When the topic of blog promotion comes up, the conversation usually turns to using social media sites like Digg, ReddIt, and others to generate traffic. And rightly so. But it’s crucial not to overlook the importance of optimizing your posts for the search engines. Remember, the search engines love fresh content, so a little SEO can go a long way to getting your blog substantial organic traffic.
To make optimizing your blog easier, I’ve developed a list of 10 great SEO plugins for WordPress.
1. Platinum SEO – Platinum SEO is basically a more robust version of the All in One SEO Pack. It features all the same benefits, but it also has more options for no indexing of certain pages and redirection. This tool covers many of the SEO bases.
2. Meta Robots– Meta Robots makes it easy to tell the search engines will posts you want indexed and which you don’t. The array of options give you the most control over how the search spiders will crawl your pages.
3. SEO Smart Links– This tool makes interlinking fast and easy. It allows you to automatically link certain phrases back to certain posts every time you mention the phrase. It’s a hassle free way to make sure you’re linking back in a way that enhances your blog’s usability.
4. Google SEO Positioner– How can you know if your SEO efforts are paying off unless you keep track of your performance? This plugin tracks your ranking for certain keywords in Google. It’s a great way to see what keywords you need to focus on.
5. Google XML Sitemaps– This plugin provides the best way to ensure your new posts are crawled by the search engines quickly. Any time you edit or submit a new post, it essentially sends a message to the search engines letting them know it’s ready to be crawled.
6. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin– You want your visitors to continue browsing through your blog after reading a post. One of the best ways to do this is to use a related posts plugin. This plugin can be used to include a short list at the end of each post with links to other similar posts. It keeps your readers moving through your blog in an orderly fashion.
7. Broken Link Checker– If your blog is optimized, you’ll have search visitors landing on old posts from months earlier. You want to make sure everything in these posts is still working properly, including the links. The Broken Link Checker alerts you in the Dashboard anytime an outbound link is no longer working. It’s a great way to keep the user-experience at its highest.
8. No Self Pings – Internal linking is a crucial part of blogging. It keeps your visitors moving through your blog, and it adds to the user experience. Of course, it can be annoying getting notified each time you drop an internal link. The No Self Pings tool eliminates these notifications, only alerting you when you receive back links from other sites.
9. SEO Friendly Images– Images are an important part of blogging. They give your posts a unique flair, and they help break up the content. SEO Friendly Images does exactly what it says– it makes your blog images search engine friendly. The tool is easy to use, and it’ll save you a lot of time.
10. SEO Slugs – We’ve all seen the blog urls that seemingly go on with no end. The point of SEO slugs is to keep your urls short and free from words that don’t help you rank better. By removing stop words that Google ignores, your urls are shorter, and keyword-rich.
Which SEO plugins for WordPress would you add to this list? Share them with us in the replies.