James Dimick, a Web developer at WordPress (news, site), says, "When it comes to Search Engine Optimization, there are a slew of options out there. Some good and some not so good."
We're inclined to agree. Thankfully, Dimick's got your back. His recent list of what he feels is the cream of the crop when it comes to SEO plugins for WordPress is, as far as we can tell, pretty thorough. Here's his top 5, which range from full packages to simple solutions:
All In One SEO Pack
We saved the best for first. According to Dimick and statistics, the All In One SEO Pack is the crème de la crème. The most popular plugin in the WordPress Extend repository, this plugin features perks such as:
- Canonical URLs
- Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality
- Provides SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites
- Support for CMS-style WordPress installations
- Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
- Generates META tags automatically
- Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others
Additionally, this plugin claims to be a great solution for both beginners looking for something out-of-the-box, and advanced users who wish to fine-tune.
HeadSpace
According to Dimick, HeadSpace takes the silver medal. The self-proclaimed "meta-data on steroids" plugin has a lot of great features, including the ability to auto-generate post tags based on the content of the post. Uncreative or just plain lazy? This one's for you.
Google XML Sitemaps
What would a top 5 list be without something of the Google variety? This particular plugin creates a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It reportedly supports all WordPress generated pages as well as custom creations.
Additionally, every time a user edits or creates a post, the sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified. Very handy!
SEO Smart Links
These guys are big on automation. SEO Smart Links automates stuff like linking keywords and phrases in your posts, as well as comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags. As Dimick says, "This really helps with keeping visitors clicking further into your site."
Robots Meta
Robots Meta is a simple solution. Some of the cooler features:
- Prevent indexing of your search result pages while still allowing the search engines to follow the links on them
- Disallow indexing of subpages to your homepage, category pages, author pages and tag pages, to prevent duplicate content
- Prevent attachment pages from ranking in the search results over your articles
- Enforce a trailing slash on archives
And that's that. So WordPress users, get your SEO on or, if you feel we've missed a life-altering solution that fits into this category, by all means let us know.
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