Complete Wordpress SEO Guide ...

We all know SEO is a big thing in this growing technological world. Combining Wordpress and SEO techniques for your blog will really yield a large traffic through search engines.

For those of you who don’t know what SEO  is, it is short form for Search Engine Optimization. According to Wikipedia, it is “Search engine optimization (SEO also search optimization) is the process of editing and organizing the content on a webpage or across a website to increase its potential relevance to specific keywords on specific search engines. This is done with the aim of achieving a higher organic search listing and thus increasing the volume of traffic from search engines.”

Wordpress SEO Plugins

1. SEO Title Tag allows you to decouple post titles from title tagsone and this is helpful in SEO. This plugins lets you define a custom title tag for each of your posts. Title tags are very important in SEO. Normally the post titles are used as title tags by Wordpress but this can really affect your blog SEO.

2. Optimal Title is another SEO plugin that performs similar to SEO Title Tag plugin, it can also perform the job of Optimal Title. It will let you optimize your Wordpress post/page titles for better SEO visibility.

3. All in One SEO Pack is exactly what the title says. This plugin has claimed a lot of popularity in such a short time period. The specialty of this plugin is that it does not concentrate on only one blog SEO factor rather takes care of all of them at once. It…

    * Generates META tag
    * Optimizes your Titles
    * Avoids indexing of duplicate content

4. Permalink Redirect is a SEO plugin saves your blog from getting a duplicate content penalty by major search engines. The plugin makes sure that all of your blog posts and pages are associated respectively to only URL and in case of otherwise query it will reply with a 301 redirect. This will help search engines bots to understand whether the URL ends with a trailing slash or even without it, in both cases the URL is the same and so is the content. For example look at the URLs below:

http://www.teckitech.com/advertise/

http://www.teckitech.com/advertise

These URLs will trigger a duplicate content penalty for your blog if you do not use this plugin.

5. SEO Wordpress is another SEO plugin that helps you save your blog from triggering a duplicate content alert just like Permalink Redirect plugin except that it uses a custom robots.txt file to handle the search engine spiders.

6. Permalink Validtor is the twin brother of the Permalink Redirect plugin but it has been specially coded for those wordpress blogs that are hosted on IIS (Internet Information Services). This plugin validates your permalinks and checks if a certain permalink really redirects to the post that has been requested. It will do these following  SEO tasks for you

    * Adds trailing back-slash if missing
    * Adds or removes www prefix according to your permalink structure
    * Forces a correct 404 page instead of showing an empty search result when using an invalid URL
    * Fixes pagination for WP on IIS

7. WWW Redirect allows users to have more control over the URI in which their users access their blog. www or no-www have been issues of great concern for SEO analysts and it has been recommended that you should either give all your URLs a www or no-www prefix. If you allow your visitors and search engine spiders and bots to access your blog through both www or no-www this can potentially result in a negative search engine optimization and can even conflict with your blog pagerank.

8. Ultimate Tag Warrior is probably the oldest and the most finest multi-features SEO plugin ever built for Wordpress. This plugin will do everything from letting you add META keywords in your blog posts to adding Technorati tags.

9. Head META description is another one of my favorite SEO plugins that I use in collaboration with Ultimate Tag Warrior on this blog. META tags are very important through SEO point of view and the META Description tag is basically used by search engine spiders to show little text snippets for your posts/pages on big search engines.

10. Another Wordpress Meta Plugin is yet another SEO plugin that can do the job of both UTW and Head Meta Description alone by itself. It focuses on the META tags because of their high importance in search engine optimizations and basically allows you to add META keywords and META descriptions to your posts and pages. The best thing about this plugin is that it is backward-compatible with All-in-One-SEO-Pack.

11. Google XML Sitemaps is the mother of all SEO plugins and I can’t imagine a single blog that is not currently using this plugin. The plugin creates valid XML sitemaps of your blog on the fly which you can submit to Google using the Google Webmaster service for faster and better indexing. This plugin ensures that your blog is indexed in Google search results so you can apply your best SEO techniques to get maximum traffic.

12. Search Meter is a plugin that helps you in doing better search engine optimization for your blog indirectly. Through this plugin you can see what people are looking for on your blog and what are the most wanted and hottest searches. Once you find out what people are looking for on your blog you can optimize your blog for those searched keywords so that you get a higher search engine ranking for those searched terms.

