5 Wordpress plugins to boost your search engine ranking and help with SEO

Wordpress has rewritten the rules for what can be achieved online with a blogging application. Not only is Wordpress these days used as more than just a blogging engine, the popularity of the software package as can be seen by the Google Trends chart below

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However, the great thing about Wordpress is that it allows developers to create software add-ons, aptly named ‘Plugins’ in the application – which offer some sort of extra functionality on top of the feature set offered in/with the default installation of Wordpress.

The following (in no particular order) are the first batch of five Wordpress plugins you should download and add to your arsenal in order to help you succeed with your search engine optimisation/optimization strategy as well as help to ultimately boost your organic search engine rankings.

1. Google Analytics

If you have read my previous blog about Google Trends you will know how much I like Google Analytics. Not only is it in my opinion the best metric measurement tool a webmaster can have in his artillery, but it also helps to diagnose issues on websites such as drop-off rates on certain pages or improvements to boost visitor loyalty. Wordpress being the awesome blogging engine that it is means there are literally thousands of plugins that people can download and ‘install’ on their blog. The Google Analytics plugin takes care of placing the tracking code on every page in your website for you. Sure, it’s a pretty easy task anyway, but it’s a small file that allows you to manually enter your Google Analytics user string; save, and refresh your site. I guess the important part is that even though this is a simple plugin, Google Analytics in itself is very far from simple – and more importantly, not using Analytics on your blog/site can mean the difference between a website and a great website (due to the information the software offers which help you make your site better).

Get the plugin here: http://boakes.org/analytics

2. Counterize II

Okay, so I like my statistics and analytics – what can I say; one of my majors was in the bugger! But back on a serious note, counterize has been the quikest way to see results off your blog/website. It provides a very easy control panel with settings such as how many results you would like to list, as well as – and here’s the cool one – whether you’d like bot tracking on or off! Yes, that means search bots, crawlers, Google bot, yada yada…

Above all, I think the results that Counterize II provide are pretty superb! Obviously nowhere near as detailed as Google Analytics – but then again, Google has a little bit more money to throw on its ‘Google Webmaster Tools‘ program; in addition, Google doesn’t update its stats every second. Obviously Analytics still captures real-time, click-per-click statistics, but the stats (at last check) were downloaded every day as apposed to ‘as it happens’.

Get the plugin here: http://www.navision-blog.de/counterize/
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3. Google XML Sitemaps

Any good web designer/developer should not underestimate the power that good Information architecture coupled with a well-built sitemap can have on; 1. Your Google and other search engine ranking, 2. How well your site is crawled, and 3. How easy Google and other search engines can find information on your site. Believe me, if Google can’t find content to crawl – it just won’t! and then you stand to possibly get into the almighty sandbox at Mountain View in the heart of Silicon Valley – or worse, thrown into the supplementary results.

Anyway, enough of the pre-story – Google XML Sitemaps helps greatly when it comes to SEO, because coupled with Google Webmaster Tools, it submits a sitemap of your site to Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask.com (Ask Jeeves) by generating an XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. Best of all, it submits an updated copy of your sitemap to the aforementioned engines everytime you write a new blog post or create a new page!

Get the plugin here: http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/
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4. All in one SEO Pack

Well, what can I say. This plugin sure freaking rocks! The concept isn’t rocket science, but the plugin is phenomenal in that it dynamically lets you edit parts of your SEO strategy including titles of every page on your site, including blog posts, content pages, search results pages and more. More importantly, it’s all dynamically linked, so it allows you to rewrite titles in this format: %post_title% | %blog_title% (which will be replaced by their real equivelents – of course!) and much more.

Simple, easy to setup and use and very, very functional – with awesome instructions/help. Highly recommended!

Get the plugin here: http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack/

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5. Objection! Redirection!

Don’t you hate it when you’ve just upgraded your site from standard-HTML to Wordpress and you lose all your links to the dreaded 404? Well obviously your visitors hate it more – but someone who really hates it is our friend the Googlebot. Search engines, in particularly their spiders hate running into missing pages; known technically as a ‘404 error’. Not only does it look bad on your client’s or your web site’s records, but it can easily mean a drop in your search engine rankings!

Objection! Redirection! is an intuitive plugin for Wordpress which allows you to set redirects on your blog/site which include: 301 (Moved Permanantly), 302 (Found) – which basically means the requested URL has temporarily moved to a different address; as well as 307 (Temporary redirect) – all of which are HTTP status codes which Google would easily prefer over a missing/dead page which results in a 404 (Page/file not found).

This one is a cool plugin which will in time help to sort out those pages that get moved for whatever reason, and will make sure that your search engine optimisation/optimization strategies are aligned for best organic search engine rankings.

Get the plugin here: http://www.biggnuts.com/objection-redirection-wordpress-plugin/

So what do you think? Have you tried any of the plugins mentioned above? How important do you think it is to get SEO strategy right? Leave your thoughts.