The quality and quantity of available plugins can often influence bloggers to choose WordPress when setting up a new blog. However, sometimes the huge number of plugins can become confusing and frustrating. There are several very good plugins that have been developed to enhance the search engine optimization of your blog. Here are 10 of the best, in no particular order.
Take control of your meta descriptions and page titles. You can also tag posts with categories. All-in-One SEO Pack is one of the most popular SEO-related plugins because of the essential functions it allows you to perform.
Another extremely popular plugin, Ultimate Tag Warrior helps you to add tags, which are recognized by search engines like Technorati, to each of your posts. UTW provides you with a few different options for entering tags, including simply typing your tags when you’re entering the post.
Internal linking is valuable for SEO and it can also help your readers to find additional content that may interest them. Related Entries will make the process easy. Your posts will automatically include links to related posts (in a list, at the bottom of the post).
We’ve already mentioned title tags with the All-in-One SEO Pack, and SEO Title Tags provides another quality option. With this plugin you can easily control and optimize the titles of every page and post you create with WordPress.
Google and other search engines use XML sitemaps to find and index all the pages of websites and blogs. By default your WordPress blog does not create an XML sitemap. With this plugin the process is automated. Additionally, it automatically updates the XML file whenever you publish a new post.
No, this is not the same thing as #5. This plugin creates a sitemap that human visitors will be able to use, rather than an XML sitemap, which is created for search engines. This type of sitemap also has SEO purposes as it will place a link to every page/post on your blog, not to mention the fact that it’s helpful for visitors.
7. Antisocial
Antisocial is more SEO-friendly version of the very popular Sociable plugin. It adds no-follow tags to the links created by the plugin to social media sites.
8. WP Backlinks
Are you interested in getting more links to your blog? WP Backlinks helps you to collect and manage reciprocal links with other blogs. Other bloggers can fill out a form on your blog, add a link to you, and you will then be notified so you can add a reciprocal link.
This plugin will give you the option to have meta tags automatically generated, or it will allow you to create them manually.
The SEO Master plugin has two modules, the nofollow module and the meta module. Like some of the other plugins listed, it will let you add and customize meta tags, but it will also let you tell WordPress to add nofollow tags to different types of links.
36 comments from readers
1 Goyin Aug 22, 2007 at 12:02 pm
Hey, these are nice tools. nice compilation. Most of them are actually new to me.
2 Vandelay Design Aug 22, 2007 at 4:42 pm
Goyin,
Thanks for visiting, I’m glad you found some new tools here.
3 SEO Tips for Paula Queen of the Surf Pirates - My Online World Aug 22, 2007 at 10:27 pm
[…] Check out Top 10 SEO Plugins for Wordpress […]
4 uberdose Aug 23, 2007 at 12:20 am
Thanks for the top position
Btw., All-in-One-SEO can use UTW’s tags for meta keywords as well, like UTW does. So you can decide which one should handle the meta keywords. Don’t let them both handle them, though.
5 Antonius Aug 23, 2007 at 8:06 am
Groovy List of SEO Plugins. I am a little unsure of the AntiSocial one, what does that do for SEO?
6 uberdose Aug 23, 2007 at 8:12 am
> AntiSocial one, what does that do for SEO?
It avoids the PR leak you get when you link delicio and the like on every post while still enabling your visitors to easily bookmark them.
7 Patrick Burt Aug 23, 2007 at 8:46 am
Great resource m8, I was looking for something like this because all the plugins were everywhere all over the internet.
8 Untitled Commentators Post - My Online World Aug 23, 2007 at 12:53 pm
[…] Steven over at Vandelay Website Design has a top ten list of SEO Plugins that can really stream line your SEO. I added this to my previous SEO Post as a related resource. Cathy over at Web Affiliate Creators has a how to create a Robot.txt file. […]
9 Windows Tips, Tricks And Hacks Aug 23, 2007 at 3:47 pm
Great list! I actually run a few of these, but didn’t know about the others - thanks! You just got Stumbled.
10 Vandelay Design Aug 23, 2007 at 4:55 pm
Uberdose,
No problem. Thanks your additional info on the plugin and for answering Antonius question (before I could get to it).
Patrick and Saman,
Thanks for reading!
11 72 More Blog Tips from the Blogging Community Aug 27, 2007 at 4:59 am
[…] The Top 10 SEO-Related WordPress Plugins by Steven Snell […]
12 Ant Eksiler Aug 28, 2007 at 12:13 pm
I think you should consider this plugin which increases your keyword density:
http://www.turkhitbox.com/gray-hat-seo/high-keyword-density-wordpress-plugin.html
13 uberdose Aug 28, 2007 at 12:57 pm
> I think you should consider this plugin which increases your keyword density
You’re kidding, right? First, you won’t gain anything in google at all (maybe slightly in yahoo and msn), plus it’s clearly against any SE’s guidelines, so expect your site getting banned. It’s using a technique called cloaking, which is not very wise in the first place, but it’s also user-agent based cloaking which can easily be detected.
