SEO for Wordpress: Five Great Plugins for Your Blog
One of the biggest advantages of running your blog or small business website on a WordPress platform is the ability to fully optimize practically every aspect of your site. From pictures to links, page titles to keywords, WordPress has a plugin that will help you modify and manage your search engine optimization efforts. Actually, there are hundreds of SEO plugins available on the Net. So, how does a small business owner know which to install and activate on their site? If you’re having difficulty narrowing things down, here are five useful plugins that I’ve used and recommend to blogging clients.
Five Useful SEO Plugins
1) Broken Link Checker
Broken links are frustrating dead ends for users and search engines. Luckily, the Broken Link Checker plugin is designed to sniff out dead end links on your site, and display any issues on your dashboard. The plugin detects broken internal and external links, and gives you the opportunity to modify the link or remove it entirely.
2) Google XML Sitemap
If your website doesn’t have a sitemap, get one now! Search engines use sitemaps as a road map to find new content on your website. Neglect to update your site map, and search engines may neglect to crawl your site on a regular basis. The Google XML Sitemap plugin for WordPress is a great tool for bloggers and small business owners because it automatically updates your sitemap structure every time you add a new post or page to your site. Once you’ve created your sitemap, remember to submit the URL to search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
3) SEO Friendly Images
Images help ad variety to your website, but they do very little in terms of SEO unless they feature the correct tags. Help your site rank better in image searches by inserting an alt tag automatically with the SEO Friendly Images plugin. This handy plugin automatically updates all images with proper alt and title attributes according to options that you setup.
4) Permalinks Migration
The default permalink setting in WordPress isn’t very SEO friendly. If you haven’t already set your permalinks option to a “pretty” format – ideal setups are /%category%/%postname%/
or /%postname%.html, you’re going to want to install the Permalinks Migration plugin. This plugin will help your old permalinks redirect to new ones instantly using permanent, search-engine friendly, 301 redirects.
5) All-In-One SEO Pack and Platinum SEO
I’ve used both of these plugins and while both are great, I prefer Platinum SEO. Both allow you to add titles, keywords, meta tags and descriptions to your posts and pages. The big difference? Platinum SEO also includes a robots meta section where you can set the follow and indexing options of every page and post. Search engines crawls and index all pages on your WordPress site by default, and this isn’t necessarily a good thing. Having the ability to customize your robots meta data and create unique titles, descriptions, and keywords for every post on your blog sets Platinum SEO apart from the All-In-One-SEO Pack. (If you’re using Alll-In-One, don’t worry – there’s a separate Robots Meta plugin download that provides similar functionality.
What are you favorite SEO plugins for WordPress? Leave a comment and let us know!
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I’ve had a few issues with the XML Sitemap generator. If you’re not using 100% compatible versions of the plugin and WordPress, you can crash your database.
[WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The poster sent us ’0 which is not a hashcash value.