Written on December 16th, 2008 at 06:12 am by Darren Rowse
9 SEO Plugins Every Wordpress Blog Should Have
Do you want to increase the search engine ranking of your WordPress blog? Check out these 9 SEO WordPress plugins that Shawn Jooste from Elite Blogger has pulled together for us.
The best place by far to find traffic is from search engines. The art of Search Engine Optimization is often very daunting for new bloggers. Even some experienced bloggers just see SEO as a cloudy puddle of mud they would rather not play in.
Wordpress by default is pretty decent at letting search engines see what’s going on. But there are a whole bunch of other things that can be done to make your blog rank better. Fortunately there are plugins available to help you get better rankings for your blog, so you don’t have to go digging into the code of your blog to get some results from search engines.
I’m not going to explain the validity or effects of each of these SEO tactics in detail. There is more than enough of that on the Internet already if you want to do some research. I’ll mention briefly what the benefits of each plugin is, and why you need it.
This allows you to set the basic SEO stuff for your blog. You need page titles, meta tags, keywords, and descriptions. This plugin allows you to configure them for either your entire blog or on a post by post basis.
2. Redirection
From time to time you make changes on your blog. Sometimes these changes end up breaking your Permalink structure. This often happens when you make a change to an old post, or do an upgrade to Wordpress and make some changes to the permalinks. It’s very very common if you move your blog from one host to another.
Basically what happens is that each post has a unique URL, called a permalink. When this changes, visitors who go to that blog post won’t find it. The redirection plugin helps you fix these problems by redirecting the visitor to the new permalink. This reduces the amount of traffic you get to pages that don’t exist.
3. Robots Meta
By default search engines crawl and index ALL the pages on your blog. This isn’t ideal, because it creates duplicate content and you can get yourself punished by search engines without knowing it. What the Robots Meta plugin allows you to do is tell the search engines which sections of your blog to crawl. This means that you’ll get more respect from search engines, and likely more traffic.
One of the key issues with SEO is your internal linking structure. The more you link to a certain page on your blog, the more important it is to your overall content. Search engines treat your internal links as an indication of how well structured your site is. The problem with this is that if you had to manually go and create links to relevant and important posts you’ll spend hours and hours doing it.
SEO Smart links allows you to specify a word, like ‘SEO’ and then link it to a post on your site. Then each time the word SEO appears on your site, it’s automatically turned into a link you specified.
Images also play an important role in your SEO strategy. So it’s important that you tag them correctly. SEO Friendly images allows you to do this, and saves you hours and hours of work. If, like most bloggers you use images in your posts, then this plugin is essential.
It’s important to know your keywords. And this handy plugin allows you to track the keywords you’re getting searches for. It’s pointless selecting a few keywords, then writing some content for those keywords and hoping that the rest goes well. SEO is about being proactive and tracing what works and what doesn’t.
7. Permalinks Moved Permanently
A common mistake bloggers make is choosing the wrong permalink structure. When you start your blog you think you know which is best, and as time goes buy you want to change your permalink structure. The problem with changing your permalink structure is that your traffic will come to a standstill until your site is reindexed, and that could take months.
This plugin is similar to redirect but is an easier and better way to manage permanent permalink changes.
The nofollow attribute over the last year or two has had a fairly large impact on the blogosphere. All comments in Wordpress by default are nofollow links. This means that no Page Rank (PR) is being given via the link. This plugin changes that and makes comment links valuable again. There are a number of reasons you would want to give away link juice. It’s often used to attract people and encourage them to comment. It can be very useful for new blogs who need some exposure.
9. SEO Slugs
Stop words are ignored by search engines. So most of your post titles have them in, but they are meaningless to search engines. So when you have a post title like this: “What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings” you have a permalink like this: ‘/what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings’ but what you really want is for your permalink to look like this: /immediately-higher-rankings.
This plugin automatically removes stop words from the permalink, helping you to rank better.
Conclusion:
Getting better traffic from search engines will help you boost your blog. You’ll get better income, rank better, and be able to build a better brand.
Tags: Plugins, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, SEO Plugins, WordPress Plugins
139 Responses to “9 SEO Plugins Every Wordpress Blog Should Have” - Add Yours
Thomas Flight - Netager.com
December 16th, 2008 6:38 am
A very good list. I have a hard time remembering to do SEO maybe these plugins will help me to do that.
JOE GELB
December 16th, 2008 6:38 am
thankyou for this valuable info right now i am going to get the redirection plugin, this will help me alot!
elizabeth ashe
December 16th, 2008 6:54 am
Wonderful and great information, I use most of these plug ins in already but I did not know about. Thank you so much.
