We all know blogging is really important – especially when it comes to abiding by Panda’s high-quality content requirements. Now, we also know that the Google algorithm recently changed to value “freshness” highly – so blogging often on current events within your niche has become even more important (if that’s even possible). And, since SEO is NOT dead (take that, Leo Laporte!), we think these plug-ins are ever more important.
Sometimes it takes more than just words to make your blog post shine. Sometimes it takes tools provided by your blogging platform!
7 WordPress Plugins That Can Help Your SEO
While blogging is effective, having some added help is never a bad thing. If your blog is built on WordPress, then you know how easy it is to optimize your content for the search engines. Because WordPress is open-source, anyone can make a plugin to provide any kind of functionality. For SEOs, that mans help comes in the form of plugins that take your work and use it to its best SEO potential (meaning, these plugins help you optimize content for search engine consumption (nom nom nom) by adjusting title tags and meta-descriptions, building up lists of keywords, and more). So, in the spirit of maximizing your SEO potential in an increasingly difficult (and some might say hostile) SEO environment, we’ve put together a list of seven WordPress plugins that could help you make a little content go a long (SEO) way (please note, these are in no particular order of importance).
If you don’t have the All in One SEO Pack installed on your blog, stop reading this post and take some action. Seriously. Without this plugin, you are missing out on some very important SEO opportunities for your post. This has to be the plugin I personally use the most (how much stock you put in that is up to you!) – you can create your title tag, meta-description, and list the keywords you’re using in the post. Based on the categories you choose for your post and on the tags you post, this plugin will also create a dynamic list of keywords in addition to the ones you have listed.
This plugin allows you to customize your SEO elements so that you can easily feed the search engines exactly what they want and need to rank your content!
This plugin creates an XML sitemap for your blog post to make it easy for search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo to index your content. It will notify the search engines each time you create new content.
With this plugin, your site is more easily and more comprehensively crawled by the search engine spiders (screenshot from WordPress.org).
If you blog often, you are likely all too familiar with spam – people offering their SEO services, people suggesting you talk to this guy about making $$$ every month!!!!, and people just generally spamming your comments with links. Besides being annoying, too many spam comments can also damage your Rep on the search engines – they don’t want to rank heavily spammed sites at the top of the rankings.
Akismet allows you to protect your blog, at least outwardly, from these wayward spam comments and trackbacks. That’s why it’s included with your WordPress – all you have to do is activate it.
This plugin has a simple and yet incredibly important function: it removes words like “a,” “the” and “in” to streamline your post’s “slugs” and improve the post’s SEO. This makes your link to your post more search engine friendly.
Thanks, SEO Slugs, for making our slugs more SEO friendly.
This plugin helps you monitor and prevent duplicate content. This plugin validates your URL and if doesn’t match official permalink (if you have multiple URLs that point to the same page, the search engines may view this as duplicate content) – it issues a 301 or 404 message.
Because what’s the use of content if no one is reading it? With this plugin, you can share your content with friends and family, and the people who read your content then can share your content with their social networks. This is how things go viral! And this helps your SEO not only by lending your content authority (if a lot of people are sharing it) but also by making other people aware of your content and hopefully linking back to it.
With this plugin, you can encourage people to share your content on multiple social networks with just a few clicks (image from wordpress.org).
This plugin allows you to set parameters for your SEO elements and then pulls them from your content without very much effort from you, the writer. With this plugin, you can set template parameters for your title tags, descriptions, and more. Also, you can customize these for each post and preview how they will show up in the SERPs. The snippet previews allow you to adjust titles and such so that they are perfectly suited for the search engines. If you don’t like how the post’s information is going to show up in Google’s search results, you can change it before you even publish. That’s incredibly valuable.
This plugin also has settings for permalinks, RSS, internal linking, etc.
Conclusion
So, there you have it: a comprehensive list of our favorite WordPress SEO plugins. Though these are the ones we use pretty regularly, we by no means feel that these are the only effective ones out there, or that these are better than others. These are just the ones we know to assist with SEO efforts.
Give Us Your Faves, Too!
Can you think of some other awesome plugins that you feel help you significantly when it comes to your content and SEO? Comment below with the name or drop us a line on Google +, Facebook or Twitter.
More Information
Looking to learn more about blogging for SEO? Fishing for information about anything else related to interactive marketing. Stay tuned to our blog, where we provide free tips and updates about SEO/SEM news on a regular basis. If you have questions that are more specifically related to your business, give our Atlanta SEO Company a call at 770-481-1766.
Related Information:
PubCon 2011: Is SEO Dead (Again???)Google “Freshness” Algorithm Update: The ImpactGoogle Search Algorithm Changes TodaySEO Strategy: New Studies Encourage Going HolisticContent Matters: AiMA Live BlogOur Top Ten Favorite SEO ToolsNow, You Can Put a Face to the BlogWhat Are Some Good, Organic Link Building StrategiesWhy Blog for SEO?