Many people have asked me why my blog ranks so well on Search Engines, and sometimes for some really good search terms. The secret sauce is using Wordpress as a platform and adding some very cool SEO plugins that I would like to share with my readers. Please backup your blog before trying them out, and use them at your own risk - none of them gave me any problems. Not all of them are strictly SEO plugins, but they all help me.
I’m guess that probably less than 5% of Wordpress users even have half of these installed, so if you take the time and effort, it should boost your search engine traffic by about 2-3x (which is what I’ve seen since installing them last year).
Permanent Redirection of Posts
This plugin helps when you need to move a post or a page to another location. Very useful in that you don’t disrupt the value that the incoming links to that page offers your site and preserve the PageRank that Google may allocate.
This plugin will really help you to migrate pages from poor page structures (i.e. http://www.vinnylingham.com/2008/01/endeavor.html to a better structure such as: http://www.vinnylingham.com/endeavor.html). Remember that having pages or blog posts that are 3 levels deep into your site is not optimal for SEO. I highly recommend that you use this plugin and move your posts to the root (i.e. the blog post should basically site on the highest level in your site directory structure).
Wordpress comes standard with NoFollow tags, that basically tell search engines not to apply weighting to links posted by readers who comment on the blog. I personally moderate every comment on this blog, and if sometime takes the time to post decent comments, I believe that they deserve a link back to their site. I obviously delete silly comments like “nice site”, etc. If used correctly, this can really incentivize your readers to interact more on your blog.
This plugin is great for getting a sitemap submitted to the major search engines, such as Google, Yahoo & Ask. I used it right after changing the permalink structure and it helped them to reindex the site a lot quicker. I had a few minor problems here, but I think the new version might have fixed those bugs.
Decent enough plugin thats assist in getting meta data into your posts. Meta data is not highly regarded anymore with the major search engines, but it might be worth inserting them.
This is a brilliant plugin. When readers come to your blog via a search engine, it reads the keyword term and offers them links to similar posts based on the initial term they searched. This is one is a must, and it greatly increased my internally pageviews from search terms ratios.
This post probably helped the most with my SEO rankings. It basically inserts the heading of my post’s keywords into the Title tags for the page - simple but effective. I recommend removing things like your name in the title - it should just be the name of the post.
My archives page is very clean. Have a look. It shows a list of posts, by month with number of comments. Good, Clean & Fresh - Nuff Said!
Here is a list of some other really good wordpress SEO plugins. Most of the plugins listed above will have links to other similar ones. I really suggest that you check them out and if you’d like, post comments below to others that are worth trying! Happy SEO’ing!
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