Freddie Taylor
December 16th, 2008 6:55 am
I really like the list as I am always searching for additional plugins to make my site more effective. However, I am wondering why you didn’t include the Headspace plug in or the Google Sitemap plugin as well?
I thought these were to good plugins. Well, actually the All-in-one-seo plugin may do the things that HeadSpace does, but the Google Sitemap, which is action Google XML Sitemap does a good job for every site.
Thanks for sharing and please advise.
B. Durant
December 16th, 2008 6:57 am
Great tips. On one of my blogs I’m using Platinum SEO pack instead of All In One SEO. I’ve seen a few reports saying platinum is more robust. Do you have any insight into it?
Steven-Sanders
December 16th, 2008 6:58 am
An article came out from Google some time back that explained in further detail what they mean by duplicate content.
Apparently having content on your blog’s front page as well as it’s own post page doesn’t qualify for the duplicate content rule.
Shelly
December 16th, 2008 6:59 am
Thank you, thank you! I have a couple of these plugins but will definitely be adding SEO slugs and SEO Smart Links.
Practical Mommy
December 16th, 2008 6:59 am
Great list, Darren, esp. the SEO Smart Links. Thanks for the tips.
Funky Space Monkey
December 16th, 2008 6:59 am
Google Positioner – Compatible up to: 2.5
you might want to check Platinum SEO Pack… basically all of the features found in AIO SEO plugin but has a feature that i needed : ” You dont have to fear changing permalinks. If you are not satisfied with the current permalink, change it through Settings>Permalinks in your admin panel, without worrying about loss of Page rank or google penalty.”
Michael Martine - Remarkablogger
December 16th, 2008 7:01 am
Actually, some stop words are NOT ignored by Google, and image tags, etc, have extremely little value, other than to attract people who want to steal your images.
If you are not very technically inclined, DO NOT mess with redirecting anything. People have had their permalinks screwed up from doing this.
You will always be better off editing slugs by hand, by the way.
I want to encourage people to use some of these plugins but to be careful with others. This post was a great resource! Thanks, Shawn!
inspirational thoughts
December 16th, 2008 7:02 am
Good collection. I have a few and I want to go and get a few more.
One thing I have noticed is that it seems Wordpress comes with a redirection when you change your permalinks. I was worried about this about a week ago so I tested it and found out that when I changed my permalink and typed in the old url it was redirected to the new page.
I think your redirection and permalinks moved permanently is not as vital.. am I wrong?
Mike Nichols
December 16th, 2008 7:03 am
I did extensive research on SEO before I started my blog, and get very good search traffic as a result.
However, WordPress has its limitations, and these plugins are there to fill in the gaps. Of all in the list, the All-In-One SEO and the SEO Friendly Images probably have the most effect.
Great reference post, Shawn! Bookmarked.
Peter van Veen
December 16th, 2008 7:04 am
Nice and valuable post. I’ve seen some plugins that I currently don’t use. Have to work on it!
I’ve use the plugin Headspace 2 on my blog in favor to All In One SEO Pack. Anyone have an opinion about this plugin?
@PetervanVeen
Stephan Miller
December 16th, 2008 7:08 am
I will have to go ad these. i thought I had a handle on all the SEO plugins but haven’t heard of Google Positioner yet.
David
December 16th, 2008 7:09 am
great plugins, i will definitely try them out
Tumblemoose
December 16th, 2008 7:11 am
Thanks for the SEO primer.
Do you know if all of these will now work with WP 2.7?
Cheers
George
Rahul
December 16th, 2008 7:11 am
Awesome list! I’m going to install and activate the SEO slug plugin and Google Positioner plugin immediately.
Hair On The Brain
December 16th, 2008 7:22 am
I’m running All In One and I’m getting great search traffic so far. Does anyone who uses the nofollow plugin let their users know that the comments are no nofollow? What’s the best way to do this? I’d imagine it would encourage commenting if they knew.
Bill Masson (WWAH)
December 16th, 2008 8:02 am
I use the all in one SEO plugin along with commentluv and do follow plugin for the comments. You should also remember to check in every now and again to Google Webmaster resources, once you have your tracking code installed you have cart blanch to optimize your blog further.
Also get the Firefox extension SearchStatus, this is a goldmine of information not just for your own site but for any site, great for use in Niche research.
The Google sitemap should have had a mention as should the Google website optimizer wp plugin.
