WordPress (WP) is a platform that was designed to embrace Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The system is built in such a way that the posts and pages are created in categories and tags in which one references the other, forming a well-connected site that guides Search Engines and helps them crawl the blogs and index them.
WordPress comes with built-in SEO tools such as blogrolls, pingbacks, and trackbacks but third party plugins can also be added to make your WordPress website more Search-Engine friendly. Here are 10 useful plugins* to optimize your site and boost your website ranking in Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing.
1. All in One SEO Pack: This allows you to customize the metatags from each post and page, create canonical URLs and fine tune navigational links.
2. Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress: This creates an XML-sitemap of the blog that is supported not only by Google but also by Ask.com, YAHOO and MSN Search. The plugin automatically indexes all posts and pages of the blog and notifies these Search Engines via ping.
3. KB Robots.txt: This creates and edits your robots.txt file from the WordPress dashboard. The robots.txt file is the first file that search bots crawl when they enter a site. It can be used to give them special instructions on what to index.
4. Platinum SEO Plugin: This offers everything that the ALL in One SEO plugin offers plus it also issues a 301 redirect to the new location of a page if you change its permalink, also adds an index, noindex, follow or nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noodp, noydir meta tags to posts and pages.
5. Simple Tags: This tag lets you easily generate Technorati tags for the blog, by entering them at the bottom of each post.
6. Dean’s Permalinks Migration: This allows you to change your permalinks without fear of affecting Search Engine ranks by using a 301 redirect command to notify them of permanently moved links.
7. Permalink Redirect: This compares URLs to ensure there is always only one URL for each blog entry and archives. If there is duplicate content, the plugin issues a redirect. This is very useful so that Search Engines don’t split page rank with the same page with a different link.
8. Link rel Plugin: This defines the link relationships between posts. HTML anchors have an attribute “rel” that allows you to specify the relationship the link has to other pages. Although the effect of link relations in search engine ranks is debatable, this plugin makes easy use of this ability.
9. Ozh’ Better Feed: This adds customizable features to WordPress feeds. Many search engines now accept feed submissions and there are many sites specializing in feeds directories and feed services. This plugin lets you add anything to each feed entry such as a copyright notice, read more links and a link for incoming links in Technorati and Google.
10. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin: This lists all related posts to an article helping visitors looking for specific information that they want more information about. This also helps Search Engines to dig deeper into the blog.
Installing WordPress SEO plugins and increasing the SEO functionality of your WordPress website will enhance your website’s SEO technical infrastructure and improve your Search Engine ranking. Increased visibility on Search Engines leads to increased traffic, a higher sales volume, better brand recognition and increased market share.
Read our article on WordPress SEO – A Great Tactical SEO Strategy on why using the WordPress platform gives you the SEO advantage.
