What SEO Plugin Should I Use for my Wordpress Website

by
Matthew Eisner

One of the great results of WordPress powering nearly a quarter of the internet and creating an ecosystem that developers can build on is a plethora of pre-made, easy-to-deploy tools, aptly named plugins. These plugins allow you to quickly build functionality and features in your site with minimal (or at least greatly reduced) effort. At the time of writing, there were nearly 55,000 plugins available in WordPress.org’s plugin directory.

I often get asked the question what plugins I use, specifically for SEO. Plugins can be a great solution to rapidly improve the SEO of a site, and there are certainly some go to ones that I use. There are a few main types of plugins that I use on a WordPress site for SEO:

  • Site performance plugins
  • SEO maintenance plugins
  • URL and link management plugins
  • Core SEO plugins

I’ve linked a checklist I’ve put together for when I’m setting up WordPress sites to ensure I have everything covered.

The plugin you will use most frequently and that is truly most important to have for building SEO is a core SEO plugin to allow for easy editing of meta tags on pages, bulk page and tag management, and sitemap functionality, among a variety of others. For this, every SEO has their preferred choice of SEO tool – which is superior may be one of the most debated topics on many SEO forums and groups. And while I certainly have mine (Yoast SEO), I thought that given the sometimes irrational affinity to some tools of some experts, it’d be better to ask a wider sample than myself and tally the results for you.

So without further ado, the responses when nearly 120 SEO experts were asked what their preferred core SEO tool for WordPress is: