I often get asked “What are the best WordPress plugins?” The answer is not always a simple one because every website has different needs.What I do tell them is that there are a core set of plugins that I automatically install on every WordPress installation I do whether it is for myself or for a client. These core plugins handle all of the heavy lifting of the SEO of your site allowing you to ensure every single page an post has the best opportunity possible to rank well in search engines.
The Best SEO WordPress Plugins
- WordPress SEO by Yoast – There are a number of different SEO plugins but I find this one particularly useful, especially for clients who are not SEO experts. What I like about this one is that it does a page analysis of a post and gives you tips on how you can further improve the SEO of your post before you publish. It’s like having a built-in checklist so you will never miss a critical element of optimization on the page. This means that overall, your site will perform better in the search engines for every search term you target.
- PubSubHubbub - This plugin allows you to let people know in real-time when you have added new content or updated your blog. Google Reader, Google Alerts and FriendFeed, and many others, use this format for their RSS updates. This takes your RSS feeds beyond the standard Atom and RSS2 which is built-in to WordPress.
- cbnet Ping Optimizer- This is an essential plugin. Every time you click publish on your blog editor when you are creating a post your site will automatically ping to various ping networks. If you are like me, you hit that publish button or save button multiple times during the course of creating the post. This means you may be pinging the site 10 times in a short period of time. Without a way of controlling how often you are pinging, you could potentially be spamming the ping site. If this happens, you risk being banned and your site will no longer update. This plugins ensures that does not happen because it controls how often your site interacts with the ping servers.
- XML Sitemap Generator – If you don’t know what a Sitemap is, it is a complete list of your website structure including every page and post. This plugin will help the search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com crawl your complete website to ensure every page is indexed. Normally you would have to create the XML file and manually submit it to each of the search engines. This plugin creates the XML Sitemap and submits it for you. Then every time you create new content it will rebuild the sitemap to include the new content and resubmit it to the search engines.
- Google Analytics for WordPress – This is fairly self explanatory, this plugin will allow you to add the Google Analytics code to your blog. This particular plugin offers more features than the standard analytics plugins than we have seen in the past.
- Google Analytics Dashboard – This one is not really essential but I personally find it handy to be able to view my Google Analytics right in my WordPress dashboard. Because I am an active blogger and manage many client accounts, I find that it saves time to be able to track my stats all in one place. You still need to have an analytics plugin like the one above to input your code, this one simply imports that results to your dashboard.
- WP Policies – Some would argue whether this is an actual SEO plugin but I personally think it is. Legally you must put a privacy policy on your website if you display Google Adsense or if any of the plugins you use, such as analytics gathers any kind of information or contains any cookies. Without a privacy policy in place, your site may not rank well in search engines. Therefore I consider this an essential to SEO. This particular plugin also allows you to create various other policies such as earnings disclaimers, etc. It will generate these automatically for you and you can choose which ones you want/need for your specific website.
- SEO Smart Links – This will look after your internal anchor text links. Once you have input your keyword terms into the settings and the urls that they should link to the plugin takes over and automatically builds those links for you whenever you use the keywords within your pages and posts. You can add new search terms anytime or edit the existing ones.
- Yet Another Related Posts Plugin- There are other related posts plugins available but I find this one to be the best. What this does is scan through your blog and place links to related posts at the bottom of the post. Like internal links, this is a great way to show the search engines and your visitors that you have more information on any given topic. It will help you rank better for your search terms.
- WP Tags to Technorati - This plugin will create technorati tags from native WordPress tags. This allows Technorati to index them in their tag pages.
- Broken Links Checker – Nothing is worse than broken links. They hurt your credibility and they can cause search engines to fail to completely crawl your website. This plugin will continually crawl your website looking for broken links and display any it finds so you can quickly go in and fix them. This is especially good if you have outbound links in your posts (which you should) since you can’t control whether someone makes a page inactive on their website.
So there you have my list of what I consider the best SEO plugins and I make them the core of every WordPress site I install. If you use them for your WordPress, you cannot help but perform better in the search engines.
Do you have a favorite SEO plugin that works well for you or one that you think I have left off the list? Leave a comment to let me know your thoughts.
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I do trust all of the ideas you’ve introduced to your post. They’re really convincing and will certainly work. Nonetheless, the posts are too brief for starters. Could you please extend them a little from next time? Thank you for the post.