I will try out the bot plugin, Thanks for the tips
Christian
December 16th, 2008 8:03 am
Nice list, but regarding Robots Meta, don’t you prefer Google xml sitemaps? Just curious. I’ll have to revisit this upon your recommendation though.
Christian
December 16th, 2008 8:06 am
@PetervanVeen I installed Headspace 2 to no avail. Didn’t even work for me. I repeated and still nothing. I must have gotten a bad download or something. for what it’s worth seo pack is stellar as best i can tell. No complaints. It’s a comprehensive plugin that does a lot for your site.
MG
December 16th, 2008 8:06 am
Great list thanks a lot!
Jennifer Hartman
December 16th, 2008 8:08 am
Great article. It is amazing how in depth all this is! I am new but learning quickly.
Nick
December 16th, 2008 8:16 am
Great list, just installed them all :)
Shayne Packer
December 16th, 2008 8:23 am
I’m using “All in One SEO Pack” and “DoFollow”. The “Nofollow Case by Case” looks more flexible than DoFollow, so I think I’ll switch to it. Thanks for the list. I’ll be checkin’ these other ones out.
Bash Bosh
December 16th, 2008 8:25 am
Hi, very nice list of plugins!
I will install all of them and try them on my site!
Thanks for sharing!
Anthony
December 16th, 2008 8:33 am
Google Positioner is buggy, i wouldn’t recommend installing it.
David Turnbull
December 16th, 2008 8:40 am
Brilliant.
I’ll install these once my sites are back up (server trouble).
ukr.net
December 16th, 2008 8:43 am
thank you for this list, to Darren, do you use all of them?
Darren Rowse
December 16th, 2008 9:05 am
ukr.net – I didn’t write this post – Shawn did. I personally don’t use them all.
Blog Expert
December 16th, 2008 9:13 am
I have done many of these posts on my blog. Basically the same list I had in my post last week. Nice list though.
Twitter Ads
December 16th, 2008 9:15 am
Thank you for the Plugins.
ATLANTA WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER
December 16th, 2008 9:37 am
Thanks for the list. I had the SEO pack but didn’t know about the others. Question: there was on that I didn’t download b/c it stated that it was valid up to 6.2. Is that going to matter with 2.7?
Sohail
December 16th, 2008 9:51 am
Hmm great list i am using some of them already, will definatly look into others
Sales Fairy
December 16th, 2008 10:01 am
Two of these were new to me. The Google Positioner and the SEO Slugs. Just installed them. Thanks for the heads up.. They look like they will be awesome.
Mike Panic
December 16th, 2008 10:01 am
Thank you! #7 on the list is the plug-in I’ve been looking for for a long time, as I’ve been wanting to update my permalink structure and not have to deal w/ people going to the wrong links. Again, thank you!
Neil Duckett
December 16th, 2008 10:01 am
I wasn’t aware of the last one with regards to page slugs, makes sense though … installing plugin now!
Lisa
December 16th, 2008 10:18 am
Great resource – I’m going to add a few to my toolbox :)
Robby G
December 16th, 2008 10:20 am
Good stuff. Now it’s time to go right ahead and download most of those.
E-Business Blogging
December 16th, 2008 10:57 am
Wow! Great list, I’ve already using some, and will try the other.
Thanks for sharing Shawn.
Raj - Transcriptionist
December 16th, 2008 11:08 am
Platinum SEO plugin is still a better choice than All in SEO.
Vern at AimforAwesome
December 16th, 2008 11:32 am
Excellent list Darren. I’ve been meaning to find a plugin to help me with redirection because I sillily used date permalinks on my AFA blog. What I’m really excited about is the SEO smartlinks plugin… now that is the most amazing thing I’ve heard. Talk about making it easy to link to your top posts. Perfect!
Ashwin
December 16th, 2008 11:43 am
I am just starting up with SEO and this is a very useful post, especially for beginners. Thanks for Sharing
Cupid Blogger
December 16th, 2008 12:23 pm
Great List…my preference is still All in SEO Pack…
I recently launched a love blog – Cupid Blogger Dot Com, and about 20% of my traffic are from Search Engines…thanks to the plugin and also keyboard research as well..
For more love tips, i would encourage you guys to check out
Cupid Blogger Dot Com
Winifred Freeman
December 16th, 2008 12:47 pm
Darren:
I thoroughly enjoyed this post because it was so full of information. Thank you so much for this post; it not only has increased my knowledge about blogging, it has also increased my internet vocabulary. Keep up the good work!
