Best SEO Wordpress Plugins
Looking for the Best SEO Wordpress plugins? You’ve come to the right place!
All in One SEO Pack
All in one SEO pack is without a doubt the most crucial wordpress plugin you’ll ever download. Major features include:
- Page Title
- Meta Keywords
- Meta Description
- SEO Configuration for home page, posts, page, categories, tags, etc.
- No index options
Having control over these aspects allow you to super charge each individual post on your blog, thus optimizing them for search engines. Without this plugin wordpress is simply inadequate from an SEO perspective. All pages / posts will be assigned a default title, tags, etc. leaving much to be desired by the search engines.
Simple Tags
Simple tags is another “simple”, yet highly crucial plugin for wordpress. This plugin allows you to take greater control of the default wordpress tagging structures to further optimize them for search engines. A properly tagged article will allow you to further increase your keyword distribution for each article, exposing new search results you may have been overlooking. Major features include:
- Quick insertion of tags
- Tag finder
- Auto linking features
- Meta Keywords (disabled if you’re using All in one SEO pack)
- Related Posts
- Related Tags
- Tag Cloud
XML Sitemaps
This plugin will automatically create an XML sitemap for your entire wordpress website. This plugin updates the sitemap on a daily basis and will notify google, yahoo, msn, and ask of your updates. Every good website needs a properly formatted sitemap and XML sitemaps is a simple and elegant solution.
Redirection
Redirection is a plugin with a whole ton of functionality, but from an SEO perspective we’re going to be using this primarily for 301 redirect links (a 301 redirect is a permanent redirect). Redirection can create this code for you with just a few key strokes, allowing you to notify search engines in the event an article has moved permalink locations.
This is incredibly important if you find it necessary to change the permalinnk structure of your blog or if you are moving an entire site. I was in a similar situation a few months ago with one of my other websites, which at the time was running drupal (another blogging platform similar to wordpress). I used a similar redirection plugin to transition my pages in drupal to a completely new structured website with wordpress.
If I had failed to complete all the 301 redirects I would have essentially blind sided the search engines. For example, one of my articles was at domain.com/node/500 (this is drupal’s permalink structure) and it was moved to domain.com/8/18/08/name-of-article (wordpress peramlink strucutre). Google had indexed the article under the drupal permalink structure, and if a visitor clicks this and gets a 404 page not found error google is going to put you at the very bottom the search results during their next algorithm update.
However, with redirection I was able to intervene, so when a visitor hit domain.com/node/500 they automatically were forwarded to my new page for the article, which was subsequently re-indexed a few weeks later. Once the new article location was indexed I was able to remove the 301 redirect and completely take the old site offline.
