The Great SEO Secret Giveaway!
Sun. Jun 06, 2010 
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As a follow-up to my popular article “Essential WordPress Plug-ins for a Blog-based Website” I thought I’d focus on some more intense and optimization-specific plug-ins for the more aggressive site owners out there. Every one of these plug-ins will greatly benefit your overall optimization plan and many can, and even should, be used in tandem to really trick out the optimization.
All in One Packs
These are handy tools when you don’t have time to faff or don’t want to/don’t know how to work the code. While these plug-ins have been developed to make your site more search engine friendly, they may impact other elements of your website – especially if you’ve already installed a number of other plug-ins. If you have a deep site (lot’s of content) you should make a back up of your site and your database. You’ll still need to utilize an effective list of well-researched keyterms and remember the 3×3 rule when writing your content.
The most flexible, easy-to-use and effective SEO plug-in available for WordPress. In addition to Google XML Sitemaps, it is THE most important plug-in you can have if you want successful SERPs.
HeadSpace is a powerful all-in-one plug-in to manage meta-data and handle a wide range of SEO tasks. With it you can tag your posts, create custom titles and descriptions that improve your page ranking, change the theme or run disabled plug-ins on specific pages, and a whole lot more. You can configure meta-data for:
* Posts
* Pages
* Categories
* Home page
* Author pages
* Search pages
* 404 page
HeadSpace2 can also import the meta data created by a large number of other SEO plug-ins.
Includes the likes of: Optimized Post and Page Titles; Generates META tags automatically; Helps you avoid duplicate content; Lets you override titles & meta data.
Internal Links
You shouldn’t underestimate the importance of good internal linking for SEO – you can drive traffic within your own site and push link juice around tactically. These plug-ins make this task easier.
BTE’s Related Posts plug-in eclipses all other related post plug-ins currently available for WordPress because it is able to randomize all the relevant posts within your site, so long as they are above the relevancy threshold.
A related posts plug-in that works quickly even with thousands of posts and tags: well worth adding to the bottom of your single post template to lower bounce rate by keeping the reader’s attention focused on your site.
The built-in WordPress widget to show the most recent posts is rather limited. The only option offered is the number of posts to display. Enhanced Recent Posts is a widget that comes as a replacement to the built-in widget. As the first enhancement, you can choose if you want to show posts from all categories, from some categories in particular or from all categories but some (exclude categories).
An easy way to link to posts and pages in your blog. As well as quickly typing in the link tag there is a tinymce wysiwyg plugin that allows you to search for posts by category. Using the UI you can search through your blog posts or browse by category and get the shortcode added to the post for you!
SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more. SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.
Sitemaps
These are also internal links but are important enough to warrant a shout out.
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently.
Dagon Design Sitemap Generator
This is not just another XML sitemap plug-in, but rather a true sitemap generator which is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel.
The Google News XML Sitemap plug-in automatically generates a Google News XML sitemap (yourdomain.com/google-news-sitemap.xml) whenever a post is created, updated or deleted. You have to be a Google approved news site for your articles to appear in Google news, which generally involves having a ‘team’ of people posting for your website/blog. Well worth doing to gain additional SERP real estate.
SEO Semantics
A couple of random SEO-related helper plug-ins. Use of these plug-ins adds advanced functionality to your site.
Fuzzy SEO Booster increases your sites search engine positions for long tail keywords automatically! Here is how it works: When someone finds your site using a long tail keyword combination not already on that page, it records it, and adds it to the page in a widget box! Think of it as an auto generated tag cloud for your blog, every tag on it helping your search engine positions!
The Recent Google Searches Widget collects the query string from Google, Bing and Yahoo. It lists the last 5 as a sidebar widget so that users might click on them and find information using the WordPress search.
Vrooom … Speed It Up!
Having a fast site is essential for keeping users happy and with loading speed potentially becoming a contributing factor in search ranking, it’s worth being as quick as you can be. These plug-ins help speed up page-loads and are particularly handy if you don’t have the best hosting environment.
Speeds up your website by crunching js/css files together & so on. Makes a significant difference.
This plug-in generates static HTML files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After an HTML file is generated your server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.
Page Titles and Meta Tags
You need to have unique, well organized page titles & meta descriptions and it’s useful to craft your no-follows & no-indexes for minimum link juice loss.
Create a customized title tag for any post, static page & category page. SEO Title Tag makes is dead-easy to optimize the title tags across your WordPress-powered blog or website. Not just your posts, not just your home page, but any and every title tag on your site! If this plug-in, along with a few hours of keyword research and copywriting of optimized titles, doesn’t make a significant impact on your search traffic, you’re doing something wrong!
From Joost de Valk, who is wise in the ways of WordPress & SEO, this plug-in allows you to add all the appropriate robots meta tags to your pages and feeds, disable unused archives and no-follow unnecessary links.
SEO Slugs plug-in strips common words like “what”, “you” or “can” out of your post slug to make it more search engine friendly.
Social Bookmarks
Encouraging your users to share your content with one another is an excellent way of gaining traffic.
Google Buzz Button will add a Google Buzz Bookmark button to your WordPress posts/pages. The button can be inserted manually or before or after the content automatically. There is an option for this.
Topsy creates a Twitter retweet button that shows tweet counts and allows retweeting with highly customizable buttons can be displayed in various colors. Adds automatic URL shortening using bit.ly, tr.im, and others including support for your own shortener API key or username where available.
Don’t let the name put you off – this plug-in adds an (X)HTML compliant list of social bookmarking icons to each of your posts. Sexy adds a little flair that will entice your readers, rather than deterring them with microscopic icons that get lost in pages heavy laden with content.
Outbound Marketing
These plug-ins help you spread the word yourself from within your own blog.
Save your blog from getting tagged as ping spammer by installing this plug-in. When you create a new post, your blog will ping and notify all the ping services that it has been updated. This encourages search engines and different blog directories/services to index your updated blog properly.
This plug-in lets you collect subscribers on your blog with a single or double opt-in subscription process. Double opt-in means the user has to confirm a subscription following simple standard instructions sent to him via email. Each step of subscribe and unsubscribe process is fully configurable.
Using your blog as the seed, find quality content from the Blog Traffic Exchange and tweet it automatically. Provide your followers with interesting and relevant content within the niche of your blog. Supplement your twitter account with quality content related to your blogging niche using the our powerful content search engine.
Socialite
Publishes your WordPress posts to Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace. Very handy, but I also use an auto post service to allow me to post to more places at once.
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