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A good search engine ranking will generates more organic traffic to your site.If you are using Wordpress, don’t worry. Wordpress already did the hard part for you. But, there are some SEO features that aren’t implemented in Wordpress core. You can easily archeive these features by installing plugins.
It is totally up to you that how much plugins you need to install in order to get a better search engine ranking. But try to keep the amount to minimum so that you won’t crash your server. Today, we are going to look into 10 Wordpress plugins that will increase your search engine ranking.
1. All in One SEO Pack
This plugin enables certain modifications to your Wordpress blog to achieve Search Engine Optimization. For example, you can customize your post title, post description and post tags for individual post. Furthermore, this plugin also has features such as auto generates Cononical URLS for your entire Wordpress site and select index/noindex for various archives pages.
2. Broken Link Checker
This plugin will monitors links in your site and list out links that don’t work or any missing images. The reason why this plugin is essential is because you may write an article and link to www.domain.com. This link may goes down in future and become dead ends for search engine. By using this plugin, you can get notifications immediately and remove these dead ends.
3. Google XML Sitemaps Generator
This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. A sitemap will help search engine spiders to crawl your content. The generated sitemap also supported by other search engine such as Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com.
4. SEO Friendly Images
SEO Friendly Images is a Wordpress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper alt and title attributes. By having a proper alt and title tag for your images, you can get more traffic from Google Image Search. This blog had gain quite a large number of traffic from Google Image Search by doing so.
5. No Self Pings
Although internal linking in your own site help navigate user to your posts, but it actually decrease your page rank because of the self pings effect. This plugin will eliminate this effect by removing all pingbacks from own site and only receive back links from other sites.
6. Enforce www. Preference
One of the important search engine fact is that search engines will treat www.domain.com and domain.com as two different site. You can easily overcome this issue by enforcing this plugin. Note: All in One SEO Pack will overcome this issue for you. Make sure you check the Canonical option.
7. Platinum SEO Pack
This plugin covers all the features of All in One SEO Pack, but it does include more options compare to All in One SEO Pack. For example, it adds index, noindex, follow or nofollow, noodp, noydir, noarchive, and nosnippet meta tags to any post/page. But, most of my clients prefer All in One SEO Pack as they are used to it and reluctant to change.
8. SEO Smart Links
SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your posts. This will help navigating your visitors to other posts. The interlinking process happens automatically and what you need to do is configure it through the administration settings panel.
9. SEO Slugs
Long URL may have a better ranking in search engines because it will contain more keywords. But search engines like Google tends to ignore some common keywords such as “you”, “a”, “the”, and “what”. Removing these keywords will improve your search engine ranking. This plugin will automatically remove these unused common keywords for you.
10. Robots Meta
Robots Meta enables users to control which pages/posts can be indexed and which can’t. For example, you may want to prevent indexing of your search results or your category pages. It is because some search engines will see them as duplicate content and decrease your page rank.
Wow very useful. Thanks for sharing !
You also should check out wpSEO http://wpseo.org
wpSEO is good, but it is not free. Do you try the trial version?
Great list! I have a couple of these but its nice to see that there are a few more to try out. thanks for sharing.
Thanks!, a great compillation!
@IhateDesign: Hope you like it. Thanks for visiting my blog!
That is a good list, i would add one of the related posts plugins and the sociable plugin cause helping people digg, stumble, tweet and tag your pages is golden
Thanks for useful list of plugins.
Thanks for this list. There are definatively some plugins I didn’t use. Even some I didn’t know about!
I wish someone creates a “SEO sluggs” for spanish users… Ay! Caramba!
removing self pings sounds very cool.
I just started using Headspace after reading a post over at Yoast. I’ve always liked All In One SEO but Headspace has some nice features.
http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/headspace2/
-=[ karl ]=-
Hmm… Maybe i should include this plugin in this article. Thanks for your comment SWKTalk!
Don’t forget wp-canonical if you want to reduce duplicate content hits.
http://cad.cx/blog/2009/02/12/search-engines-to-honor-new-canonical-urls-to-reduce-content-duplication/
Hi Colin, i have no idea on how wp-canonical works. But i think the “All in One SEO” will also perform the same task auto generates Cononical URLS for your entire Wordpress site.
Yes, All in One SEO Pack will take care of your Canonical URLs.
Launching a new Wordpress blog, so thanks very much! Good timing!
gk
Big fan of All-in-one SEO …
The main thing is it makes your title tags look less generic.
I believe there is another plugin that allows you to centralize social media links for users to post? I’ve seen that one on some sites.
Thanks for the post.
Hi Acnepril, I have no idea about plugin that centralize social media links. Can you share with us? thanks.
Are you referring to ShareMe Plugin?
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/share-this/screenshots/
I think you are right! This plugin centralizes social media links into one button.
Wow, great list! I can’t believe I’m only using a few of them…they all sound so useful!
some great tips here but i have a question – is there a plugin that suggests people should follow me on twitter
I think you may try this plugin – WP Greet Box.
OHH Some very interesting and insightful thoughts. Adding this to my bookmarks. ^_^
could someone explain to me the difference between #5- No Self Pings and #8 -SEO smart links?
It sounds almost like you’re saying don’t include links within your own posts to other posts on your blog, but do include links within in your own posts to other posts on your blog.
I’m sure there’s something I’m missing.
thanks.
Include links to your own posts are good, it help navigate your readers to other articles, that’s what SEO Smart Link works. While No Self Ping will prevent the “pingback” appear at your comment section, and Google don’t like these pingbacks.
