WordPress is one of the most widely used blogging and publishing system on the Internet. WordPress has a wide no no huge variety of plugins that gives sites a much needed boost in the search engine rankings.
WordPress performs really well when it comes to SEO and search engine results page (SERP) rankings. Out of the box, however, WordPress has a ton of duplicate content problems. For instance, if you’re not using excerpts on the home, tags, categories pages and you are displaying the entire post, that post is being shown not only on the homepage but also on the category, tags, and archives pages too. Google and other major search engines don’t think too highly of that and your search rankings will therefore suffer. Not to worry there are plenty of WP SEO plugins available to help you optimize your WP blog. Below are all the plugins, that I am aware of, that are aimed at improving WordPress SEO.
Here is a compilation of 45+ Top SEO WordPress Plguins – WordPress SEO. Enjoy!
| All in One SEO Pack |
| One of the most popular plugins ever for WordPress, this plugin does a bit of everything for you from helping choose the best post title and keywords, to helping you avoid duplicate content and more. |
| Automatic SEO Links |
| Automatic SEO Links allows you to choose a word or phrase for automatic linking, both internal and external, set anchor text, choose if it should be “nofollow” or not, and more. One of the best features of this plugin is that it will only do this for the first occurrence of a word in a post so you don’t have to worry about spamming your post with numerous links to the same thing. |
| Google XML Sitemaps |
| An essential tool in any blogger’s armory of SEO tools. While the name only mentions “Google,” this plugin creates an XML-sitemap that can be read by Ask, MSN and Yahoo also. |
| HeadSpace2 |
| This plugin allows you to install all sorts of meta-data, add specific JavaScript and CSS to pages, suggests tags for your posts and a whole lot more. |
| Meta Robots WordPress plugin |
| An easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page you choose on your blog. You can use it to make your front page links into “nofollows,” prevent indexing of search pages, disable author and date-based archives, prevent indexing of your login page and numerous other features. |
| Nofollow Case by Case |
| This plugin allows you to strip the “nofollow” command from your comments, and then you can apply it to only the comments you don’t wish to support. |
| Platinum SEO Plugin |
| The Platinum SEO Plugin offers you such features as automatic 301 redirects for permalink changes, auto-generation of META tags, post slug optimization, help in avoiding duplicate content and a host of other features. |
| Redirection |
| For any number of reasons you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, but then you risk losing that page’s status in search results. Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more. |
| SEO Blogroll |
| Do you worry that the people you link to in your blogroll are feeding off of your PageRank? With SEO Blogroll you can make separate sections for various groupings of links, with an unlimited number in each, and all of them will receive the “nofollow” attribute. |
| SEO for Paged Comments |
| With the introduction of paged comments in WordPress 2.7, there was a potential problem with search engines thinking you had duplicate content as the post would appear on each page. This plugin aims to take care of this issue for you until the folks at WordPress change things up. |
| SEO friendly and HTML valid subheadings |
| Some themes for WordPress will confuse your sub-header tags based on the page they are to be displayed on, but this plugin will automatically reset them to make them more SEO friendly by moving them down one spot in the hierarchical tree. In other words, h2 becomes h3, h3 becomes h4 and so on. |
| SEO Friendly Images |
| Images can be a great source of traffic as people search for images of various subjects, and this plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them. |
| SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin |
| If you must have duplicate content on your site for whatever reason, SEO No Duplicate will allow you to state which version of the post search engines should index while ignoring the others. |
| SEO Post Link |
| The post slug is the blog title you see in a browser’s URL bar, and if it’s too long, search engines won’t take a liking to it. SEO Post Link comes with an already populated list of words to cut from a title when it turns into a URL to make your post addresses that much friendlier. You can set it so that it’s limited to a certain number of characters, cut short words, cut unnecessary words and more. |
| SEO Smart Links |
| Interlinking your blog can be the key to getting more people to read more of your posts, but it is time consuming and tedious to do it by hand. SEO Smart Links does this for you automatically when you tell it what words to link to what URLs, and it also allows you to set “nofollow” and “open in window” comands for the links. |
| SEO Tag Cloud Widget |
| Love ‘em or hate ‘em, a lot of people use tag clouds on their blogs. Since their inception they have been fairly unreadable by search engines, but with this plugin they will be converted to an SEO-friendly HTML markup that can be indexed. |
| SEO Title Tag |
| Your tags are an important part of your site for making sure that search engines know where to place your posts, and SEO Title Tag focuses exclusively on this. Unlike some other plugins, and WordPress itself, this extension will allow you to add tags to your pages, your main page and even any URL anywhere on your site. |
| Simple Tags |
| An extremely popular plugin that focuses on helping you choose the best tags for your posts by offering suggestions, auto-completion of tags as you type, an AJAX admin interface, mass tag editing and a whole lot more. |
| Sitemap Generator |
| This is a more customizable sitemap generator than most with options to support multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, permalink support, choices on what to display, options to show number of comments and more. |
| TGFI.net SEO WordPress Plugin |
| This particular plugin will do most of the usual SEO work of optimizing titles and keywords, but it adds a unique twist as it is mainly directed at people who use WordPress as a CMS. |
| WP Super Cache |
| This plugin is great for two reasons. First, it makes your pages load way faster. Second, since it stores static versions of your site, it requires much less CPU processing than using WordPress all by itself. This WordPress plugin is number one on the list for a reason. |
| HeadSpace 2: WordPress SEO Made Simple |
| Move over All in one SEO. There’s a new guy in town. HeadSpace provides you with the features you need to drive your site to the top. People spend way to much time working on SEO and too little time writing great content. This plugin let’s you put your focus back where it belongs. It takes care of all the SEO work that your blog will need. |
