4 Best SEO Plugins for WordPress WebsitesIn our previous post, we shared our knowledge about improving the performance of a WordPress website using a cacheplugin. Taking a step further, we decided to share our knowledge up on SEO plugins. An SEO plugin will do a big favor toyour site for making it better from the search engines’ perspective. We will share four best SEO plugins that offer utmostoptions for optimizing WordPress websites for search engines. We have also compared the features of these plugin, sothat you would be easily deciding on installing the one for your site.

SEO Plugins Comparison Chart

Parameters WordPress SEO by

Yoast

All in One SEO

Pack

SEO Ultimate SEO

WizardTitle Tag template Yes Yes Yes NoMeta Description template Yes Yes Yes NoMeta Robot Tag Yes Yes Yes YesSupport for custom post

types

Yes Yes Yes No

Automatic Interlinking No No Yes NoPermalink settings Yes No Yes NoXML Sitemap generation Yes Yes No YesCanonical URL settings Yes Yes Yes NoGoogle 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 NoPage Analysis Yes No No YesSMOFacebook Open Graph Yes Yes Yes NoTwitter card support Yes Yes Yes NoPinterest profile Yes Yes No NoGoogle+ profile Yes Yes No NoInstagram profile Yes Yes No NoLinkedIn profile Yes Yes No No

Let us discuss in detail about each plugin.

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 shouldhave. A plethora of options is provided to the user. You can set the title templates and Meta-description templates forthe 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 pagenot.

Social Media optimization (SMO) is also an integral part of SEO. The Yoast takes care of social media optimization andprovides us the options for configuring the Facebook Open graph, twitter card metadata to the website. You can informthe 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. The Yoast offers more permalink settings than those given bythe 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, bettertitle and Meta descriptions. This feature stays available while the user writes/edits a page or a post. Selecting the pageanalysis option, the user can see whether the keywords is used in title and description properly, whether the contentincludes the keyword up to the recommended and other related things. Beyond just indications, Yoast even providesrecommendations.

All in One SEO Pack

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

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

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

SEO Ultimate

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

The plugin supports both, custom post types and custom taxonomies. Another good feature of the plugin is DeeplinkJuggernaut. 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 areallowed to customize it.

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

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 goodfor on page SEO. Alike Yoast, this 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 asadvanced as Yoast. The plugins can automatically add the keyword in post titles, can automatically add the nofollowattribute to the images and to the external links. More options given by SEO Wizard include 404 monitor and automaticXML Sitemap generation.

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

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

Both the plugins provide us the option for connecting the site with social platforms for social media optimization of thesite. While the Yoast supports Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+, the SEO ultimate supports only first twoplatforms. But, the additional advantage of SEO ultimate is that it has a “Deep Juggernaut” feature, which allowsautomatic interlinking of the content.