When creating any website, SEO should be a consideration from the beginning, and that all starts with good on-page SEO. For your site to rank, you need good content that references the topics you want to rank for. You need to take care when choosing URLs for your pages, titles, headings, meta descriptions, image alt text, keyword density and more.
Luckily, with WordPress's extreme popularity, there are quite a few quality plugins that help you manage this. Which one is the best? Our choice is Rank Math, but we've compared the top three most popular WordPress SEO plugins so help you decide.
Rank Math is our recommendation out of all the options for WordPress SEO plugins. While the other options are also very popular, Rank Math is a newer plugin with a lot going for it.
Rank Math's stand out feature is its analysis of your writing. You can enter your focus keyword and other keywords you're trying to rank your article for, and Rank Math will give suggestions on how you can improve your chances. It checks for things like the use of the keyword in your title and description, use in the content and keyword density, and use in image alt tags, as well as some other factors that will improve your chance of ranking and click through rates.
Rank Math also generates a sitemap, robots.txt file, inserts structured data, including for local SEO, and more. It has a 404 monitor and redirects feature, so you can make sure any dead links pointing to your site are dealt with, preserving the precious link juice. You can configure custom URLs for each page, and set the meta robots tag, setting attributes like nofollow and noindex.
There's built-in support for WooCommerce, Advanced Custom Fields, and other popular plugins. With Rank Math, you can get all of this in one easy to configure plugin. Best of all, Rank Math is completely free with all of its features. There's no premium version or annoying ads in the settings page.
One of the older WordPress SEO plugins, Yoast SEO is a good choice for optimizing your WordPress content with titles, descriptions, and other meta tags. The Yoast SEO plugin has been around since 2010. Yoast also offers a content analysis feature, similar to Rank Math, but with fewer checks. Yoast will generate a sitemap for you, helping search engines to easily discover all of your pages
Yoast has a premium version, with features like redirects and multiple keywords. Additionally, there are separate paid extensions for WooCommerce and local SEO. Since these are features Rank Math gives you for free, we would recommend it over Yoast SEO.
All In One SEO Pack is the oldest SEO plugin for WordPress. It was introduced in 2007, three years earlier than Yoast's plugin was. It is still the most widely used SEO plugins, with over 50 million downloads and over 2 million active installations.
All In One SEO does not analyze your content for keyword density and other optimizations, like Yoast SEO and Rank Math do. All In One SEO Pack also includes a sitemap feature, like the other options, as well as generating a robots.txt file, meta robots tag editing and options for custom post types with their premium plugin. Once again, Rank Math takes the win here, offering all of this for free.
If you're looking for an SEO plugin for WordPress, Rank Math is the best choice. Not only is it fully-featured, and has an excellent content analysis feature, but all of its features are 100% free. There are no ads asking you to upgrade to the premium version or pricy extensions for thinks like robots.txt, meta robots tags, and redirects. You get it all in one amazing plugin.
If you need help with local SEO for your business's website, Bidwell Websites can help. We'll optimize all of the metadata these SEO plugins deal with and more, getting you the most visibility and most customers from search.
