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WordPress has made it easy to create scalable sites based on their powerful CMS, but as great as WordPress is, there are some SEO issues that haven’t been addressed out of the box. Fortunately these problems can be solved with a few plugins. The following are the only 6 WordPress SEO plugins that you need to optimize your site.
All in One SEO Pack
This is a really powerful plugin that lets you change many of the most important on-page elements for SEO. You can systemically set the way page titles, meta descriptions, and meta keywords will be displayed across your site, but you can also change these individually on each post or page that you create. The All in One SEO Pack also lets you set the canonical URL tag, and will display it on each page - this is a great way to help establish the canonical version of your site.Get the All in One SEO Pack plugin WordPress
Google Analytics for WordPress
The Google Analytics for WordPress plugin is a pretty simple but important plugin. Once you have installed this plugin, all you have to do is set up a Google Analytics account and then add your account ID during the plugin process and you are set. One of the cool features built into the plugin is that you can choose between placing the tracking code in the footer, before the </body> tag, or use the new asynchronous code in the header. There are several other nice features in the advanced settings such as tracking download clicks, outbound links, downloads, keywords from image search, as well as several other options.Get Google Analytics for WordPress.
Redirection
Redirection is just about the easiest way to add 301 redirects to your WordPress site. Using this plugin, you don't have to modify your .htaccess file -- all you have to do is put in the old URL into one text field and the new URL into another and Redirection does the heavy lifting.Get Redirection
Cross Linker
By installing Cross Linker on your WordPress site, you can add Wikipedia-style linking to your site. If you wanted to rank for the term “mountain biking”, you could configure this plugin to link to your page about mountain biking every time the phrase “mountain biking” is used. This will help flow authority and link love throughout your site so that your pages will rank better.Get Cross Linker
Google XML Sitemaps
This is a really straight forward plugin with big benefits. Having an XML Sitemap is one of the best ways to get search engines to find and index your content. Once you install this plugin, you just have to sign up at Google Webmaster tools where you can submit the location of your sitemap. Google XML Sitemaps has some cool features as well such as the ability to create normal XML sitemaps and gzipped files and adding the address of the sitemap to your robots.txt file. Additionally, you can choose which content types you want on your sitemap, so that search engines give a higher priority to your more important content.Get Google XML Sitemaps
Sociable
Sociable is a plugin that allows users to easily share your content on your WordPress site by adding buttons for social media sites. This plugin allows you to add sharing functionality to your content easily so that your readers can easily share your content.Get Sociable
For further SEO reading:
SEO Best Practices
How to Get Backlinks
Social Media Guide
by: seiko_08 on 2010-02-22 at 11:57:06ID: 9959
Another excellent article Geoff. I already voted it yes while it was still in the works knowing it would get approved. I had two of these already, but now I've picked up a few more. Thanks!