Do you want to increase the search engine ranking of your WordPress blog? Check out these 9 SEO WordPress plugins that Shawn Jooste from Elite Blogger has pulled together for us.

The best place by far to find traffic is from search engines. The art of Search Engine Optimization is often very daunting for new bloggers. Even some experienced bloggers just see SEO as a cloudy puddle of mud they would rather not play in.

WordPress by default is pretty decent at letting search engines see what’s going on. But there are a whole bunch of other things that can be done to make your blog rank better. Fortunately there are plugins available to help you get better rankings for your blog, so you don’t have to go digging into the code of your blog to get some results from search engines.

I’m not going to explain the validity or effects of each of these SEO tactics in detail. There is more than enough of that on the Internet already if you want to do some research. I’ll mention briefly what the benefits of each plugin is, and why you need it.

1. All in One SEO Pack

This allows you to set the basic SEO stuff for your blog. You need page titles, meta tags, keywords, and descriptions. This plugin allows you to configure them for either your entire blog or on a post by post basis.

2. Redirection

From time to time you make changes on your blog. Sometimes these changes end up breaking your Permalink structure. This often happens when you make a change to an old post, or do an upgrade to WordPress and make some changes to the permalinks. It’s very very common if you move your blog from one host to another.

Basically what happens is that each post has a unique URL, called a permalink. When this changes, visitors who go to that blog post won’t find it. The redirection plugin helps you fix these problems by redirecting the visitor to the new permalink. This reduces the amount of traffic you get to pages that don’t exist.

3. Robots Meta

By default search engines crawl and index ALL the pages on your blog. This isn’t ideal, because it creates duplicate content and you can get yourself punished by search engines without knowing it. What the Robots Meta plugin allows you to do is tell the search engines which sections of your blog to crawl. This means that you’ll get more respect from search engines, and likely more traffic.

4. SEO Smart Links

One of the key issues with SEO is your internal linking structure. The more you link to a certain page on your blog, the more important it is to your overall content. Search engines treat your internal links as an indication of how well structured your site is. The problem with this is that if you had to manually go and create links to relevant and important posts you’ll spend hours and hours doing it.

SEO Smart links allows you to specify a word, like ‘SEO’ and then link it to a post on your site. Then each time the word SEO appears on your site, it’s automatically turned into a link you specified.

5. SEO Friendly Images

Images also play an important role in your SEO strategy. So it’s important that you tag them correctly. SEO Friendly images allows you to do this, and saves you hours and hours of work. If, like most bloggers you use images in your posts, then this plugin is essential.

6. Google Positioner

It’s important to know your keywords. And this handy plugin allows you to track the keywords you’re getting searches for. It’s pointless selecting a few keywords, then writing some content for those keywords and hoping that the rest goes well. SEO is about being proactive and tracing what works and what doesn’t.

7. Permalinks Moved Permanently

A common mistake bloggers make is choosing the wrong permalink structure. When you start your blog you think you know which is best, and as time goes buy you want to change your permalink structure. The problem with changing your permalink structure is that your traffic will come to a standstill until your site is reindexed, and that could take months.

This plugin is similar to redirect but is an easier and better way to manage permanent permalink changes.

8. Nofollow Case by Case

The nofollow attribute over the last year or two has had a fairly large impact on the blogosphere. All comments in WordPress by default are nofollow links. This means that no Page Rank (PR) is being given via the link. This plugin changes that and makes comment links valuable again. There are a number of reasons you would want to give away link juice. It’s often used to attract people and encourage them to comment. It can be very useful for new blogs who need some exposure.

9. SEO Slugs

Stop words are ignored by search engines. So most of your post titles have them in, but they are meaningless to search engines. So when you have a post title like this: “What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings” you have a permalink like this: ‘/what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings’ but what you really want is for your permalink to look like this: /immediately-higher-rankings.

This plugin automatically removes stop words from the permalink, helping you to rank better.

Conclusion:

Getting better traffic from search engines will help you boost your blog. You’ll get better income, rank better, and be able to build a better brand.

Kaynak: 9 SEO Plugins Every WordPress Blog Should Have

We have a nice stockpile of lesser known plugins that we use on websites we build. I wanted to share that list with you in the hopes these plugins will help you as much as they have us!

All of the below plugins have been tested compatible up to WordPress 2.7.1

10. SEO Slugs – The SEO Slugs plugin removes common words like “the, a, in, to” etc from the post slugs (permalinks) when you create a post or page.  This helps search engine optimization by only using the keywords you care about in your URL.

