5 WordPress SEO Plugins You Have To Use

WordPress Logo

WordPress has always been great because of how easily you can extend the free software. With the large community backing this Open Source project there are now a fair number of plugins that will do an array of things to be both a benefit to you, your visitors and of course those potential visitors we all desperately seek.

Here is a list of WordPress plugins we recommend that you use on your blog.

Headspace 2

Headspace 2 is one of the best and definintely one of the most important WordPress plugins around. It sorts out a lot of the simple SEO functions as well as giving you a lot of extra functionality with built in page and site wide modules.

Page specific features:

• Page titles – SEO optimized titles
• Tags and keywords are auto-suggested using a smart algorithm or via Yahoo and work on both posts and pages (pages can also be set to appear in tag archives)
• Page-specific plugins – have plugins that run only on specific pages!
• Theme-specific plugins – change your site theme on specific pages!
• Description – what appears in search engine listing
• More text – change the ‘more text’ for each post
• JavaScript & CSS – add JavaScript or CSS files to a post
• No index – configure whether a page is indexed by search engines
• No follow – configure whether links receive a follow/nofollow attribute
• Site name & description
• RSS name & description
• Anything else you want – HeadSpace allows custom meta-data

Site wide features:

• Configure auto-formatting (wpautop), auto-fancy quotes, auto-clickable links, and disable visual editing
• Tracking codes for Google Analytics (new & old code), Crazy Egg, StatCounter, 103bees, Mint, FeedBurner Stats, Yahoo! Site Explorer, HitTail, Google Webmaster, Piwik, and Apture, with the ability to not track registered users
• Google section targeting
• First Time Visitor – display a special message to visitors when they first visit your site (based upon idea by Seth Godin)
• Disable Widgets
• Change PHP memory limit, timeout, and error reporting level

There is also a cool feature to import data from many of the other plugins used to improve on SEO such as UTW (Ultimate Tag Warrior), SEO Title tags, All-in-one SEO, Jerome’s Keywords and Simple Tagging to name but a few.

This is a highly recommended plugin to anyone who cares about SEO, who doesn’t?

Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress

Sitemaps should be used on every site which is this plugins core functionality. Having to update your websites sitemap everytime you publish a post will literally become a pain in the ass and that is what Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress removes entirely (the pain that is).

Apart from having to create the sitemap.xml once there is no actual work required from you and the sitemap is updated every time a new post is created.

Another cool feature is that is ties into the Popularity Contest plugin and will assign the relevant priority to popular posts.

Redirection

This Redirection plugin is perfect for managing 301 redirects, 404 error pages and generally neaten up any loose ends.

It is also great if you need to redirect posts from an old site or have changed your WordPress directory.

Features:

• Supports both WordPress-based and Apache-based redirections
• 404 error monitoring – captures a log of 404 errors and allows you to easily map these to 301 redirects
• RSS feed for 404 errors
• Custom ‘pass-through’ redirections allowing you to pass a URL through to another page, file, or website.
• Full logs for all redirected URLs
• Create redirections based upon a URL, browser, referring site, or login status
• Automatically add a 301 redirection when a post’s URL changes
• Full regular expression support
• Fully localized
• Export all redirections to CSV, XML, or Apache .htaccess files
• Import Apache .htacces files

SEO Slugs

SEO Slugs plugin strips common words like “what”, “you” or “can” out of your post slug to make it more search engine friendly. This make sure that the important keywords in the URL are kept and the unimportant words removed.

SEO Smart Links

Cross linking posts has quickly become very popular with in blogosphere and SEO Smart Links is a plugin that automates this for you. You have a few options to use that allows you to decide on which posts are linked to each other.

Features:

• Find keywords in your posts, pages and comments and link them to your other posts, pages, categories and tags
• Full control with customizable options
• Ignore list for keywords you do not want to link
• Improves your site’s interlinking
• Control external links with custom keywords
• Add nofollw attribute or open links in new window
• Caching for speed – make sure you have define(’ENABLE_CACHE’, true); set in your wp-config.php

These are definately some of the most important WordPress SEO plugins and it would be beneficial to have them installed from the outset. However it is still not to late to optimize your blog and install all of these plugins giving older posts a slightly better optimization and making all the new posts optimized for best success.

Please note: this does not mean that your website will jump to the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Ranking Pages) but it definately make a difference.