5 Super SEO Plugins for Wordpress Blogs ...

Back in May Problogger readers were asked from what source they received most traffic to their blogs, and when the results came in Google picked up a resounding first place with 46% of the votes.

What it illustrates is that if you’re not receiving much traffic from Google then you’re missing out on a lot of potential visitors. With this in mind I’ve put together a list of the top 5 SEO plugins for Wordpress:

1) All in One SEO Pack

If you only install one plugin make it the All in One SEO Pack. It allows you to specify all the essential aspects for making your blog search engine friendly, with specific features including:

    * The ability to define the title, description and keywords for your blog.
    * META descriptions are added automatically for posts.
    * All Titles, descriptions and keywords can be edited manually.
    * Duplicate content problems are avoided through preventing the indexing of category, archive and tag archive pages.

Best of all it’s a very flexible plugin, where you can specify whether you wish to define your own meta tags and keywords, and use noindex for certain pages. It’s worth reviewing the options when first installed as, for example, you may want to allow your categories to be indexed by search engines.

2) Google XML Sitemaps Generator

This plugin, as the name suggests, generates a sitemap for your Wordpress blog. While not essential (we don’t currently have one here at PiggyBankPie, although may add one soon) sitemaps are an excellent way of allowing search engines to find your content, particularly important if your main navigation is limited. Features of the Google XML Sitemaps Generator include:

    * It creates a Google Sitemaps compliant sitemap for your Wordpress blog.
    * Your Sitemap is automatically updated each time you write a new post.
    * Search engines are automatically notified about any changes in your sitemap.
    * Clever other features such as ranking posts within your sitemap by the number of comments they’ve received.

3) Similar Posts Plugin

The Similar Posts Plugin is a clever plugin which has more to its armoury than simply SEO benefits. It allows you to display a list of similar posts to the one currently being viewed, with this similarity being judged based on page title, content, tags, or a customised combination.

The benefit from a search engine optimisation point of view is that the related posts now have links on highly relevant pages.

It could also be seen as a step towards semantic SEO, showing visitors related posts and as a consequence increasing page views.

4) Internal Link Building Plugin

The power of internal linking is frequently overlooked, but often a couple of keyword-rich links from high PageRank pages is enough to get a web page ranking highly for moderately competitive keyword phrases.

To aid with the task of internal linking a super new tool has been designed, namely Internal Link Building. In their own words:

    “What it does is give you an admin panel to assign keywords to given destination URLs. The point being that your website will link within itself a la Wikipedia - every time a keyword occurs, it links to the page you defined.”

With 74 Sphinns at the time of writing this it’s clearly a very useful tool - Sphinns aren’t given out lightly!

5) Redirection Wordpress Plugin

Finally, here’s one plugin which could be considered an essential housekeeping tool for established bloggers. The Redirection Wordpress Plugin has a number of features to tidy up duplicate, missing and loose web pages:

    * The ability to add ‘www’ to all your web pages, or vice versa.
    * If you change the URL of one of your posts a 301 redirect will automatically be applied from the old URL to the new one.
    * Manual redirects can be added.
    * There’s 404 page error monitoring, allowing you to locate and redirect these pages.

So there you have it - you’re just 5 plugins away from having a search engine friendly blog and eradicating many of the most common SEO mistakes that bloggers make. Know of any other useful SEO plugins for Wordpress? Feel free to mention them in the comments below.

source: piggybankpie

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