What proof or evidence do you have to suggest that Google doesn’t like pingbacks?
VERY useful list – thank you. Plugins already installed!
Thank you for this great list of plug ins. I never knew self pings would hurt in search engine rankings and if this is true I think Wordpress should do something about it to. I will use the plug-in until then. Think I will use the SEO Friendly images as well.
Self pings don’t hurt your rankings any more than allowing links in your comment section do.
The self ping plugin has no impact on SEO.
I strongly recommend that you turn the No Follow off in your comment section. I’ll watch Google Webmaster Tools, and if the links don’t show up after a couple of weeks — I won’t go back to that blog again. Another suggestion: you should have a Top Commentator widget installed. Do Follow and Top Commentator will ensure that you have a successful blog with lots of readers!
I think turning off the “No Follow” in comment section will decrease your search engine ranking. According to some SEO expert, “Do Follow” will indirectly “share” your Page Rank with the blog that you are linking to, am i right?
Pagerank Checker just wants the link from commenting.
Actually you lose the PageRank either way, if the link is nofollowed it evaporates & if it’s DoFollow it flows to the site that’s linked.
Excpetionell. I have found some useful plugins.
Already installed. Works like a charm.
Thank you.
Thanks for this article. Before I read this we were barely hitting the 20th or 30th page of Google search results. After putting some of these plugins to use, one of our recent posts is the second result for the subject matter.
Hi ThinkSoJoE,
I am so happy that my post helps you to get higher ranking. Make sure you subscribe to my blog as there are a lot of good stuffs coming out.
Consider it done.
I was not having SEO Slugs will install now thanks for sharing
@ThinkSoJoE: wow… 20 to 2 that’s awesome.!
I know what I’ll be doing tonight. Plugins here I come…
Thanks for the great list!
I have first two installed but never knew self pings can decrease PR.
Great job. keep coming up this great resource
You definitely have some beautiful content here, good luck in whatever you do!
Well, All in one SEO is by far the best for me with couple of others good plugins. However, the rest may not be that useful at all.
New plugin I have found and am using to build one way links to my blog:
http://www.iblbuilder.com
(plugin download link is at the top of the page).
very useful, thansk a lot.. I always thought pins can increade PR
For the pings you need to get MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer.
By default Word Press to the default ping service every time you make any change to the tiniest bit of text. The ping-o-matic service which WP comes configured with straight of the box broadcasts your very frequent pings to many other sites that monitor such things, and you could be hurt badly, because it looks like you’re being a spammer. Max will prevent a ping just because you thought an extra 5px of padding would make the page look nicer.
I’d recommend some security and anti-virus plug-ins too, because its so well known, so are all the possible security flaws. I have the anti virus plugin, the no disposable emails one and the WP – Security Admin Tools from Semper Fi.
I started with Bad Behaviour I suspected it was blocking some spiders from social network sites as well as just spammers.
There are at least 3 twitter plugins, depending on whether you what to tweet content to your site, or you want your promote your blog by sending a tweet out with each new post.
very useful post, thanks
Hello,
A question to the thread creator: do the plugins require that you have an externally hosted Wordpress blog (Wordpress.org), or can they be used with natively hosted Wordpress blogs (Wordpress.com)?
Thank you
Hi Stewart,
Sorry i can’t answer your question as i never use Wordpress.com service before. But i guess most of them should be able to work with natively hosted Wordpress blogs.
Nice blog, just bookmarked it for later reference
Good post and nice design, is this a regular template?
Hi noor,
Thanks for your visit and bookmark. I created the theme myself.
Dicky
I note your comments about “all in one SEO” and “platinum SEO pack”.
I get the impression that you think that Platinum SEO is the better choice.
Is Platinum the one you would choose?
Hi Keith,
Currently i still stick with All In One SEO, as me and my clients are familiar with it. But I’ll try to use Platinum SEO if my clients are willing to try.
Good plugins are hard to get .any way thanks for providing some insight. great work
Veyr very awesome!
Hi,
Great list of SEO plugins, i spend all day implementing them on my all WordPress websites.
HeadSpace2 is very good.
On older sites i use this as main SEO plugin:
http://www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin/
Thanks for the useful info
this, very thank you..
Your site full professional and very beautiful…
Thanks for sharing these nice compilation. It surely helps a lot
Thanks for sharing these nice compilation. It surely helps a lot.
Great work..!!! thanks 4 sharing..
Very nice… Love the All in One SEO Pack.
These are great plugins.. The SEO Smart Links tool is extremely helpful. Thanks so much!
Thank you for this post. I installed most of your recommendations. I really like the broken link checker. After using it I see I have some work to do.
Thanks for sharing these nice compilation.
Although search engines help you generate immense traffic to your websites, it is not a technique, which bloggers think of using to maximize the potential of their blog. If you have chosen WordPress as a blogging platform – here’s some great news! There are wide varieties of Plugins, which you use to help your blog attain a good ranking online. SEO Plugins are vital components to WordPress blogs. WordPress is itself a great tool right out of the box. But it can be excellent if you incorporate some key Plugins that can help your blog.
Do not forget XSAL too
http://xev.com/
Very nice list of plugins. Even though I am presently using 6 out of the 10, I missed some good ones. Thanks.
Good all plugin
i used 4 out of these.. but i will use all to see how outcome comes ..
I used smart link plugin looks good.. i got my company website iam using wordpress for that .. basically iam flash specialist .. i need seo for site so i use wordpress.. now via this site i am shocked.that wordpress got alot for seo