10 Awesome all-time wordpress SEO plug-ins

Posted on 13. Dec, 2010 by Andrew Paul in Resources, SEO

The recent windows live and wordpress.com tie-up has resulted in a tremendous increase in the number of wordpress blog users. The number of people joining wordpress.com has doubled from around 400000 to over 900000 per month (source: wordpress blog). If you are a blogger you would want your blog to rank better, attract unique visitors and avoid spammers. In order to achieve these objectives you must do some effective SEO. To start with the SEO process, you can use a few SEO plug-ins which can do wonders for your blogs. I have compiled and explained about a few SEO plug-ins which I think are some of the best.

1. All in One SEO Pack

This is an all-time favorite WordPress SEO Plug-in for many WordPress lovers. The Plug-in automatically optimizes the WordPress blog for Search Engines. The Plug-in automatically optimizes titles and Meta tags. It avoids duplicate content found on wordpress blogs.

The Plug-in works out of the box, making the task easier for beginners, as they don’t have to even look at the options and can just install and advanced users can fine-tune everything.

Requirements:

WordPress Version: 2.8 or higher

compatible up to: 3.0.2

2. Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps generates a special XML sitemap which helps major search engines to better index blogs. The sitemap enables the search engines to see the complete structure of the site and retrieve it more efficiently. This plug-in supports all types of wordpress generated pages and custom URLs. It also notifies major search engines whenever you create a post.

Requirements:
WordPress Version: 2.1 or higher

Compatible up to: 3.0.2

3. Platinum SEO Pack

Platinum SEO Pack also offers all the functionalities of All-in-one-SEO Pack. The Plug-in optimizes post and page for search engines, generates all SEO relevant Meta Tags automatically. Automatic 301 redirects for any permalink changes, canonical URLs, option to specify Meta description and Meta keywords tag for categories and tag pages are some of the features.
Requirements:

Requires WordPress Version: 1.5 or higher

Compatible up to: 3.0.2

4. WassUp

This is a fantastic Plug-in to track your visitor statistics and behavior. It can track visitors in real-time. The Plug-in has a readable and fancy admin console to keep track of site visitors and gives a detailed view of user behavior (almost everything users are doing on the site). A useful Plug-in for SEO or Statistics maniacs and importantly, it is not intended show group statistics like visitors per day, page views per month etc, as there are already good tools available for that like Google analytics.  Instead, WassUp provides flexible, easy-to-read views of visitors’ data that is customizable by time periods, visitor types, search keywords, and much more.

Requirements:

Requires WordPress Version: 2.2 or higher

Compatible up to: 3.0.2

5. WordPress SEO by Yoast

This Plug-in you can say the complete all in one SEO solution for a wordpress blog. Some of the considerable features out of the huge list include Taxonomy title and Meta description support, Google search result snippet previews, post title and Meta description meta box to change these on a per post basis, breadcrumbs support, with configurable breadcrumbs titles etc.

Requirements:

Requires WordPress Version: 3.0 or higher

Compatible up to: 3.1

6. WP Minify

Wp Minify helps improve page load time by combining and compressing JS and CSS files using Minify engine. The Plug-in grabs JS and CSS files in the generated WordPress page and sends that list to the Minify engine. The Minify engine then delivers a consolidated, minified, and compressed script or style for WP Minify to reference in the WordPress header.

If you even have some idea about SEO you must be aware of the importance of page loading time in SEO point of view and thus can understand the importance of this useful Plug-in.

Requirements:

Requires WordPress Version: 2.7 or higher

compatible up to: 3.0.2

7. SEO Friendly Images

SEO Friendly Images is an image optimizer, automatically updates all images with ALT and TITLE attributes for SEO purposes in case the images do not have ALT and TITLE set and the plugin makes the post W3C/XHTML valid as well.

Requirements:

Requires WordPress Version: 2.7 or higher

Compatible up to: 3.0.2

8. SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links brings automatic SEO benefits for your site, the plug-in can automatically link keywords and phrases in posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on the blog and it also allows to set up own keywords and set of matching URLs and allows blog owner to set nofollow attribute and open links in new window as well.

Requirements:

Requires WordPress Version: 2.3 or higher

compatible up to: 2.9.2

9. SEO Ultimate

This Complete SEO plug-in gives you control over title tags, noindex, meta tags, slugs, autolinks, 404 errors, canonical, rich snippets and includes a lot of powerful features.

Requirements:

WordPress Version: 2.8 or higher

compatible up to: 3.0.2

The latest version 4.5 adds bug fixes as well.

10. HeadSpace2 SEO

HeadSpace2 is a complete Meta data manager that allows fine-tuning the SEO potential of the site. It controls almost every aspect of site’s Meta-data including advance tagging, analytics and a few plug-ins.

One can configure meta-tag for posts, pages, categories, homepage, author pages, search pages, 404 pages. This Plug-in has a lot more interesting features.

Requirements:

Requires WordPress Version: 2.3 or higher

Compatible up to: 2.9.2

Views, Suggestions and Constructive comments are welcome; you can also share with us about any other SEO plug-ins that you might find useful.

Tags: SEO, The Plug, WordPress