20 of the Best SEO Plugins for WordPress

Do you want to rank better in Google, and if you have a WordPress blog, how do you do? Maybe is a better way to install some good SEO Plugins, but there are ton of plugins talk about SEO, how to choose?

With more than 120 million blogs in existence, how do people find YOUR content on the Internet? The key starts with great search engine optimization (SEO), which is an art and a science that helps search engines discover your content and understand how relevant it is to specific search queries.

You can blog your heart out, but if you don’t have good SEO, then odds are you won’t have many readers.  Luckily, the WordPress () plugin community values SEO and has developed a number of plugins to help. Here are 20 of the best SEO plugins to help you choose the right tags, tell search robots what to work on, optimize your post titles and more.

Have another SEO plugin to recommend? Tell us more about it in the comments.

Nofollow Case by Case – This plugin allows you to strip the “nofollow” command from your comments, and then you can apply it to only the comments you don’t wish to support.

Platinum SEO Plugin – The Platinum SEO Plugin offers you such features as automatic 301 redirects for permalink changes, auto-generation of META tags, post slug optimization, help in avoiding duplicate content and a host of other features.

Redirection – For any number of reasons you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, but then you risk losing that page’s status in search results.  Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more.

SEO Blogroll – Do you worry that the people you link to in your blogroll are feeding off of your PageRank?  With SEO Blogroll you can make separate sections for various groupings of links, with an unlimited number in each, and all of them will receive the “nofollow” attribute.

SEO for Paged Comments – With the introduction of paged comments in WordPress 2.7, there was a potential problem with search engines thinking you had duplicate content as the post would appear on each page.  This plugin aims to take care of this issue for you until the folks at WordPress change things up.

SEO friendly and HTML valid subheadings – Some themes for WordPress will confuse your sub-header tags based on the page they are to be displayed on, but this plugin will automatically reset them to make them more SEO friendly by moving them down one spot in the hierarchical tree.  In other words, h2 becomes h3, h3 becomes h4 and so on.

SEO Friendly Images – Images can be a great source of traffic as people search for images of various subjects, and this plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.

SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin – If you must have duplicate content on your site for whatever reason, SEO No Duplicate will allow you to state which version of the post search engines should index while ignoring the others.

SEO Post Link – The post slug is the blog title you see in a browser’s URL bar, and if it’s too long, search engines won’t take a liking to it.  SEO Post Link comes with an already populated list of words to cut from a title when it turns into a URL to make your post addresses that much friendlier.  You can set it so that it’s limited to a certain number of characters, cut short words, cut unnecessary words and more.

SEO Smart Links – Interlinking your blog can be the key to getting more people to read more of your posts, but it is time consuming and tedious to do it by hand.  SEO Smart Links does this for you automatically when you tell it what words to link to what URLs, and it also allows you to set “nofollow” and “open in window” comands for the links.

SEO Tag Cloud Widget – Love ‘em or hate ‘em, a lot of people use tag clouds on their blogs.  Since their inception they have been fairly unreadable by search engines, but with this plugin they will be converted to an SEO-friendly HTML markup that can be indexed.

SEO Title Tag – Your tags are an important part of your site for making sure that search engines know where to place your posts, and SEO Title Tag focuses exclusively on this.  Unlike some other plugins, and WordPress itself, this extension will allow you to add tags to your pages, your main page and even any URL anywhere on your site.

Simple Tags – An extremely popular plugin that focuses on helping you choose the best tags for your posts by offering suggestions, auto-completion of tags as you type, an AJAX admin interface, mass tag editing and a whole lot more.

Sitemap Generator – This is a more customizable sitemap generator than most with options to support multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, permalink support, choices on what to display, options to show number of comments and more.

TGFI.net SEO WordPress Plugin – This particular plugin will do most of the usual SEO work of optimizing titles and keywords, but it adds a unique twist as it is mainly directed at people who use WordPress as a CMS.

All in One SEO Pack – One of the most popular plugins ever for WordPress, this plugin does a bit of everything for you from helping choose the best post title and keywords, to helping you avoid duplicate content and more.

Automatic SEO Links – Automatic SEO Links allows you to choose a word or phrase for automatic linking, both internal and external, set anchor text, choose if it should be “nofollow” or not, and more.  One of the best features of this plugin is that it will only do this for the first occurrence of a word in a post so you don’t have to worry about spamming your post with numerous links to the same thing.

Google XML Sitemaps – An essential tool in any blogger’s armory of SEO tools.  While the name only mentions “Google (),” this plugin creates an XML-sitemap that can be read by Ask, MSN and Yahoo also.

HeadSpace2 – This plugin allows you to install all sorts of meta-data, add specific JavaScript and CSS to pages, suggests tags for your posts and a whole lot more.

