Must-have( or Best) Free WordPress SEO Plugins in 2017

To rank your website higher in the search engine results, your website needs to be fully optimized. Yoast SEO is a free SEO plugin for WordPress site which enables you to improve your website SEO, making you able to write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site. From meta titles to the whole content, Yoast SEO provide step-by-step instructions, including real-time feedback as you type into each field with colors and instructions

Sitemap (an XML file) is a list of web-page URLs on a website that is accessible to all users. An sitemap is a way to tell search engines about all the pages that exist on a website. The XML file include some additional information about each URL: last updated, how often it changes, and important of the URL in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to learn about that page, so that it can indexed the page more efficiently. This improves the visibility of the website to search engines.

Speed is an important factor in SEO performance and user satisfaction. Caching is crucial for larger websites which significantly improve the performance and speed of your site.

W3 Total Cache is probably the most advanced, free and recommended caching plugin available for WordPress. it’s always in the top 5 caching plugins. It is designed to make sure your WordPress website loads fast, optimize server performance at high traffic periods. With the advanced options like Database Caching and automated use of Content Delivery Network, it's the complete caching solution

By default, WordPress does not have a system for website speed optimization. So you need a plugin that automatically performs optimizations to your site to increase speed and reduce server load and bandwidth.

With Autoptimize optimizing your site really easy. This plugin reduces HTTP requests by concatenating all scripts and styles files into groups of files, minifies and compresses them, set expires headers, also cache those. Minification is done in real time and done on the frontend. It can move styles to the page head and scripts to the footer. Autoptimize also minifies the HTML itself, making your page really lightweight.

Image compression or optimization by up to 90% can dramatically improve your website's loading time, better SEO ranking, increase visitors and ultimately better user experience.

This WordPress plugin automatically optimizes images as you upload them. It has the capabilities to optimize the images that you have already uploaded, convert images automatically to the file format that will produce the smallest image size, and optionally apply lossy compression to achieve huge savings for PNG and JPG images.

We all know that image attributes plays an important role to for site ranking in search engines. This is a free WordPress plugin which automatically optimize all ALT and TITLE attributes of images in all your posts.