Stepping out from yesterday’s post on SEO Basics for New Bloggers, today I’d like to highlight my 5 favorite SEO plugins for Wordpress that even the newbie blogger can install. Each plugin makes your SEO job easier – another beautiful feature of using Wordpress.
Platinum SEO Pack
I used to be a huge fan of All-In-One SEO Plugin, until I had increasing conflicts with other plugins as my blog started to get more advanced in functionality. I’ve learned the hard way, that even if your blog is very basic right now, plan ahead and install an SEO plugin that will grow with you. Will definitely save you tons of headache later. The other reason, and more important to me at this point in my blogging experience — in order to do all that Platinum SEO did, I had to have All-In-One SEO and other plugins. Simple is better for you, for upgrading, and just all around.
Platinum SEO Pack Wordpress Page
Platinum SEO Pack includes the following features, that are important for SEO:
Optimized Post and Page Titles for search engines and override any title and set any META description and META keywords, for any post or page. This features lets you customize every page/post Meta Data individually, rather than having the same data for the entire site. When you post, you’ll see the options. Here’s how to keep it simple and consistent:
- Set your post/page title as the Meta Title
- Use a keyword, call to action based description as the Meta Description
- Use your categories and tags (if you’ve done them with keyword focus) as your Meta Keywords
Helps you avoid duplicate content by letting you noarchive/nofollow tags versus category archives and more. This basically helps you organize your site better and keep from having several duplicate pages for each post. Set it and forget it but continue to get SEO friendly benefits.
Compatible with most other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others. There are very few plugins that Platinum SEO Pack conflicts with. This keeps upgrading headache free, as well as expanding the features of your blog.
You don’t have to fear changing permalinks. If you are not satisfied with the current permalink, change it through Settings–>Permalinks in your admin panel, without worrying about loss of Page rank or google penalty. Platinum SEO plugin will take care of issuing a 301 redirect to the new location. For example, by adding Platinum SEO Pack to your blog first, then changing your permalink structure (as suggest in yesterday’s SEO Tips post) you’ll be covered and able to move it all over to a better site link structure.
Add index, noindex, follow or nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noodp, noydir meta tags to any post/page. Nofollow, noindex and the like let you choose what pages/posts search engines can find and follow on an individual basis. One great way to use this feature is when you have download pages during an optin/subscription process. By noindex/nofollow them, you’re not only taking them out of the crawl action of search engines, it’s an added protection for you so only those you intend to access those pages actually access them. (Of course, this doesn’t guarantee those pages can not be discovered, but it’s certainly gives you an additional chance as protecting them.)
WP-Super Cache Plugin
A super plugin that helps your site function faster and not lock up when you get a huge influx of traffic, by caching or storing static pages for most viewers to see — rather than recreating the page everytime someone visits it. Here’s what the plugin description states, “99% of your visitors will be served static html files. Those users who don’t see the static files will still benefit because they will see regular WP-Cache cached files and your server won’t be as busy as before. This plugin will help your server cope with a front page appearance on digg.com or other social networking site.”
You simply upload it, install it, and turn it on (choose first of 3 options on settings page). It’s that easy. Also, at any time, if you’ve made major changes to the site, you can manually delete the cache that is stored. Great plugin to have.
Cookies for Comments
Cookies for Comments Wordpress Page
This plugin adds a stylesheet to your blog’s html source code. When a browser loads that stylesheet a cookie is dropped. If that user then leaves a comment the cookie is checked. If it doesn’t exist the comment is marked as spam. Basically, this plugin helps you avoid the obnoxious amounts of spam you can receive once your blog gets popular, by avoiding automated comment tools/software.
Enforce WWW Reference
Enforce WWW Reference Homepage
Enforce WWW Reference Wordpress Page
[After doing www reference fix myself, I discovered this on Matt Cutts blog, from his recent Wordcamp presentation, and think it's an awesome fix to an annoying problem.]
This plugin will help preserve your permalinks by enforcing your no-www or yes-www preference (http://example.com/ vs. http://www.example.com/) and will strip off index.php from the ends of URIs. In simple language this prevents some issues in search engines and with people linking to you (going to different www and non-www versions of your site’s URL.)
SEO Friendly Images Plugin
SEO Friendly Images Wordpress Plugin
SEO Friendly Images is a Wordpress optimization plugin which 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. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well.
Note: There’s debate as to image ALT and Title actually play a roll in SEO. Again, like I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I’m not arguing for or against it. If you do it, at the very least it validates your posts and pages and just might give you SEO benefits. No harm, no foul.
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Looking forward to connecting with you!
Maria 
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