In today’s post, I want to go over some WordPress SEO plugins. These plugins are important to me because they help give my sites stronger SEO and become overall, more impactful in the search engines.

Here are just some of my favorite WordPress SEO plugins that I use on a regular basis.

SEO Smart Links

This plugin absolutely rocks. It’s first on the list because I feel it’s one of the more valuable SEO plugins for WordPress. This plugin has the ability to easily set and forget keywords and links, and the ability to even auto-link tags and categories, if you choose to do that.

Here are some of the features of this plugin:

• Find keywords in your posts, pages and comments and link them to your other posts, pages, categories and tags
• Full control with customizable options
• Ignore list for keywords you do not want to link
• Improves your site’s interlinking
• Control external links with custom keywords
• Add nofollw attribute or open links in new window
• Caching for speed – make sure you have define(‘ENABLE_CACHE’, true); set in your wp-config.php

SEO Smart Links plugin link

SEO Titletag

This plugin is a huge help with optimizing your <title> tags within the HTML of your post.

There are a few options with it as well, to customize the title tag experience.

Here are a few of the features of this plugin:

• Allows you to override a page’s or a post’s title tag with a custom one.
• A Title Tag input box in the Edit Post and Write Post forms. (Previously in version 1.0 you had to use the Custom Field box.)
• Mass editing of title tags for all posts, static pages, category pages, tag pages, tag conjunction pages, archive by month pages, – indeed, any URL – all in one go.
• Mass editing of slugs for all posts and static pages.
• Define a custom title tag for your home page (or, more accurately, your Posts page, if you have chosen a static Front Page set under Options -> Reading), through the Options -> SEO Title Tag page in the WordPress admin.
• Define the title tag of 404 error pages, also through Options -> SEO Title Tag.
• Handles internal search result pages too.
• If you choose to keep the blog name in your title tags (not recommended!), the order of the blog name and the title are automatically reversed, giving more keyword prominence to the title instead of the blog name. Note there is also an option to replace your blog name with a shorter blog nickname.

SEO Title Tag plugin link

SEO Slugs

I’ve been using this plugin off and on, and I’m probably going to turn it back on for this site. This plugin helps ease the process of writing slugs for your posts. The WordPress default is set to use the slug of the entire post name, which is not always ideal. The SearchEngineJournal wrote a great article about URL Best Practices for SEO, which outline a lot of great things to do for your permalinks. The first item on this list is short URLs.

This plugin will help automatically create shorter URLs and more effective URLs.

One of the key features of this plugin is that it will instantly strip common [and ignored] words like “what”, “you”, and “a” out of the permalink.

SEO Slugs plugin link

SEO All in One Pack

In terms of number of downloads, this by far one of the more popular SEO plugins available for WordPress. This does a lot of things, in a single plugin. Here are a few things this plugin features.

• 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
• 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

…and that’s not even the entire list! This is a great, “one stop, get it all done in a single plugin,” plugin. The other plugins I mention in this post are still great, if you want slightly more granular control over things.

Here’s a screenshot of what the options look like.

All in One SEO Pack plugin link

Headspace2

Another SEO pack of sorts, but this one is written by John Godley, now an Automattic employee. He has been a long-time WordPress developer, and I still use many of his historical plugins.

This plugin features an array of customizations for configurable meta tags, page titles, custom “more text”, site name and site description, custom themes per page, and custom plugins per page.

Here are a few other great features of Headspace2:

• Allows you to add Google Analytics
• Allows you to authenticate to Google Webmaster Tools
• Ability to easily integrate into CrazyEgg (heat map click-tracking)
• Allows you to authenticate to Yahoo! Site Explorer
• Easy integration into Feedburner Stats Pro

Something else I noticed about this plugin that is different than just about any other SEO plugin, is the ability to import settings from other plugins. You can import settings from legacy plugins like Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, and Simple Tagging; which I think it pretty awesome.

Headspace2 plugin link

BONUS: Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

This bonus plugin, termed YARPP, is not exactly an SEO plugin, but I feel it helps a great deal with SEO. Related content is great for internal link juice; which is one reason why Wikipedia is effective and has such great rankings. Internal, relevant links, are quite important to the search engines and while this does play a role in SEO, it’s equally as beneficial for the visitors [to see what related content you have on the site.]

For an example of this plugin, just look right below the end of this post and look for “related posts” and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about.

YARPP plugin link

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So those are some of my favorites. Do you have any WordPress SEO favorites or tips?

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