| Akismet |
| Akismet is the comment spam fighter that comes built into WordPress and it does a mighty fine job. Activate this plugin and you won’t need to moderate or captcha your comment submissions. Akismet does 99% of the work for you. |
| Backtype Tweetcount |
| If you’re using the TweetMeMe tweet counter badge on your blog then kill it right now. Nobody wants to authorize another program to access their Twitter account just to share a link to your site. |
| Nofollow Case by Case |
| This site’s comment links are dofollow. I’ve stripped out all of the nofollow tags from the comment section of Site Sketch 101. You leave a comment here and Google page rank will chase you all the way back to your site. This plugin is what makes that happen. So leave a comment here and then install this awesome WordPress Plugin at your blog. |
| WP-DBManager |
| This little gem is amazing for backing up your website. It actually has quite a few functions that it can perform but perhaps it’s most impressive feature is it’s ability to email the entire WordPress databse to me every day. |
| Thank Me Later |
| This plugin is great. It sends an email to all first-time visitors. You can write up the email to remind them about your RSS feed or just to invite them to connect with you personally. I do both. |
| WP-PageNavi |
| Those ‘Older Posts’ and ‘Newer Posts’ links are boring. With WP-PaveNavi you can get page buttons so users can go directly to whichever page they want. Plus they look a lot better than plain little links. |
| Permalinks Moved Permanently |
| Last year I moved all of my permalinks to post the page so that they wouldn’t be so long. This would have meant that all of the links to my posts would generate 404 errors. This plugin just forwards all the links and PR to the new addresses. |
| SEO Slugs |
| Using your entire post title as the slug for the article can make web addresses long and it can waste the opportunity to focus on using your keywords. This plugin strips out all the unnecessary words from the permalink for you so that you don’t have to. |
| SEO Smart Links |
| Do you inter-link your articles? You should. Linking within an article to other articles is a great way to build Page Rank throughout your site and it’s a great way to get readers to find your other articles on similar subjects. This plugin will interlink keywords to your other articles for you. |
| Subscribe to Comments |
| This plugin took a little bit of work to get it to work right but it’s great because it allows people to subscribe via email to any other comments that show up on a given post. This helps get readers to keep coming back. |
| WordPress Related Posts |
| If a reader enjoys one of your articles then one of the best things that you can do is to put some more articles in front of them to keep them digging through your site. |
| Search Excerpt |
| WordPress Search by default sucks. Fixing it takes a bit of work, but the heavy lifting is done by this plugin. If you want to know what I’ve done with this blogs search pages, read my post on improving the WordPress search function. The results are very cool, as you can see in this search, for instance. |
| FeedBurner FeedSmith |
| I use and love FeedBurner, even though it goes awry every once in a while, and the best way of using it is with FeedSmith, which I’ve been using since before it was “acquired” by FeedBurner. Just install, enter your FeedBurner ID and activate. That’s it, you’re done. |
| MailPress |
| With MailPress WordPress plugin you will be able to send beautiful and styled html and plain text mails for comments subscribers, your periodic newsletters or post notification (per post/daily/weekly/monthly) as well as specific admin events : registration of a new user, comment to moderate, new comment on your posts. This plugin is widget ready; it’s using Swiftmailer and Google Chart API. |
| Geotagger WordPress plugin |
| Geotagger is a WordPress plugin to manage your post geotags and optionally to display maps with markers and paths in your posts |
| Stray Random Quotes |
| Stray Random Quotes plugin helps you collect and display random quotes everywhere on your WordPress blog. The quotes can be reloaded on the blog with Ajax automation. The plugin is widget compatible, and the appearance of the quotes can be highly customized. It comes with an easy to use, advanced management tool and an option page. |
| WP-Directory-List |
| WP-Directory-List provides you with a categorized directory listing for Url’s and Businesses. The directory listing can range from the simple link with description to a full business address, phone, fax and contact email. You can create separate pages for each category or list all of them at one time and allow your users to add links that will be pending until approved. |
| Smart Youtube |
| Smart Youtube is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily insert Youtube videos in your post, comments and in your RSS feed. The plugin is designed to be small and fast and not use any external resources. Smart YouTube also supports playback of high quality videos, works on iPhone, produces xHTML valid code and allows you to view videos in fullscreen. |
| WP Visitors WordPress plugin |
| WP Visitors WordPress plugin records information about every visitor (page load). Requested URL, referring URL, IP address, hostname and browser along with Date/Time are recorded and displayed in a tabular fashion. Geographical resolution of IP address (it’s only approximate) is also included. |
| WordPress Popular Posts |
| WordPress Popular Posts is a sidebar widget to show the most popular posts in your blog. You can set its title (or leave it blank if you don’t want to use any), how many entries to show, whether to display or not comments count and/or pageviews for each entry listed, and to show (or not) an excerpt of each post’s title. You can list your posts either by comment count, pageviews or average daily views. |
| Related Entries |
| Internal linking is valuable for SEO and it can also help your readers to find additional content that may interest them. Related Entries will make the process easy. Your posts will automatically include links to related posts (in a list, at the bottom of the post). |
| Antisocial |
| Antisocial is more SEO-friendly version of the very popular Sociable plugin. It adds no-follow tags to the links created by the plugin to social media sites. |
| WP Backlinks |
| Are you interested in getting more links to your blog? WP Backlinks helps you to collect and manage reciprocal links with other blogs. Other bloggers can fill out a form on your blog, add a link to you, and you will then be notified so you can add a reciprocal link. |
| WordPress SEO Master |
| The SEO Master plugin has two modules, the nofollow module and the meta module. Like some of the other plugins listed, it will let you add and customize meta tags, but it will also let you tell WordPress to add nofollow tags to different types of links. |
