Search engines are one of the most important sources of traffic for any website. This is typically referred to as organic search traffic. This source of traffic is why it’s so important to optimize a website for SEO (search engine optimization). One of the best and easiest ways to improve your SEO is by installing an SEO plugin, and to follow some best practices.

In this article, we’ll look at a few of the best SEO plugins for WordPress, and Divi. Hang around until the end for a handful of tips to take your SEO even further!

What is a WordPress SEO plugin?

An SEO plugin adds search engine optimization features to WordPress’s built-in features, giving you more options, and digging deeper into the meta data of each page, post, category, image, and keyword. They create a sitemap structure, and ping search engines when there has been an update. They even go as far as to add features that help you improve your content.

SEO is Important for WordPress Websites

Search engines are one of the most important sources of traffic for any website and the competition for that search traffic increases every day. It’s true that WordPress is already SEO-friendly, but plugins add a level of features that improves that SEO. They also provide features to help you improve your website’s structure and analyze your content for SEO.

4 Best SEO Plugins

Here’s a quick look at our favorite SEO plugins. You only need one. I recommend trying them out to see what works best for you.

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO focuses on people and web spiders. It includes tools to help improve your content, making it more readable while optimizing it for search engines at the same time. It uses a traffic light to show the status of an article’s SEO, making it easy to see where improvements are needed at a glance.

Advanced XML Sitemaps functionality

Breadcrumbs

Set canonical URLs

Title and meta description templating

Content & SEO analysis

Snippet preview

Tunes your websites’ engine

Mark cornerstone content

Counts internal links to improve site structure

Integrates with Google Search Console

Manage SEO roles

Bulk editor

More Information

All in One SEO Pack

All in One SEO Pack has lots of tools from both beginners and advanced users. You can install it and let it run its default settings automatically, or you can fine tune it to give your site an extra boost of SEO. You can also override the settings for any post or page that you want to adjust yourself.

XML Sitemap

Image XML Sitemap

Google AMP support

Google Analytics support

SEO on Custom Post Types

Advanced Canonical URLs

Redirect attachment pages to the parent post

Notifies search engines of changes to your site

Built-in API

SEO Integration for WooCommerce

Nonce Security built-in

Optimizes titles

Generates META tags

Avoids duplicate content

Requires no setup but you can fine-tune if you want

Override any title and

Set META description

Set META keywords

57 languages

More Information

The SEO Framework

The SEO Framework was designed for both beginners and advanced users. Beginners can install it and let it run on automatic settings. Advanced users can use the API to create extensions. It uses bar and pixel counters to show you how to improve your SEO.

Preconfigured

Automatically optimize your pages through AI

Outputs Structured Data

Optimizes metadata

Prevents duplicate content issues

Global options

Optimize every public page, post, and term

Shows you how to improve SEO

Helps your pages get shared

Supports all custom post types

More Information

Squirrly

Squirrly provides SEO for both WordPress and WooCommerce. It has lots of tools to manage the SEO settings, but also adds tools to manage your team of writers, developers, contributors, and your SEO strategy.

On-demand audits

Keyword rankings

Real-time content analysis

Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn integrations

WooCommerce SEO

Live assistant

Research tools for writers

Social media preview

More Information

Tips for Improving SEO

Divi includes SEO settings for the homepage, single posts, and the index page. They’re disabled by default, allowing WordPress to handle the SEO for you. Divi’s SEO settings let you override the WordPress default settings with your own custom settings.

The speed of your website (how fast it loads into your visitor’s browser) also affects your SEO. You can test the speed of your website with online tools like PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix. Both provide a loading score GTmetrix includes PageSpeed Insights and YSlow. They include information about what is slowing your site down and give insights on what steps to take in order to speed up your website’s loading time.

One of the best ways to speed up your website is to optimize your images. Images are usually the largest files within your content. They can be resized and compressed without losing quality. For a comparison of the top image optimization plugins, see the Elegant Themes article The 6 Best WordPress Image Optimization Plugins Compared.

Choosing the right host is one of the most important decisions you can make about your website’s performance. For more information about choosing a host for your Divi website, see the article 8 Best Hosting Options for Divi + WordPress.

Lastly, I recommend optimizing the titles for your blog articles. By default, WordPress assigns a number to the post (something like ‘p=123’). A better option is to use the article’s title (which includes keywords that search engines like).

In the dashboard menu, go to Settings > Permalinks and choose one of the common settings. My favorite is Post name. You can also create a custom setting if you want. Tags are provided to help you create your own permalinks.

Ending Thoughts

SEO is vitally important for any website, and WordPress and Divi sites are no different. Even though both WordPress and Divi have some excellent SEO features built in, choosing a high-quality SEO plugin and following a few SEO best-practices will make all the difference in your search engine rankings.

What are your favorite SEO tools on this list? Let us know in the comments.