Once you make the commitment to blog on a regular basis, take the next step to ensure all of your hard work is rewarded: Focus on the search engine optimization (SEO) aspects of your blog. Whether your intent is to communicate information to existing customers or to build relationships with new prospects, a shared goal should be attracting as many targeted visitors as possible from search engines.

In my opinion, the content or articles that you write for your WordPress blog (or any blog, for that matter) is the most important part of your SEO efforts. Write content for humans first — your visitors — never just for search engines. The way I see it; if you are lucky enough that a poorly-written article generates search engine rankings, and therefore visitors, but those visitors leave immediately because the blog post was written exclusively for search engines, what good has come of it? In all likelihood you have done more damage with indecipherable content than reaped rewards with a high ranking. Always think of your visitors and readers first and the search engines a very distant last place. In this era of sharing content through social media sites and other venues, useful, well-written content will rank highly on its own merit. WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms on the Internet largely because of its thousands of available plugins — a handful of which are built to aid in SEO. Along with writing superb content, consider these five very useful plugins for your blog. They can all be found at WordPress.org/extend or in your WordPress dashboard.

1. All in One SEO Pack
One of the best plugins and with nearly five million downloads, also an industry standard. This plugin will allow you to write custom meta information for all your posts and pages. This should be one of the very first plug-ins you install when starting a WordPress blog.

2. Contextual Related Posts
This plugin will display a series of related blog posts at the end of each published post by seeking those with relevant tags. This not only helps with internal link building but the user experience is also enhanced. Readers now have the potential to stick around longer and read other areas of your website.

3. SEO Smart Links
Interlinking your posts is a great way to strengthen the SEO elements of your WordPress website. SEO Smart Links will interlink your posts and pages as you write and publish them. This is a great little tool that can have a major impact on your blog’s search engine rankings.

4. WP-DB-Backup
Nothing will kill your SEO efforts faster than losing all of that informative content. This tool will e-mail a file of your entire database whenever you want — so if something should happen and things go downhill you can quickly get everything back up and running as soon as possible.

5. Google XML Sitemaps
When you add new posts and pages to your website every day, you want to let Google know about your sitemap changes. This plugin will update your sitemap automatically as you build onto your website. Google will then quickly index new content as it becomes available.

Successful SEO starts with producing top-quality content but it doesn’t stop there — it is an ongoing process incorporating many different strategies. And while other, proven tactics (such as link building) must not be ignored, WordPress users can take advantage of these plugins to get a head-start with a successful SEO campaign.

About the Author: Nick Stamoulis is the President and Founder of the full service SEO and SEM company, Brick Marketing. Stamoulis also writes daily in his SEO blog the Search Engine Optimization Journal.