In our previous post, we shared our knowledge about improving the performance of a WordPress website using a cache plugin. Taking a step further, we decided to share our knowledge up on best WordPress SEO plugins. An SEO plugin for WordPress will do a big favour to your site for making it better there are techniques for search engines optimization of WordPress sites. We will share four best WordPress SEO plugins that offer utmost options for optimizing WordPress websites for search engines.Make sure you site take minimize load time, create SEO friendly images for WordPress and write SEO optimized content. Website speed test tools help o check performance. Here at TemplateToaster WordPress website builder software and WordPress theme builder, I have also compared the features of best WordPress SEO plugin, so that you would be easily deciding on installing the one for your site.

List of the best WordPress SEO plugins

Yoast All in One SEO Pack SEO Ulitimate SEO Wizard

Best WordPress SEO Plugins Comparison Chart (2018)

Best WordPress SEO Plugins WordPress SEO by Yoast All in One SEO Pack SEO Ultimate SEO Wizard Title Tag template Yes Yes Yes No Meta Description template Yes Yes Yes No Meta Robot Tag Yes Yes Yes Yes Support for custom post types Yes Yes Yes No Automatic Interlinking No No Yes No Permalink settings Yes No Yes No XML Sitemap generation Yes Yes No Yes Canonical URL settings Yes Yes Yes No Google Analytics support Yes( Install Add on) Yes Yes(Insert the code) No Site verification with webmaster tools Yes(Google, Bing, Yandex) Yes (Google, Bing) Yes(Google, Bing) No Alexa verification Yes No No No Page Analysis Yes No No Yes SMO Facebook Open Graph Yes Yes Yes No Twitter card support Yes Yes Yes No Pinterest profile Yes Yes No No Google+ profile Yes Yes No No Instagram profile Yes Yes No No LinkedIn profile Yes Yes No No

Best WordPress SEO Plugins in detail

1. WordPress SEO by Yoast

The WordPress SEO by Yoast is by far the most downloaded plugin. It has almost every feature that an Ideal plugin should have. A plethora of options is provided to the user. You can set the title templates and Meta-description templates for the pages, posts, media, taxonomies and archives. Moreover, you can configured Meta Robot tags for pages, posts, media, archives and taxonomies. A Meta Robot tag tells the search engine spider whether it should index a page or page not.

Social Media optimization (SMO) is also an integral part of SEO. The Yoast takes care of social media optimization and provides us the options for configuring the Facebook Open graph, twitter card metadata to the website. You can inform the Google about all your social accounts through Yoast. You can provide Yoast with the URLs of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Myspace, Pinterest, Google+, and YouTube profile of your site to let the Google know about them.

Further, the Yoast can automatically generate the XML sitemap for your site with custom settings. With custom settings, you can control the number of entries in the sitemap and what post types and taxonomies not to include in the sitemap.

You can also set up the pretty permalinks with the Yoast. It offers more permalink settings than those given by the WordPress. Beyond this, you can also select the links to hide in the head tag. These links can be hidden- RDD links, RSS links, short link of posts, WLW manifest links.

Page analysis is also a noteworthy feature of Yoast, which helps the user to write keyword focused content. Also, better title and Meta descriptions. This feature stays available while the user writes/edits a page or a post. Selecting the page analysis option, the user can see whether the keywords is used in title and description properly, whether the content includes the keyword up to the recommended and other related things. Beyond just indications, it even provides recommendations.

2. All in One SEO Pack

All in one SEO pack is also a feature rich WordPress SEO plugin. The settings are simpler to configure. All you need to do is to tick the checkboxes and select the radio buttons for preferred configurations of this SEO plugin. You can write the title formats of page, post, category, archive, tag, and 404. Also, you can write the description format. Beyond default WordPress post types you can enable the SEO for custom post types also.

This WordPress SEO plugin can generate the XML Sitemap of your website. There is no option to define the number of entries in the sitemap, but, you can select the post types and taxonomies to include in it. The WordPress SEO plugin can submit the sitemap to Google and Bing. Google analytics support is also available.

This WordPress SEO plugin also helps in doing social media optimization. For this, you can specify all the social media accounts in the Social Meta settings. You can also find the options to configure the open graph settings and Twitter card settings.

3. SEO Ultimate

A heavy set of options is offered by this plugin. You can find the options classified into several modules. You can think of modules as another word for features/options. There are separate modules given for defining title formats (Title Tag rewriter) and Meta description formats (Meta Descriptions), unlike above WordPress SEO plugins.

SEO Ultimate supports both, custom post types and custom taxonomies. Another good feature of the plugin is Deeplink Juggernaut. It allows you to configure auto link settings of anchor text and URLs, and the interlinking of posts. There is a “Silo Linking” mode, which would allow the interlinking of posts of same category only.

The plugin automatically generates the open graph data for all the pages including homepage and user profiles, posts, custom posts types and attachments. The auto generated open graph data is not stringent to modifications, you are allowed to customize it.

The bloggers and affiliate marketers can take the advantage of advanced link mask generator. They can create global link masks, which appertain across the site. It also offers a rich snippet creator, which supports new Schema.org used by Google and Yahoo both.

4. SEO Wizard

The SEO wizard is very easy to set up. It offers comparatively least options than all of the above plugins, though it is good for on page SEO. Alike Yoast, this WordPress SEO plugin analyses the pages and posts and indicate the deficiencies of the content; thereby helps in writing better content, Meta titles and descriptions for the posts and pages. But, this feature is not as advanced as Yoast. WordPress SEO plugins can automatically add the keyword in post titles, can automatically add the nofollow attribute to the images and to the external links. More options given by SEO Wizard include 404 monitor and automatic XML Sitemap generation.

While drafting the pages and posts, you can avail these options from SEO Wizard- rich snippets generation, social SEO and Meta robot tags’ settings (no index, no follow). You can do Social SEO only on two platforms that are Facebook and Twitter, but with the limitation of not having the open graph and Twitter card implementation. You can simply add the publisher, author, Title and description for Facebook and Twitter.

Which is the best WordPress SEO plugin?

All of the above discussed WordPress SEO plugins are quite good for the search engine optimization of a website. But, we are required to pick the one for us. We have observed that Yoast and SEO Ultimate provide us ample SEO settings than the rest of WordPress SEO plugins. Both the plugins give the options for writing better Meta Titles and Meta descriptions to us.

Both these WordPress SEO plugins provide us the option for connecting the site with social platforms for social media optimization of the site. While the Yoast supports Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+, the SEO ultimate supports only first two platforms. But, the additional advantage of SEO ultimate is that it has a “Deep Juggernaut” feature, which allows automatic interlinking of the content. Check out TemplateToaster to create your own website and get WordPress themes.