Eric "Shuck"
December 16th, 2008 1:46 pm
Since wordpress has been updated, will it hurt if I install a plugin that has not been tested with the current version of wordpress?
Jeremy Winter
December 16th, 2008 2:16 pm
Question:
Darren,
Obviously you do not utilize the SEO Slugs plugin here on problogger, is there a specific reason you do not?
I have my guesses, but I figured you would be able to clear it up.
Thanks – Jeremy Winter
Shirley
December 16th, 2008 2:20 pm
Great list.
@Jeremy. Nice observation. I suspect they limit their use of plugins because plugins slow websites down and clutter the backend. And as you can see, there are already a few plugins in use: Adsense, Democracy Poll, Bookmark this, etc…
Ravi Ahuja
December 16th, 2008 5:32 pm
Great plugin list, I am using some of them. Some other plugin I have never heard and looking great I will defiantly try this plugins.
Shawn Jooste
December 16th, 2008 5:59 pm
@Freddie Taylor, I didn’t include the headspace plugin because the All-In-One plugin does the same job, and has a little more flexibility. I’ve also got more experience with it, and have seen the results. So I like to stick to what works. As for the sitemaps, I haven’t actually found one I like. I’ve tried 2 or 3, but find the flexibility somewhat limiting. If you know of a good one, please link to it ;-)
@B Durant, The Platinum plugin does pretty much what the All-In-One does, and as I said to Freddie, I have experience with the All-In-One.
@inspirational thoughts, I’ll be honest, I haven’t looked at the redirection Wordpress does, but thanks for the heads up, I’ll have a look.
@Tumblemoose I am running 2.7, and haven’t had any problems.
Craig
December 16th, 2008 8:13 pm
Thanks Darren. Some good plugins I didnt know about.
Off to install them now!!
Jenn Mattern
December 16th, 2008 9:34 pm
I agree with what others have mentioned – that the redirection plugin seems pretty unnecessary. Wordpress seems to handle all of that automatically these days. I changed quite a few categories (which I include in my permalink structures) on one of my sites (as well as some manual smaller changes to some posts), and Wordpress took care of the redirects perfectly without any plugins.
Syed Balkhi
December 16th, 2008 11:45 pm
Nice list of plugins. I have All in One SEO and SEO Slug. Others I have to look into.
Jason
December 16th, 2008 11:50 pm
Great list! I’ve been looking for some help in the SEO department, I think this will do the trick.
-Jason
votetheday
December 16th, 2008 11:54 pm
I use keylords.com for finding keywords for my site. The thing I like most is that this service not only shows price, publisher competition and popularity, but pageranks of sites, which are in first page of Google SERPS for specific keyword. So I choose keywords with average pagerank that is lower than mine, and after posting an article with that keyword, soon I am in the first SERP page for that keyword.
The secret is to choose popular keywords, but with still low pageranks :) and with moderate price, of course :)
Tips 2 Make Money
December 17th, 2008 12:49 am
Very useful set of plugins. Didn’t know I needed some of them until I saw this list. Thanls.
BloggerSavvy
December 17th, 2008 1:28 am
Google Positioner plugin says it’s only compatible up to WP 2.5 – Is that correct? And SEO Slugs only to 2.1.2, maybe I’m missing something here? (I got this info from the wordpress.org “extensions” area).
One tool that is not directly keyword/link related is Google XML Sitemaps. Using should improve crawling quality and will in turn improve SEO: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
Two tools you mentioned that I’m going to try are the Positioner and SEO Slugs (Which work on WP 2.7?). Thanks for a great post!
Neil
December 17th, 2008 2:29 am
Some useful information. I’ll be sure to install some of them next time I’m doing blog maintenance.
العاب
December 17th, 2008 2:59 am
Thank you so much for this list . My blog is hosted on blogger not wordpress . However , i think i can use some of them or find blogger equivalent for these tools .
J.R. Farr
December 17th, 2008 3:07 am
Darren,
You’re awesome man! This list is invaluable to all bloggers. Thanks for sharing your knowledge!
Best,
JR Farr
NBWeb.it
December 17th, 2008 3:25 am
Thanks for this “must have” list.
I use Redirection and i can say i’ts really wonderful, i wouldn’t live without it :)
P.s. do you know if Seo Slugs can remove stop words in languages other than english?
Gary C.
December 17th, 2008 3:52 am
Wow. I just read your book, ProBlogger. This is not a book. It is a truthful paradigm-changing full course on blogging. I enjoyed the direct head-on content with no fluff.
You told the truth about blogging in that with time, research and hardwork it is possible to make a great living blogging.
