5 Useful SEO WordPress Plugins
April 28th, 2009Guest post by Harsh
One of the biggest advantages of WordPress over blogspot is the power to add functions and modify the settings for better search engine optimization. Search engine optimization in simple words means making your blog/website search engine friendly. This will help your posts to rank high in search engine.
Wordpress is already SEO optimized but there are few settings needed to be done before launching your first post. If your useful post cannot be discovered by search engines, you are actually losing lots of potential readers.
Permalinks Migration
Wordpress Permalinks are permanent links of your posts. By default wordpress permalinks are in the following format
http://www.yourdomainname.com/?p=123
This is not a search engine friendly permalink. First thing after installing wordpress, you should consider changing your permalink structure. If you use permalinks which has keywords in it and are relevant to your post, chances of ranking in search engines are high.
The ideal permalinks are
/%category%/%postname%/
/%postname%.html
You can use either of them, but if you use more than one categories for a single post, I would suggest you to go for later one. You can change your permalink structure, under your wordpress admin dashboard > Settings > Permalinks
But what if you are changing your permalinks after publishing many posts? Use the Permalinks migration-plugin, and it will help your old permalinks to redirect to new ones instantly. The redirection will be 301 permanent redirects, so you do not loose any Google link juice.
SEO Friendly Images
Optimize your images for Search Engines. Many bloggers avoid the importance of traffic from image search engines, like Google image search and Yahoo image search. By adding an alt tag to your images you can make it search engine friendly.
The basic rule is if you upload any image by the name 12387.jpeg with the same alt tag, it doesn’t make any sense to search engines. But if you upload an image with the title iphone-screenshot.jpg and using the same alt tag, you can rank high in the image search engine results as well.
Though manually adding alt tag is not easy for every image you upload, this can be easily accomplished by using wordpress SEO-friendly image plugin.
It automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. Download SEO Friendly Images Plugin .
ALL in one SEO plugin
Recently I attended Wordcamp and got the opportunity to meet Matt Mullenweg. In the discussion round, one of the topics was integration of “ALL in one SEO plugin” with wordpress. Matt answered they would like it to be users choice rather then implementing it by default. The point here is “All in one SEO plugin” is one of the basic essential SEO plugin for any wordpress blogger.
All in one SEO plugin helps you to stuff appropriate keywords and optimizes your blog for the keywords you are targeting. You can read more about the plugin or download All-in-one SEO plugin
Broken Link Checker
Broken links become dead ends for search engine bots. Suppose you have written a post which is pointing to a website www.domain.com, and after some time website goes down; you will never realize it and such posts become dead ends for your blog.
Broken link checker wordpress plugin comes very handy in such situations. It will show the broken link on your dashboard which you can unlink from there. Download Broken link checker for WordPress
NoFollow Plugin
Nofollow plugin helps you to add a nofollow attribute to your external links. You can simply select to which external links you want to share your link juice. It’s always a good advice to add a nofollow attribute to bad neighborhoods, like warez websites or adult/p0rn websites. Download Nofollow WordPress Plugin
These search engine optimization tips will help you to get more visitors from search engines, but in the end it’s “Quality of the post” which matters the most. Don’t forget to share your search engine optimization technique.
Guest author Harsh Agarwal is a blogger from New Delhi, India who writes on ShoutMeLoud about social media, internet, computer tips and tricks, torrents and social networking. You can follow him on Twitter at @denharsh. You can also share your tips by guest blogging on QOT.
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nice article.
but there is no need for permalink plugin as the inbuilt function does the redirect work to old url structure whenever you change.
@Meethere
You are right for a fresh wordpress blog, permalink plugin is not necessary, but if you are changing your permalinks after some time. This plugin will take care of 301 perma redirection and you will not loose any traffic. This is the same plugin which I used after moving from blogspot to wordpress and changed my permalinks without loosing any traffic.
I there better than All in One SEO plugin? and free?
Good suggestions. However, there are two things I things I disagree with:
1. Ideal permalink structure: /%category%/%postname%/ Unless you plan your category name and tag really well from the beginning, I think it’s better to go with /%postid%/%postname%/ or simply /%postname%/
2. Broken Link Checker – The last time I used BLC, it was a resource drain. I think it’s more effective to scan your site with Xenu’s Link Sleuth once a month.
@VanUdin – You can look at HeadSpace2. A little more complicated, but really good if you use tags a lot.
Thanks for sharing this content that details plugins that can be used for Wordpress. There are a lot of things that this host can do.
@Vanudin
You can also consider “Platinum SEO plugin”. But I will not suggest changing one SEO plugin to another.
If you are already using it, keep using it.
Changing SEO plugins will have impact on your blog SEO.
@GreatNexus
Using /%category%/%postname%/ Need planning from the beginning, for a newbie I will suggest using /%postname%/ sturcture. It will take care of most of thing including duplication which can create using multiple categories for single post.
The All In One SEO is a fine SEO plugin but I have found that out of the box the Head Space plugin is outstanding and works very well right from the start. Great list of plugins thanks.
I do agree Wordpress has lot of plugins than blogspot blogs.
I’ve been using the permalinks migration plug-in and it works like a charm on my blog :)
Gonna install the broken link checker once to validate my links, thanks
but i already told you, even if you change permalinks structure lateron (Even after 100 posts) – wordpress automatically creates 301 redirect.. no plugin needed.. I suppose i am not wrong.
using too much plugins slow down sites and sometimes works like a sql injection. So when you have reliable online tools like Xenu, no need to use BLC.
Thank you nice post.:)
Now,Im using Platinum Seo Plugin instead of All in One SEO.
And you forgot to mention, INTERLINKING plugin.
That also works great!
Thanks for your informative article..
Superb article man. Never in a mil years thought that no. 1 existed.
Not sure if the broken link checker plugin caused it, but within 24 hours after I activated the plug-in, my blog was disabled for a day because of a high cpu usage :(
I took it out but not sure if it’s the real culprit
thanks for that article! it was extremly informative! keep up the great work!
Hi,
Thanks for sharing information.
Here is an important tip about SEO.
When a user types in a search query in search engines, the robot will match the query with all the web pages in the index. Then, it will return the most relevant web pages to the user. Meanwhile, a short description of the pages will be generated for the search results page. The description can be taken out from your content or Meta Description.
Thats a very informative article Harsh.. Great job..
Nice piece of info, Very useful.
thank you.
Also impostant when building sites is to make sure the pages are fairly tight conceptually. Having a single page with 25 searchable concepts is impossible to optimize. Also “think before you link”!
Wow, great information. I could say my knowledge in seo is already broad but I find it nice to see people giving out tips and new information.
A fantastic read….very literate and informative. Many thanks….what theme is this you are using and also, where is your RSS button ?
@Harsh Agrawal
These are some amazing tips. but tell me how can we Search engine optimized a blog that is hosted on Blogger (custom domain).
it nice and informative
Thank you very much I just installed link checker plugin after read your good information.
Hi,
Good Article. But may be one change…i think its best to go for /%category%/%postname%.html since html pages are always crawlled and ranked better. Any suggestions.
/%category%/%postname%.html permalink are good only if you are using one category per post, and your category are not showing full content..But if you don’t have any of these two. to avoid post duplication I will suggest prefer using only /%postname%.html permalink.
Let me know if you have any questions.