Website design and developing. Flash and CSS tools

After being on WordPress for over four months now, I thought I would compile a quick list of WordPress plugins that I’ve used to optimize my blog for search engines. I have found that most lists out there include a couple of these, so I thought I would try to create a master list of the best SEO plugins for WordPress. These SEO plugins are very useful and actually quite essential if you want your blog to rank well in Google. Most of them require little to no customization and work perfectly right after installation.

1. Permalink Redirect – A very nice plugin that supplies a 301 redirect if the requested URL is different from the post’s permalink. For example, if you were to type in this address into your web browser, http://www.online-tech-tips.com/wordpress/the-best-way-to-move-from-blogger-beta-to-wordpress, it will automatically be changed to include an ending “/” after the post name. This ensures that there is only one URL for each blog post entry and avoids duplicate content issues. Download Permalink Redirect

2. WWW Redirect - This plugin is used to avoid having different PageRanks for www and non-www versions of your site. Using WWW Redirect, you can either redirect everything to the www or non-www version depending on how your site is setup. This avoids the same pages being indexed under various forms of of the same domain. Download WWW Redirect

3. Add Meta Tags – Unfortunately, WordPress does not automatically put meta tags into your post pages for you. However, it is quite essential to have meta tags for search engines and for the tags to be unique for each post. Add Meta Tags adds XHTML Description and Keywords tags to your blog’s front page as well as to each post, static page, and category archive. Download Add Meta Tags

4. SEO Title Tag – This plugin is similar to Optimal Title, but has a few extra features. This plugin will change the order in which your blog name and post name are displayed in the title. It is considered better for search engines to have your unique post name first followed by your blog name. It can also be used with Ultimate Tag Warrior to put the tag name in the title for tag pages. Download SEO Title Tag

5. Similar Posts – A plugin that displays a list of posts that are similar or closely related to the current post. This is good for search engines, especially Google, because internal link structure of your blog is very important when it comes to getting a higher PageRank. The more pages that are interlinked, the more PageRank they will receive and the higher those pages will be in the Google search results. Download Similar Posts

6. Google Sitemap Generator – One of my favorite plugins so far! It’s painless to install and generates an XML compliant sitemap for you and automatically updates Google every time you publish a new post. And it generates a sitemap not only posts, but also static pages, categories and archive pages. It also gives a priority to each post based on the number of comments. Download Google Sitemap Generator

7. NoIndex Feed – A simple little plugin that will prevent Google and Yahoo from indexing your WordPress feed by adding a META tag to the feed. You can also use a robots.txt file to do this, but this plugin can take care of it for you easily. Download NoIndex Feed

8. Duplicate Content Cure – If you are using the default settings for WordPress, a single post on your blog can be indexed numerous times through archives, categories, built in search, and home page paging. Mostly it’s summaries or posts or exact copies of the same post. This plugin will ensure that the pages and posts are the only things that get indexed. Download Duplicate Content Cure

9. Link to Me Textbox – This plugin will hopefully give you more links and hence raise the number of backlinks to your blog post. More backlinks will give your posts a higher PageRank. Simple and yet useful way to get more links. Download Link to Me Textbox

10. Sociable or Submit It – Use these plugins to add social bookmarking sites to each of your posts. Readers can easily bookmark your post on Digg, Reddit, del.icio.us, Furl, StubleUpon, and lots more. This will give you more backlinks and more traffic. Download Sociable or Submit It

11. SEO WordPress Plugin – This plugin is exactly what the name suggests, a smart plugin that creates a robots.txt file for you with the disallow statement to block certain directories from being indexed by the Google bot. I had not seen this plugin on most sites, but I currently also use a robots.txt file manually to block trackbacks, feeds, archives, and other directories from being indexed. I think this will be a very useful and effective SEO plugin. Download SEO WordPress Plugin

12. Permalinks Migration Plugin – This is another great plugin if you currently are not using an SEO friendly permalink structure on your blog, this plugin will redirect your old link to your new link without effecting your search engine rankings. It uses a 301 redirect in order to accomplish this and therefore you don’t lose any of your PageRank. Download Permalinks Migration Plugin

13. Simple Tagging – A simple, yet powerful, plugin that allows you to attach tags to each post so that you can create tag clouds, display lists of related posts, add tags as meta keywords in the header, add tags to your feed which will index your tags with Technorati, and embed tags directly into a post. Download Simple Tagging

Updated: July 24th, 2007

14. All-In-One SEO Pack – A great plugin mentioned by San Diego in the comments. It fixes, the Home Title, Home Description, Home Keywords, rewrites titles, uses noindex tag for Category and Archive pages to avoid duplicate content, and auto generates meta descriptions. Download All In One SEO Pack