A Pro Bloggers SEO / Plugin Check List
There are more then 120 million blogs floating around out there. What makes yours better then theirs? Better yet, how are you going to get a legup on the others in any given niche? I mean, that’s a lot of competition! You’re going to have to pull out all the stops in order to rise to the top and it all starts with SEO both online and offline.
Building back links is the long term goal through other blogs, forums, articles and other social networking sites but you need to lay out a foundation that the search engines will embrace first. When someone enters a search term into their browser you have to give the search engines a reason to list you. To help out, the WordPress reviews plugin community has developed a number of plugins to assist.
There are the basics like:
All In One SEO Pack (no longer supported)
Or the more advanced
Sitemap Generator by Dragon Design
(focuses on helping you choose the best tags for your posts by offering suggestions, and more)
(allows you to choose a word or phrase for both internal and external links, set anchor text, choose if it should be “nofollow” or not, and more. Lets you use just the first occurrence of the word so your posts don’t get all spammy)
(An easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page you choose on your blog. Can put “nofollows”, prevents indexing and archiving on individual pages like the author, login and optin pages)
(Unlike some other plugins, and WordPress itself, this extension will allow you to add tags to your pages, your main page and even any URL anywhere on your site. Your tags are an important part of your site for making sure that search engines know where to place your posts, and SEO Title Tag focuses exclusively on this)
Now here’s a few others that you may not be familiar with…
(allows you to install all sorts of meta-data, add specific JavaScript and CSS to pages, suggests tags aqnd more)
(Lets you move a page from one spot on your blog to another with out the risk of you risk losing that page’s status in search results. Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more)
(This plugin allows you to strip the “nofollow” command from your comments, and then you can apply it to only the comments you don’t wish to support.
(separate sections for various groupings of links, with an unlimited number in each, and all of them will receive the “nofollow” attribute preventing people that link to you in your blogroll from feeding off your page rank)
(With the introduction of paged comments in WordPress 2.7, there was a potential problem with search engines thinking you had duplicate content as the post would appear on each page. This plugin aims to take care of this issue for you until the folks at WordPress change things up.
(makes sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them)
SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin
(If you must have duplicate content on your site this one will allow you to state which version of the post search engines should index while ignoring the others)
(Interlinks posts on your blog with the intent of getting visitors to read more. SEO Smart Links does this for you automatically when you tell it what words to link to what URLs, and it also allows you to set “nofollow” and “open in window” comands for the links)
(you should all ready be using ’/%category%/%postname%’ as a permalink, but if urls get to long they get truncated by the search engines defeating the purpose. SEO Post Link comes with an already populated list of words to cut from a title when it turns into a URL to make your post addresses that much friendlier. You can set it so that it’s limited to a certain number of characters, cut short words, cut unnecessary words and more.
And lastly… if you must…
SEO Tag Cloud Widget - Love ‘em or hate ‘em, a lot of people use tag clouds on their blogs. Since their inception they have been fairly unreadable by search engines, but with this plugin they will be converted to an SEO-friendly HTML markup that can be indexed.
