SEO Plugins For Your Blog

If you have been trying to make your blog search engine friendly, you will want to install some of the better plugins focused on making your blog more user friendly as well as ranking higher within search engines like Google or Yahoo.

Here is a list of handy plugins that will help you with blog based SEO:

1) SEO Title Tag

Title tags are arguably the most important of the on-page factors for search engine optimization (”SEO”). 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. This plugin provides a simple solution.

2) Related Posts Plugin
Features a listing of related posts at the bottom of each page or post, keeping visitors on your site longer.

3) Ultimate Tag Warrior
You can easily use categories and the tag system within one blog making it easier to search through specific tags you have created for previous posts and pages.

Ultimate Tag Warrior is a multi-headed hydra of a plugin. It allows you to add tags either through the Write Post page in wordpress in a tag box, on posts using an AJAXy box, and in posts using special syntax from external editors (or internally, if you’d like).

From the write post page, you can also get suggestions for tags using the Yahoo! keyword suggestion service.Once you’ve got your tags entered; you enter a realm of interesting ways of doing things with your tags. At the complicated end, AJAXy search is included with the download (it may need some customisation to match your theme). At the simpler end, you can automagically have tags included at the top and bottom of your posts without making changes to themes.

4) Head META Description Plugin
This plugin offers an automatic meta description tag for your blog by attaching a description depending on the request (query)

Head META Description provides four user-configurable variables.

These are:

$default_blog_desc
Setting this overrides the use of the tagline (Options > General in WordPress) for the default description on your blog. If you don’t use the tagline, edit this line. Default value is ” (empty).

$post_desc_length
Length of the description in words for post and Page descriptions (the first # words of the excerpt, or post content). Default value is 20.

$post_use_excerpt
This tells the plugin to use the excerpt for description on posts, if one exists. Set this to 0 (zero) to force post content as description. Default is 1.

$custom_desc_key

Name of the custom field key used to override post or Page excerpts for descriptions. Default is description.
You can change these variables by editing the plugin file online through the plugin editor (Plugins > Plugin Editor, then select the plugin file), or offline in a text editor.

5) Google Sitemaps
This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.