I recommend this book to all that want an action roadmap and an awsome course on blogging. This rates as one of my top five reads in the fast 3 years. I read and study about 75 books a year.
You guys really need to do the blogging world a favor and really get the word out about this jewel of blogging instruction. If this were a reality show, you would be rated number one. You may be tired of pushing your book but you need to renew your efforts on letting others in on this awsome life-changing work.
ProBlogger is the name of the book. Go get it now. What, are you still here? Go get this book. It will be the best Christmas gift you give yourself this year! Go, go, go. Invest in it NOW! Go. Please. You will be delighted that you did.
Rebecca
December 17th, 2008 3:53 am
Thanks for the tips on plug-ins. I’m starting to use more plug-ins. I do use the All-in One Seo. I never heard of the SEO slugs. I’ll review these plug-ins and check them out.
Carl H. Martens
December 17th, 2008 4:07 am
Regarding SEO Smart Links:
Is it better if you have the time to hyperlink the keywords yourself as it allows you the ability to include alt tags or does that really not matter when linking internally? The SEO Smart Links makes the alt tag the same as the keyword page url.
Leo
December 17th, 2008 4:29 am
I would like to ask do i need to install all of those 9 SEO plugins?
Is problogger.net install all of those plugin?
adsense alternative
December 17th, 2008 5:43 am
waa. most of that plugin, i still not have. I think i should install some of them for my site.
Outlet
December 17th, 2008 6:46 am
Very useful list. I have digged it :)
maya
December 17th, 2008 7:49 am
i am totally new to blogging and as such i found your comments and tips invaluable. You just made my day by .explaining the difference between a blog and a website. Great list too, thanks :]
Kim @ What's That Smell?
December 17th, 2008 9:25 am
Thanks for the list, I was missing a few of these!
Ikaro
December 17th, 2008 9:31 am
“SEO Smart Links” seems to link only to internal pages.
Check also “Cross Linker” at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cross-linker/
It allows internal and esternal linking ;)
Dan
Ryan @ Linkbuildr
December 17th, 2008 10:24 am
Great list and I highly recommend related posts plugin.
Scott Barker
December 17th, 2008 11:43 am
I’ve had my blog for about 8 months now. I had no idea some of these plugins even existed. Thanks for the quality information.
Joshua Dorkin @ BiggerPockets
December 17th, 2008 1:11 pm
Great list! There’s definitely some on the list that I missed. Thanks.
Jeffrey Smith
December 17th, 2008 1:51 pm
Thanks Darren:
The only thing I can say is Damn, someone beat us to the punch with Smart Links Plug in. We were thinking about developing something like that anyway, since we do the it “the old fashioned way” to sculpt link flow for relevant keywords.
Thanks for the update on some great new plugins.
Bruce > The Big Desk
December 17th, 2008 1:51 pm
Terrific list of plugins, I use almost all of them. There’s one more that I swear by and that’s the Related Post plugin, as you mentioned, internal links are important and this plugin gives you more and is nice for you readers as well.
Domain Marvelous
December 17th, 2008 5:05 pm
I am uploading the Google Positioner plugin as I write this comment :)
swag lamps
December 17th, 2008 5:18 pm
Thank you for your share. I’ve already use one of them, all in one seo pack, and wanna use the others… I think this content is good for my bahasa blog…I’ll ganna translate it…
Leon
December 18th, 2008 1:53 am
Great post Darren. This is sure to be a top post. I’ve been looking to enhance my SEO for a while now. Thank you!
Social Networking North
December 18th, 2008 3:36 am
Great post, I swear by afew of these plugins already but thanks for afew new ideas!
Social Networking North
December 18th, 2008 3:37 am
Great post, I swear by All in one SEO already but thanks for the new ideas!
Tech Support Software
December 18th, 2008 9:53 am
Thanks for the advice. I just ordered your ProBlogger book from Amazon. I can’t wait to dig into it and really learn from the pros!
SEO Services
December 18th, 2008 10:11 am
Nice list, I’d add permalinks in there rather than nofollow. Nofollow really is a traffic thing and is not really advantages in an SEO view point but rather in a marketing view point. Plus pages with keywords in the URL are great for SEO so permalinks is a should have – even though it’s not a plugin (but there are plugins to there revolving around it).
Stuart
December 18th, 2008 10:18 am
We just set up a companion blog, FaveCraftsBlog.com to go along with our site. For the folks that are asking about site map generator, we used this plugin: Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress from http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/ – we use this for all of our companion blogs. Very simple and works well.
