Do you want to increase the search engine ranking of your WordPress blog? Check out these 9 SEO WordPress plugins that Shawn Jooste from Elite Blogger has pulled together for us.
The best place by far to find traffic is from search engines. The art of Search Engine Optimization is often very daunting for new bloggers. Even some experienced bloggers just see SEO as a cloudy puddle of mud they would rather not play in.
WordPress by default is pretty decent at letting search engines see what’s going on. But there are a whole bunch of other things that can be done to make your blog rank better. Fortunately there are plugins available to help you get better rankings for your blog, so you don’t have to go digging into the code of your blog to get some results from search engines.
I’m not going to explain the validity or effects of each of these SEO tactics in detail. There is more than enough of that on the Internet already if you want to do some research. I’ll mention briefly what the benefits of each plugin is, and why you need it.
This allows you to set the basic SEO stuff for your blog. You need page titles, meta tags, keywords, and descriptions. This plugin allows you to configure them for either your entire blog or on a post by post basis.
2. Redirection
From time to time you make changes on your blog. Sometimes these changes end up breaking your Permalink structure. This often happens when you make a change to an old post, or do an upgrade to WordPress and make some changes to the permalinks. It’s very very common if you move your blog from one host to another.
Basically what happens is that each post has a unique URL, called a permalink. When this changes, visitors who go to that blog post won’t find it. The redirection plugin helps you fix these problems by redirecting the visitor to the new permalink. This reduces the amount of traffic you get to pages that don’t exist.
3. Robots Meta
By default search engines crawl and index ALL the pages on your blog. This isn’t ideal, because it creates duplicate content and you can get yourself punished by search engines without knowing it. What the Robots Meta plugin allows you to do is tell the search engines which sections of your blog to crawl. This means that you’ll get more respect from search engines, and likely more traffic.
One of the key issues with SEO is your internal linking structure. The more you link to a certain page on your blog, the more important it is to your overall content. Search engines treat your internal links as an indication of how well structured your site is. The problem with this is that if you had to manually go and create links to relevant and important posts you’ll spend hours and hours doing it.
SEO Smart links allows you to specify a word, like ‘SEO’ and then link it to a post on your site. Then each time the word SEO appears on your site, it’s automatically turned into a link you specified.
Images also play an important role in your SEO strategy. So it’s important that you tag them correctly. SEO Friendly images allows you to do this, and saves you hours and hours of work. If, like most bloggers you use images in your posts, then this plugin is essential.
It’s important to know your keywords. And this handy plugin allows you to track the keywords you’re getting searches for. It’s pointless selecting a few keywords, then writing some content for those keywords and hoping that the rest goes well. SEO is about being proactive and tracing what works and what doesn’t.
7. Permalinks Moved Permanently
A common mistake bloggers make is choosing the wrong permalink structure. When you start your blog you think you know which is best, and as time goes buy you want to change your permalink structure. The problem with changing your permalink structure is that your traffic will come to a standstill until your site is reindexed, and that could take months.
This plugin is similar to redirect but is an easier and better way to manage permanent permalink changes.
The nofollow attribute over the last year or two has had a fairly large impact on the blogosphere. All comments in WordPress by default are nofollow links. This means that no Page Rank (PR) is being given via the link. This plugin changes that and makes comment links valuable again. There are a number of reasons you would want to give away link juice. It’s often used to attract people and encourage them to comment. It can be very useful for new blogs who need some exposure.
9. SEO Slugs
Stop words are ignored by search engines. So most of your post titles have them in, but they are meaningless to search engines. So when you have a post title like this: “What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings” you have a permalink like this: ‘/what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings’ but what you really want is for your permalink to look like this: /immediately-higher-rankings.
This plugin automatically removes stop words from the permalink, helping you to rank better.
Conclusion:
Getting better traffic from search engines will help you boost your blog. You’ll get better income, rank better, and be able to build a better brand.
A very good list. I have a hard time remembering to do SEO maybe these plugins will help me to do that.
thankyou for this valuable info right now i am going to get the redirection plugin, this will help me alot!
