015 – WordPress and Search Engine Optimization

WordPress is a great choice for serious bloggers, but like any out of the box solution it has a few limitations when it comes to search engine optimization. The good news is that there is a world of free and inexpensive WordPress SEO plugins to solve any problems you might be having. They will help your WordPress site stand up and be noticed in the search engine crawling wars. Not wanting to go unnoticed, the two best plugins are first in this list:

All in One SEO Pack—This free plugin can be used by beginners and experts alike and allows for a fair range of modifications to your WordPress blog. Customizing your post title, description, and tags on each individual post is a snap. You can use this tool to set basics like page titles, keywords, meta tags, and descriptions across the entire blog.

SEO Sniper—Yes, this one costs something, but it is a small investment for the kind of power this catch-all SEO plugin brings to experienced SEO writers and developers. Based on the Dan Thies’ SEO Fast Start manual, this plugin is made for those already fairly proficient in SEO that want to take control of their WordPress site to a whole new level. The list of features is so long that the best thing you can do is give this one a test drive for yourself. It comes with a risk-free guarantee and is well worth the money.

SEOPressor works by giving each of your post and score between 0 to 100 the higher the score is the better the on page SEO factors are on that specific page. It then provides you with a list of things that you can do to your post/page to make it more optimized for your chosen keywords.

The rest of these plugins are free, so knock yourself out:

Broken Link Checker—An essential; it notifies you when a link has become a dead-end to search engines. Nothing outside your own site is in your control, but dead links wreak havoc on internal SEO quality. This plugin will also alert you to missing images.

SEO Friendly Images—An optimization plugin that automatically updates every image on your site with correct alt and title attributes. This one simple correction can multiply your results in Google Image Search results.

SEO Slugs—Search engines such as Google are apt to disregard common keywords such as ‘a’, ‘the’, and ‘what’. By removing these keywords search engine rankings rise. What makes this little jewel so great is that it does this automatically without you having to give the task another thought.

Robots Meta—It is often a good idea to prevent indexing of search results and category pages, as some search engines see these as duplicate content, thus lowering your page rank. This free plugin allows for control over which pages and posts are indexed and which aren’t.

These plugins are a good place to start, but know that this is only the beginning of what is available to optimize your WordPress site. To learn more, check out WordPress.org.