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This post is the third part of my SEO for Blogs series and today I am going to concentrate solely on SEO for Wordpress.

Wordpress is very SEO friendly on its own, but there are a number of SEO plugins for Wordpress that can make improve your search engine ranking. Listed below are (in my own opinion) 10 of the most useful and best SEO Wordpress Plugins.

All in One SEO Pack – allows you to set up TITLE, Meta Description and Meta keywords tags for your home page and specify a format for all your page titles and meta tags. It also allows you to tweak individual post  titles tags and URLs on the fly when you create or edit posts and pages. If you only install one plugin for SEO, then it should be this one!

=> More information about All In One SEO Pack.

Google XML Sitemaps Plugin – A site map helps Google and other search engines to index all the pages on your website or blog. It isn’t going to increase your search engine ranking but it will help to ensure that all the pages on your site are indexed by Google. This plugin generates an XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your Wordpress blog.

=> More information about Google XML Sitemaps Plugin

Redirection Plugin – if you make changes to your blog e.g. removing or moving pages or posts then you need to make sure that you don’t lose the traffic that was going to these pages. This plugin allows you to manage 301 redirections and keep track of 404 (not found errors)

=> More information about the Redirection Plugin

Google Positioner Plugin – this plugin allows you to quickly and easily track your keyword positions in Google. If you know what keywords you are ranking for, this can help you focus your SEO efforts.

=> More information about the Google Positioner Plugin

SEO Friendly Images Plugin- if you use a lot of images on your site this is a good plugin to install and can help your images to get ranked in the Google Image search. The plugin automatically adds ALT attributes and TITLE attributes to all your images.

=> More Information about SEO Friendly Images Plugin

SEO Slugs Plugin – Search engines ignore stop words (e.g. the, a, in, it). This plugin automatically  removes stop words from the permalink structure, putting more emphasis on the most important keywords and helping you to rank better.

=> More information about SEO Slugs Plugin

Meta Robots Plugin – by default the search engines will try to crawl all pages on your site. This means that they could end up spidering the same content more than once (e.g. if you have a post that appears in multiple categories or in archives.). This plugin allows you to adds robot meta tags to the appropriate places on  your pages to ensure that the same content is not indexed multiple times.

=> More Information about the Robots Meta Plugin.

ShareThis Plugin – this plugin makes it easy for your readers to bookmark a post or page on your website using one of a number of social bookmarking services. Social bookmarking a post will often result in a backlink to your site (depending on the social bookmarking service used), which in turn will help to improve your search engine rank.

=> More Information about the ShareThis Plugin

WP Backlinks Plugin – Reciprocal linking isn’t as effective as it once was, but it will still help to improve your search engine ranking. This plugin makes it easy to exchange and manage links with other bloggers. It allows you to add a form to your sidebar to let other bloggers exchange links with you. In the admin panel you will be able to approve or dissaprove links and keep track of the status of these backlinks e.g.  to make sure they are linking back to you.

=> More Information about WP Backlinks Plugin.

Permalinks Moved Permanently Plugin – if you started off using Wordpress and didn’t use the optimum setting for permalinks (see part 2 of my SEO For Blogs Series) then you can install this plugin before you change your settings to ensure that that you don’t lose traffic or page rank permanently. This plugin  generates a 301 redirect from the old pages.

=> More information about the Permalinks Moved Permanently Plugin.

In my opinion, these are 10 of the best Wordpress SEO plugins. It is not necessary to install all of them, but it is worth reading the summaries and deciding if the plugin will be of benefit to you.

Read Part 4 -  On Site Optimization for WordPress