Finding the best wordpress plugins for search engine optimization (SEO) is a hard task, but we have taken the hard work out of the situation for you! I’ve used tons of WordPress plugins over the last few years and these are the best. These plugins will help your site climb to the top of Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
1. All in One SEO Pack– this plugin lets you define the homepage title, meta description, and meta keywords for your site. It also lets you define the page titles for just about every type of archive/search page for categories, pages, tags, and more. It’s a great SEO tool so you don’t have duplicate title tags in your site. Perhaps the best part of the plugin is that it includes the nofollow attribute for certain types of search pages like archive & tag. This way the search engines don’t index search pages that might end up in duplicate content.
2. Homepage Excerpts – this one is great for websites that want to avoid putting the entire post on the homepage and archive pages, category searches, and tag pages. This let’s you define how many words to display from the post as an excerpt which is great if you don’t use the custom excerpt feature. I have imported a few blogs from blogger and those don’t come along with a custom excerpt in the post – and one of the blogs has over 700 posts! So I can’t exactly go back and write a custom excerpt for all those posts anytime soon. This is the perfect fix for this.
3. Akismet– a lot of people think this is the best wordpress plugin altogether. Akismet WordPress plug filters spam comments. This is free to personal site users and Automattic charges a small fee to business users. Why is Akismet plugin good for SEO? If you have comments set loose in moderation tactics – you need something like this. This way you won’t have non-topic comments coming into your blog that will dilute your page’s keyword density. It will also save you time so you can focus on getting more high quality links to your site and posting quality content.
4. Google XML SiteMaps– this is pretty straightforward. If you have a Google Webmaster Account – you’ll want this feature. It will generate a sitemap which you can include in your site and post to your google account to ensure better and deeper spidering of your content. Google will also check on how often this is updated so they can spider quicker. With the new Google Instant feature in search fresh content is more and more important – you need to make sure Google/Yahoo/MSN get to your content faster.
5. Meta Robots WordPress Plugin– another great WordPress plugin for SEO. The meta robots plugin allows you to stop the search engines from indexing your images, any kind of archive pages, and certain links on your homepage. It can also prevent the indexing of your private pages like the login page for your WordPress admin area.
These are just a few of the favorites that you can count on to SEO your WordPress blog. These are the best WordPress plugins for SEO that I have found, but I’m not quite done looking! I’ll keep you posted on other plugins for various functions in SEO as I find them.