JeffAshby.com

In my last post, I talked a lot about some of the capabilities of the actual Wordpress platform when it comes to SEO.  Sure, Wordpress has several built in tools that can help you out in the SERPs, however these tools are nowhere near the potential power of your Wordpress website.  Wordpress plugins are the magic behind Wordpress SEO.

Because of the open source-ness of Wordpress, many developers have built plugins to make SEO easy for even the newbie search engine optimizer.  I have compiled a list of my favorite SEO related Wordpress plugins in order to give you a tactical SEO advantage for your site.

This list is in no particular order.

1. Askimet - One of the first things you will notice in starting a Wordpress blog is the amount of spam comments you receive.  If you are like me, sometimes you will receive hundreds of spam comments a day.  This can be quite annoying, and you will spend much of your time deleting these comments instead of working on your site.  This is where Akimet comes in.  Askimet has a database compiled of spam websites.  When this plugin is enabled (You will also need the Wordpress.com API Key) Askimet will automatically delete your spam comments for you or give you the ability to review them before deletion.  This plugin doesn’t really relate to SEO tactics, but it does come in handy.
2. All In One SEO Pack – After you have done the keyword research for your website, you’ll want to modify your title tags and meta tags.  The All In One SEO Pack is a plugin that will give you the ability to modify these information easily.  In the plugin’s configuration (found under settings) you’ll be able to modify the title tags and META tags for the website, as well as create title tag structures for the rest of your pages.  You will be able to set up rules for how this information will be displayed for posts, category pages, and tag pages.  Also, this plugin will give you the ability to give unique META and Title information for each page individually.  You will also be able to add your own META content that, for example, can be useful in Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics.
3. Google XML Sitemaps - An important part of SEO is the ability for the search engines to find each page on your website and crawl it.  That is why the Google XML Sitemaps plugin in so important.  This plugin will automatically generate an XML sitemap and automatically update it as you add content to your Wordpress website.  You will be able to give your sitemap specific perimeters to determine how often each page is crawled.  Import this sitemap into Google Webmaster Tools and then Google will know the exact contents of your site at all times.
4. Homepage Excerpts - Homepage Excerpts is a recent plugin that I have added to my arsenal of SEO plugins.  You can see the effects on the home page of this website.  Instead of including each entire post on the homepage, this plugin will give you the ability to post just a set word amount as an “excerpt” of each post.  Not only does this clean up the home page and make your older posts more visible, but it also mitigates the search engines penalizing your site for duplicate content.
5. Sociable - This plugin will automatically add links to the bottom of your posts to the most popular social bookmarking websites.  From here, you or your visitors will be able to easily share your posts on Digg, Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, and any other social networking website you choose.
6. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – At the end of each post on your website, a unique algorithm will automatically detect your related posts and display a list of them.  This will really help out your website’s inter-linking as well as keeping related content together that not only the search engines, but also your users will find useful in navigating your site.
7. Simple Tags – I actually just found this plugin today, and love it!  Simple tags gives you the ability to control all of your page and post tags.  If you need to change tags site-wide, this can do it.  It also gives you the ability post additional content based on what tags are used as well as automatically create tags based on your content.  I am still learning more about it, but see its huge potential so far.

Get these plugins setup on your website and you will be well on your way to seeing success for your SEO with Wordpress.  I will continuously add to this list as I find more useful SEO plugins.  Do you have any others you like to use?