WordPress core gives you foundational SEO elements out of the box: customizable permalinks, automatic XML sitemaps since version 5.5, title and meta tag support, and a hierarchical URL structure. You can write clean URLs, set alt text on images, and manage categories and tags without installing anything extra. That covers maybe 20% of what you actually need for competitive SEO. The heavy lifting happens through plugins. Yoast SEO and Rank Math are the two dominant choices in 2025, both free with premium tiers. They add schema markup, breadcrumb navigation, content analysis with readability scores, XML sitemap controls beyond WordPress defaults, redirect management, and meta description fields for every page and post. Rank Math tends to pack more features into the free version, while Yoast has a cleaner interface that newer users find less overwhelming. All in One SEO is the third major option, sitting somewhere between the two in complexity. At Ottawa SEO we run Rank Math on most of our 500+ domain portfolio because the free tier includes schema types and internal linking suggestions that Yoast locks behind a paywall. For client sites where the team isn't technical, we'll use Yoast because the traffic light scoring system is intuitive and the support community is massive. Beyond the big three, specialized plugins handle specific SEO tasks: Redirection for 301 management if your main plugin doesn't cut it, WP Rocket or similar for Core Web Vitals optimization, and Broken Link Checker to catch 404s before Google does. You don't need a dozen plugins, most sites do fine with one comprehensive SEO plugin plus a caching solution. The trap is thinking the plugin does SEO for you. It gives you the controls, you still need to know which levers to pull. A site with Yoast installed but generic meta descriptions and no keyword research will lose to a hand-coded HTML site with proper optimization every time. The tools matter less than the strategy behind them.