SEO Tools —WordPress Plugin Review
We will start with an overview of the most popular WordPress SEO plugins, and then review the Google XML Sitemaps Plugin.
All in One SEO Pack Plugin
Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines
Compatible up to: 3.0.5
Last Updated: 2011-2-9 Downloads: 7,734,273
- Just install, it works out-of-the-box.
- Support for Custom Post Types
- Advanced Canonical URLs
- Fine tune Page Navigational Links
- Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality
- ONLY plugin to provide SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites
- Nonce Security
- Support for CMS-style WordPress installations
- Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
- Generates META tags automatically
- Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
- You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
- Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.
Platinum SEO Pack Plugin
Offers complete onsite SEO solution for your WordPress blog with all the functionalities of All In One SEO
Compatible up to: 3.0.5
Last Updated: 2010-12-1 Downloads: 535,460
- Automatic 301 redirects for any permalink changes
- Canonical URLs
- Optimized Post and Page Titles for search engines
- Generates all SEO relevant META tags automatically
- Option to specify meta description and meta keywords tag for categories and tag pages.
- Option to turn off Page title or Post title rewrites for any particular post or page
- Helps you avoid duplicate content
- Lets you override any title and set any META description and META keywords, for any post or page
- Support for custom post types
- Compatible with most other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.
WordPress SEO by “Yoast” **
Yoast’s all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog: SEO titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs & much more.
Compatible up to: 3.1.2
Last Updated: 2011-4-13 Downloads: 214,382
- Post title and meta description meta box to change these on a per post basis for ultimate SEO.
- Taxonomy (tag, category & custom taxonomy) title and meta description support.
- Google search result snippet previews, let your editors improve your SEO!
- Focus keyword testing.
- Meta Robots configuration:
- Easily add noodp, noydir meta tags.
- Easily noindex, or nofollow pages, taxonomies or entire archives.
- Improved canonical support, adding canonical to taxonomy archives, single posts and pages and the front page.
- RSS footer / header configuration, improve your SEO by getting links from scrapers.
- Permalink clean ups, while still allowing for, for instance, Google Custom Search.
- Breadcrumbs support, with configurable breadcrumbs titles.
- The ultimate XML Sitemaps for your SEO with:
- Images
- Configurable removal of post types and taxonomies
- Pages or posts that have been noindexed will not show in XML sitemap (but can if you want them too).
- Custom post type support.
- XML News Sitemaps.
- .htaccess and robots.txt editor.
** “Yoast” — Digital Shorthand for: “Like Tiffany’s — only way, way, better!”
Google XML Sitemaps Plugin
This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap that will help search engines to better index your blog.
Compatible up to: 3.1.2
Last Updated: 2010-5-29 Downloads: 5,189,401
NOTE: XML is a coding language – XML site maps are not generated for human interface — they note and list which pages to index, their order of importance, and the last updated date. Web spiders now read XML site map formats for image and video files
- Generates an XML sitemap readable by Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com
- Will index complete structure of your site
- Enables rapid retrieval of specified query
- Supports all WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs
- Notifies all major search engines every time you create new site content
- Works out of the box, creating a sitemap of all posts, pages, tags, categories, and archives
- Use Checkboxes to exclude what you don’t want indexed
Search Engine Registration
All three major search engines offer a “webmaster” panel to register your account.
- google.com/webmasters
- bing.com/webmaster
- siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/ *
Once registered, submit your XML sitemap and other sitemap URLS to be indexed.
Although Yahoo! and Bing have separate webmaster panels, they utilize the same index process for search results.
More SEO Configuring Tips for Your WordPress Site
“NoFollow” is there for a reason
By default WordPress comments are “nofollow”
There are WordPress plugins to remove the “nofollow”
The “nofollow” feature is offered to prevent blog spam
A SPAM–comment is any non-specific comment that doesn’t relate to your post
Bad ‘SPAM-Comments’ Hygiene can negatively affect your rankings
Removing “nofollow” is not a preferred practice unless you are the admin and moderating an active community site
Some additional suggested plugins
No Comment Links
When activated, disables automatic parsing and creation of clickable links in comments, including http, ftp, and e-mail links. Links can still be add
Compatible up to: 3.1.2
Last Updated: 2011-5-2 Downloads: 845
Disables the automatic parsing of links in comments on your blog.
If a user types something like http://www.google.com/, it will automatically be turned into a clickable link when it is displayed.
Disables this behavior for http, ftp, and e-mail links.
Note that comments can include the HTML tags necessary to create links, if you allow HTML in comments, and these links will not be removed. This also allows you as the administrator to get around the “no comments in links” rule enforced by this plugin, since administrators (and editors) by default can post comments with unfiltered HTML.
Google Webmaster Tools
If you are serious about SEO —
Learn and use the Google Webmaster Tools to:
- Give you analytics about keywords and queries
- Detect malware and hacked sites
- Alert you to “site mischief”
- Troubleshoot indexing errors
- Check site optimization processes
- Get HTML suggestions for better indexing
Keyword Resources
This six-part tutorial barely scratches keyword research. Here are some free resources to
add to your knowledge of researching and selecting keywords.
- Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. – One of the best PDFs for understanding the process of keyword research and keyword selection
- Keyword Research Guide (PDF) – Real experts offer thoughts on keywords for
a fictional company. - Google AdWords Keyword Tool
- SEO Book Keyword Tool
- WordTracker
- Keyword Discovery
Additional SEO Checklists and Tips
Again there’s a lot more that can be said about SEO and site development than
we can accommodate in this SEO Tutorial series. Here are a few checklists with additional tips.
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