Search Engine Optimization

There are many advantages to using WordPress as a content management system.  Whether you use WordPress solely for your blog or to manage your entire website, it is a great choice because of its search engine friendliness, resistance to spam, and easily customizable interface.  To maximize your WordPress website’s search engine visibility, download these top 10 SEO plugins.

1. Related posts

The Related posts plugin posts entries with related tags or words after each of your blog posts.  This plugin is good for SEO because it improves your website’s internal linking structure.

2. All in one SEO pack

The All in one SEO pack plugin is the Cadillac of all SEO plugins for WordPress.  It allows you to add title tags, keywords, and descriptions to each page of your website. It also helps you avoid duplicate content.

3. SEO slugs

This plugin removes words that the search engines ignore from your site’s permalinks (unique URLs of your blog posts) so that they rank better for target keywords.  For example, if you write a post titled, “Why you should use this WordPress SEO plugin,” the permalink normally looks like this: “/why-you-should-use-this-WordPress-SEO-Plugin.”  The SEO slugs plugin removes the unnecessary words so that the permalink looks like this: “/WordPress-SEO-plugin.”

4. Nofollow case by case

By default, the comments on WordPress blogs have the nofollow attribute, meaning that commenters do not get any SEO value from providing a link back to their site.  The Nofollow case by case plugin enables you to make the links on blog comments dofollow.  This plugin is beneficial for new websites because it encourages people to comment, drives more traffic to your site, and builds community.

5. Google positioner

The Google positioner plugin helps you choose the right keywords to target in your content.  Rather than blindly targeting keywords that you think people might use to find your site, you can use this plugin to determine exactly which keywords are leading searchers to your site and then optimize your content for those specific keywords.

6. SEO friendly images

This plugin will help to ensure that all of the images on your site have alt and title tags so that they are indexed properly by the search engines.  Images are often a great source of traffic, particularly when they are optimized for search.

7. Google XML sitemaps

This essential plugin creates an XML sitemap that is readable for Google, Ask, Yahoo, and MSN.

8. Redirection

Whenever you make changes to your blog, the permalinks also change.  The Redirection plugin will ensure that visitors are redirected to the new permalinks in order to reduce the amount of traffic you get to pages that no longer exist.

9. SEO blog roll

To prevent the blogs listed in your blog roll from feeding off of your page rank, install the SEO blog roll plug in so that all of them receive the nofollow attribute.

10. Automatic SEO links

With this plugin, you can choose a word or phrase for automatic linking (internal or external), set anchor text, and then choose the dofollow or nofollow attribute.  This plugin will only create an automatic link for the first mention of the word or phrase in a post, so the same page isn’t linked to multiple times in one post.