Wonderful and great information, I use most of these plug ins in already but I did not know about. Thank you so much.
I really like the list as I am always searching for additional plugins to make my site more effective. However, I am wondering why you didn’t include the Headspace plug in or the Google Sitemap plugin as well?
I thought these were to good plugins. Well, actually the All-in-one-seo plugin may do the things that HeadSpace does, but the Google Sitemap, which is action Google XML Sitemap does a good job for every site.
Thanks for sharing and please advise.
Great tips. On one of my blogs I’m using Platinum SEO pack instead of All In One SEO. I’ve seen a few reports saying platinum is more robust. Do you have any insight into it?
An article came out from Google some time back that explained in further detail what they mean by duplicate content.
Apparently having content on your blog’s front page as well as it’s own post page doesn’t qualify for the duplicate content rule.
Thank you, thank you! I have a couple of these plugins but will definitely be adding SEO slugs and SEO Smart Links.
Great list, Darren, esp. the SEO Smart Links. Thanks for the tips.
Google Positioner – Compatible up to: 2.5
you might want to check Platinum SEO Pack… basically all of the features found in AIO SEO plugin but has a feature that i needed : ” You dont have to fear changing permalinks. If you are not satisfied with the current permalink, change it through Settings>Permalinks in your admin panel, without worrying about loss of Page rank or google penalty.”
Actually, some stop words are NOT ignored by Google, and image tags, etc, have extremely little value, other than to attract people who want to steal your images.
If you are not very technically inclined, DO NOT mess with redirecting anything. People have had their permalinks screwed up from doing this.
You will always be better off editing slugs by hand, by the way.
I want to encourage people to use some of these plugins but to be careful with others. This post was a great resource! Thanks, Shawn!
Good collection. I have a few and I want to go and get a few more.
One thing I have noticed is that it seems WordPress comes with a redirection when you change your permalinks. I was worried about this about a week ago so I tested it and found out that when I changed my permalink and typed in the old url it was redirected to the new page.
I think your redirection and permalinks moved permanently is not as vital.. am I wrong?
I did extensive research on SEO before I started my blog, and get very good search traffic as a result.
However, WordPress has its limitations, and these plugins are there to fill in the gaps. Of all in the list, the All-In-One SEO and the SEO Friendly Images probably have the most effect.
Great reference post, Shawn! Bookmarked.
Nice and valuable post. I’ve seen some plugins that I currently don’t use. Have to work on it!
I’ve use the plugin Headspace 2 on my blog in favor to All In One SEO Pack. Anyone have an opinion about this plugin?
@PetervanVeen
I will have to go ad these. i thought I had a handle on all the SEO plugins but haven’t heard of Google Positioner yet.
great plugins, i will definitely try them out
Thanks for the SEO primer.
Do you know if all of these will now work with WP 2.7?
Cheers
George
Awesome list! I’m going to install and activate the SEO slug plugin and Google Positioner plugin immediately.
I’m running All In One and I’m getting great search traffic so far. Does anyone who uses the nofollow plugin let their users know that the comments are no nofollow? What’s the best way to do this? I’d imagine it would encourage commenting if they knew.
I use the all in one SEO plugin along with commentluv and do follow plugin for the comments. You should also remember to check in every now and again to Google Webmaster resources, once you have your tracking code installed you have cart blanch to optimize your blog further.
Also get the Firefox extension SearchStatus, this is a goldmine of information not just for your own site but for any site, great for use in Niche research.
The Google sitemap should have had a mention as should the Google website optimizer wp plugin.
I will try out the bot plugin, Thanks for the tips
Nice list, but regarding Robots Meta, don’t you prefer Google xml sitemaps? Just curious. I’ll have to revisit this upon your recommendation though.
@PetervanVeen I installed Headspace 2 to no avail. Didn’t even work for me. I repeated and still nothing. I must have gotten a bad download or something. for what it’s worth seo pack is stellar as best i can tell. No complaints. It’s a comprehensive plugin that does a lot for your site.
