15 Under Utilized WordPress SEO Plugins

My earlier post on Top 15 Essential WordPress Plugins mentions all the essential plug-ins required for your blog, where as this post primarily focuses on the SEO plug-ins that are under utilized.

Search Engine Optimization is all about optimizing your blog to position it higher in the Search Engine Results and thus increase overall visibility. It’s one of the most, if not the most, important aspect of blogging.

In what I have come to learn, there are 3 fundamentally important factors determining the success of a blog, not in any order of importance as you can’t take away any of them from the equation.

1. Blog Content
2. Blog Design
3. SEO

SEO Your Blog to Success

Basically there are 2 ways we can all SEO our blog to greater success either manually or automatically with the use of plugins.

If there is one plugin for SEO you can’t blog without, it’d be the indispensable All In One SEO. It’s the ultimate on-site SEO tool that works right out of the box. You can’t talk about WordPress and SEO without mentioning the All In One SEO.

But today I’ll be sharing with you 15 of the most under-utilized yet useful plug-ins to SEO your blog and rank higher in the search engine results.

1. Robots Meta
Creating a robots.txt file has never been easier with this plugin. You can control how search engines and crawlers index your site. What I like about this plugin is that you can edit your robots.txt and .htaccess from within your Admin dashboard.

2. SEO Friendly Images
SEO Friendly Images is an optimization plug-in which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, it will add them according the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well.

3. SEO slug
Basically SEO Slug removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’, ‘and’ from post slug to better optimize your keywords and improve search engine optimization. SEO Slug plug-in strips common words out of your post slug to make it more search engine friendly.

4. RB Internal Links
This nifty plug-in is a great tool for internal linking. An easy way to search and link to older posts and articles within your site category without the need to remember its URL. This is one of the plug-ins I can’t write a post without.

5. Nofollow Links in Posts
Nofollow Links in Posts plug-in enables you to add the “nofollow” attribute into links in a post within a specified category. This plug-in is useful if you are doing sponsored posts. You can set the plug-in to add the “nofollow” attribute for posts older than “X” days.

6. Google Analytics for WordPress
Google Analytics for WordPress plug-in automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads. Did I say that you can also to track AdSense clicks using this plug-in?

7. Duplicate Content Cure
A very simple, yet effective SEO plug-in that prevents search engines from indexing pages that contain duplicate content, like archives and category pages. If you aren’t in the know, Google hates duplicate content.

8. TagMahal – Automatic Tag Suggestion
Firstly, I like its name. TagMahal is a plug-in that suggests tags for a post using the Flaptor Tagger API. It works in a toolbox in the sidebar with a button that retrieves and recommends a list of possible tags and displays them in the toolbox. Now who says ‘tagging’ is that difficult?

9. WP DeliciousPost
WP DeliciousPost is a WordPress plug-in that auto-submit your post and pages to del.icio.us as you publish them. How else can it be more convenient? How I wish I could do the same for StumbleUpon?

10. Link Summarizer
With Link Summarizer you can display a list of all the links you referred to in your post summarized at the end of the post. There is an option to exclude links from the summary by specifying regular expressions for links that shouldn’t show up.

11. Recent Posts
This plug-in displays a list of the most recent posts to your blog in a highly customisable way with an options page which lets you change how the output is generated and displayed.

12. Clean Archives Reloaded
It creates a pretty list of all of the posts that you’ve made to your blog. An archive page is necessary for both your readers and search engines.

13. Nice Search
This is a really simple plugin that redirects your WordPress searches (?s=search-term) to the pretty-looking URI version: /search/search-term, and also converts spaces (%20) to plus symbols.

14. Technorati Incoming Links
Since the birth of WP 2.3, you have noticed that the Dashboard “Incoming Links” has been replaced from Technorati to Google Blog Search. For those who would like to restore the Technorati Incoming Links without removing the new Google Blog Search, this little addition to the dashboard might just be what you need.

15. Enforce www. Preference
Search engines often regard www.yourblog.com and yourblog.com as two different websites unless you take specific measures to signal to them that they are the same site. This is the simplest way to redirect your URL from WWW to no-WWW without the hassle of re-writing .htaccess.

There you have it. 15 of the most under-utilized plug-ins you’ll probably wouldn’t know about. I hope this article will help you reorganize your plugins and SEO your blog to the top.

Update

SEO Title Tag: It blows my mind how post titles are also used as title tags by WordPress, considering that post titles should be catchy, pithy, and short-and-sweet; whereas title tags should incorporate synonyms and alternate phrases to capture additional search visibility.

Related posts:

1. Top 15 Essential WordPress plugins
2. WordPress Features
3. Blog Every Where
4. Can you make money online???
5. What does it take to be on top?