Without a doubt the versatility of WordPress in the online arena is growing by leaps and bounds on a daily basis. This is also gives rise to the issue of having your website/blog being indexed by search engines as the process of getting your domain live is as easy as 1-2-3. With more domains going live it is inevitable that your competition will naturally increase.
So how do you separate yourself from the rest of the crowd and carve your own niche on the web?
First of all, before you even think about optimizing your setup, have you looked at your content? Because the below list of SEO plugins are just tools to enhance your content not magically give your content juice it does not have in the first place.
The first rule of SEO is content, everything comes next.
Here are FreshPress Themes most recommended SEO plugins for WordPress :
WordPress.com Stats – Although this is mostly a stats plugin it does provide some great information on your most popular content and search terms that lead to your blog and its posts. So if you like a quick glance at how your SEO tweaks are doing right within your dashboard this is a great plugin to do just that. Download WordPress.com Stats.
Robots Meta – This is an awesome plugin that helps you out with customizing your meta robots tag in your WordPress pages. The plugin helps you prevent indexing of your search result pages, while still allowing the search engines to follow the links on them, by adding noindex,follow robots meta tags. Prevents indexing of your login, register and admin pages by adding noindex robots meta tags. You can also edit your robots.txt and .htaccess from within your WordPress and much more… Read more about Meta Robots plugin. Download Meta Robots
Redirection – Let’s say someday you decide that you want to restructure the way your content is presented on your blog. The only thing is that everything on your blog will throw up a 404 error if you decide to change directories or permalink structure. The best way to fix this is to use this plugin to help you redirect all your posts to the new permalinks. It will even keep a log of your 404 errors, after which you can do a 301 redirect for those pages. Download Redirection
Google XML Sitemaps – A very handy plugin to generate an XML sitemap for search engines to slurp up. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like Ask.com, Google, MSN and YAHOO!, are notified about the update. Download Google XML Sitemaps
SEO Image – I’m always amazed at the number of hits I get from search engines via their Image Search. That’s taught me to do one thing and that is to give my images even more importance while inserting them into my posts. The ALT attribute is an important part of search engine optimization. It describes your image to search engine and when a user searches for a certain image this is a key determining factor for a match. SEO Image automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. Download SEO Image
All In One SEO Pack – The granddaddy of all SEO plugins for WordPress. This is one plugin that I include by default in all my blogs and sites that are powered by WordPress nowadays, come to think of it most of my sites are powered by WP! This is a definite YES for your blog. Download All In One SEO Pack
The above represents some of the most important SEO plugins for WordPress, naturally there are many others due to the extremely large community behind the platform. But if you use the above coupled with your great content I’m sure you’ll do just fine.