WordPress has already proved itself as one of the leading open source platforms for blogging and these days, building complete websites. The more I learn about WordPress, the more I realise there is to learn, because 1000s of developers out there are designing new plugins, widgets and apps every day—it’s enough to make your head spin. Search Engine Optimisation is another one of those topics that makes your head spin, so I’ve put together a list of my favourite SEO plugins for WordPress. Please let me know if there are any free WordPress plugins you find invaluable as a web designer.
1. Redirection
This handy little plugin helps you to manage any changes you have made on your blog that alter your permalinks. This can happen when you make a change to your permalink structure overall, edit an old post, or move your blog to a different host.
The redirection plugin redirects the page to the new permalink and reduces the amount of broken links and 404 errors.
2. Robots Meta
Search engines, such as Google, crawl the web indexing all of the pages on the Internet, but sometimes this doesn’t optimise the information it gathers about your site, because you may have duplicate content, or you may be indexing login and admin pages, comments and other useless info.
The Robots Meta plugin allows you to tell the search engines which sections of your website to index by allowing you to add Meta tags to individual posts and pages.
This is one of the most popular plugins for instantly optimising your website for search engines. It enables you to manually include META tags (title, description and keywords) for each page and post on your web site, from within the WordPress dashboard itself. It means you can add the data at the same time as you post, rather than optimising it later. You can configure the information for your entire blog, or on a post-by-post basis.
4. Google XML Sitemaps
I love this plugin because generating a sitemap manually is such a pain in the butt and no one ever does it properly. This plugin automatically generates an XML sitemap supported by Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask, and it also notifies all the major search engines every time you add new content. Sitemaps are essential for helping search engines index your site properly.
5. Clean SEO Slugs
Slugs are the hyphenated “long-title-that-is-filled-with-keywords” that appears in your URL, otherwise known as the permalink to your post or page. This plugin removes the common words like ‘a’; ‘the’; ‘if’; ‘as’; ‘you’ and so on, from the WordPress post slug to make it more Search Engine friendly, because they ignore those “stop” words anyway. You can do it manually of course, but who ever does? H1 headings are very important in terms of keyword optimisation and this plugin automatically removes the “stop” words from your permalinks, helping you to rank better.
6. SEO Smart Links
This plugin automatically links keywords and phrases to related posts, pages, and categories within your site. Why bother? I hear you ask. Well internal linking adds to the importance of your pages in the “eyes” of a search engine and helps indicate how well structured your site is. As with most of these plugins, they are simply providing a convenient and automated way to do something that you could do manually, but no one ever does! This plugin allows you to specify a word, like ‘Moonsail’ and then each time the word Moonsail appears on your site, it links to the page or post you want it to automatically.
7. SEO Friendly Images
It is important to tag all of your images correctly with a proper ALT tag and title. This plugin is essential if you use images within your posts because it automatically updates all of your images with a proper ALT and Title, helping to make it SEO friendly. Every little bit helps. It also helps people read slow loading images or blind people visiting your site using an automatic reader.
8. Nofollow Case by Case
This plugin allows you to apply or remove nofollow attributes on a case-by-case basis, to comment links, comment author links, pingbacks and trackbacks. By default, WordPress sets these links as “nofollow” links to discourage spam comments, because back linking used to be a powerful SEO strategy until it was abused. If you want to give away “link juice” to encourage people to comment, you can use this plugin to selectively remove the nofollow attribute.
9. 404 SEO plugin
Don’t you hate the useless ‘Page Not Found(404)’ error message? This plugin automatically displays links to relevant pages on your website, by guessing what the person was looking for, based on the words in their wrongly typed URL. Pretty clever huh?
10. SexyBookmarks
Just about any plugin that gives people the option to Twitter, Buzz, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon or Delicious your post should be included in a list like this, because sharing the love is what the Internet is all about and making it easy for visitors to share is completely essential. I like this plugin in particular because it’s cute and customisable to whatever links you feel are useful.
I’d love to hear what you think of this article, please make a comment below.
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