Looking for the best WordPress SEO plugin? With dozens of options out there, making the right choice can feel overwhelming.
The reality is, Yoast SEO consistently stands out as the go-to SEO plugin for serious WordPress sites.
In this post, we’ll show you why Yoast SEO has earned its spot as the top SEO plugin for WordPress, and how it can transform your site’s search performance.
Why you need an SEO plugin for WordPress
Let’s start with the basics: WordPress is great for creating websites, but it needs help when it comes to optimizing for search engines. That’s where SEO plugins come in.
Think of an SEO plugin as your site’s personal search engine assistant. It:
- Guides you in optimizing your content.
- Handles technical SEO automatically.
- Spots SEO issues you might miss.
- Makes SEO tasks easier, even if you’re not an expert.
While WordPress has some built-in SEO features, they’re pretty basic.
Without a solid SEO plugin, you’re missing out on crucial optimizations that could help your site rank better.
This is why Yoast SEO has become the go-to choice for millions of WordPress sites.
It turns tedious SEO tasks into manageable actions anyone can handle.
Yoast SEO: The best WordPress SEO plugin
You’ll find Yoast SEO on pretty much every list of top WordPress SEO plugins, and for good reason.
Since its launch in 2008, it’s grown into a reliable tool trusted by over 10 million websites. That’s a massive vote of confidence.
While Yoast SEO (free) brings serious value to most sites, Yoast Premium offers advanced features you’ll rarely find anywhere else.
Top features of Yoast SEO plugin
What makes Yoast SEO stand out from other WordPress SEO plugins?
We use it daily on this very site and several others, and these are the Yoast SEO features that make our work so much easier:
Automated SEO settings
The truth is, there’s nothing in SEO you couldn’t handle on your own. But doing it all manually? That would take up way too much of your time.
Yoast SEO automates all these otherwise manual tasks. The general settings page lets you tap into all the SEO data optimization settings for your site.
Yoast automatically scans your site and applies the most optimal settings for you, saving them straight to the database. No need for you to configure anything by hand. It’s a simple, automated process that gets the job done with ease and speed.
SEO content analysis that actually helps
What really sets Yoast SEO apart from the competition is its real-time content analysis system. It’s like having an SEO expert guiding you as you write.
Here are the key features in Yoast SEO’s content analysis system:
- SEO analysis
- Readability analysis
- Inclusive language analysis
- Insights
- Cornerstone content
- Text link counter
- Yoast AI (Yoast Premium)
- Internal linking suggestions (Yoast Premium)
You can easily turn any feature on or off by toggling it in the settings dashboard.
Here’s what we love about Yoast’s content analysis system:
The SEO analysis tool uses a simple traffic light system—red, orange, and green—to show how SEO-friendly your content is. It’s a powerful visual cue that encourages you to make improvements on the spot. As you optimize your page or post, the lights change accordingly. Green means you’ve nailed the optimizations, while red signals there’s still work to do. It’s a quick and easy way to motivate you to improve your content.
- Real-time suggestions guide you as you write, helping you achieve the best keyword distribution across your page. However, with the free version of Yoast SEO, you can only optimize for a single main keyword. Upgrading to Yoast Premium unlocks the ability to analyze synonyms and related keywords, giving you a more well-rounded optimization for even better results.
- The readability checker ensures your content is clear and easy to understand, which is crucial for SEO. It helps you avoid things like jargon, long-winded sentences, and unnecessary repetition, making your content more reader-friendly.
Advanced technical SEO made simple
While most users focus on Yoast’s ability to simplify and automate non-technical SEO tasks, its true power shines in managing complex, often hidden technical SEO settings.
Yoast SEO makes essential adjustments—such as setting up canonical URLs—easy, which are critical to avoiding duplicate content issues and helping search engines understand your site’s structure.
Here’s a closer look at the key technical SEO features Yoast simplifies:
XML sitemaps and crawlability settings: Yoast SEO generates automatic XML sitemaps that update every time you publish new content. But that’s not all—Yoast lets you customize how your archives and tag pages are displayed in search engines. You can choose to include or exclude them from the sitemap, giving you control over what gets indexed. Additionally, you can manage which URLs are included or excluded from the sitemap, improving search engine crawl efficiency.
Easy Robots.txt Control: Yoast SEO provides simple settings to manage how search engine bots interact with your site, allowing you to control which resources they can access through the robots.txt file.
Schema Markup: Yoast SEO allows you to enable rich snippets with its advanced schema markup settings. Most post types come pre-configured, helping Google better understand your content and display enhanced search results.
Clean Canonical URLs: When you have multiple pages with similar content, Yoast SEO’s advanced settings make it simple to set canonical URLs, guiding search engines to prioritize and follow only the original page. Even better, Yoast SEO automatically adds self-referencing canonicals to all your archive and post pages. Plus, you can manually edit the canonical URL for any post or page directly in the Yoast SEO panel within the editor.
How to install and set up Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO truly embodies WordPress’s core philosophy: making powerful tools accessible and easy to use for every website owner.
The installation and setup process runs like this:
1. Install like any WordPress plugin (Plugins > Add New > search for ‘Yoast SEO’).
2. Once installed and activated, you can configure essential settings in the main settings dashboard. Many settings will already have been automatically set by Yoast, and you should leave these defaults as they’re usually the best idea. You can manually provide other details such as social media handles, among others.
Pros and Cons
Yoast SEO has may great features and gets many things right. but there are some that could be better. Here are the best and worst about Yoast:
Pros:
- Easy-to-use and intuitive interface.
- Extensive suite of SEO tools.
- Very reliable. Regular updates and improvements.
- Excellent documentation.
- Strong free version.
Cons:
- Yoast Premium can be pricey for multiple sites.
- Some features are buried in settings.
- Occasional information overload for beginners.
- Annoying upsells and notices when using the free version.
User Experience
Yoast nails the user experience part. The interface is clean and intuitive, with a gentle learning curve. Even if you’re new to SEO, their green/orange/red indicators make it clear what needs fixing.
Their documentation is excellent, with detailed and helpful knowledge base articles and guides for every feature. Plus, their support team actually knows their stuff.
Final thoughts
SEO isn’t rocket science, and WordPress gives you a headstart when optimizing your site for search. However, to maximize your site’s full ranking potential, it’s smart to use a proven tool like Yoast SEO. It enhances the native SEO features in WordPress and ensures optimal performance while automating many of the routine SEO tasks.
FAQ
Is Yoast SEO premium worth it?
Absolutely. While Yoast SEO provides essential SEO features for free, Yoast Premium offers advanced optimizations that can give you an edge over your competitors.
Which is better: All-in-One SEO or Yoast?
Both Yoast SEO and All-in-One SEO are leading WordPress plugins for SEO, with similar feature sets. However, Yoast SEO’s 10 million users serve as strong social proof, and it consistently nails key SEO features. Ultimately, choosing between them is a matter of personal preference.
How to add keywords in Yoast SEO?
It’s simple. When editing a post in the WordPress editor, the Yoast SEO panel appears just below the editor screen. From there, you can easily add keywords and make other SEO adjustments to optimize your post.
