There are many things to love about this simple, yet versatile CMS, that has quickly grown to be the most widely adopted CMS used today. One thing that had originally attracted me to WordPress was the strong focus on SEO, both from official WordPress developers, as well as theme and plugin developers. The permalinks feature alone is enough to get any SEO excited, particularly a few years ago, when there was nothing but elaborate workarounds for overly complicated CMSs like Joomla, Drupal, and PHPnuke *shudders*.
Most professional themes these days are created with SEO in mind, and more often than not, are in line with my regular SEO practices. However, there are times when you’ve got to look beyond the themes, and start looking for plugins to do your dirty work.
Below are 6 plugins that I activate on nearly all my WordPress installations, and chances are, you should be using them too!
If you have any plugins that you would like to add to the list, please do so in the comments!
- Platinum SEO Pack – This is one plugin that you need to have
Platinum SEO Plugin
installed on your WordPress blog. If you’ve ever used the All in One SEO Plugin, then you’ve already been familiarized with Platinum SEO, because it’s actually based on it.It performs all the basics like custom page titles, more control over META data, nofollow, noindex, and more. I’m trying really hard to make this sound enticing, but making meta tags and page titles sexy is not easy.
- WP No Category Base – Hopefully you’re effectively using permalinks to SEOify your URLs. Again, its one of my favorite features, but there is a problem. The category base, the default being “category” which gets tagged onto your URL, right after your domain. Not only does it over zero SEO significance (at least not when it’s set as the default), but it also adds 9 more characters to your SEO-friendly URLs.This is an extremely simple plugin, with a single purpose, but it’s quick and easy, and doesn’t require any hacking around in your .htaccess file. Do note that this plugin hasn’t been updated in over 7 months. I am, however, currently using it on dozens of blogs, and I’ve yet to run into any problems.
- Google XML Sitemaps – I see this plugin recommended time and time again across the Web, and for good reason. This plugin is awesome at what it does! So what does it do? As you probably guessed, this plugin is great for generating XML sitemaps, which are used by most major search engines to thoroughly spider full sites. And it should be noted that this is not just a tool to appease the Google Gods, but Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com as well.
- Google Analytics for WordPress – If you aren’t thoroughly analyzing your traffic, than all your SEO work has been done in vain. Google Analytics is arguably the best free analytics software available today. To track your stats, you must first install the Analytics tracking code on your site. Google Analytics for Wordpress does this for you, but goes a step further, and lets you easily set yourself up to track and segment outgoing clicks and Adsense clicks.
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- Scribe SEO
Scribe SEO – Scribe SEO takes in depth look at the actual content of your posts. Scribe SEO is the perfect solution for blogs with multiple authors and editors that aren’t as well versed in SEO as they should be. If you’re producing mass amounts of content, it’s not always easy to ensure that it meets all your SEO standards. Scribe SEO fixes this problem.
- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Although not typically thought of as a SEO plugin, “YARPP” provides a convenient and natural way to interlink your pages, resulting in some serious onsite SEO benefit. You can also add related posts to your RSS feed for even more effect
The Scribe SEO plugin looked interesting. Too bad it isn’t free. It is an interesting concept though. Do you know of any free alternatives to that service?
Hi, thanks for the list. I’m wondering why you didn’t include the All-in-one SEO. That’s the one that I see everyone recommending. What are your thoughts?
@Ileane
Hey Ileane! The Platinum SEO Pack (#1) is actually a replacement for the All-in-One plugin. It does all the same, and more.
There’s also an import feature to easily transfer your All-in-One settings to Platinum SEO
Thanks for the tip on ‘WP No Category Base’. I had been trying to get around that for a while on another site.
If you are going to mention Scribe SEO I would’ve mentioned that you either need to have specifically sanctioned themes or be running ‘All-in-one-SEO’. I’m not sure of the success rate with having both Platinum and it at the same time if you were to use a non-approved theme.
I am using majority of these plugins for my blog ICT Trends. I loved wordpress since huge lot of useful plugins are readily available that can be implemented without touching the code.
Flores commented in one of my posts arguing the load these plugins causes and the limitation of shared hosting, how much they can cope up with. She suggested to reduce the plugins as much as possible so that the database queries could be reduced to have satisfying blog performance. In this scenario it is very necessary to choose right plugin that are most essentials.
Thanks for the list of the list of great plugins.
I might take a look at these but I don’t know. Do you really need an analytics plugin? I just add mine to the footer of my blog. Also I’m with Ileane and I use the all in one seo pack. It’s perfect and doesn’t require much set up or attention to it.
A site map generator is pointless to be honest. Google will cache any word website with or with out it. I think it’s over rated really.
WP No Category Base looks interesting I might do some more reading on it but right now I feel really comfortable with the way my blog is as is.
Adding related posts to the rss feeds sounds like a great marketing tool I will be looking into that one for sure.