Please take note, some SEO plugins can conflict and give you duplicate information, which is not good. So please, pick your favorites and stick with them. (Those that WILL conflict will be noted in their description.)

We all know that “Content is King,” but if your content can’t be found, it won’t be a help to anyone. But be honest with yourself, do you really want to spend hours on end on SEO? Don’t worry – you won’t have to if just let these plugins go to work for you while you focus on the main thing, and that’s content.

1. The Thesis Theme- Yah, yah, yah I know it’s not a plugin, but if your serious about SEO you’ll look into the Thesis Theme. The Masters have run head to head testing against other WordPress themes, and Joomla sites in the several niches, and there is absolutely no comparison. All other factors being equal, Thesis will trounce a basic WordPress or Joomla installation when it comes to SEO. The secret is how it divides the code related to content, and design so search engines see clean, indexable code.

2. Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin will generate a XML sitemap for Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com which allows to index your posts faster my favorite part is the fact that it pings each service when new content is added. This is a definite must have for those serious about SEO make sure to sign up with Google Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Bing Webmaster Center to tell these services the location of your sitemap.

3. HeadSpace2 – This plugin allows you granular control over meta-data, such as tags, titles, descriptions, etc. You can also use this to add specific JavaScript and CSS to pages for various analytics software. Headspace automatically suggests tags for your posts and allows you to create custom titles and descriptions that can improve your page ranking and indexability. (This WILL conflict with All in One SEOd and Meta Robots.)

4. Redirection – For any number of reasons you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, but if not done correctly you risk losing that pages status in search results.  The Redirection plugin saves you time and headaches with 301 redirects, it captures a log of 404 errors so you can work on correcting them, and sets up an RSS feed for errors.

5. All in One SEO Pack – One of the most popular plugins of all time for WordPress, this plugin SEO swiss army knife from helping choose the best post title and keywords, to helping you avoid duplicate content and more. If your running Thesis this may be a little redundant as it handles alot of the same features. (This WILL conflict with Meta Robots and Headspace.)

6. Automatic SEO Links – Ever looked up from Wikipedia and realize you’ve been reading for like an hour that is because of their thorough interlinking between articles. Interlinking has two benefits it will spread link juice deeper into your site, and also it will make your site more sticky as users more easily can find key content. Automatic SEO Links allows you to choose a word or phrase for automatic linking, both internal and external, set anchor text, and choose if it should be “nofollow” or not.  One of the best features of this plugin is that it will only do this for the first occurrence of a word in a post so you don’t look like your just spamming.

7. SEO Slugs – Using your entire post title as the slug for an article can make web addresses to long and throw useless keywords into the mix .  The SEO Slugs plugin strips out all of the common, unnecessary words from the permalink to save you time.

8. Nofollow Case by Case – Because of the democratic nature of the web thanks to Google every vote (backlink) from other pages moves you up the ranks. Because of this system the Masters are big fans of DoFollow comments – it’s the blogospheres version of kissing babies. Take care of people and they will take care of you. This plugin removes the “nofollow” attribute from your comments, allowing you to share some linkluv which will encourage commenting. It can also nofollow specific comments on a case by case basis. (Hence the name.)

9. SEO friendly and HTML valid subheadings – Some themes for Wordpress will confuse your sub-header tags based on the page they are to be displayed on, but this plugin will automatically reset them to make them more SEO friendly by moving them down one spot in the hierarchical tree.  In other words, h2 becomes h3, h3 becomes h4 and so on.

10. SEO Friendly Images – I have found many essential sites while using images search. Images can be an untapped source of traffic as people search for images on your niche, and this plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.

11. Meta Robots WordPress plugin – A quick, and easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page of your choice on your blog.  You can use it to make a variety of links nofollows such as: front page links, search pages, author and dated archives,  your login page. (This WILL conflict with AIO and Headspace.)

12. SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin – If you must have duplicate content on your site for some reason, SEO No Duplicate allows you to select which version of a post the search engines should index while ignoring the others.

13. SEO Blogroll – If you worry that the people you link to in your blogroll are feeding off of your PageRank?  With SEO Blogroll you can make separate sections for various groupings of links, with an unlimited number in each, and all of them will receive the “nofollow” attribute.

14. SEO for Paged Comments – With the introduction of paged comments in Wordpress 2.7, there was a potential problem with search engines thinking you had duplicate content as the post would appear on each page.  This plugin aims to take care of this issue for you until the folks at WordPress change things up.

15. SEO Tag Cloud Widget – Tag clouds can be a unique way for website visitors to visualize your blogs theme unfortunately they are notoriously unreadable by search engines. The SEO tag cloud widget changes all that, your tag cloud will be converted to SEO friendly HTML markup that can be indexed.

Bonus! Permalinks Moved Permanently This plugin is great for if you ever change the permalink structure of your blog. If a 404 is detected, it will take the last part of the post slug, and search your current posts for that same slug. If it finds a match, it will do a 301 redirect from the old link to the new. We used to use a custom permalink structure, /%category%/%postname%/, for our blog here but decided to remove the %category% part. I found that we were getting more 404’s than before (using Redirection) and we needed a way to get this done more effectively. Permalinks moved Permanently did what we needed. (Don added this. I tried to get him to stick with just 15, but NOOOOO. So this ones for free. lol)

One more thing, this list was inspired by Nick over at SiteSketch101. Check him out if your looking for how to blog.

Will has been designing websites for over a decade, and has extensive experience with Joomla!, WordPress, and social media. He has consulted hundreds of businessmen and webmasters on the oftentimes mystifying aspects of Search Engine Optimization.

Will has blogged 54 posts here.

Related Posts

• 10 Guidelines for Guest Posting
• Top 10 SEO Tools for Daily Use
• Top 10 SEO Extensions For Joomla 1.5 in 2010
• Blogging Goals for 2009 – A Look Back
• 20 Indispensable Websites For Understanding Web Usability

Tags: blogging, commenting, content, images, niche, plugins, rss, SEO, wordpress

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Bloggers, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.