Extra Money Hub
December 18th, 2008 12:37 pm
I just wanted to thank you for this list. The Google SEO Positioner is a true time saver.
It’s not often you find good advice with so many resources on the web. This is a great one.
I haven’t picked up your book but by the sounds of it, it’s pretty good. I’ve been reading some of the other bloggers out there. There are so many different angles to take and improve on it’s so much fun.
poer
December 18th, 2008 7:55 pm
in term of internal linking and content, i love to use plugin Insights. with insights we can search a related topic in our previous posts and put the link into the new post, and we can also do a search query to google, youtube, wikipedia, and more to find a content that related to our posts, making the content richer and at the same time, we are doing a link baiting.
Search Engine Optimization
December 19th, 2008 1:30 am
Great list and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for plugins for Wordpress to help with there SEO.
funny t shirts
December 19th, 2008 2:40 am
I have the all in one seo pack and love it. the one on the list that I had never heard of is the Google positioner, I am going to download this one right away. I dont think I am going to mess with my permalinks until I read a little more about this but the list really shines the light on a handful of plug ins that I have not found before. Thanks for the help.
ATLANTA WEDDING PHOTOGRAPHER
December 19th, 2008 9:10 am
@stuart, I used it too. great plugin and very quick to get set up
NSJ
December 19th, 2008 12:52 pm
Is there anything that Wordpress plugins cannot do?
From this list All in one SEO is by far the pick. I have been using it for nearly 2 years now.
Houston search engine optimization
December 19th, 2008 3:06 pm
SEO slugs, SEO smartlinks and SEO friendly images are all new to me. These sound pretty cool so I’m going to check them out. Thanks for the information.
-Gerald Weber
Vincent
December 19th, 2008 4:32 pm
I really like All in one SEO, it’s so easy to use and from first install it is improving the blog! Recommend it to all!
Internet Marketing Do-Follow Blog
December 19th, 2008 5:56 pm
Good plug-ins! Thanks for sharing them Darren! I too love All in One SEO, great plug-in
Littletechgirl
December 20th, 2008 7:14 am
Great article. I am all for useful Wordpress plugins.
Brad Hart @ A DoFollow Blog
December 20th, 2008 10:57 pm
I dislike the Al in one SEO Pack, it has been having more and more problems for many users these days which could lead to a negative SEO impact for many bloggers who think installing it is good enough and let it go. I much prefer Headspace 2 which while requiring a little more work, does an fantastic job of maintaining metadata.
You can still use HS2 to automatically generate your meta data including page slugs, page descriptions and tags, the real power is the option of manually entering this information both on the write page but also doing it en masse from the manage meta data page it creates. You can set it for between 25 and 200 entries at a time, though I recommend no more than a 50 if altering page slugs.
Unless I am doing something wrong or my blog won’t accept the input of auto slug tools I have yet to find one that would automatically alter the slug without actually opening the actual page. While it is is fine to have a slug plugin for new posts, even though I prefer to just take 3 seconds and alter the slug manually removing insignificant yet non trash words, headspace 2 is the only plugin that will let you quickly and easily change the slugs of old posts. I purchased an old blog not long back and used HS2 to custom edit the slug of more than 3000 posts in a single afternoon.
While I agree with notion the the SEO Friendly images is a powerful plugin, I feel it is a bad recommendation for noobs. Since the plugin simply used the image file name to create the alt and title text if you don’t have a good file name you don’t have very good alt or titles for the image. God forbid you get most of your images from flickr with file name like 266169446.jpg I think it is simpler just to get in the good habit of using a tool like the tinymce plugin’s image button that will not only let you quickly and easily add the custom title and alt tags, it will let you align and perfectly size the image for your spot.
teevee
December 20th, 2008 10:58 pm
Installing the remaining ones I did not have. Thank you.
Blogging Tips
December 21st, 2008 9:39 am
All in One is probably my most used worpdress plugin
Sarah
December 22nd, 2008 8:40 am
What I would really like, in place of No Follow Case by Case is more like a Do Follow Case by Case. That way I can tell people that if they post thoughtful comments frequently, we will set their account to do follow.
Is there anything out there like that?
Sarah
Evan
December 22nd, 2008 1:35 pm
Thanks for this list. I’m already using All in One SEO, and I’m opening the others in new tabs as I write this!
Hany Sleem
December 22nd, 2008 2:06 pm
Great list and I highly recommend related posts plugin.
