There are hundreds of plugins and widgets designed specifically for WordPress. If you have a website and use WordPress, you should take advantage of these great tools. Although some of them may not be directly related to on-page optimization, they can help you in your SEO efforts. Here are some of the best and most effective SEO plugins for WordPress:
All-in-One SEO Package
This innovative program optimizes your titles for search engines, offers SEO integration for e-commerce websites and generates meta tags. More than eight million users have downloaded All In One SEO Pack. This tool is suitable for both beginners and advanced users.
WP SEO by Yoast
This SEO plugin has a wide range of features like RSS Optimization, Page Analysis, XML Sitemap, Rich Snippets, Breadcrumbs, Social Integration and Webmaster Tools Verification. WP SEO by Yoast allows you to see a representation of how your page or post will look in search results. tools for blogging With this tool, you can edit your robots.txt and .htaccess files, auto-publish titles and meta descriptions, and clean the head section of WordPress installs.
SEO Smart Links
SEO Smart Links is currently used by over 300,000 people worldwide. This plugin can help you create internal links and manage your affiliate links. It also improves your search engine rankings by automatically linking your posts together. This powerful SEO tool gives your website visitors more paths to follow, which can also increase page views. With SEO Smart Links you can enable case sensitivity, define custom keywords and limit the maximum number of links per post.
Platinum SEO Package
More and more webmasters use Platinum SEO Pack for search engine optimization, page redirection and metadata management. This tool allows users to create custom meta descriptions, rewrite titles, and prevent category and tag archives from being indexed. You can also set a 301 redirect for permalink changes, generate automatic descriptions for posts and pages, and control indexing of specific posts or pages.
SEO friendly images
This new WordPress plugin updates all images with ALT and TITLE attributes automatically. If the images published on your site do not have these attributes, this program will add them according to your preferences. SEO friendly images will automatically pull keywords from your post title and include them in your image alt tags. If you optimize your images for search engines, you will get a lot of traffic via Google image search.
The five best WordPress plugins for a new website
It's no secret that WordPress is a marketer's best friend. This simple, free little piece of software can do just about anything from building the foundation of a blog to providing a way to make sales directly to your readers. I love it. But WordPress by itself is not necessarily a “complete” software tool. You'll need to make a few tweaks and upgrades if you really want to make something solid out of it.
- All in One SEO – This should be number one when building a new WordPress website. It allows you to quickly and easily create titles, descriptions, and keywords for your post, index all your categories and tags, and generate keyword-rich URLs. In short, it ensures that your content gets seen on Google.
- XML Sitemap - Google likes to see sitemaps on websites with more than two or three pages of content. For a blog, a manual sitemap would take a long time and probably be inaccurate most of the time. XML Sitemap Creator generates a new sitemap every time you write a post and submit it not only to Google but also to the other major search engines.
- Ultimate Analytics - Google Analytics is the most powerful free online tracking tool. If you want to know where your visitors are coming from, what they're looking at, and how long they stay on your site, you need an Analytics account. This plugin places the tracking ID for your account on every page of your blog, so you'll continue to get the data you need no matter how big your site grows.
- WP Ecommerce – If you are planning to sell something on your website, you can easily add a shopping cart that integrates with PayPal or Google Checkout with this free plugin. You can sell items directly from your website with a redirect to the payment processor of your choice. It doesn't get much easier than that.
- AddtoAny/TweetMeme – AddtoAny is a tool that allows users to use a social bookmarking service like Facebook, Digg or StumbleUpon to share your posts. TweetMeme is a "retweet" button that allows instant retweeting with shortened URLs. I recommend you add both to your WordPress to maximize your content sharing.
Simply put – you must be willing to play with some of the features and toolsets available for WordPress. The possibilities are nearly endless when you do this, and it's fun to see what you can accomplish with simple, free software.
