Commentary

My Four Favorite Wordpress Plugins For SEO

by Janet Driscoll Miller , March 1, 2011

After last year's Google Caffeine update, blogs have seen an increased boost in Google organic search rankings. Whether you're new to blogging or trying to improve your blog post rankings, where can you get started? First and foremost, if you're not using a self-hosted WordPress, consider making the switch. I've found WordPress to be the most SEO-friendly blogging platform, and with its many fantastic plugins, WordPress goes a long way to making your blog SEO efforts more efficient. Here are my four favorite WordPress plugins for SEO:

The All-In-One SEO Pack

This plugin is my favorite SEO plugin for WordPress. The All-In-One SEO Pack allows blog post authors to define a specific title tag, meta description and meta keywords tag for each post. If you don't have the All-In-One SEO Pack installed, WordPress defaults to using your post title for the title tag and doesn't add a meta description or meta keywords tag. Using the plugin, you can then define these tags, which can not only help your SEO but also your click through rate in organic rankings by adding compelling content in these areas.

You can download the All-In-One SEO plugin here.

Google XML Sitemaps Generator

This plugin is a key one. The Google XML Sitemaps Generator plugin automatically updates your blog's Google XML Sitemap every time a new post is added.

Download the plugin and activate it. Once your Sitemap is created, register the Sitemap with Google Webmaster Tools. Then, each time you add a new post, Google will know about it quickly through your Sitemap update.

You can download the Google XML Sitemaps plugin here.

Redirection

If you're not a PHP programmer and don't want to touch your .htaccess file for fear of messing something up, the Redirection plugin is a great way to create and manage 301 redirects without getting too technical. Redirection is especially important if you make changes to a blog post URLs. For instance, let's say you change the way WordPress automatically constructs URLs for blog posts. Don't lose your rankings for those existing posts! Use the Redirection plugin to create redirects for old URLs.

You can download the Redirection plugin here.

Google Analytics for WordPress Plugin

Like with the Redirection plugin, if you aren't the super techie type and don't want to have to edit your PHP template pages, the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin can help you add Google Analytics tracking scripts to your blog pages without having to actually code them yourself.

You can download the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin here.

3 comments about "My Four Favorite Wordpress Plugins For SEO".

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Aaron Bradley from SEO Skeptic, March 1, 2011 at 6:18 p.m.
With all due respects to the makers of the All-In-One and XML Sitemap generator plugins, there's a new kid in town in the form of the Yoast SEO plugin:
http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/
In my opinion it does a better job than the All-In-One pack, and includes a sitemap generator than is better than the one that you've cited.
For some reason many writers have come out with "WordPress SEO plugin" posts of late, always omitting the Yoast plugin - and then there's a flurry of types like me that pimp it in the comments. I'm beginning to feel like we all work for Joost de Valk - but just to be clear, I have no association whatsoever with him. It just happens to be a great plugin. :)
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Nancy Fraser from Nota Bene Consulting, March 1, 2011 at 7:23 p.m.

Wordpress is very search engine friendly and easy for non-technical website owners to manage themselves, which is why we use it to build websites and blogs.

Headspace2 is one of our other favourite SEO plugins. We use a number of Joost de Valk's plugins but not the Yoast seo one.

Standardizing the plugins we install makes it easier to become familiar with the features of each & learn where to look for and how to deal with any conflicts that may occur so we pretty much use the ones you mentioned Janet and it works.

And of course, you only want to install the plugins you truly need to avoid slowing your site.

Jay Meattle from Shareaholic, Inc., March 1, 2011 at 11:41 p.m.

Hi Janet,

Would love to get you to try our popular WordPress plugin that enables your viewers to share your content (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sexybookmarks/).

It has proven time and time again to be an extremely useful and successful tool in getting your readers to actually submit your articles to numerous social bookmarking sites.

Let me know if you'd like any help! We're here for you.

- Jay
jay@shareaholic.com