WordPress is one of the most popular vehicles for blogging available on the Internet today. The reason for this is that WordPress is easy to use and easy to customize. There are multiple plugins available to assist you with your blogging goals. One of the most important aspects to any blog, though, is getting people to your site. Advertising and marketing efforts will help expose your site to the general public. However, the first place you should start is to ensure you have a high placement in search engines. This process is called search engine optimization, commonly known as SEO.
SEO means that you make your site more easily indexed by search engines so that when someone searches for particular keywords that relate to your site, your site will come up within the first few results. There are many ways you can optimize your site so that this works best for you. WordPress has multiple plugins available to help you. Choose from the top 10:
- All in One SEO is a WordPress Plugin that does what its name implies: just about everything. This is the perfect plugin for those who do not want to install multiple applications but still want the versatility to do a lot of SEO functions. What this plugin will accomplish is SEO for titles, descriptions, keywords, no index of duplicate content, per post and per page modifications of default data to be more SEO friendly.
- Platinum SEO is another all inclusive plugin designed to make SEO options quick and easy without having to install multiple applications. This is perfect for the beginner WordPress user who wants to ensure good SEO without a lot of hassle. Titles, meta tags, duplicate content settings, permalink settings, indexing, archiving, following, post and page settings are all addressed in one easy to use plugin.
- Redirection is perfect for any time you need to change your links on your WordPress blog. When this occurs you run the risk of losing any search engine indexing that has already occurred. However, with this plugin you can manage your redirects so you do not lose any indexing plus get a listing of any 404 page errors so hey can be fixed as soon as possible. This plugin is available in over 10 languages.
- No Follow Case by Case is a plugin that allows you to tell search engine bots whether or not to index or follow a particular link on your site. This way, you can have relevant links indexed appropriately without giving benefit to others’ sites who post links to help promote their own blogs. You can choose to have a search engine follow those you wish to support and not to follow others on a case by case basis.
- SEO for Paged Comments is especially handy for busy interactive sites. If you have an interactive community where you have a lot of people commenting on your posts you run the risk of having multiple pages for comments. This alone is not a bad thing; a busy blog is great. However, if you have multiple pages of comments the original post will appear on each page and each page is its own link. The problem occurs with search engines that may penalize you for duplicate content. This plugin eliminates this by posting an excerpt with a link as opposed to the entire text.
- If you do need to have duplicate content for some reason you will need to address this for SEO purposes and SEO No Duplicate plugin will take care of that for you. It allows you to have duplicate content on your site for visitors to see but you can identify the parent post that you want to get indexed and followed and any additional versions that you want ignored. This will ensure you do not get penalized for duplicate content while allowing it to be seen.
- SEO Friendly Images is a plugin that makes creating “ALT” tags easier and ensures your embedded images help your SEO. Because images are a valuable tool in assisting with your page ranking, it is important to optimize them as much as possible and this tool makes it easy and quick.
- Google Sitemap Generator is a great tool for SEO to create a sitemap for use in indexing. However, even though it was designed specifically for Google, the most popular search engine, many others use this format as well. So, if you want to get high placement on Yahoo, MSN and Google, this is a great place to start to automatically generate the sitemap without needing any coding knowledge.
- Tag Cloud Widget is a plugin that allows you to use tag clouds without having the indexing problems normally associated with their use. While attractive, they are typically not readable by indexing bots and therefore do not get the benefit of SEO. With this widget it converts the tags to HTML so they can be read easily.
- Related Entries is a helpful plugin that allows you to take full advantage of SEO possibilities using internal links. This plugin finds other posts within your site that are related to the original one and links to it. This way viewers can browse easily to additional content within your site while allowing you the benefit of increased SEO all at once.
With the inclusion of some of these handy SEO plugins you can optimize your site quickly and easily without needing to learn any extensive SEO tricks or hire a coder. The top ten SEO plugins for WordPress will take care of a lot of the necessary activity for you quickly and easily. You can increase exposure to your site via better search engine placement and increase your SEO with very little effort when you use these handy tools.
