Edited and Compiled
by Mina Adly Younan
by Mina Adly Younan
WordPress is one the most popular tools for publishing content on the web. Everything from e-commerce websites to blogs can be developed using WordPress. Additionally, the WordPress community has built up a huge offering of free themes and plugins to make it easy for newcomers to get content published on the web quickly and easily.
However, just posting content on the web isn’t enough for many; attracting people to your site is part science, part art — and many WordPress plugins help you do just that. This is a listing of top-notch WordPress plugins for SEO to improve your WordPress site’s search engine rankings.
Some features:
- Google Analytics support
- Support for Custom Post Types
- Advanced Canonical URLs
- Fine tune Page Navigational Links
- Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality
- ONLY plugin to provide SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites
- Nonce Security
- Support for CMS-style WordPress installations
- Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
- Generates META tags automatically
- Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
- For beginners, you don't even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
- For advanced users, you can fine-tune everything
- You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
- Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.
If upgrading, please back up your database first!
2- Yoast SEO plugin called WordPress SEO
This plugin is written from the ground up by WordPress SEO consultant and WordPress developer Joost de Valk to improve your site's SEO on all needed aspects. While this WordPress SEO plugin goes the extra mile to take care of all the technical optimization, more on that below, it first and foremost helps you write better content. WordPress SEO forces you to choose a focus keyword when you're writing your articles, and then makes sure you use that focus keyword everywhere.
“The plugin also allows you to write meta titles and descriptions for all your category, tag and custom taxonomy archives, giving you the option to further optimize those pages.” – Yoast
Also, it
- Helps enable pretty permalinks
- Inserts meta information into the code
- Allows you to control indexing of categories and archives
- Adds rel=”next” and rel=”prev”
- Creates an XML sitemap
- Adds breadcrumbs if your theme is compatible
- Provides an easy way to Edit your .htaccess and robots.txt file
- Comes with Facebook OpenGraph implementation
- Comes with Twitter Card implementation
- Allows you to import from All in One SEO Pack and other SEO plugins
- Allows you to add rel=”author”
- Easily do 301 redirects
- Easily add canonical URL
Write better content with WordPress SEO
Using the snippet preview you can see a rendering of what your post or page will look like in the search results, whether your title is too long or too short and your meta description makes sense in the context of a search result. This way the plugin will help you not only increase rankings but also increase the click through for organic search results.
Page Analysis
The WordPress SEO plugins Linkdex Page Analysis functionality checks simple things you're bound to forget. It checks, for instance, if you have images in your post and whether they have an alt tag containing the focus keyword for that post. It also checks whether your posts are long enough, if you've written a meta description and if that meta description contains your focus keyword, if you've used any subheadings within your post, etc. etc.
The plugin also allows you to write meta titles and descriptions for all your category, tag and custom taxonomy archives, giving you the option to further optimize those pages.
Combined, this plugin makes sure that your content is the type of content search engines will love!
Technical WordPress Search Engine Optimization
While out of the box WordPress is pretty good for SEO, it needs some tweaks here and there. This WordPress SEO plugin guides you through some of the settings needed, for instance by reminding you to enable pretty permalinks. But it also goes beyond that, by automatically optimizing and inserting the meta tags and link elements that Google and other search engines like so much:
Meta & Link Elements
With the WordPress SEO plugin you can control which pages Google shows in its search results and which pages it doesn't show. By default, it will tell search engines to index all of your pages, including category and tag archives, but only show the first pages in the search results. It's not very useful for a user to end up on the third page of your "personal" category, right?
WordPress itself only shows canonical link elements on single pages, WordPress SEO makes it output canonical link elements everywhere. Google has recently announced they would also use
rel="next" and rel="prev" link elements in the head section of your paginated archives, this plugin adds those automatically, see [this post](http://yoast.com/rel-next-prev-paginated-archives/ title="rel=next & rel=prev for paginated archives") for more info.XML Sitemaps
WordPress SEO has the most advanced XML Sitemaps functionality in any WordPress plugin. Once you check the box, it automatically creates XML sitemaps and notifies Google & Bing of the sitemaps existence. These XML sitemaps include the images in your posts & pages too, so that your images may be found better in the search engines too.
These XML Sitemaps will even work on large sites, because of how they're created, using one index sitemap that links to sub-sitemaps for each 1,000 posts. They will also work with custom post types and custom taxonomies automatically, while giving you the option to remove those from the XML sitemap should you wish to.
Because of using XSL stylesheets for these XML Sitemaps, the XML sitemaps are easily readable for the human eye too, so you can spot things that shouldn't be in there.
RSS Optimization
By automatically adding a link to your RSS feed pointing back to the original article, you're telling the search engine where they should be looking for the original. This way, the WordPress SEO plugin increases your own chance of ranking for your chosen keywords and gets rid of scrapers in one go!
Breadcrumbs
This allows you to create an easy navigation that is great for both users and search engines and will support the search engines in understanding the structure of your site.
Edit your .htaccess and robots.txt file
Using the built-in file editor you can edit your WordPress blogs .htaccess and robots.txt file, giving you direct access to the two most powerful files, from an SEO perspective, in your WordPress install.
