Graywolf dropped a list of essential WordPress plugins a while back entitled “SEO Plugins for WordPress”. Although a bit misleading, the article covers a variety of useful SEO plugins (some more so than others) that will do everything but tie your shoe. More recently, John Chow referenced an out of the box SEO solution which should also help you achieve better search engine results.
Meanwhile, I tend to fallback on the same WordPress plugins for all my optimization needs. In order from top to bottom, or rather header to footer, here they are:
Page Titles
SEO Title Tag – Super easy installation and highly configurable. Allows you to override page or post title tags with a custom ones.
META Tags
Head META Description – Upload and activate. Simple. Done.
Keywords
Ultimate Tag Warrior – Compatible with the page title plugin and works wonders for drawing Technorati traffic, not to mention reinforcing on-page keyword density.
Syndication
FeedSmith Plugin – Trick out your feed with all sorts of options including PingShot, a quick notification service that enables your feed to be updated in the widest variety of places as quickly as you add new content.
Sitemap
Google Sitemap Generator – Get a search engine compliant sitemap in seconds.
Common sense would also suggest you contain your core keywords in the post title since most WordPress themes typically wrap them in h1 or h2 tags. Furthermore, for maximum SEO impact, I recommend you read the definitive guide to semantic web markup for blogs.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
hella great post as I have not payed any attention to Wordpress plugins/widgets in the past 6 months…
We just release a new kind of plugin .
Still in french , V 0.1 , just release this day
Give your page the 301 +url , 302 + url , 404 error code from the “edit post page”
Traduction needed ! ( mail can be found on our site if you can help )
http://www.wordpress-seo.com/seo-http-error-manager.php
How it works :
Download, copy to plugin directory, Activate.
When editing you can choose Leave, 301, 302, 404 ( and url for 301, 302 )
Licence , “can be stolen”
and we still dont care of man who still want to give a licence for “nothing” like this !
Comment for make it better welcome
Sorry for my english
++
hella great post as I have not payed any attention to Wordpress plugins/widgets in the past 6 months…