WP Plugins: Must Have WordPress Plugins
WordPress is an incredibly powerful content management system largely due to wp plugins. There are literally thousands of wp plugins out there that can transform the most basic of blogs to powerful, automated, and SEO friendly Google Ranking machines. I have been involved in the installation and setup of over 240 wordpress blogs and have tried almost every plugin out there. Here is a list of the wp plugins I absolutely HAVE to have on all sites I work on. If you are looking for the best WordPress SEO plugins look no further.
All in One SEO Pack
Get found by Google!
The All in One SEO Pack is one of the most important wp plugins in my arsenal. You have complete control over all major SEO attributes including the TITLE, Meta keywords and description on a page and post basis, and the ability to ‘noindex’ certain pages to avoid duplicate content penalties inherent with wordpress. This is a pretty advanced tutorial and for the most part requires some experience with basic SEO functions and practices. With that being said, there is an excellent wp plugin video tutorial for the All in One SEO Pack. Click this link for the video tutorial.
Post Plugin Library
Does Nothing but Everything at the Same Time
This plugin does nothing on it’s own, however, it provides the library of essential routines for Post Plugins such as Similar Posts, Recent Posts, and Recent Comments. I highly recommend that everyone download and install the Post Plugin Library wp plugin and try out the Post plugins – they are awesome!
Google XML Sitemaps
Communicate with Search Engine Robots
This plugin automatically creates an XML based sitemap. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO, and MSN Search as a means of creating a full list of content. This helps search engines index your site and find content to be indexed. Creating sitemaps can be an arduous task and this plugin really saves a lot of time and effort while being extremely effective and easy to use.
Dean’s Permalinks Migration
Search Engine Friendly URLs
This wp plugin is the absolute best thing in the world. The All in One SEO Pack allows you to completely control the URL structure of all the pages and posts you want, however, categories and other tag pages can have problematic results. For example, SiteName.com/Post_Title/ is much better than SiteName.com/id=45/ from an SEO perspective and this plugin accounts for that. It is quite simple to implement and highly effective.
No Self Pings
If you link to your own content…
This wp plugin is an absolute necessity for people who want to link to their own content frequently. We all know how annoying it can be when you link to your contact page or a post on your site and you are notified via email and wordpress that someone has “tracked back” a post of yours when in reality it was just you. Well no more, this wp plugin requires you upload and activate and you’re on your way to linking without tracking back on your own site!
WP-Email Plugin
You’ll be surprised how many people use it!
This wp plugin is from one of the best wp plugin creators in the world in my opinion – Lester Chan. With over 1,000,000 total wordpress plugin downloads, Lester has created some of the most remarkable plugins we have seen. This plugin allows users to email interesting articles or pages to friends. I wasn’t expecting anyone to really use it but decided to give it a shot because why not? Well to my surprise I was getting a bunch of people emailing friends and family about articles. Click here for a full list of Leter’s wp plugins.
Related Posts
Similar content links & more…
This plugin is absolutely great! It will display similar, relevant posts related to the topic in question. The best part is you are then a part of the “Related Posts” network and your links will be included on similar pages and posts. You can choose the anchor text and backlinks to your site which really can turn this related posts wp plugin into an SEO goldmine!
MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer
Future posts not a problem ANYMORE…
WordPress is great. You can set future posts and have them post at a designated time you choose which really helps you with google because you are updated everyday right? WRONG! Unfortunately by default wordpress will automatically ping search engine robots of the scheduled content the day it is posted, even if you do not have it scheduled to be published until later. Max Blog Press has create a wp plugin called the Ping Optimizer which sees to it that you are safe from this problem inherent to wordpress by not allowing the site to ping search engine robots until you decide the post is live.
MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate
The best WP Plugin for last…
This is the best wp plugin out there – especially if you have hundreds of pages of content and want to turn specific keywords into affiliate URLs. The reason I listed the best wp plugin last is because, unfortunately, this plugin costs money- $97 to be exact. Do I think the plugin is worth the money? I think it can go either way but yes, I believe it to be a sound investment. It cloaks links and automatically turns keywords you specify into aff. URLs – how much better can you get than that!?
Click here to return to the SEO Expert homepage.
3 Comments
Leave a comment
About Me
I have been involved in digital marketing since 2004 and have consulted with over 100 companies including Burger King, ScoreBig, ReachLocal, Hyundai and many more.
I help my clients by empowering them to improve three-fold:
- First, I make them make more money from the traffic they already have through revenue and business optimizations.
- Second, I help them convert the traffic they already have at the highest rates possible based upon their primary and secondary conversion goals.
- Third, I drive incremental traffic to their website through a variety of sources, organic and paid.
hi alex.
thanks to you.
i install the plugins you recommend.
I have installed your recommended plugins they are really nice.
[…] WordPress SEO plugins look no further. by Alex Becker. Read the full article – here : http://www.alexybecker.com/2009/04/12/wp-plugins/ Posted in SEO, WordPress | Tagged Alex Becker, Google Ranking, […]