When it comes to SEO and WordPress, there is very little that people know about, other than Meta info and Page Titles. I’ve seen many folks argue that WordPress is by default SEO friendly and there is no further optimization required. Little do these people know that SEO is not about meta tags and page titles alone. Here are a list of plugins that will do more than your regular SEO job.

The Best SEO WordPress Plugins

Here is the entire list of SEO Plugins for WordPress along with their use, possible problems, common errors, ways to fix and tips to make the best use of them.

1.  Automatic Google SEO Sitemap Generator Plugin for WordPress

Dagon Design’s Google SEO Sitemap generator plugin is one of the most popular SEO WordPress plugins that you can’t miss. If set properly, it would create XML Sitemaps for every new post published on your blog. So you don’t have to worry about updating your sitemap every time. Blogs with frequent posts are the ones that will benefit most from this plugin, but yes smaller blogs too.

Tip for making the best use of this plugin: The settings for this plugin, though straight forward, can be tricky because you cannot easily confirm if its working or not, the right way. You can see the sitemap file, but to confirm if Google is indexing it or not, you have to wait.  So, be careful when you set it up, and make sure you submit the sitemap (which is mostly yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml) to Google Webmasters tool additionally. Don’t leave the plugin as such after installation. Also, make sure your single posts (or posts which are changing frequently) are set at higher priority, and less frequently changing pages (like Aboutme, Contact etc) are set to low priority or lesser crawling frequency (say monthly).

Rating: 4/5
Support: Available via comments

2.  Keyword Linker – To Increase your Internal Linking Strength

As you might already know, strong and effective internal linking is a key plus to your overall SEO efforts. Internal Links will strengthen deep linking in your site, and increase overall Google juice spread. Generally link structure within a website is flat where mostly only the major pages are interlinked. But Google bots love links and especially when they are contextual. So, one good way of ensuring deep crawling of your pages and increasing relevancy to them is to interlink them with contextual anchor texts. For instance if you have a good article on “WordPress SEO Hacks and Tutorials” then make sure that you link to that page from as many other pages as possible with the anchor text “WordPress SEO” (or your preferred keyword for that page). This ensures that just like backlinks from an external website, the particular page gets “highlighted” for the selected keyword.

To get this done, try the KB Linker plugin. This is a fairly simple plugin that you can set so as to link to any page that you like with any keyword marked against it. For example, in the above case, you can make sure that whenever there occurs the phrase “WordPress SEO” on your site, a particular page is linked to it. This makes the job easier of manually doing it. However, this plugin is not advanced and I wish if there were other fine tuning options with it.

Rating: 3/5
Support: Available via comments

Tip for making the best use of this plugin: Do not set duplicate keywords, be careful with that. Although this is an automatic plugin, it requires manual overlooking, or else it can break links/page data. So, always test the plugin before going live, or you might run into some unpleasant surprises.

3. One WordPress Plugin for all SEO Solutions

No, I’m not talking about AllinOne SEO plugin, which probably is the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress out there. I like AllinOne SEO, it does a good job in fact, but I do not like the way its been developing over the years now, its lost from the real developer’s hands and are now with folks who no longer support it really. Which is sad, for an otherwise beautiful plugin.

But Platinum SEO plugin is a great alternative, in fact a better one. But its very likely that you wouldn’t have known about it compared to AllinOne SEO. Its an effective plugin for all your SEO needs because its got a variety of settings that will probably save you another ten plugin installations. Looking at the settings will probably confuse you, and it should rightfully, because they’re a bit advanced for the normal user who wouldn’t even know why these options are in here in the first place.

Platinum SEO lets you do some fine tuning including “nofollow tagging/noindexing” various levels of pages, various parts of pages such as comments, sub pages, category listings etc.

Rating: 4.5/5
Support: Available via comments

Download plugin here

4. Control External Links with Advanced Features

Typically, SEOs are a little too obsessed with external links. But, maybe its worth all the attention because on WordPress you do not have enough options to control how links (forget external links) behave. Well, if you have lot of external links on your site, and you’re worried about Google Page Rank issues, you might want to control them unlike the regular WordPress user. This plugin, External Links – helps you do just that.

You can control how external links appear on your site via this plugin with advanced features like the following.

- Visual markings on all external links.
- Add Nofollow tags to external links etc.

Rating: 3/5
Support: Available via comments

5. Search Engine Optimize your Images automatically

Image optimization is something many of us miss for its “negligible” value. I mean, what is it after all, a few ALT tags and Titles, that’s it ! What’s the big deal ? Well, for those of you who use images consistently in their posts would know the power of images. Take a look at your referrals from images.google.com and you’d be surprised to see those keywords that you never SEO’d for. Imagine how easy it would’ve been had you optimized those images ?

Well, this plugin (SEO Friendly Images) takes care of all your image optimization needs on WordPress in one go. All you need to do is name the files properly and you’re done !

Rating: 4/5
Support: Available via comments

Tip for making the best use of this plugin: Do not over do it by repeating your blog name/description on the ALT titles. Instead, do your bit of SEO while naming the files, do the Keyword Research, and name the files appropriately. Set the ALT and Title attributes to appear differently and not the same, or it would appear spammy.

6. SEO URL Optimization on WordPress made easy

If you look at top blogs and website you’d notice one strange thing in their URLs. They never write long URLs, but make them short and meaningful for search engines. For example, a URL like – 100-ways-to-make-your-wordpress-blog-search-engine-friendly.html is no good when compared to a URL like – wordpress-search-engine-optimization.html.

To get this done, either you have to do your SEO research manually and get rid of the unwanted parts from the URLs or write search engine optimized titles itself in the first place. But things get easier when you use the SEO Slug plugin.

It gets rid of the unwanted parts from your WordPress slug urls automatically and optimizes them for search engines.

Download plugin here.

Rating: 4/5
Support: Available via comments

Tip for making the best use of this plugin: Manually edit the URLs of your favorite/best performing posts. Never leave it completely with the plugin as its judgment is limited.

7. Manage URL Redirections & 404 Errors effectively

404 Errors and broken links are uninvited guests on any blog. There is no one time you can get rid of them completely. The idea however is to curb them as much as possible, and doing it effectively so as to avoid major bumps.

This plugin covers everything right from fixing 404 errors to effectively managing them with error logs, maps and analytics that can give you valuable insights about your website you wouldn’t have known otherwise.

The plugin can redirect any number of pages, and even close URL matches/typos that might give rise to 404s on your site.

Download the plugin here.

Rating: 4/5
Support: Available via comments

So there you have it. Seven essential WordPress SEO plugins other than the regular cliche plugins you must have on your blog for a sound SEO foundation. More plugins and “not-so-common” hacks coming up in the next article. Stick around.