WordPress Plugins needed to Optimize your Blog for Search Engines

The following Wordpress Plugins will help you Optimize your Blog for Search Engines.

1. Head Meta Description - Head Meta Description allows you to add dynamic meta description automatically by extracting the first few words from your post. So it’s important to place your most important keywords in the first paragraph so that they are picked by this plugin.

   Download Head Meta Description

2. SEO Title Tag - Title tags are one of the most important on-page factors for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This WordPress plugin, SEO Title Tag, addresses several limitations in creating Search Engine Optimized title tags for blog posts and for Pages in the WordPress blogging platform. It allows you to optimize your WordPress blog’s Title tags in ways not supported by the default WordPress installation.Features include:
   • Allows you to override a page’s or a post’s title tag with a custom one defined through a custom field
   • Allows you to define a custom home page title through the Options -> SEO Title Tag page in the WordPress Admin
   • Reverses the order of the blog name and the title. This gives more keyword prominence to the title instead of the blog name. Or you can even drop the blog name altogether or replace it with a shorter nickname
   • Puts the tag name in the title of ‘Ultimate Tag Warrior‘ tag pages
   • Uses a Category’s description as the title tag on Category pages

   Download SEO Title Tag

3. Ultimate Tag Warrior - Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) is a tagging plugin for WordPress designed to increase the functions for tagging posts and expanding site navigation through the creation of lists of tags.

   How does this plugin help to Optimize your Blog for Search Engines?

   Ultimate Tag Warrior let’s you include your tags as Meta Keywords in the header of tag pages and single post pages. To enable this, login to your Admin panel > Options and then click ‘Tags’ to enter the configuration page of UTW. From there tick ‘Include meta keywords’ found under ‘Meta Keywords’.

   Download Ultimate Tag Warrior

4. All in One SEO Pack - This plugin optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines by letting you
   • define your home page title, description and keywords
   • define your post, page, category, archive, tag and search title formats
   • use categories for META keywords
   • avoid indexing of duplicate content (prevents indexing of category, archive and tag archive pages)
   • autogenerate descriptions

   If you decide to use All in One SEO Pack, remember to disable Head Meta Description, SEO Title Tag and Ultimate Tag Warrior Meta Keyword feature as this plugin does all that these plugins do and much more! Click here for more info on All in One SEO Pack plugin.

   Download All in One SEO Pack

5. Google Sitemaps Generator - Google Sitemaps Generator will create a Google compliant Sitemap of your WordPress Blog. The Google sitemaps program is part of the “Google webmaster tools”.Currently homepage, posts, static pages, categories and archives are supported by this plugin. The priority of a post depends on its comments. More comments, higher priority! If you have external pages which don’t belong to your blog, you can also add them to the list.The XML file gets automatically rebuilt if you change/edit/create/publish a post and the plugin will automatically inform Google about changes via Google-Ping.An excellent article what Google Sitemaps is and how it can help you to get indexed by Google can be found at the searchenginewatch blog.

   Download Google Sitemaps Generator

6. Related Posts - Related posts will list out all related posts to an article which is helpful to your visitors when they are looking for specific information and want to read more on it. This also helps Search Engines to dig deeper into your blog.

   Download Related Posts

7. WWW Redirect - This plugin is useful for people like me who have different PageRanks for their www and non www versions of their domain name. Example: PR 5 for http://johntp.com and PR 3 for www.johntp.com.
   

   The continuous plague of several pages being indexed using numerous variations of the same domain name has definately been experienced by most of us. In an attempt to remedy this extremely aggrivating issue; WWW-Redirect was born. Originating from the source of Matt’s no-www plug-in, www-redirect takes it a step or so further by allowing users to opt for different redirect settings. This plugin allows users to have more control over the uri in which their users access their blog. By doing so, you’re giving search engines and users a consistent link for accessing your content.

   Download WWW Redirect

8. Permalink Redirect - A WordPress plugin that replies a 301 permanent redirect, if requested URI is different from entry’s (or archive’s) permalink. It is used to ensure that there is only one URL associated with each blog entry.

   Download Permalink Redirect

That’s all for now. I will update this post whenever I find new Plugins. Till then have a look at my Collection of useful WordPress Plugins.

Do you know of any other WordPress Plugins that help to optimize Blogs for Search Engines?