8 easy plugins to install to SEO your WordPress
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This is a very simple guide on which plugins you can install today to increase your blogs performance in the search engine rankings. It’s based on a few years of experience in optimizing WordPress blogs. Some of the blogs I did this on had 50% more traffic from the search engines within 2 weeks!
- HeadSpace2
Headspace2 is one of the two plugins by John Godley that I keep promoting to everyone. Simply install it and use the special tags in the options to change your page titles and meta descriptions to meaningful stuff, make sure the post and page names are the first things in your title, and then your blog name. - Redirection
The other plugin by John Godley is Redirection. You can use this to redirect old URL’s to new ones, but it has one feature that is my prime reason for using it. It automatically adds a redirect to it’s database when you change a posts slug. So, you can now easily change your post slugs and do not have to worry anymore about search engines and users going to the wrong place. - SEO Friendly Images
This plugin automatically optimizes ALT and TITLE attributes for each of your images that doesn’t have one. This will make them xHTML valid, and it will also help you a bit in your rankings. Download it here. - SEO Slugs
SEO Slugs automatically removes words like ‘a’, ‘the’ and ‘in’ and other stop words from your post slugs before saving them, making your URL’s a lot shorter and cleaner, which will improve your chances to rank and improve usability! - Robots Meta
One of my own plugins, Robots Meta might be a bit impressive on first install. Without going in to all the details here, I’d suggest you at least enable the following options:- Prevent indexing of search result pages
- Prevent indexing of login and register pages
- Prevent indexing of all admin pages
- Prevent indexing of author archives
- Nofollow login and registration links
- Replace the Meta Widget with a nofollow one
- RSS Footer
Another plugin of mine, RSS Footer will allow you to add a link back to each blog post on your blog in your feed. This way, if scrapers scrape your RSS feed, they will always link back to your original article. Since using this, I’ve come to love scrapers! - Yoast Breadcrumbs
The last of my plugins, Yoast Breadcrumbs, actually only released this morning, is a plugin to easily add breadcrumb paths to your theme. This is a very good way for your users to navigate around your site, and for search engines to determine the structure of your site. For maximum SEO effect, you should enable the category to show up in your single posts breadcrumbs. - WP Page Numbers
WordPress’ default pagination is one of the reasons why search engines won’t index older posts, they simply can’t find a post that’s buried 10 clicks away. Using WP Page Numbers, you can change the pagination to use numbers, and link to several pages at once, highly increasing your WordPress SEO.
These tips should help you a lot in improving your rankings. If you want to go even further, read my in-depth article on WordPress SEO, and be sure to start reading my SEO blog.
Thanks for the awseome article Joost. This is great, I’ve got a few of these installed and plan on installing a few more within the enxt couple of hours
Glad you like it Lachy!
Just the post I was looking for. Thanks for the tips. I’ll be sure to Digg this post.
You’re a machine, Joost. A mean, green WordPress plugin machine.
Thanks for the great list and for continually producing some outstanding WP plugins.
Hi Joost,
Great list. A couple of points though:
1. Have you ever tried All In One SEO? I believe it does all (or most) of what HeadSpace2 and Robots Meta do together. I’m just wondering if you know of any weaknesses with All In One which stops you from using it.
2. I was interested to see that you can switch RSS Footer to display the top, which puts it in friendly competition with my own FeedEntryHeader.
However, it’s a bit misleading to say "if scrapers scrape your RSS feed, they will <strong>always</strong> link back to your original article", because a lot of scrapers strip any links from your work before posting it. For that reason, I often tell people to use the URL as the anchor text. Not so good for SEO if the link stays, but it will let the reader see where the post originated.
Anyway, great article. I need to get the WP Page Numbers plugin and I’ll give your Breadcrumbs plugin a try too. Thanks!
I have to agree that these are really must have plugins for your WP blogs..^^ very helpful plugins..^^
Great post Joost! I’ve been looking for exactly what your RSS Footer plugin does. I got it running on my blog network now.
Hi all, thx for the great comments!
@ Stephen: 1: I don’t particularly like All in One SEO, but that’s a matter of taste. 2: good point
I’m a big fan of Joost’s work, a very switched on guy and can fully recommend his plugins. He also is very knowledgeable about SEO.
Hi Joost,
nice Summary of SEO Tools. But i think here are some other good SEO plugins:
aLinks: automatically links keywords in your blog post for internal linkbuilding
Related Postse: for internal linkbuilding
Top Level Categories: emoves the prefix from the URL for a category
What do you think about this plugins?
Thx for all these good plugins.
I’ll make sure I can get Joost to answer these questions!
The information is really good. It would be great if keep us updated on more SEO plugins. Give us more information about RSS footer.
The All in SEO plugin does alter the meta description and keywords tag, but it doesn’t alter your robots.txt file. Robots Meta looks like a great plugin, good job!
Re: #6, RSS Footers… we should be mindful that if scrapers are (inadvertently) dropping backlinks to our original content, that could also adversely affect our link profiles… since scrapers are highly likely to be using other spammy techniques. I have to wonder if this one is really worth the risk.
Nice lists Josh, thanks!
#SEO Notes: alinks is cool
Sorry, I mean Joost
Hi Joost,
i’ve been working on SEO for Wordpress and I really enjoy myself hacking and testing.
So my 2 cents…
What about:
Wordpress Crawl Rate Tracker Plugin;
Karailiev’s sitemap (good for sitemap news).
Wordpress is a great blogging platform and getting it search engine optimized really isn’t a hard task. Using proper permalinks and robots.txt file to prevent duplicate content and a few other methods can really make a difference. The All in One SEO plugin is really the best bet.