Best WordPress Plugins for SEO

• August 19th, 2010
• Posted by Jason
• Blogging
• No Comments

If you have a blog of your own and post regularly, you probably find yourself checking to see how many comments your blog posts got or how many visitors came to your site on a regular basis. How much traffic a site gets is a factor determined by its visibility to search engines and how well the site is ranked. Undoubtedly, the web is host to many millions of blogs with more appearing with every passing day. If you want more hits to your blog, you will have to optimize it so that it appeals to search engines. Tweaking your WordPress blog and optimizing it to improve its ranking in order to bring in more traffic is called Search Engine Optimization. SEO can be a daunting task for any newbie and does require intermediate webmaster expertise. Fortunately, there are numerous WordPress plugins which can help you optimize your site. Here are some of them:

1. Robots Meta
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/robots-meta/
This plugin allows you to determine which sections of your blog you want to allow search engines to crawl and enables you to verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Tools. It allows you to easily add robots tags to your WordPress pages. Other features include the addition of noindex,follow robots meta tags to allow search engines to follow links in your search engine results while preventing them the results from being indexed, prevention of duplicate content and the indexing of login, register and admin pages, the ability to disable author and date-based archives. The plugin also makes it possible to edit your .htaccess and robots.txt files from within WordPress.

2. All in One SEO Pack
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
With this plugin, you get the best options out of the box for all the basic SEO requirements and lets you optimize your home page according to the best SEO practices. You can customize and control the basic elements such as the title, keywords, meta description, and meta tags for each post or apply them to the whole blog.

3. Sitemap Generator
http://www.dagondesign.com/articles/sitemap-generator-plugin-for-wordpress/
A highly customizable sitemap generator for sites running WordPress which includes multi-level category and page support, permalinks, generation of multiple pages with navigation, comment count and post date options and much more. Includes a separate options page inside the WordPress admin panel to provide access to settings.

4. SEO Slugs
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-slugs/
This plugin makes blog post slugs search engine friendly by removing common words such as “what”, “you”, “is”, “can” as these words are ignored by search engines. By using this plugin, you can generate SEO friendly permalinks for your blog. Slugs are generated automatically but you have the option to edit or delete them and force a new slug generation before publishing them.

5. Redirection
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/redirection/
Updating your blog or migrating from one host to another may result in destroying your permalink structure. When visitors follow such permalinks, they will not be able to access the blog posts that they point to. The redirection plugin can be used to avoid this situation as it redirects visitors to the new permalinks. It also allows you to manage 301 redirections, automatically add a 301 redirection when a permalink changes, moniotor 404 errors, the ability to add or remove the www prefix from your WordPress pages and a host of other useful features.

6. Google Positioner
http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wordpress-google-seo-positioner.zip
This plugin enables you to track your website for your keywords in Google to determine where it ranks. This allows you to analyze search engine results and optimize your site accordingly.

7. Automatic SEO links
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/automatic-seo-links/
This plugin makes the job of creating links in your blog posts easier. By using this plugin, you can choose words or phrases that you want to create links for and it automatically searches for them, replacing them with links throughout your blog.

8. SEO Title Tag
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-title-tag/
This plugin allows easy optimization of title tags, one of the most important SEO elements, throughout a WordPress blog instead of using blog post titles as title tags which is the default WordPress way of handling title tags. It allows you to override the title tag of a page or post with a custom title tag, the ability to enter title tags in the Edit and Write post forms, mass editing and 404 error page title tag and setting title tags of category pages to the category description.

9. 404 SEO plugin
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/404-plugin/
With the help of this plugin, you can generate customized Page Not Found (404 error) messages and also display links to relevant pages on your site based on the word in the URL that caused the error.

10. WP to Twitter
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-to-twitter/
This handy plugin automatically updates your Twitters status from your WordPress blog. Tweets can be sent by default when updating or editing a post or page and can also be custom written. All Tweets are automatically truncated to the allowed maximum length. The plugin posts a URL back to your post by using the Cli.gs or Bit.ly URL shortening services.