Shawn Jooste
December 22nd, 2008 5:53 pm
@Sarah that is a really cool idea. I wonder if it exists. I’ll hunt around and see if I can find anything. Failing that I’ll write a plugin to do that.
Joe
December 26th, 2008 4:33 am
Has anyone heard of that WP Plugin that makes it so an article will automatically pass Copyscape?
Sunshine Coast Housing
December 27th, 2008 8:28 am
I have been using All in One SEO for awhile but recently switched to using WP-SEO-Master. Unfortunately I forgot who recommended it and why, but I’ll try it for awhile.
I will take a look at the SEO Slugs plugin as I had no idea this could be a problem. I’ll do some more reading and give it a try on a blog soon.
Nathan Ketsdever
December 28th, 2008 6:32 am
Generally a pretty good list.
I’m kinda surprised that Stephan Spencer’s SEO plug-in isn’t included in the list. He’s really quite an SEO guru.
I would love to see a comparison between Smart Links and the plug-in SEO ROI created in terms of usability, design, and SEO.
Gib
December 28th, 2008 10:57 am
Thank you so much for these.
I didn’t think there was a redirect plugin. I have rewritten some headlines for posts but left the permalinks alone because of trackbacks.
ALL In One SEO has been great — I can see the difference because whenI upgradedd to 2.7 I didn’thave it at first and traffic went way down.
Money making in online
December 28th, 2008 7:56 pm
i have been actually searching for a plugin that builds internal links but luckly i found your blog. its great post.
thanks keep going…
the moneymaker
January 1st, 2009 7:49 pm
Hey thanks for information about these great wordpress plugin. I was trying to switch to the wordpress and have found that wordpress is quite interesting.
rich
January 2nd, 2009 12:23 am
Just a quick note regarding the duplicate content comments in point 3 about robots meta.
I read an article recently (directly from Google)that duplicate content isn’t so much of a problem any more as they understand that there are many sites that generate dynamic urls and duplicate content as a result. They factor this into the way a site is crawled – and consequently, don’t punish it.
Matt
January 2nd, 2009 2:51 pm
What a great list! We use a few of these already but can’t wait to try out a couple more. Thanks and Happy New Year!
b2b Internet Marketing | Site-Seeker | brian bluff
January 10th, 2009 3:59 am
Very good post. I’ve been researching similar information and appreciate you putting this all in one spot. I’ll check out your other posts for additional information. Specifically, I’m looking for a concise and up to date post about marketing a new blog to a b2b audience.
Thanks again — brian
Winifred Freeman
January 14th, 2009 11:05 pm
Dear Darren:
The comments from Poer and Brad Hart were very educa-tional and informative. These kind of comments are helping me take more time to plan my projects and launch them in a way that makes more sense. Thank you again.
Matthew Kettlewell
January 21st, 2009 12:21 pm
I’ve found that Headspace 2 is great for SEO and includes robots handling too…As well as Google Analytics integration.
Nice list of plugins, though I have to say that I’d add the Google Sitmap plugin to the list as well…
Great list!
Matt
liam
January 30th, 2009 4:15 am
thanks a million, i love your blog and installed everything you listed here. I just need to figure out how to use them
Casino Hire
January 30th, 2009 4:54 pm
I have to admit to finding Wordpress a bit tough going. I think these plugins should make the process easier.
c3v3n
February 17th, 2009 12:49 am
great…thanks darren…a million thanks…
The Gadgets
February 23rd, 2009 6:49 pm
I really found this article useful. And a thing to mention is, I reached here from google’s 1st page. I gonna install most of these plugins. Thnx ProBlogger!!!
HdBond
February 25th, 2009 3:33 am
In Blogger have no chance to use such plugins
Bollywood Wallpapers
http://bollywoodwallpapars.blogspot.com
Raphnexx
February 25th, 2009 5:58 am
This adds up to my knowledge.The pages on a blog really have to be connected to each other.It is good idea to have an article link to other pages in you site.
Rick Hollywood Rack
February 26th, 2009 2:57 pm
Great list.
Do you dofollow on any of your blogs? I know you get enough traffic without it on this blog.
Thanks
SEO agent
March 3rd, 2009 10:08 pm
Thank you for this informative article. It is a big help for us who just starting SEO career. I am looking forward to hear more from you. More power.
kunal
March 6th, 2009 3:02 pm
The redirection plugin is wonderful. See a walkthrough to implement it here: http://sidekickblog.com/force-www-redirect-to-improve-seo-28.htm
botez
March 9th, 2009 2:04 pm
My wonder is about this blog if it has a do folow or a no folow atribute.
