Organic website traffic on your website is what you want. If you don’t know that, get it through your thick skull! If you are writing blogs today or maintaining a website that runs on WordPress, you are probably wondering what you can do to help in your website (or blogs) search engine optimization. Search engine ranking (or Page Rank mentioned here) is something that most webmasters are constantly thinking about since most organic traffic will come from one or more search engines. If you are using WordPress as your Content Management System, the software has already did the hard part for you. But, there are some SEO features that aren’t implemented in WordPress core. You can easily achieve these features by installing some of the most excellent SEO plugins that are around. Here I talk about the 11 Best Search Engine Optimization Tips.
The number of available plugins in the SEO category is large, but I have been working with these below and I can say that they are top notch. 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 website orblog.
Right now, I’ll give you a list of 10 WordPress plugins that I feel are first class and will definitly help in increasing your search engine ranking of your website or blog
(these are NOT in order)
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1. All in One SEO Pack
This plugin enables certain modifications to your WordPress blog to achieve Search Engine Optimization. For example, you can customize your post title, post description and post tags for individual post. Furthermore, this plugin also has features such as auto generates Cononical URLS for your entire WordPress site and select index/noindex for various archives pages.
2. Broken Link Checker
This plugin will monitors links in your site and list out links that don’t work or any missing images. The reason why this plugin is essential is because you may write an article and link to www.domain.com. This link may goes down in future and become dead ends for search engine. By using this plugin, you can get notifications immediately and remove these dead ends.
3. Google XML Sitemaps Generator
This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. A sitemap will help search engine spiders to crawl your content. The generated sitemap also supported by other search engine such as Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com.
4. SEO Friendly Images
SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper alt and title attributes. By having a proper alt and title tag for your images, you can get more traffic from Google Image Search. This blog had gain quite a large number of traffic from Google Image Search by doing so.
5. No Self Pings
Although internal linking in your own site help navigate user to your posts, but it actually decrease your page rank because of the self pings effect. This plugin will eliminate this effect by removing all pingbacks from own site and only receive back links from other sites.
6. Enforce www. Preference
One of the important search engine fact is that search engines will treat www.domain.com and domain.com as two different site. You can easily overcome this issue by enforcing this plugin. Note: All in One SEO Pack will overcome this issue for you. Make sure you check the Canonical option.
7. Platinum SEO Pack
This plugin covers all the features of All in One SEO Pack, but it does include more options compare to All in One SEO Pack. For example, it adds index, noindex, follow or nofollow, noodp, noydir, noarchive, and nosnippet meta tags to any post/page. But, most of my clients prefer All in One SEO Pack as they are used to it and reluctant to change.
8. SEO Smart Links
SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your posts. This will help navigating your visitors to other posts. The interlinking process happens automatically and what you need to do is configure it through the administration settings panel.
9. SEO Slugs
Long URL may have a better ranking in search engines because it will contain more keywords. But search engines like Google tends to ignore some common keywords such as “you”, “a”, “the”, and “what”. Removing these keywords will improve your search engine ranking. This plugin will automatically remove these unused common keywords for you.
10. Robots Meta
Robots Meta enables users to control which pages/posts can be indexed and which can’t. For example, you may want to prevent indexing of your search results or your category pages. It is because some search engines will see them as duplicate content and decrease your page rank.