I have listed the top 5 best free SEO plugins for WordPress 2023 other than the popular, Yoast. Some plugins can also be used as an alternative for Yoast. These WordPress SEO Plugins will help in improving page rankings. Use them to beat the competition and increase your traffic.
Understanding the Key Factors involve in SEO
SEO has a complex and changing dynamics. It doesn’t depend on a few factors. But there are some which are the basics for Good SEO and we’ll be focusing on them only.
Quality Content
This needs hard work and Research.No WordPress Plugin will write quality content for you. But a good SEO plugin can analyze your content according to the target keyword and gives you a suggestion to make it more Google Friendly. Like, suggesting you create more internal links, appropriate headings, and make the content better optimize for Google to understand.
Backlinks
There’s no WP plugin that will produce automatic Backlinks. The simple method to follows is to create quality content, share it on social media platforms, use email contacts, etc. High authority Websites will link to your content if it’s worthy of and that’s what matters. There are tips and methods for creating backlinks. That we will discuss later in some other blog post.
Speed
Website loading speed and overall performance is also a key aspect in the ranking.No one loves slow websites and Google respects its users. This is why Google is pushing websites to use AMP format to enhance their speed on mobile platforms. There are many WordPress plugins that improve the loading speed and performance of the website.
The following are the few unnoticeable WordPress plugins that you can use to enhance your website speed and make your content more Google Friendly.
5 Best Free SEO Plugins (Other than Yoast)
Rank Math
The plugin is called the Swiss army knife of WordPress SEO. It is created by the team behind mythemeshop. The best thing about Rank Math is that it provides a ton of free premium features.
Although, Rank Math is a new player in SEO game its timely updates have improved its stability and WordPress integration. I personally prefer Rank Math over Yoast SEO. Even many other popular websites and blogs are using Rank Math instead of Yoast SEO. Learn more about this in Rank Math vs Yoast SEO comparison.
Some of its flagship features are:
- Rich Snippets for your posts
- Optimization for 5 focus keywords per post.f
- URL Redirection
- AMP support
- Advance SEO analysis of website
- Search Console Integration
Asset CleanUp: Page Speed Booster
This is the real deal if you want to improves your website loading speed by 30-50%. Websites have achieved a high-performance score in GTmetrix, PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom Website Speed Test by using this amazing plugin.
Asset CleanUp uses the assets blocking method by not allowing to load unnecessary (.CSS and .JS files) produced by certain plugins. For instance, you might use a plugin that generates contact forms and it loads its assets (.CSS and .JS files) on every page of your website instead of doing it only in the /contact page (if that’s the only place where you need it).
Further users can unload WordPress default JS files and remove useless links, meta tags, and HTML comments within the HEAD and BODY (footer) tags of the website.
The Asset CleanUp Key Features include:
- Decreases the number of HTTP requests loaded and eliminate render-blocking resources
- Preload CSS/JS, Local Fonts & Google Fonts files to instruct the browser to download the chosen assets as soon as possible
- Minify & Combine remaining loaded CSS & JavaScript files
- Inline Chosen CSS Files
- Defer combined JavaScript files by applying the “defer” attribute to the SCRIPT tags
- Combine all Google Font requests into fewer (usually one) requests, saving one round trip to the server for each additional font requested
- Apply “font-display” CSS property to all loaded Google Font requests
- Site-wide removal for Emojis, Dashicons for guest users and Comment Reply if they are not used
- Reduces the HTML code of the actual page (that’s even better if GZIP compression is enabled)
- Makes source code easier to scan in case you’re a developer and want to search for something
- Remove possible conflicts between plugins/theme (e.g. 2 JavaScript files that are loading from different plugins and they interfere one with another
S-G Optimizer
This is an official cache plugin from SiteGround.
Websites that are hosted on SiteGround can use this plugin to improve loading speed and overall website performance. SG-Optimizer links WordPress with the SiteGround Performance services and will not work on another hosting provider.
The key features of SG-Optimizer are:
- Dynamic Caching
- Browser-Specific Caching
- Memcached
- Browser Caching
- PHP Version Selection ( up to 7.3)
- Front end optimization (HTML,CSS,JS)
- Image optimization
- Lazy image loading
Easy Table of Content
A user-friendly plugin that allows you to insert a table of contents into your posts, pages, and custom post types. It enhances the user experience by highlighting the whole article in points table form. This tells Google that the user is easily finding the answer to his queries. By all this, Google can easily understand what the article or blog post is all about. This will help post to be ranked better for the exact keywords.
Easy Table of Content Key Features:
- Automatically generate a table of contents according to headings (settings can be changed)
- Custom post types are supported, as long as their content is output with the
the_content()template tag. - Auto-insert option.
- Customization (Color,position,themes,etc)
- Supports smooth scrolling.
- Selectively enable or disable the table of contents on a post by post basis.
- Widget available
JetPack
This is certainly the most popular WordPress plugin on this list. There are many things JetPack offer but the auto-sharing of content on the social platform is the best for me. You can use the plugin to improve website performance, check stats, activate social sharing buttons, etc. It basically enhances overall WordPress functionality.
People who are lazy to check out and update their social media pages with their blogposts must use JetPack. Just link your Facebook, Twitter, Google accounts with it, and you are done.
JetPack key features:
- provides security ( Brute-force attack protection, spam filtering, and downtime monitoring, etc)
- Images and static files, like CSS and JavaScript, served from our servers, not yours.
- Elasticsearch-powered related content and site search, for relevant results with no drain on your servers.
- Lazy image loading for a faster mobile experience.
- Unlimited and high-speed video via our content delivery network.
- Advanced site stats and analytics for understanding your audience.
- Customization tools (Social sharing buttons, related posts, Image gallery carousel)
- Auto Social Media Sharing
- SEO tools for Google, Bing, Twitter, Facebook, and WordPress.com to maximize your reach.
- Integration with the official WordPress mobile apps, to manage your site from anywhere.
I’m sure these best free SEO plugins for WordPress will help your Blog/Website to do good on google search. If you think any plugin is missing from the list, do comment below. I’ll make sure to check it out.
He is a web publisher with over 5 years of experience in SEO, WordPress, Niche website building, and Content creation. Via this website, he can assist you in creating your first niche website and can also help you attain success in improving the ranking of your current website, increasing revenue, enhancing your website’s speed, and much more.