10 Best SEO Plugins To Optimize Your WordPress Blog – Part I

WordPress is a wonderful platform that not only lets you build up your website fast, but it also comes with many enhancements that let you optimize every aspect of your website and get more out of your efforts. That includes increasing your traffic as well. If you own a blog and you write posts on it on a consistent basis, you want to make sure you drive lots of traffic to it to get the best value out of your work. You can always advertise or leave comments on other blogs, but you shouldn’t ignore the organic search channel. Getting free traffic from Google, Yahoo!, and even Live.com is a must if you want to make it on the Internet. In order to do that, you need to optimize your website for search engines. WordPress may be search engine friendly but it’s not optimized for organic search. Your permalinks, title tags, slugs, and … all play a big part in you gaining the best ranking possible on search engines such as Google. So you want to make sure you have the best settings on your website to get the most free traffic.

There are lots of plugins that you can install on your WordPress blog to optimize it for organic search, but you want to make sure you don’t go overboard and damage your blog’s performance in the process. With that in mind, here are 10 cool plugins that help you get more free traffic to your blog:

1. All In One SEO:  All In One SEO is one of the best SEO plugins for WordPress. It not only allows you to optimize your title tags, but it makes it so easy to no-index pages that could be deemed harmful towards your search engine rankings. It automatically generations your title and descriptions, which means you save time.

2. Virtual Silo: Virtual Silo is a cool plugin that makes it easy to no-follow those spam comments and any other factor that can hurt your search engine rankings. You can also create a silo structure on your blog to maximize your search engine rankings.

3. Broken Link Checker: what you don’t want to do is leave broken links on your blog. Search engines certainly won’t like it. Use Broken Link Checker to find out broken links or image links.

4. Google XML Sitemaps Generator: creating a sitemap by hand can be a hassle. Some people are more scared of XML than spiders. Either way, Google XML Sitemaps Generator makes it so easy to generate and keep your sitemaps up to date.

5. SEO Smart Links: a very cool plugin that automatically links to your related posts and makes it so easy for your visitors to navigate through your pages easily.

6. SEO Friendly Images: a lot of people forget about their alt and description tags for their images. It’s true that alt tags are not as important as they used to be but you can still get traffic from Google Images, and besides it’s a best practice to have them. SEO Friendly Images makes it easy to get around this issue.

7. Advanced Permalinks: Advanced Permalinks is truly a life saver. Let’s say you didn’t know how to set up your permalinks properly when you started your blog. You can always change your permalink structure but that could affect your rankings immensely if you don’t go about it the right way. This plugin makes sure your old pages are redirected to their new location via 301 redirect.

8. Permalinks Redirect: Permalinks Redirect another simple plugin that lets you optimize your URLs and get rid of all those weird characters in some of your URLs. It 301 redirects them to a more search engine friendly URL.

9. Nofollow Links In Posts: Nofollow Links in Posts is a great tool for anyone who want to control what they link to and whether they want to dofollow or nofollow their links.

10. Robots Meta: Robots Meta is another cool plugin that lets you nofollow your comments and other pages on your blog. You can also control what pages are indexed on your WordPress blog. You can also easily add your Google Webmaster Tools account information and track your results properly.

There you have it: 10 wonderful SEO plugins for WordPress. But there is a second part with more cool search engine optimization plugins. So stay tuned! In the meantime, don’t forget to share your favorite SEO plugin for WP below.