7 Best WordPress SEO Plugins 2022
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?
It's Jack here from Rank Math,
the WordPress SEO plugin that 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 site.
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 it free with Rank Math
and you're not losing out in 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
of 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 here is
that all 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
which 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 analyse 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 a 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 tell 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 and 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 in 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 analyse 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 on your content,
it 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 a 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 you
local SEO where you can add information
related to your local business, like
opening hours, 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 it will
redirect them to the target URL.
Let me walk you through an example.
In this case,
we are promoting an affiliate product
on this article called
Best WordPress Web Hosting.
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 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 we 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
into 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 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 set up 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 that 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 for 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,
and 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 bias with 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 because 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
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more insights and knowledge.
This is Jack from Rank Math.
I'll see you in the next video.