9. Sidebar Login – Plugin allows the ability to easily add a sidebar login widget on your WordPress website.  Once logged in the plugin will display a “Welcome” screen with admin links and a Logout button.  Very nice touch on a user-focused site.

8. Top Level Categories – Plugin gives the ability to remove the category prefix in the URL to your category page. Instead of http://domain.com/category/web  it would use http://domain.com/web  Great for SEO and CMS like taxonomy by category.

7. Author Image – Allows your WordPress users to upload a custom avatar to use as their author image.  Image can easily be used inside your WordPress themes to display post authors image next to content they have created.

6. Featured Content Gallery – Creates an automated, customizable rotating image gallery anywhere on your WordPress powered website. Most famously used in the Revolution themes.  Flexible styling options let you set the size and color of the rotator.

5. WP Hide Dashboard – Hides the dashboard from users assigned to the Subscriber role on your WordPress powered site.   Only options available is to edit profile so users can still edit their details/information.

4. Exclude Pages – Plugin adds a checkbox “include this page in menus”, checked by default. If field is unchecked the page will be hidden from your navigation menus.

3. Duplicate Sidebar Widgets – WordPress by default only lets you use a widget in one location on one sidebar. This plugin allows you to duplicate sidebar widgets across multiple sidebars. This is handy if you want to use the same widgets on different sidebars within your site.

2. Search Regex – Adds a powerful set of search and replace functions to WordPress.  Easily find any value within your WordPress content and replace with a different value.  Great for website migrations from different platforms.  Also has the ability to use Regex patterns.

1. External Links – Forces all outbound links on your site to open in a new window. You can also add an external link icon and add rel=nofollow to all outbound links for SEO purposes.

Some of these plugins are more known than others, but they are all excellent plugins that make life easier on all of us! Enjoy!

Kaynak: Top 10 WordPress Plugins You’ve Probably Never Heard of – 2009 Edition

Joost de Valk’ın önerisi olan SEO-Slugs’u gördüm ancak ingilizcem iyi olmadığından ilk başta anlamadım eklentinin ne işe yaradığını sonra Google türkiyede arattım Beyn.org’da bu eklentinin türkçe açıklamasını gördüm anladım eklentiyi :) Adı üstünde yazı kısa ismi!

WordPress SEO tekniği olarak önerilir.

Eklentiyi indir : SEO Slugs

SEO Slugs nedir?

Eklentinin amacı uzun linkleri kısaltmak aslında. Örnek vererek açıkliyim: “Ertuğrul SAĞLAM Fenerbahçeye teknik direktör olarak getirildi” bu konunun linki şu şekilde olucaktır. (http://example.com/ertugrul-saglam-fenerbahceye-teknik-direktor-olarak-getirildi) eklenti sayesinde bu linki (http://example.com/ertugrul-saglam) yapıcaz.

Biz bu eklenti ile linki kısaltacağız o kadar yani.

Peki eklentinin yararı nedir?

1. Daha kısa adresler daha kolay okunur. Bahsettiğin okuyanlar arama motorlarının robotları; kısa ve anlaşılır adresler daha yüksek sıralarda yer alır.
2. İyi bir yazı yazdığınıza inanıyorsanız ve yazınızın başlığında iyi bir açıklama girmediyseniz (bu yazının başlığı mesela), YKİ olarak daha iyi şeyler girip arama motorlarının dikkatini çekebilirsiniz. Mesela bu yazının YKİ’si yazi-kisa-ismi-olusturma-ve-seo-yonundeki-yararlari olsaydı muhtemelen arama motorları bu yazıyı pek dikkate almazlardı. Ama slug-nedir olunca -iddia ediyorum- slug hakkında bilgi almaya çalışan Google kullanıcıları slug yazıp Türkçe sayfalarda aratırsa birinci sayfada beni görecekler. Google’a oynamak her zaman kötü niyetlilik değildir, bu örnekte ben insanlara YKİ’nin ne olduğunu açıklayabilmek için bu tarz bir yol seçiyorum.
   (Bu olay kötü niyetli kişilerin elinde ölümcül bir silaha dönüşebilir tabii.)

kaynak

Yazı kısa izmi oluşturma SEO slug

Eklentiyi kullanma

Burada “Yazı Kısa İsmi” seçeneğine tıklıyoruz. Ekran seçeneklerine tekrar tıkalayıp o alanı kapatıyoruz.

Bu alanada kısa linkimizi giriyoruz. Olay bu kadar!

SEO Slugs örnek

WordPress SEO – Definitive Guide To High Rankings For Your Blog konu linki ise “wordpress-seo” Googlede “WordPress SEO” diye aramanız yeterli. Google araması için tıklayınız.