Search Engine Optimisation - Tuesday, June 30, 2009 7:03 - 1 Comment

10 wordpress plugins to boost your blog’s SEO score

One of the reasons wordpress is such a popular blogging platform is the ability to use plugins which enhance the functionality of your blog. So when it comes to search engine optimisation, several plugins are available along with newer ones that are continuously being developed by the wordpress community. This list covers the top plugins which can boost your blog’s SEO score.

1. All In One SEO Pack

One of the most popular and widely used wordpress plugins, All in One SEO does exactly what it says – it has the ability to twist and tweak every corner of your blog for proper search engine readability and indexing. Add proper Meta keywords and descriptions, page titles and post titles with this plugin.

2. Google XML Sitemaps

A sitemap enables the Google spiders to quickly index the posts and pages on your blog. This plugin automatically creates and updates a Google compliant sitemap to ensure that no post is left unindexed.

3. SEO Smart Links

Interlinking your blog posts can boost the SEO score of your blog significantly and also leverage fresh traffic to older posts. As doing this manually is time consuming, one can simply set keywords and their target urls to link to and also specify other attributes through this plugin.

4. SEO Slugs

Another great plugin to optimise your permalinks, SEO Slugs removes stop words from permalinks which are ignored by search engines by default. For example, a post with ‘the best SEO plugins for your blog’ in the link would be automatically re-named as ‘best SEO plugins blog’.

5. Simple Tags

Tagging posts is a great way to improve navigation and simple tags is the most powerful plugin to help you add tags to your posts.

6. Robots Meta

Duplicate content is a heavily under looked area of search engine optimisation particularly when it comes to a blog. This plugin enables you to specify the sections that you want to be indexed and not indexed such as archives, comments, tags, etc.

7. SEO Friendly Images

Organic traffic from images can only be enhanced if all your images have proper tags associated with them and SEO Friendly Images ensures that this is done every time you add an image to a post.

8. Nofollow Case By Case

If you have a new blog which desperately needs exposure in the blogosphere, then removing the ‘nofollow’ attribute from your comment links can help attract attention. This plugin removes the attribute, positively encouraging your readers to comment and receive link love.

9. Redirection

Most blogs tend to undergo several changes, both major and minor, over a period of time. This affects the permalinks of older posts and can lead to dead links on your blog. Redirection is a highly useful plugin which ensures that users are redirected to new the permalinks.

10. Yoast Breadcrumbs

Very few people realise this but putting breadcrumb navigation on your blog can significantly perk up site navigation – both for users and search engine crawlers. ‘Home>SEO>plugin’ is an example of breadcrumb navigation.