WordPress is one the most popular tools for publishing content on the web. Everything from e-commerce websites to blogs can be developed using WordPress. Additionally, the WordPress community has built up a huge offering of free themes and plugins to make it easy for newcomers to get content published on the web quickly and easily.
However, just posting content on the web isn’t enough for many; attracting people to your site is part science, part art — and many WordPress plugins help you do just that. This is a listing of top-notch WordPress plugins for SEO to improve your WordPress site’s search engine rankings.
This WordPress SEO plugin allows you to track certain keywords in your site, and then issues you a report every 3 days (with all sorts of pretty graphs to boot). The plugin will also notify you via email whenever certain keywords experience major changes in search engine ranking.
Any basic research on SEO plugins for WordPress will lead you to All in One SEO Pack. It is the most popular solution for your WordPress site’s search engine optimization. This plugin automatically optimizes your WordPress site for search engines by generating meta tags and helping you optimize web page titles. Advanced users are given the ability to customize post titles, descriptions, URL structures and tags for each post.
SEO Ultimate is a suite of tools for, well, ultimate SEO. It has a feature called Canonicalizer, which extends WordPress’s native canonical features to ensure that web spiders are pointed to the primary post in the case of web pages with the same content, but different URLs. It has a built-in robot.txt editor (one of the five web files that will enhance your site) that will allow you to easily set up this file for optimal search engine indexing. It works well with All in One SEO Pack, allowing you to import meta-data from it if you wanted to switch to SEO Ultimate.
This nifty plugin helps you identify weak content in your site. For example, many WordPress owners forget to include descriptions of their categories, which is a potential point of improvement for enhancing your search engine rankings. SEO Content Control helps you easily identify these potentially troublesome areas.
Optimizing images for search engines is often neglected; but when done right, you increase their semantic value, accessibility, and search engine indexability, especially for image searches. This WordPress SEO plugin automatically updates your images with alt and title attributes.
SEO Smart Links is a WordPress SEO plugin that automatically links keywords and phrases in your blog posts based on previous pages and posts. SEO Smart Links gives you the ability to set up your own unique keywords and sets of matching URLs. It also allows you to set nofollow attributes and open links in new browser windows or browser tabs. A very convenient way to save time, learn a bit about SEO best practices and interlink blog posts.
This WordPress plugin is able to generate an XML sitemap that will assist search engine spiders in crawling and indexing your WordPress site. XML Sitemaps reveals the structure of your site’s content in a transparent way for search engines. Google XML Sitemaps also includes support for Bing, Yahoo!, Ask.com, and MSN, notifying them every time you create a post.
This SEO plugin for WordPress is loaded with plenty of features, including automatically generating meta tags, helping you optimize page and post titles for search engines, and aiding you in avoiding duplicate content (one of the ways to improve SEO of sites you design).
Conclusion
These WordPress plugins will give your WordPress site a complete SEO overhaul. Installing them and getting to understand each plugin’s inner workings may take some time, but it is worth it to know how each plugin can benefit your site. When used correctly, your content will be more visible, potentially attracting additional traffic consisting of your target audience.
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About the Author
Matt Krautstrunk is an expert writer on document management software based in San Diego, California. He writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs such as payroll services at Resource Nation. You can follow him on Twitter @Mattbill.
