WordPress is one of the most popular website platforms to use because it is customized for search engine optimization and it is very user friendly. You do not have to be a web designer and understand fancy technical code to put together a professional looking and SEO effective website. However, there are time when you will want to add some extra tools to improve your SEO, otherwise known as ‘plugins’. Not all WordPress SEO plugins work the same or even work well. Therefore, it’s important to know which WordPress SEO plugins to use when creating your own website or blog.
Top WordPress SEO Plugins
Here’s a compilation of top WordPress SEO plugins as detailed in an article written by the folks at Bruce Clay, Inc.
- Google XML Sitemaps Generator: Produces an XML Sitemap-compliant site map of the WordPress blog and is supported by Google and other major search engines.
- HeadSpace2: This plugin allows a user t manage Meta data including shortcuts for saving time such as mass editing of Meta information and dynamic descriptions.
- High Performance SEO: Allows you to configure more than 100 on-page characteristics without extra junk code in areas of main title, head section, secondary title, secondary descriptions, paged comments and duplicate content.
- Increase Sociability: Checks refer traffic to a post and gives a custom welcome message to those coming from Digg or StumbleUpon, asking them to give a positive vote for the post.
- Ping.fm Custom URL: Collects blog, microblog entries and status updates from people in your social networks and posts them to your blog with customizable Meta data.
- Redirection: This plugin manages 301 redirects and keeps track of 404 errors. Particularily helpful if you’re migrating pages form a former website.
- RSS Footer: Add an extra line of content to articles in your feed with a default “Post from (name),” linking back to your blog with the blog name as anchor text.
- SEO Friendly Images: Automatically updates all images with the proper ALT and title attrobutes, according to the criteria you set.
- Smart YouTube: Allows you to embed YouTube videos and playlists into posts, comments and RSS feed without using any external resources.
- Ultimate Google Analytics: An easy-to-install plugin that tracks Google Analytics data.
- WP-PageNavi: Adds advanced page navigation to a WordPress site.
- WP Super Cache: Works to increase the speed of your WordPress blog by generating html files served directly by Apache withour processing heavy PHP scripts.
- Yet Another Related Posts: This plugin displays a list of related entries based on a customizable algorithm, including post titles, content, tags and categories. http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2011/05/wordpress-seo-plugins/
Attribution: Common – Picture Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stickergiant/3769771267/
Hi,
I am a regular reader of your blog but commenting on very first time. I have learned a lot about Search Engine Optimization from your articles which you have published here.
Most of visitors of my blogs came from Search Engines and I have very low ratio of my permanent followers. So, I always tried SEO tips for my blogs.
Thanks for your informative articles.