01 Nov WordPress SEO Plugins: Ratio 7's Top 10
Ratio7 loves WordPress for clients, not just because it is user-friendly for designers, but because it is user-friendly for, well, users AND Google and other search engines love it. They also have handy little bits of code, called ‘plugins’ that are easy to install to customize your site. If you are a Ratio7 customer, we take care of these for you! For search engine optimisation, these plugins are the best:
Scribe. Scribe is not free. It is from the same developers who’ve created the very popular (premium) theme “Thesis” and is a handy keyword/SEO analysis tool for bloggers. It scores your post for SEO-friendliness, guides you in making improvements and, for heavy duty blogging, is invaluable.
All-In-One SEO Pack is a really popular free plug-in which creates “meta tags” (little snippets of code that the search engines use to crawl, i.e. read) for your content, title and keywords.
Platinum SEO Plugin helps you avoid duplicate content, offers permanent and temporary page redirects (301 and 302 respectively) and also generates meta tags.
SEO Friendly Images: Images make your blog more enjoyable but it also adds another avenue for search engines to find your page. This plugin helps you with adding title tags and keywords to your images.
SEO Tag Cloud plugin allows you to create a cloud that search engines will actually search.
Sitemap Generator is an important plugin. Search engine crawlers like to crawl a neat, organized site map and this plugin helps you with categories, pages and more.
SEO Smart Links is a plugin that takes care of an important part of blogging: interlinking (linking to other pages within your blog) which can be time consuming. This plugin does the heavy lifting for you.
HeadSpace2 is another meta data plugin that helps you create custom titles, tags, and descriptions to improve page ranking.
wpSEO does what many of the other SEO plugins do but also allows you to add an SEO monitor as a dashboard widget, renames files to make them more SE friendly upon upload and prevents indexing of RSS feeds by search engines.
W3 Total Cache improves the speed and overall performance of your WordPress site. Thus, impatient search engine crawlers are likely to spend more time finding content on your site which improves optimization and page rankings.