Bill Rini
March 15th, 2009 8:16 pm
Just a note to let you know that the Smart Links plugin is great except that it has some serious performance issues. I had installed and a few days later I noticed that some pages weren’t loading. PHP was giving up on waiting for something to return a value and only the header of my blog would appear.
I went through the error logs and found a line that said that there was a problem with seo-links.php on line 163
Opening up the file it seems like the preg_match gets called and then never returns.
Out of curiosity I typed in “seo-links.php on line 63″ into Google and found several websites where that error message had been indexed on someone’s website.
It seems to primarily happen on very long articles. Five or six pagers. You can run “top” in Linux and watch the httpd process spike in resource usage whenever you call a page that Smart Links chokes on.
It could be a simple error in the code or maybe it’s a case of asking the plugin to do too much.
Amit Banerjee
March 18th, 2009 2:08 am
Any Plugin that Will automaticaly Scan My posts and Suggest Links to me. ??
Seo Smart Links is Good No doubt but It would have been better if It suggests related Articles from your Blog so that you can Manually link theme without having to remember anything .
SEO Company
March 27th, 2009 4:18 pm
What a great share, my knowledge in SEO is very broad. I find it is nice to see very informative blogs like these. Thanks.
John Zoum
April 20th, 2009 12:55 am
Great list. I prefer the all-in-one to headspace. I will be posting some long posts soon and installing the Smart Links plugin so I will see if it causes me problems as it has done to Bill Rini. Good primer though, thanks mate.
usman
April 27th, 2009 1:13 am
thx for tell us about great plugin. i hope these will help me to increase traffic.
SEO India
April 28th, 2009 10:32 pm
Thanks a lot for giving me such a useful list. I am always searching for extra plugins to make my site more valuable.
John M
May 7th, 2009 1:36 am
I use All in One SEO Pack plugin. Its very great!! Thank you.
Freelance Biz
May 7th, 2009 2:21 pm
Thanks for the information on the plugins. I am a big fan of the all in one seo tools plugin. I had no idea thought that there were more useful ones. Thanks again!
The Wandering Scotsman
May 16th, 2009 10:29 am
I’m going to implement some of these plugins from the word go on my new blog and hopefully see some great results.
MikeHTS
May 25th, 2009 4:25 am
Excellent list. Very helpful. I’m using the Thesis theme which takes care of some of these things (such as SEO-All-In-One) but others such as SmartLinks and Friendly Images should be quite useful. Many Thanks.
Wordpress SEO
May 25th, 2009 10:47 pm
Great plug-ins collections,
Thanks Darren Rowse,
I started to use 3 plugins on the list from now
SEO Slug
SEO Smart Link
Google Position me
Diane Scott
May 30th, 2009 2:42 pm
Hi Darren! Made it to your blog in a roundabout fashion, and while I’m still browsing your posts the plugins caught my eye. We’re big fans of plugins – using the right ones that is…
I have a question though. Listed as recommended plugin #8 (which we currently do have along with many of the others you recommend), you state, “This plugin changes that and makes comment links valuable again. There are a number of reasons you would want to give away link juice. It’s often used to attract people and encourage them to comment. It can be very useful for new blogs who need some exposure.”
However a closer inspection of the coding of your own blog and comment area reveals the opposite. You are using the rel=’external nofollow’ tag which means no link love when I hit the submit button.
I will still submit my comment, and I will continue looking around (you have much I’m interested in), but as for #8 I’m thinking either 1) you are unaware that this is happening (highly unlikely); or 2) you are aware and for (obvious) reasons of your own just do not choose to activate and actively use this plugin.
Curious as to why (not)….
Mark (London)
May 31st, 2009 7:50 am
I have a blog of each post i put in tags, when i look at my site with google webmaster tools it shows a seperate page for every tag i put in a post
so if i have 1 post with 7 tags i will have 8 of the same pages with a different title, is that going to mess me up with google?
Please help as I really need an answer to this.
Latif
June 4th, 2009 9:11 pm
Great plug-ins collections,
Thanks Darren Rowse,
animebuzz
June 13th, 2009 10:16 pm
Thanks for this collection of plugins.This helps a lot for me.
Shoaib
June 16th, 2009 8:57 pm
A very good list. I really like the list as I am always searching for additional plugins to make my site more effective.
thank you for this valuable info..
Abhirup
June 17th, 2009 12:39 am
Thank you very much for this wonderful post. The plug in collection is really useful
jogalrungkung
June 18th, 2009 2:35 am
what a great list!!
thanks you.. i love your blog..
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