Social Integration
SEO and Social Media are heavily intertwined, that's why this plugin also comes with a Facebook OpenGraph implementation and will soon also support Google+ sharing tags.
Multi-Site Compatible
This WordPress SEO plugin, unlike some others, is fully Multi-Site compatible. The XML Sitemaps work fine in all setups and you even have the option, in the Network settings, to copy the settings from one blog to another, or make blogs default to the settings for a specific blog.
3- Scribe
The math behind Scribe’s patent-pending algorithms is heavily influenced by information retrieval and search engine expert Dr. Edel García. Dr. Garcia consulted directly with us in the development on Scribe v4, providing a mathematically-robust algorithmic foundation for viewing content the way search engines do and finding under-served content opportunities.
· Content is the foundation, and Scribe gives you the research tools you need to discover the topics that matter to your intended audience, and the language they use when searching and discussing in social media.
· Social networks, blogs, and social media news sites spark the sharing and natural links that cause your content to gain initial attention and provide valuable signals of content quality to both people and search engines.
· Search rankings become viable once social sharing and links provide “signals” that people love your content, at which point on-page optimization and overall editorial strategy will have you outranking the competition.
4- W3 Total Cache
It increases the website speed with many interesting features such as:
- Being Compatible with shared hosting, virtual private / dedicated servers and dedicated servers / clusters
- Transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration with Media Library, theme files and WordPress itself
- Mobile support: respective caching of pages by referrer or groups of user agents including theme switching for groups of referrers or user agents
- Caching of (minified and compressed) pages and posts in memory or on disk or on CDN (mirror only)
- Caching of (minified and compressed) CSS and JavaScript in memory, on disk or on CDN
- Caching of feeds (site, categories, tags, comments, search results) in memory or on disk or on CDN (mirror only)
- Caching of search results pages (i.e. URIs with query string variables) in memory or on disk
- Caching of database objects in memory or on disk
- Caching of objects in memory or on disk
- Minification of posts and pages and feeds
- Minification of inline, embedded or 3rd party JavaScript (with automated updates)
- Minification of inline, embedded or 3rd party CSS (with automated updates)
- Browser caching using cache-control, future expire headers and entity tags (ETag) with “cache-busting”
- JavaScript grouping by template (home page, post page etc) with embed location control
- Non-blocking JavaScript embedding
- Import post attachments directly into the Media Library (and CDN)
5- SEO Rank Reporter
This WordPress SEO plugin allows you to track certain keywords in your site, and then issues you a report every 3 days (with all sorts of pretty graphs to boot). The plugin will also notify you via email whenever certain keywords experience major changes in search engine ranking.
6- All in One SEO Pack
Any basic research on SEO plugins for WordPress will lead you to All in One SEO Pack. It is the most popular solution for your WordPress site’s search engine optimization. This plugin automatically optimizes your WordPress site for search engines by generating meta tags and helping you optimize web page titles. Advanced users are given the ability to customize post titles, descriptions, URL structures and tags for each post.
7- SEO Ultimate
SEO Ultimate is a suite of tools for, well, ultimate SEO. It has a feature called Canonicalizer, which extends WordPress’s native canonical features to ensure that web spiders are pointed to the primary post in the case of web pages with the same content, but different URLs. It has a built-in robot.txt editor (one of the five web files that will enhance your site) that will allow you to easily set up this file for optimal search engine indexing. It works well with All in One SEO Pack, allowing you to import meta-data from it if you wanted to switch to SEO Ultimate.
8- SEO Content Control
This nifty plugin helps you identify weak content in your site. For example, many WordPress owners forget to include descriptions of their categories, which is a potential point of improvement for enhancing your search engine rankings. SEO Content Control helps you easily identify these potentially troublesome areas.
9- SEO Friendly Image
Optimizing images for search engines is often neglected; but when done right, you increase their semantic value, accessibility, and search engine indexability, especially for image searches. This WordPress SEO plugin automatically updates your images with alt and title attributes.
10- SEO Smart Links
SEO Smart Links is a WordPress SEO plugin that automatically links keywords and phrases in your blog posts based on previous pages and posts. SEO Smart Links gives you the ability to set up your own unique keywords and sets of matching URLs. It also allows you to set nofollow attributes and open links in new browser windows or browser tabs. A very convenient way to save time, learn a bit about SEO best practices and interlink blog posts.
11- Google XML Sitemaps
This WordPress plugin is able to generate an XML sitemap that will assist search engine spiders in crawling and indexing your WordPress site. XML Sitemaps reveals the structure of your site’s content in a transparent way for search engines. Google XML Sitemaps also includes support for Bing, Yahoo!, Ask.com, and MSN, notifying them every time you create a post.
12- Platinum SEO Pack
This SEO plugin for WordPress is loaded with plenty of features, including automatically generating meta tags, helping you optimize page and post titles for search engines, and aiding you in avoiding duplicate content (one of the ways to improve SEO of sites you design).
Technorati is the leading blog search engine. Technorati’s Blogger Central allows you to see the ranks of a particular blog to gauge its popularity among the 128 million+ blogs in the world. You can find the Top 100 blogs in Blogger Central. Technorati determines a blog’s rank by the number of reactions (links that go to the blog) it has.
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