SEO Plugins for WordPress that Give your Blog Wings!

SEO Plug Ins

WordPress is the Content Management Solution of choice today and is what I recommend all of my clients use. This is because it is Open Source, has a huge userbase, and is highly customizable. Today I wanted to review a few PlugIns that are SEO focused. These plugins are very easy to setup but you can also dive head first into them for lots of customization. Using these plugins will help your site show up for the keywords you want and get you more traffic.

1. All in One SEO – This is the granddaddy of SEO Plugins for WordPress. It covers getting your META tags setup for every Page and Post on your site. In the main setup area you will be able to set the META tags for your home page and then make selections for how it handles your Pages and Posts. When you create a new Page or Post or edit an existing one you are also presented with options for setting the META tags for those pages. It adds a little more time to your Post and Page creation but this time is totally worth it in the long run. There is a paid version as well.
2. Permalink Finder – We have all run into them before and they can ruin our image of a website in 2 seconds flat, no I am not talking about banner pop ups, I am talking about 404′s. A 404 shows up when the page someone is looking for no longer exists. The Permalink Finder plug in solves this issue by redirecting to either a Post or Page with similar keywords, or to the blogs homepage. There is a settings page once installed and you should review it to make sure it doesn’t do anything you won’t like. This also solves issues when the search engine bots are following old links that no longer have pages at the other end, now they are redirected and you keep the link juice!
3. SEO Slugs – Once you start using WordPress one of the first things you need to update is how it creates Permalinks. By default they look like this http://arizonaseo.com/?p=123 which is a dynamic page and will have a lower chance of being indexed by Google. Instead you want to set it to either “Day & Name” or “Month & Name” so that each new Page and Post will create a ‘Slug’. Slugs are basically the title of the post with hyphens(-) instead of spaces( ). The SEO Slugs Plugin will also remove common words from the slug like ‘a’, ‘it’, ‘the’, etc. This will help the search engines identify what your post is about that much faster, and speed is the name of the game. There are no settings for this plugin, once you have it installed it just does its job.
4. SEO Smart Links – In the SEO world links are a major focus. There are two types of links: external and internal. While external links get most of the attention it is critical that you are also linking internally. The Navigation bar covers a lot of this but you should also be linking from within your posts to your other posts. The SEO Smart Links plugin helps you automate this by looking at your post’s keywords and linking them to other posts that share that keyword. Once you install the plugin be sure to go to the settings page and make adjustments as you like. Be sure to review the results each time and correct anything that just doesn’t make sense.

Keep in mind this is a pretty short list of all the SEO related plugins for WordPress. I may have missed your favorite. If so please let me know.