. W3 Total Cache
Your website page loading time is one of the most important things. Did you know that website speed is a crucial Google ranking factor? If your website is taking too much time to load, not only it hurts your search engine rankings but also affects your overall website’s bottomline.
Here’s where W3 Total Cache plugin comes into handy that helps you reduce your page loading times through caching.
Features:
- Increases your site’s overall performance
- Reduces your page loading times by caching
- Increases your website server performance
- Minifies and does HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and feeds
- Browser caching is also available to optimize your website’s speed
Why is this the best SEO plugin for WordPress?
This is one of the widely used WordPress SEO plugins for increasing a website’s speed and performance. It helps your site by increasing website performance, reducing download times through caching, content delivery network (CDN) integration etc.
#4. WP Limit Login Attempts
One of the most common tricks hackers use to get access into your site is through brute force attacks where they try a variety of usernames and passwords. If you’re worried about security your site, I strongly recommend you to install this security plugin.
This plugin helps you better secure your site by limiting login attempts (it also blocks IP addresses if there are too many login attempts are made).
Features:
- Limits access to your WordPress site
- Safeguards your site from brute force attacks
- Captcha verification is provided
- Redirects to home page when abnormal requests are performed
Why is this the best SEO plugin for WordPress?
Securing your website’s login page is one of the best ways to safeguard your site from all the common security attacks such as brute force login attempts, password guessing etc. WP Limit Login Attempts plugin is a free WordPress plugin that adds better security to your login page by limiting the login attempts from hackers.
Quick note: 000webhost.com, a free web hosting solution has an amazing article on securing your WordPress login page that demonstrates you how to secure login page. Make sure to check out 000webhost if you want to host your site for free!
#5. Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights
Tracking your website traffic is the key to know your traffic sources, audience behaviour, top performing posts etc. Although there are a ton of website tracking tools available but nothing comes close to Google Analytics.
Features:
- This plugin allows you to easily connect your WordPress site with Google Analytics account
- Analyse how visitors find and use your website
- It is one of the widely used SEO plugin for WordPress with over 15 million downloads
- You’ll get real time stats
- It gives you universal tracking and so much more
Why is this the best SEO plugin for WordPress?
Accessing your Google Analytics page is often a time taking process. Here’s where this plugin comes into handy where you can easily access all your Google Analytics data from your WordPress dashboard. Install the plugin, connect to your Analytics account and you’re done.
#6. The SEO Framework
Are you new to SEO? Do you want to better optimize your content and improve your website rankings on search engines like Google? Then, you need this plugin which is completely automated and gives you excellent features which are listed below.
Here’s a screenshot of how you can improve a web page by hovering on it.
Features:
- Automatically generate titles to better optimized your blog’s content
- Open Graph descriptions for social media optimization
- Includes a sitemap
- Helps you easily prevent canonical errors with categories, pages etc
Why is this the best SEO plugin for WordPress?
If you’re a beginner who is looking for ways to easily optimize your content to boost your search engine rankings, this is a must have WordPress SEO plugin. It works out of the box and comes with predefined settings so you don’t have to make any further changes to get better rankings on Google.
#7. All in One SEO Pack
If you’re looking for an SEO plugin for WordPress which works out of the box to helps you increase the search engine visibility of your site, this plugin is for you!
Features:
- Content optimization
- XML sitemaps
- Image XML sitemaps
- Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines like Google
- You can easily override any title and set meta description however you want
Why is this the best SEO plugin for WordPress?
If you’re looking for an all in one SEO toolkit, this plugin is made just for you. As the name suggests, this is an all in one SEO pack which does so many things from optimization to sitemaps to increase your search engine visibility for your sites and it works out of the box. Install, activate and you’re done!
#8. ThirstyAffiliates Affiliate Link Manager
Are you an affiliate marketer or do you want to cloak your messy and long affiliate links into short and beautiful URLs? If yes, you need a link cloaking plugin to easily cloak your affiliate links. ThirstyAffiliates affiliate link manager is one of the widely used and most effective WordPress plugins for link cloaking.
Features:
- Turns your long and boring affiliate links into beautiful short links
- Easy to install and setup
- Easily group all your affiliate links into hierarchical categories to manage your links in a better way
- Also add images to your affiliate links and so much more
Why is this the best SEO plugin for WordPress?
Gives you so many options from opening your affiliate links in new tabs to link cloaking. It makes it really easy to cloak your affiliate links (here’s how it generally looks like: http://domain.com/recommends/your-affiliate-link). It also gives you all the stats of your clicks so you can easily find out which links are performing well.
#9. Broken Link Checker
Broken links, 404 error pages, dead links – whatever you call them, they are all bad and can really hurt your search rankings on Google. Unfortunately we don’t focus too much on fixing our dead links and here’s where you need a plugin like “Broken Link Checker” that helps you easily find and fix your broken links.
Features:
- Find and fix your website’s broken links
- Find missing images
- Get notifications to your email whenever a broken link is found
- Prevents search engines from following broken links (which is optional but highly useful)
Why is this the best SEO plugin for WordPress?
Once the plugin is installed, it starts working and finds all the broken links and missing images within your website. You can fix your broken links from the plugin’s page which makes this plugin unique and highly useful.
#10. Rel Nofollow Checkbox
Are you worrying about high bounce rates on your blog? Then, I’ve a quick tip for you where you can instantly reduce your website’s bounce rate. Start opening your external links in new tabs and also make sure to add nofollow tags to most of your external links such as affiliate links, social media links etc.
