Long Term SEO Strategies
June 1, 2009A Healthy Dose of SEO
July 7, 2009One of the reasons wordpress is such a popular blogging platform is the ability to use plugins which enhance the functionality of your blog. So when it comes to search engine optimisation, several plugins are available along with newer ones that are continuously being developed by the wordpress community. This list covers the top plugins which can boost your blog’s SEO score.
1. All In One SEO Pack / Or Yoast
One of the most popular and widely used wordpress plugins, All in One SEO does exactly what it says – it has the ability to twist and tweak every corner of your blog for proper search engine readability and indexing. Add proper Meta keywords and descriptions, page titles and post titles with this plugin. Yoast is also an excellent SEO plugin. This post is pretty old now, and we often prefer Yoast these days.
2. Google XML Sitemaps
A sitemap enables the Google spiders to quickly index the posts and pages on your blog. This plugin automatically creates and updates a Google compliant sitemap to ensure that no post is left unindexed.
3. SEO Smart Links
Interlinking your blog posts can boost the SEO score of your blog significantly and also leverage fresh traffic to older posts. As doing this manually is time consuming, one can simply set keywords and their target urls to link to and also specify other attributes through this plugin.
4. SEO Slugs
Another great plugin to optimise your permalinks, SEO Slugs removes stop words from permalinks which are ignored by search engines by default. For example, a post with ‘the best SEO plugins for your blog’ in the link would be automatically re-named as ‘best SEO plugins blog’.
5. Simple Tags
Tagging posts is a great way to improve navigation and simple tags is the most powerful plugin to help you add tags to your posts.
6. Robots Meta
Duplicate content is a heavily under looked area of search engine optimisation particularly when it comes to a blog. This plugin enables you to specify the sections that you want to be indexed and not indexed such as archives, comments, tags, etc.
7. SEO Friendly Images
Organic traffic from images can only be enhanced if all your images have proper tags associated with them and SEO Friendly Images ensures that this is done every time you add an image to a post.
8. Nofollow Case By Case
If you have a new blog which desperately needs exposure in the blogosphere, then removing the ‘nofollow’ attribute from your comment links can help attract attention. This plugin removes the attribute, positively encouraging your readers to comment and receive link love.
9. Redirection
Most blogs tend to undergo several changes, both major and minor, over a period of time. This affects the permalinks of older posts and can lead to dead links on your blog. Redirection is a highly useful plugin which ensures that users are redirected to new the permalinks.
10. Yoast Breadcrumbs
Very few people realise this but putting breadcrumb navigation on your blog can significantly perk up site navigation – both for users and search engine crawlers. ‘Home>SEO>plugin’ is an example of breadcrumb navigation.
11. Smush
This plugin can shrink your image file size and helps to load your website faster.
When you get your website made by an SEO friendly wordpress developer, such as us, you can be sure we choose the right plugins to suit your theme or custom design. This will help streamline your web design to ranking process and save plugin conflict issues that can happen with WordPress website.