13. Nofollow Case by Case helps you remove the nofollow attribute from links in your blog comments. You can also selectively apply nofollow to any comment link you do not like to support or you can even selectively apply nofollow to any comment author link too. The plugin also has a feature that can make all your comment links open in a new window using target=”_blank”. This way you can control the crawling of search engine spiders which are responsible for blog SEO. This plugin should be used with great caution as it can cause negative SEO as well pagerank leaking in some cases.

14. Bunnys Technorati Tags is a simple plugin that is used to display technorati tags in your blog post or pages. Though Ultimate Tag Warrior can do the same job for you but Bunnys Technorati Tags is always a good choice when you want a light and not-heavy plugin unlike UTW. It is always good to display your Technorati tags in posts as this helps you getting extra backlinks from blogs and splogs that copy and republish your content.

15. Simple Tags is yet another plugin used to display Technorati below your blog posts or pages but itis unique and different in the sense that it does not any custom fields. Just by following a simple format you can display technorati tags below your posts and pages even if you are blogging through a remote blogging software like Windows Live Writer etc.

16. Wordpress Tag Clouds is a little-complex plugin that will generate a tag cloud of your blog categories. The tag cloud is generated in accordance to the post concentration of a category i.e. the category with greater posts in it will get a bigger shape and so on. Tag clouds are important through SEO point of view as they tell search engines which links and categories hold more weight and which of them are more important.

17. Permalinks Migration is a SEO-Support Plugin that will not improve your search engine optimization rather it will save it. For example at some point in your blogging career you plan to change the permalink structure of your blog, for better SEO, but are unable to do so because you fear that all of your blog pages and posts indexed by search engines will become invalid and you will lose all your search engine traffic. You don’t need to worry about this anymore as Permalinks Migration plugin will use a 301 redirect to save your SEO and broken links thus you can change the permalinks structure of your blog anytime ever in your life.

18. KB Robots.txt helps you create, manage and maintain a robots.txt file from within your Wordpress admin menu. I have already mentioned that robots.txt is a very important text file that search engine spiders check whenever they enter your blog. This file keeps robots and spiders out of reach of those regions which can trigger negative SEO and duplicate content alerts. This is a very good plugin for blogs which are hosted on a subdomain and for Wordpress MU blogs.

19. Objection Redirection is another SEO support redirection plugin that controls your blog URL redirects. It will let you redirect your old or broken URLs to new and clean ones. Basically the purpose of this plugin is to control your site redirection without having to touch htaccess file and preserving your search engine optimization.

20. SEO Slugs is a pure SEO tool that will generate search engine optimized and SEO friendly posts slugs for your blog posts by removing the common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ automatically. This plugin strips common words like “what”, “you” or “can” out of your post slug to make it more search engine friendly and the good thing about it is that i won’t overwrite an existing slug. However you can force a new slug generation by deleting your old one.

21. Wordpress Subdomains is a plugin that will convert all your blog categories to subdomains. This is a very good plugin regarding SEO point of view but very dangerous at the same time as it may or may not work with your hosting provider and is kind of complex. Search engine spiders give more weight and ranking to subdomains than mere URLs so this is a good plugin if you want to improve your search engine rankings.

22. Really Simple Sitemap is a plugin that will generate a very simple sitemap of all your blog posts and pages. Unlike Google XML Sitemap plugin this plugin just lists all your published posts for a user or search engine spider to see and does not create an XML sitemap. This plugin is very useful if you want to stop bots and spiders from indexing your categories, archives and feeds.

23. No Ping-wait is a plugin that does not directly help you in any SEO but it can be referred as a long-term and indirect SEO-supporting tool. This plugin will prevent the delay that is caused while publishing your blog post when you are pinging a huge amount of services by making the pinging-action passive. Pinging a huge amount of services gives your blog a better search engine visibility and buzz. You should use this plugin if you are pinging more than 20+ services at once. Here is a list of pinging services that Teckitech uses in accordance to No-Ping wait plugin. You can also ping by using service like Pingomatic.
24. Wp-Supercache - This is really useful in SEO but many people and even qualifies professional forget about this factor. Using this speed up your wordpress blog as it stores a cached version of a page. So when a user requests the page it displays the cached version by not making any heavy server queries every time a user requests the same page. So when a bots vists your site, you site would load much faster making it to index more each visit. I wrote about it on one of my post so feel free to read it as well over here.

25. KB Linker - KB Linker will link phrases you specify to sites you specify. For example, you could make it so that whenever “Wordpress” occurs in a post it is automatically linked to wordpress.org. All you do is enter keyword->URL pairs into the Options->KB Linker page in your admin screen.

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