With this plugin, you can easily do both the tasks and it works seamlessly with WordPress interface. Have a look at the following screenshot.
See that? You can easily open your external links in new tabs and also add nofollow tags.
Features:
- Adds a simple checkbox in the insert/edit link popup
- Also allows you to add nofollow tags to your external links
Why is this the best SEO plugin for WordPress?
Although there are a ton of other WordPress plugins that do the same work this plugin does, this plugin tops the list because it is simple to use, free and lightweight plugin which doesn’t affect your website loading times. This plugin is especially useful for affiliate marketers who deal with affiliate links.
Why should you use the best SEO plugins for WordPress
Here are some of the benefits of using the WordPress SEO plugins in 2018 and beyond.
Increase your website’s search traffic: One of the primary reasons to use best free WordPress SEO plugins is that they help you increase your search engine traffic quickly. So if you’re someone who’s struggling to get more traffic from search engines like Google, start using the best SEO plugins for WordPress mentioned above.
Speed up your SEO process: SEO tools and plugins help you save your time and they speed up your SEO process to get results faster. They help you find keywords, backlinks, website traffic really quickly and most of the SEO tools give you accurate results.
Assess your competitors better: If you want to master SEO or get better results from search engines, you need to learn how to analyse your competitors. The only way to get better SEO results is to evaluate your competitors metrics such as backlink analysis, keyword analysis, website traffic estimation etc. Here’s where the best SEO tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz can help you like a charm.
Conclusion about the best SEO plugins for WordPress
Although there are hundreds of best SEO plugins for WordPress available, the above list of 10 plugins are highly recommended. These are the plugins I’ve been using over the years to get more traffic and sales to my sites.
So what are your thoughts? Did I miss any of your favorite WordPress SEO plugins in the list? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Hey bro,
This is exciting content. SEO traffic is best, really and WordPress makes it quite easy for OnPage optimization. Yet, people don’t know about these easy and helpful plugins. I use some of these on the list and thanks for the shout out ;)
You rock!
Pss: Good to see you back. We have better days ahead so let’s keep giving.
Hi Enstine,
Hands down, I’d prefer search engine traffic every over any other traffic source. It sends you qualified visitors to increase your leads and sales.
That being said, WordPress has a ton of useful SEO plugins that can save your time and give you better results.
Thanks for stopping by!
Hey Rahul!
I love the Yoast SEO plugin and the Broken Link Checker plugin.
I use these two on my internet marketing blog. They are great and super helpful plugins for better SEO. The Yoast SEO plugin has very helpful features for a new blogger to optimize their site for better search engine rankings.
It is also important to make sure your site doesn’t link to dead pages – and this is where the broken link checker is very helpful.
Thank you for sharing this list! These are all very helpful plugins for better SEO!
Have a wonderful weekend! :D
Hi Freddy,
Glad to see you here.
Yes, I love Yoast SEO and I’ve been using since I started blogging back in 2012. It’s one of the most effective SEO plugins for WordPress that I can’t live without.
Broken link checker is another great WordPress plugin that helps you quickly find and fix all your broken links (if you’re concerned about SEO, you need this plugin).
Keep rocking and thanks for stopping by!
Hi Rahul,
Thanks so much for the link in dude. Plug ins rock when you use effective ones, and you’ve some gems here. Yoast is so darn easy; it does all legwork for you. Just listen. Check the greens versus reds, and if an amber pops up, no biggie deal. Follow advice and prep your posts for some sweet SEO juice.
Ryan
Hi Ryan,
Yoast is so good and works like a charm. The great thing about using it is it works out of the box (that’s why I always recommend this plugin to new users).
Thanks for so much for stopping by bro. Always a pleasure to mention your content :) Long way to go!
Rahul,
Manny plugins I use in WordPress but I can find best “justify plugins” is not working properly Please help me and suggest some plugins.
Hi Shyam,
Haven’t used such plugin before.. what does it do?
With all these plugins we need back up plugin. Otherwise will lost our hard work and data.
SEO can be complicated for beginners or those who don’t understand these things easily. SEO Plugins make it really easy for users to custom control SEO settings without any professional skills.
Hi Rahul,
SEO is an important part of successful blogging. Fortunately, WP owners can optimize their contents with the help of plugins. There are several types of plugins are available including analytics, link management, broken links, XML maps etc.
Yoast is my choice from the very beginning. It is simple and lets you optimize the contents in many ways. Thanks for mentioning many tools in this post.
All the best,
Hi Rahul! It’s really great pleasure to see your collection.
I also want to suggest you to have a look at Trash Duplicate And 301 Redirect. This is a responsive WP plugin that helps to get SEO ranking. It can find and delete duplicate content in your website and make you safe from being penalized by Google for duplicate content.
Seo is an important part for ranking and blogging.very nice and informative article its very useful..thanks for sharing
Hi Rahul,
This is a great list! I agree that Yoast is probably the best SEO plugin available. And when you use it, you don’t need to use any XML plugin or keyword checker. Many of the features that Yoast has make it possible to have fewer plugins installed. I also like using Sumo Plugin. It has Analytics integration, list builders, social media sharing. These two plugins almost make it unnecessary to add any other plugin. They’re pretty good!
Thank you for this list
. Yet, people don’t know about these easy and helpful plugins. I use some of these on the list and thanks for the shout out ;)
Seo is an important part of ranking and blogging.very nice and informative article its very useful..thanks for sharing