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Essential WordPress Plugins (Part 3)

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So here’s the third installment in the series. This week I have a handful of plugins to help in the area of SEO.

From its solid foundations WordPress is very ‘search engine friendly’ out of the box. Its default themes and template system are built on modern Web standards and the clean, valid code makes it easy for search engines to find, understand and index content. However, that doesn’t mean there is no room for improvement for those wanting to take every possible advantage when creating exposure for their products or services.

The plugins I have selected today enable little tweaks and techniques to make your site play nice with search engines – and ultimately help them help people find their way to you.

Making your site search engine friendly

Google XML Sitemaps

XML sitemaps are a tool webmasters can use to make it easier for search engines to understand the structure of their site and index pages more accurately. This plugin automates the process of building and updating a sitemap and runs quietly in the background. When you first fire it up, you’ll be prompted to build a sitemap manually. Following that, every time you publish a page or post the sitemap will be updated automatically.

Many standalone, 3rd party tools are available for creating sitemaps quickly. However the ability to automatically update your sitemap every time you post, and check search engines picked it up in-tact, saves a lot of time and keeps things neat and tidy.

KB Robots.txt

Another handy Webmaster tool is the robots.txt file. This is a simple text file that sits on your server waiting to instruct search engine spiders on which pages and directories they should and shouldn’t add to their indexes. For example, on our corporate site we have a testing directory where we try new things and show clients work in progress for their feedback. We don’t want these test pages to accidentally show up in search results so we don’t allow any search engines to index them.

Robots.txt files are easy to write but, like a lot of my recommendations in this series, having a WordPress setting page to manage it is very handy and keeps things neat. This plugin does exactly that. Once installed it offers a simple textbox for editing your robots.txt, then when you save the changes it will create or update the file right away.

All-in-one SEO Pack

Last, and by no means least, we have what is arguably one of the most valuable plugins available for WordPress. As its name suggests this plugin is like a Swiss Army knife for managing important aspects of your site’s SEO.

Most of its features give you more control over your metadata (extra information embedded in a Web page to describe its contents). Including your keywords in these metadata elements makes your site more findable for potential customers who are searching for products or services like yours.

The crucial areas of metadata for SEO are page titles and meta-descriptions. Search engines heavily rely on these to understand what your site is about, and commonly use them to make up the snippet shown when your site appears in search results. All-In-One SEO Pack lets you edit these elements on a page-by-page basis, and if you know how to use them it can make a huge difference to your rankings and click-through rate.

Something Google et al frown upon is duplicate content. With blogs this can be a hard thing to avoid (mainly due to category, tag and archive pages being very similar and numerous). All-In-One SEO Pack lets you instruct search engines not to index these navigation pages and concentrate on your destination pages (i.e. the valuable stuff). Another time-saving feature of this plugin is automatically generating canonical URLs. I would be going way off-topic if I described those here, but for anyone who is interested, this post from SEOmoz explains what they are very well.

Note: I have also heard good things about a similar plugin called Headspace 2, but I haven’t studied it in detail yet.

So I hope your WordPress plugin fix has been satisfied for another week. Next week will see the final part of the series (well, maybe the final part. There could be more), where I’ll share some recommendations for analytics plugins and cool tools to track visitor behaviour on your WordPress blog.


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