The ranking of your blog article mainly depends on the volume of organic traffic. Organic traffic means visitors who land on your website through search engines.

According to data available on the internet, 93% of overall total traffic and 39% traffic of e-commerce sites is organic. This simple statistic is enough to highlight the importance of organic traffic.

As a content writer, you put your best effort to develop good quality content, do a lot of research, exercise your brain to develop attractive graphics; but if your page is on the 5th page of google search, then no one is there to exhibit your content.

This is heartbreaking. Being 100% focused on content creation is not a wise decision. Particularly if you have a business in mind.

Good content is a must and prerequisite for a successful blog, but a good SEO strategy is also essential to increase its visibility.

Why SEO plugins are necessary?

If your blog is a personal one or you are writing on a highly specialized niche then a content created with the conscious use of keywords may be sufficient; but if you are building a brand and competing with some authority website contents, then a strong SEO strategy is required.

Today a new blogger when writes his first blog, competes with millions of bloggers to make a place in SERP. To survive in this cut-throat competition, your content should be SEO optimized in all aspects. You have to use SEO plugins to optimize metadata, alt text, tag, the content title even images are also nowadays optimized to get better visibility

Google search engine algorithm is continuously evolving and search engine crawlers are collecting data through rigorous surveys on every aspect of your site according to that algorithm. So WordPress SEO plugins are nowadays a must for every site owner to increase his site’s visibility as much as possible.

 There are several WordPress SEO plugins available both free and premium. If you just started your blog and right now don’t want to invest much on SEO, then my suggestion is to start with free SEO plugins. They are quite capable of handling basic SEO tasks.

Best free SEO plugins 

Here I will discuss 7 best free WordPress SEO plugins, which will be your best friend to optimize your article and rank fast. 

Yoast SEO plugin

This is the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress and used by almost 5 million users worldwide. This plugin gets automatically installed while installing WordPress.
Although this plugin has a premium version with lots of advanced features, the free version itself also provides basic SEO optimization facilities like the search for keywords in the blog title, meta description, heading, and content; provides the glimpse of a snippet of the blog post; checks the readability and share in social network

Source: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/

SEO friendly image

These are essential plugins to handle the ALT and TITLE attributes of every image used in your site. These two attributes are important for local SEO of your content. 
The ALT attribute tells the Google search engine and the users in turn about the image when the user searches any query.

On the other hand, the TITLE attribute shows the title text on the tooltip when any visitor hovers the mouse on the image.

PB SEO friendly image is such a plugin to create SEO friendly images and freely available.

Source: https://wordpress.org/plugins/pb-seo-friendly-images/

Short Pixel is also a very important WordPress freemium plugin to optimize the images and PDF documents by compressing pixels without losing clarity of images used in web pages.

Thus this plugin helps to improve page load speed, better user experience and ultimately higher rank in Google search results. The plugin is also very handy, lightweight and easy to use.

Source: https://wordpress.org/plugins/shortpixel-image-optimiser/

All in one SEO pack

This is true to the name, an allrounder plugin for almost all SEO optimization purposes. It was first launched way back in 2007. It takes care of the generation of XML sitemap of your site and different images and submission of it to different search engines.

Accelerated mobile pages or AMP is the new sensation in the SEO arena. Mobile users now consist of almost 60% of total internet users. So, this large chunk of visitors to your website can be handled using the Google AMP support facility of this plugin.

Google analytical support, Advanced canonical URLs, Schema.org makeup, generating meta tags automatically, automatic notification to search engines like Bing and Google about any changes in your website are few of the other important SEO activities performed by All in one SEO plugin.

Source: https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

The SEO framework

This is a very helpful plugin to which uses Artificial Intelligence technology to perform SEO optimization. It goes through the WordPress environment and generates meta tags on its own in any language you want. Thus, it saves considerable time of yours enabling you to be more focussed on content creation.

Source: https://wordpress.org/plugins/autodescription/

Broken link checker

This plugin is for finding out a broken link on your site. Broken link checker looks for links that don’t work, images that are not uploaded or not visible and redirects. It also monitors all your posts and pages, comments for any possible problem and notifies you through the dashboard or via email. 

This plugin is highly customizable; you can adjust is to make broken links appear differently in posts and prevent search engines from following broken links.

Source: https://wordpress.org/plugins/broken-link-checker/

Rank Math

It is an SEO made easy tool. In today’s’ world success of blogging largely depends on a good SEO strategy. So, sometimes for a blogger SEO for his/her blog becomes such a big concern, that he/she starts spending more time on search engine optimization even than creating high-quality content.

Rankmath plugin here provides a helping hand to bloggers to focus more on content writing leaving the job of SEO for it. Rankmath totally automated the SEO task and thus is a very important plugin in WordPress.

Some of the major features of this plugin are like Google schema markup or rich snippets integration, optimization of the content using up to 5 keywords, Google search console integration, Google keyword ranking, LSI keyword i.e Latent Semantics Indexing keyword search, monitoring 404 error, Local business SEO, suggesting internal links, etc. 

All in one Schema rich snippets

Snippets are the new mantra of success of your blog. A good eye-catching rich snippet results in search engines significantly increase the chance of readers clicking your page link, thus, increasing organic traffic.

A rich snippet is a brief summary of your blog page content showing a glimpse of related images, author images or key tables in a nice format. This snippet is displayed in the search result pages of google, bing, yahoo search engines or a news feed of Facebook quickly drawing the attention of visitors.

This plugin provides a search engine the precise information for creating snippets Thus, helping you to stand out from the cut-throat competition and rank higher in search engine results.

Source: https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-schemaorg-rich-snippets/

Conclusion

The SEO plugins mentioned here are all either free or they have their freemium versions which you can use without investing a rupee. So, if you just have started your blog and worried about its optimization, these tools are your best friend for basic SEO tasks.

Write great content and optimize it using these tools, you have a great chance to rank your page only with on-page SEO strategies. So, no more waiting and go on trying these tools. SEO can be best learned by experimenting with different SEO techniques. Apply something new and wait for a few weeks, see how did the changes affect your ranking and accordingly change your plan. You can read thousands of pages on SEO and hundreds of videos about how to do SEO, but without applying it practically, you can never learn the technique.