6 Best WordPress Plugins For SEO in 2010

Guest post by Alex. So which are the Best WordPress Plugins for SEO in 2010? Within the past year, a lot of changes have been implemented that have affected how search engine optimization works.   The growth of social media sites, Google’s “Caffeine,” “Real Time Search,” and “Personalized Search,” are a few of the primary catalysts.

Best WordPress SEO Plugins

I believe the following WordPress plugins are especially relevant and valuable for search engine optimization in 2010.

1. SEO Smart Links – This SEO-friendly plugin can automatically link keywords and phrases to related comments, posts, pages, and categories within your site. This makes less prominent pages or older content more relevant and crawl-able for search engines, and keeps site visitors engaged. It also lets you set “nofollow” tags on URL’s and create custom keyword lists with automated URL hyperlinks for individual terms.
2. I Love Social Bookmarking -  I.L.S.B. is a great way to encourage blog readers to rank your post on popular social media sites.  In the past year, sites like Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Sphinn have become major resources for driving relevant traffic to quality site content.  This plug in inserts an attractive drop-down menu next to your blog posts that allows readers to submit or rank your site content on a number of popular social media sites, without leaving your blog.
3. WP to Twitter —Twitter is an ideal space for (viral) content sharing since users are constantly engaged in niche conversations.  Now that Google’s Social Search indexes tweets at the top of SERP’; more tweets/retweets = more indexing power.  WP to Twitter is a plugin that automatically tweets a tiny URL link to new blog posts or blog edits on your site.   Without any additional effort, your content is distributed to a relevant, willing audience; this can drive relevant traffic and increase your presence in social search results.
4. WP-Super-Cache —This plug in contributes to your site speed and it helps your blog load faster.  The number of pages on your blog that a search engine will index on a daily basis increases with speed.  If indexing each page is a quicker endeavor, more pages will be indexed.  WP-Super-Cache creates static html pages from your WordPress blog so your server will present this file instead of the much denser PHP script.  This will also help fortify your server when it is receiving a high amount of traffic, which can result from all your other great SEO strategies!  This is because this plug in serves a static html page to 99% of your site visitors.
5. Robots Meta — Robots Meta automatically inserts “nofollow” tags on internal site links that are irrelevant to search crawlers; this keeps search engines from wasting time indexing unimportant pages like results, login, and admin pages, instead directing crawlers to index primary site content.
6. SEO Slug — Blog post titles typically get an h1-h3 heading, which makes them very important in terms of keyword optimization.  SEOSlug optimizes blog post titles to improve search engine visibility by editing keyword strings. It removes conjunctions from titles, (words like “as” and “if”) to allow crawlers to more readily crawl main content keywords as a fluid string.

Guest blogger Alex Stetson works for a Boston-based digital media firm that specializes in web design, web application design, user interface web design, and internet marketing. You can also submit guest posts and share your favorite WordPress plugins.