14 Vandelay Design Aug 28, 2007 at 5:43 pm
I agree with uberdose. It’s not worth getting your site banned. I think there are other safer and more effective ways to improve your rankings (like the ones listed above).
15 UNMATCHABLE MARKETING! » Blog Archive » Cool Word press plugin for SEO Aug 29, 2007 at 6:11 pm
[…] Here’s the link: http://www.vandelaydesign.com/blog/wordpress/top-10-seo-related-wordpress-plugins/ […]
16 72 More Blog Tips from the Blogging Community | MegaBlogg Free Blog Host Aug 30, 2007 at 12:34 pm
[…] The Top 10 SEO-Related WordPress Plugins by Steven Snell […]
17 Tay - Make Money Blogging Aug 31, 2007 at 1:16 am
I use number 1, 5, 6, 7, and… that’s all. Currently. I’m planning to get the Ultimate Tag Warrior as well. I’ve tried getting the Related Entries plugin, but it never seems to work for me. I always getting an error when running the script for installation, and I’m not fantastic at technical stuff so manual install would be very complicated for me. I guess I’ll give it another go, though!
Thanks for writing this fantastic list. It was a great read, and I can’t wait to hear more from you.
Tay
18 CFernandes Sep 1, 2007 at 2:48 pm
Very good list, but some of them do overlap.
19 Vandelay Design Sep 2, 2007 at 6:47 pm
CFernandes,
Thanks for reading! Yes, some of them do overlap, but they all have different features and functions that make them unique.
20 Cole Haan Oct 2, 2007 at 12:50 pm
The ones I use which are not mentioned above.
Permalink Redirect: Permalink Redirect ensures that pages and entries are always accessed via the permalink. Otherwise, a 301 redirect will be issued. By Scott Yang.
WP-PageNavi: Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog. By Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.
21 Vandelay Design Oct 2, 2007 at 8:40 pm
Cole Haan,
Thanks for your recommendations.
22 uberdose Oct 3, 2007 at 4:58 am
@Cole: I think the Permalink Redirect is obsolete. WP 2.2 had some problems with that, but 2.3 does this out-of-the-box. E.g., the “?p=nnn” will be redirected to your permalink.
23 Karthik Oct 5, 2007 at 12:15 pm
Steven, is there something that the SEO Title Tags does that All in one SEO doesn’t?
Also, UTW is also obsolete, so to speak isn’t it?
24 Acopic - Web Designers Oct 9, 2007 at 6:14 am
Hey - thanks for that list. Some really useful plugins there that I hadn’t come across before. Very useful.
25 unTECHy Oct 14, 2007 at 10:02 pm
Once again, a great compilation of links.
I’ve mentioned before that I currently use Nucleus. When I successfully transfer my blog to WP, you can bet I’ll be using several of these plugins.
5 *’s
26 IT & Web Resources | Sites, Networks, Software » Blog Archive » My del.icio.us bookmarks for November 3rd Nov 4, 2007 at 2:26 am
[…] Top 10 SEO-Related WordPress Plugins << Vandelay Website Design - Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
27 SEO Australia Nov 6, 2007 at 8:24 pm
The only Wordpress Plugin I use is the All In One SEO pack, as it does the bulk of the essential on-site SEO work. The rest is how I structure the HTML and written content.
28 Vandelay Design Nov 6, 2007 at 8:37 pm
SEO Australia,
I lean towards using fewer plugins when possible too. This is just a list of useful plugins to give some options.
29 Dan Perry Dec 2, 2007 at 7:51 am
Total beginner here, and this list helped me a ton. Thanks for putting it together.
30 Jim Spencer Dec 8, 2007 at 8:07 am
This SEO plugin looks mighty powerful. Anyone tried it and can offer comments? http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/headspace2/
31 Search Engine Optimization Direct » Blog Archive » Top 10 SEO-Related WordPress Plugins Jan 6, 2008 at 11:51 pm
[…] lloydthomas article is brought to you using rss feeds.Here are some of the top articles on search engine optimization.Internal linking is valuable for SEO and it can also help your readers to find additional content that may interest them. Related Entries will make the process easy. Your posts will automatically include links to related posts (in a … […]
32 sheds Jun 24, 2008 at 5:44 am
What a great list.Was looking for plug ins to help with my blog ranking.
cheers
33 SEO Jul 6, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Seo in Turkey
34 Gezginler Jul 25, 2008 at 4:39 am
Very good list, but some of them do overlap.
35 Guntur Aries Setiawan Aug 1, 2008 at 11:03 pm
wowowowow …. good plugin … but what the best plugin do you think ? thxs jeh …
36 31 Days to Building a Better Blog « Sztuka Spekulacji Aug 5, 2008 at 3:41 pm
[…] The Top 10 SEO-Related WordPress Plugins by Steven Snell […]