Great list thanks a lot!
Great article. It is amazing how in depth all this is! I am new but learning quickly.
Great list, just installed them all :)
I’m using “All in One SEO Pack” and “DoFollow”. The “Nofollow Case by Case” looks more flexible than DoFollow, so I think I’ll switch to it. Thanks for the list. I’ll be checkin’ these other ones out.
Hi, very nice list of plugins!
I will install all of them and try them on my site!
Thanks for sharing!
Google Positioner is buggy, i wouldn’t recommend installing it.
Brilliant.
I’ll install these once my sites are back up (server trouble).
thank you for this list, to Darren, do you use all of them?
ukr.net – I didn’t write this post – Shawn did. I personally don’t use them all.
I have done many of these posts on my blog. Basically the same list I had in my post last week. Nice list though.
Thank you for the Plugins.
Thanks for the list. I had the SEO pack but didn’t know about the others. Question: there was on that I didn’t download b/c it stated that it was valid up to 6.2. Is that going to matter with 2.7?
Hmm great list i am using some of them already, will definatly look into others
Two of these were new to me. The Google Positioner and the SEO Slugs. Just installed them. Thanks for the heads up.. They look like they will be awesome.
Thank you! #7 on the list is the plug-in I’ve been looking for for a long time, as I’ve been wanting to update my permalink structure and not have to deal w/ people going to the wrong links. Again, thank you!
I wasn’t aware of the last one with regards to page slugs, makes sense though … installing plugin now!
Great resource – I’m going to add a few to my toolbox :)
Good stuff. Now it’s time to go right ahead and download most of those.
Wow! Great list, I’ve already using some, and will try the other.
Thanks for sharing Shawn.
Platinum SEO plugin is still a better choice than All in SEO.
Excellent list Darren. I’ve been meaning to find a plugin to help me with redirection because I sillily used date permalinks on my AFA blog. What I’m really excited about is the SEO smartlinks plugin… now that is the most amazing thing I’ve heard. Talk about making it easy to link to your top posts. Perfect!
I am just starting up with SEO and this is a very useful post, especially for beginners. Thanks for Sharing
Great List…my preference is still All in SEO Pack…
I recently launched a love blog – Cupid Blogger Dot Com, and about 20% of my traffic are from Search Engines…thanks to the plugin and also keyboard research as well..
For more love tips, i would encourage you guys to check out
Cupid Blogger Dot Com
Darren:
I thoroughly enjoyed this post because it was so full of information. Thank you so much for this post; it not only has increased my knowledge about blogging, it has also increased my internet vocabulary. Keep up the good work!
Since wordpress has been updated, will it hurt if I install a plugin that has not been tested with the current version of wordpress?
Question:
Darren,
Obviously you do not utilize the SEO Slugs plugin here on problogger, is there a specific reason you do not?
I have my guesses, but I figured you would be able to clear it up.
Thanks – Jeremy Winter
Great list.
@Jeremy. Nice observation. I suspect they limit their use of plugins because plugins slow websites down and clutter the backend. And as you can see, there are already a few plugins in use: Adsense, Democracy Poll, Bookmark this, etc…
Great plugin list, I am using some of them. Some other plugin I have never heard and looking great I will defiantly try this plugins.
@Freddie Taylor, I didn’t include the headspace plugin because the All-In-One plugin does the same job, and has a little more flexibility. I’ve also got more experience with it, and have seen the results. So I like to stick to what works. As for the sitemaps, I haven’t actually found one I like. I’ve tried 2 or 3, but find the flexibility somewhat limiting. If you know of a good one, please link to it ;-)
@B Durant, The Platinum plugin does pretty much what the All-In-One does, and as I said to Freddie, I have experience with the All-In-One.
@inspirational thoughts, I’ll be honest, I haven’t looked at the redirection WordPress does, but thanks for the heads up, I’ll have a look.
@Tumblemoose I am running 2.7, and haven’t had any problems.