Essential WordPress Plugins for SEO
I’ll be doing a few posts about WordPress Plugins for SEO but I’ll start with the three that are essential. I’ll list them in order of importance.
All in One SEO Pack
The all in one SEO pack uses WordPress’s custom fields to create a friendlier page title and meta description and allows you to add into certain pages to reduce content duplication.
The default set up on the All in One SEO Pack seems to do the trick, for the titles and descriptions you leave the boxes blank on your post page and it will create the meta title from the blog title and take around the first 160 characters for the meta description. All you need to do is remember to try to have a good opening sentence for your blog. For example this post I’ve mentioned the title of the article again so it’s included in the description.
Google doesn’t look at the keywords tag so I keep this blank, but you can tick a box to make the plug in use the categories as the keywords.
The options to reduce internal content duplication allows you to add the noindex, follow tag to the archives, categories and tag pages. I leave the default settings so Google’s isn’t indexing the archives and categories.
Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress
Not essential but helps to get some of those older blogs in WordPress cached. Each time you edit a post the site map is rebuilt, this means once you’ve set it up you don’t really need to do anything. The newer version of this plug in does all the work installation work for you creating the XML sitemap file.
Alinks
Alink essentially is a text replace script. It will replace a word in your blog with other text. E.g. every time you mention GWT it can replace it with Google Webmaster Tools. But, it will also replace text with links, so each time you mention contact us it will replace it with contact us. This is great for creating relevant internal links to deeper pages in your site. Many blogs also use the plug in to add in affiliates links.
Really this is a time saver plug in and means content writers and clients don’t have worry about linking to the correct pages with the correct anchor text.
So get those three plugins into your WordPress blog and you can’t go wrong!
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