Meta Robots WordPress plugin – An easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page you choose on your blog.  You can use it to make your front page links into “nofollows,” prevent indexing of search pages, disable author and date-based archives, prevent indexing of your login page and numerous other features.

source,http://mashable.com/2009/03/20/wordpress-seo-plugins/

Best WordPress Plugins Recommended by Ghacks

the plugins recommended by ghacks I am using are, All in one SEO,Redirection,WP-DB-Backup,Broken Link Checker, of course I also have my best list, and I will introduce them later.

via ghacks.net

A few years ago when the name WordPress was mentioned, most people would not know what it was. But thanks to the popularity of blogging and “the new media” WordPress has become a well known name in the internet community. Other then the small blogs which use it, WordPress is also used on major sites as Yahoo.com, Sony PlayStation Network, WSJ, All Things Digital and Tech Crunch among others.

One of the main strengths of WordPress is its huge developer community, something that is unmatched by most of its competitors. With this great third party support comes thousands of plugins and themes. So without further ado, I’ll name out a couple WordPress plugins that every user of the blogging platform should use.

All in one SEO

WordPress has the reputation of being the best SEO optimized blogging/CMS platform out of the box. But even with that it still could use a little work. That’s where “All in one SEO” comes in. Basically it allows you to control the SEO aspect of every post, page or tag on your blog as well as override the default WordPress features.

Customizing the plugin is easy and the readme file helps with any problems you might have. There is a reason why it has well over 2 million downloads. So if you haven’t checked it out, I suggest you do so. If you are looking for something a little more advanced you can check out the Headspace2 plugin which is also popular (at the time of this writing it had over 200,000 downloads).

Broken Link Checker

I didn’t know how much I needed this plugin until I got it and since there I have installed it on all my blogs. As the name suggests, this plugin checks your blog at intervals (user defined) for links that might be broken. I cannot stress how important this plugin is for those who run political, tech or news blogs as it is extremely vital at notifying you if your links are active or leading to 404 error pages.

WP-DB-Backup

If it were not for hackers and hard drive failures, this plugin would be obsolete. But thanks to these and many other problems, database failures are prevalent. At least there are options to help keep your database safe.

WP-DB-Backup is one of those plugins which offers users the ability to backup their WordPress databases instantly or have monthly, weekly, daily or hourly backups. The backups can either be sent to a specified email address or can be downloaded instantly. While this plugin is mainly built for those who carry large amounts of traffic on their websites, I would recommend it for everyone including personal bloggers.

Beware that this only backs up the database and not information stored on the server such as download files, pictures and such. That will require another program.

Redirection

When I first started using WordPress I decided to go with the default permalink structure as I was not versed in customizing .htaccess files. That changed a few months later and by that time my blog had boasted well over 150 posts. I needed to do some major on site SEO but was stuck with the fact that if I changed the permalink structure to something more search engine (SE) friendly, visitors who came to my site from backlines would be left with a 404 page error.

Well after a little Google expedition I came across the Redirection plugin which did exactly what it sounds like, redirects old links to the new location. I was extremely happy and I didn’t lose SERPS because of my updated permalink structure.

Even if you are not in the same position I suggest you get this plugin because it is well worth it and it requires very little configuration.

NextGEN Gallery

It’s not everyday that a plugin crosses the 1 million download mark. But Alex Rabe has struck gold with his plugin. For those who are familiar with the WordPress, it is clear that while 2.7 did fix a lot of issues, the built in media library fails to say the least. It’s OK for basic media but managing gallery’s, albums and such is impossible.

That’s where NextGEN Gallery comes in by providing the best photo gallery plugin for the platform. While it still lacks in certain areas, it is light years ahead of the built-in functions of WordPress. Plus with the numerous plugins that expand its features it is quite a beast. If you would like an excellent example of the plugin in action, check out TechCrunch.com.

cformsII

It used to be the top downloaded plugin on wordpress.org until someone brought to the attention of the WordPress community that its license agreement did not match the requirements of wordpress.org. Since then it has been removed, but even with that it still continues to be an excellent plugin.

Basically cformsII allows you to create contact forms, contest forms and anything else your heart desires. Although it is not the easiest plugin to use, it’s powerful and extremely customizable as the CSS file can be edited to meet any requirement.

The only drawback to this plugin is since it’s no longer available on wordpress.org, those wishing to use it have to install and update it manually. That said I still would recommend using it but if you cannot be bothered with the hassle for the extra features, you can always check out Contact Form 7 which carries many of the features but still lacks in the customizability department.

I’m sure there are many others out there but these are the ones that I have found out to be the most useful and would recommend for every WordPress blog. But if you think I left one out, hit me up in the comments below.