Top 5 SEO Plugins for Wordpress
When it comes to the top SEO plugins for Wordpress, there are many posts out there that give the author’s list of SEO plugins. Most of those lists are outdated, either not featuring the newest plugins available, or featuring ones that simply don’t help out for SEO. Wordpress on it’s own does a pretty good job at helping you with SEO, but there are a few things that could be changed or better optimized for SEO purposes.
I am going to give you the top 5 SEO plugins for Wordpress, and tell you why they are great to use, and even why some are better than the ones in other lists. All of these SEO plugins are free to download!
1. Platinum SEO Pack – Platinum SEO is a great plugin. Many of you have heard of the All-in-One SEO plugin based on recommendations from other lists. I used to use All-in-One, until I found Platinum SEO. Platinum SEO has all of the features of All-in-One SEO and takes it a step further, allowing you to set many different options for noindex of pages that may cause duplicate content (such as date-based archives, etc). It can also do permanent 301 redirection of any changes to your permalink structure.
One of my favorite features of Platinum SEO allows you to change the Title Tag, META Description, and META Keywords for each individual page and post. This way, each post can have an optimized description for Google to display when that page is searched. It also allows you to have a separate title in the title tag, to help to make your post title catchy for on-site readers, and keyword-optimized for search engine crawling. (Yes, there is another plugin such as Headspace that does this, but why upload and install multiple plugins if you don’t need to, especially if creating many, many niche sites.)
2. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – This is a great plugin for getting your site fully indexed, and for building internal links to your site. This creates a nice sitemap that can assist your users in finding information fast on your blog. But, it also allows Google to see all of your pages, and to crawl them. Having links to your own internal pages is very important, and this plugin automatically creates them on a niche Sitemap page (see the one on Niche Titans).
3. Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin creates a different kind of sitemap than #2. While #2’s type of sitemap is more for internal link building and user assistance, XML sitemaps are strictly for Google knowing your pages that you want indexed, and how often they are updated so Google can crawl them. This will automatically generate/update a sitemap whenever you write a nice post. If you’ve submitted your xml sitemap to Google through Webmaster Tools, then this plugin will keep it nice and updated whenever you generate new content for your Wordpress blog.
4. No Self Pings – This plugin is great for those who build internal links (linking to one post from another post). Internal linking is great for keeping your visitors on the site, and passing authority to certain pages of your site. But, when you post to another article, Wordpress automatically pings that article, and creates useless pings. This SEO wordpress plugin simply eliminates that behavior.
5. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – If you don’t know by now, I LOVE internal linking. This is another plugin that helps you to build links to other, relevant internal pages. (To see it in action, scroll to the bottom of this post.) It calculates a “score” for everything other post you’ve written, based on the current post (based on an algorithm you specify) and lists a certain number of posts (that you specify) at the bottom of the article. This is great for keeping your users on your site by helping them to find other posts they may be interested. It also helps to spread your authority to other pages on your site.
Are there other plugins out there? Probably. Some of the other Top SEO Plugins for Wordpress lists include some funky plugins, including ones that HURT your SEO. I tried to give you just the top 5 plugins to help your Wordpress SEO, and break each one of them down to show you EXACTLY WHY it helps your SEO.
Enjoy these, and don’t forget to subscribe in case I find anymore that I want to share with you.
