Blog Tipz

Blogs generally don’t grow without any help from the search engines.  Although WordPress is generally SEO friendly right from the start, there are several great plugins for better optimizing your blog to harness more higher ranking results from keywords.  By having content that is listed higher, it’ll likely have a positive reflection on your blog as long as visitors are happy with what they see – great content.

It is never a good idea to rely completely on search engines, however you should always keep tabs on how you are doing against “competitors” in the same niche as you.  By utilizing these plugins from the start, you’ll see more organic SE referrals over the long term.

Note: Plugin overviews and discussions shown below are targeted towards optimizing your site’s appearance and ranking in search engines, by using keywords, META tags, XML sitemaps, and appearance when searchers navigate to your page.  With the recent releases of WordPress, be sure that you check when the plugin was last updated and what version the plugin is compatible up to.

1.  All in One SEO Pack – WP Extend | Plugin Homepage

The All in One SEO Pack has become one of the standards when it comes to SEO plugins for WordPress averaging over 1,200 downloads per day.  In general, it optimizes your WordPress blog for search engines.

This plugin automatically adds an area below each post for adding optimized titles, keywords, and descriptions to individual posts.  Under the Options > All in One SEO tab, you are able to easily change the home page title, description, keywords, and the title formats shown in search engines and in the title bar of your browser.  You are also able to manage the duplicate content problem with the “noindex” tag for categories, archives, etc.

Some of the other built-in features include international support, backward-compatibility with many other plugins such as AutoMeta, Ultimate Tag Warrior, and others.  META tags and information can also be overridden.

Overall, this plugin can help greatly increase your chance of having higher ranking content – especially news stories and posts with topics that are frequently being searched for.

 2.  SEO Title Tag – WP Extend | Plugin Homepage

The SEO Title Tag plugin helps you separate post titles form title tags.  You can not only optimize your title tag across your blog, with the ability to override a page’s or post’s title tag with a custom one.

The plugin adds a title tag box in the Edit Post and Write Post area.  Mass editing for all posts, static pages, category pages, tag pages,tag conjunction pages, and archive by month pages just touch the surface on the unlimited number of pages that you are able to add custom titles to.

Similar to the All in One SEO pack, you can define a custom title tag for your homepage, 404 pages, and backward compatibility with Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin.

An added bonus is that it is authored by SEO specialist web agency Netconcepts and is released as open source under the GPL license.

 3.  Google XML Sitemaps – WP Extend | Plugin Homepage

The Google XML sitemap plugin helps inform search engines of updates or changes to your blog as well as new posts or post edits.  Despite the title of the plugin, it notifies all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol including Ask, Google, MSN, and Yahoo.  Completely free, the plugin is released under the GPL and comes with various translations.

Other features include:

• No PHP skills or file changes needed.
• Easy to use interface to customize all parameters like priorities.
• Calculates a priority for each post, based on the number of comments.
• Generates a static XML file as well as a zipped version.

 4.  Related Posts – WP Extend | Plugin Homepage

The Related Posts plugin helps improve SEO as more links are included on your pages for better internal linking.  It does exactly as the name suggests – displays related posts related to the category that the current post is displayed under.  You have the ability to change how many posts are displayed and the list of related posts can be placed in individual posts via a placeholder.

 5.  No-WWW Plugin – Plugin Homepage

Instead of displaying your URL with the “www” part, this plugin will take that out, so all of your domains will be displayed without it, perhaps leading to a shorter URL and a higher click through rate in search engines.

 6.  DoFollow Plugin – Plugin Homepage

This plugin disables the rel=”nofollow” attribute added to external links.  In other words, it exposes more of your pages to search engines, so it should only be used if you have good spam filtering and moderation in place.  It also passes “Google juice” onto blogs that leave comments.

 7.  Angsuman’s Permanent Redirector – Plugin Homepage

Allows you to redirect using HTTP status 301 any posts that you move to a different URL.  This plugin is useful if you transfer domains or are reorganizing the locations of your posts.  Google rank of your post or page is transferred to the new page and the new page is displayed in search results.

No configuration is required and the post/page content is not altered.

 8.  WP Tag Manager – WP Extend | Plugin Homepage

Helps manage tags as it is seamlessly integrated into your WordPress admin interface.  The plugin also features the ability to delete, edit, and merge tags.

 9.  AskApache Google 404 – WP Extend | Plugin Homepage – Demo

A plugin that adds AJAX and a couple tricks to display a very user friendly SEO error page.  The default displays Google search results for images, news, blogs, videos, web, custom search engine, and your own site.

 10.  Duplicate Content Cure Plugin – Plugin Homepage

This plugin has one purpose – adding the to prevent search engines from indexing WordPress pages that contain duplicate content, such as archives and category pages.

11. WP SEO Plugin – Plugin Homepage

The WordPress SEO plugin has numerous features such as the ability to have different titles for different sections, wildcards replacing the chosen order, and it does not interfere with your .htaccess or httpd.conf files.  This plugin rivals the All in One SEO pack in terms of the amount of modifications a user can make in the title and keyword areas of your blog.

There are dozens of other plugins created for tag optimization, redirecting, or META tags, but haven’t been updated since pre-2007 so would likely cause major problems to your WordPress files.  Plus, other plugins haven’t been mentioned as some of the plugins above accomplish multiple SEO tools.