Welcome to WordPress Wednesday at WebsiteMagazine.com.
Since WordPress is an open-source platform for creating a blog-based
website, it doesn't come with very many specific features. Rather, the
site builders are expected to customize on their own, which is a way to keep the platform easy-to-use and doesn't let it get bogged down with specialized features that many owners may not use.
That is why today we are going to focus on the plugins that will best help you create the most efficient site possible for your specific needs.
Anyone in the Web world can tell you that SEO is a necessity, and many of those same people will also tell you that it can be cumbersome and difficult -- especially when just starting out. There are whole books on the subject, and a significant portion of the work we do here at WM is devoted to helping people navigate the turbulent waters of search engine optimization.
Luckily for those who may be unfamiliar with the best SEO practices, WordPress offers a wide array of plugins that will help you increase your visibility on the Web. These plugins add to your site by providing you with many different methods and options for using Meta Tags, optimizing your URLS, using no-follow options and many other great practices to help get your website to the top of the search rankings.
Here are three of the top WordPress SEO plugins:
All in One SEO Pack
The name says it all. This is
one of the most popular SEO plugins available for WordPress. It's pretty
simple, not a lot bells and whistles to be found on this plugin, but it
is key to helping drive search engine traffic to your site. What really
makes All in One SEO great is that it's easy to use and install, which
makes it perfect for beginners or those who are new to SEO, but it is
also able to be customized and fine-tuned for more advanced users. It
also helps you to avoid duplicate content, a problem often associated
with WordPress blogs, automatically optimizes your titles for search
engines and generates Meta tags for you, allowing the website owner to
have superior control over titles and meta descriptions. This plugin
gives you a lot of hands-on control over how your blog's pages are
indexed in search engines. It's probably the most highly-praised and trusted SEO plugin available.
SEO Smart Links
There are a lot of cool features
that come with SEO Smart Links, which provides automatic SEO benefits to
your site with the inclusion of custom keyword lists, nofollow and
more. This plugin can automatically link keywords and phrases in your
posts or comments with corresponding pages, posts, categories and tags
on your blog. You can also use it to set nofollow attributes, open links
in a new window and set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs.
SEO Smart Links is a great tool for interlinking your blog posts or
adding affiliate links to other sites, and it's nothing to go in to
control and edit the plugin's options from the administration settings
panel.
Sitemap Generator
Sitemap Generator is an excellent plugin that, believe it or not, generates a sitemap for your WordPress site. It's strength is that it is highly customizable by offering its own options page in the administration panel. Among the features it offers are multi-level category and page support, category and page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, the ability to choose what to display and what order to list items in and showing comment counts and(/or) post dates, along with many other great options. This is plugin has been very well-received by many WordPress users thanks to its rich features and capacity for customization. This particular plugin is made by Dagon Design, but its very "descriptive" name makes it really hard to find, because it seems like every developer has designed X's Sitemap Generator, so if you don't find it by clicking the link in this post, make sure that you track it down by its designer so you don't end up with a lesser version from someone else.
For more information on WordPress plugins, check out WordPress Plugins from A to Z.