Some would claim as I am a very heavy user of the WordPress CMS and an SEO Junkie that this blog is more than overdue. After a good number of requests recently I decided the time was right to tell you what I consider…

The Best SEO plugins for WordPress

WordPress SEO by Yoast

For a long long time I used a combination of SEO Plugins to get the job done, but WP SEO by Yoast is a truly all in one solution. It includes everything from page titles and descriptions to sitemaps and social descriptions. It also has a handy “is this good for seo” section on pages and posts, making this plugin very very flexible for almost any need. It can also deal with breadcrumbs, permalinks and rss feeds – thats if you want it too, which I haven’t as they were already set up with this theme. One more thing it can do is deal with canonicalisation issues and redirects of pages and posts. It also will deal with verification of Google Webmasters and Bing Webmasters. You can also import settings from my old favourite all in one seo (#2).

All in One SEO Pack Plugin for WordPress

This plugin is pretty handy, especially if you are an SEO not wanting to give too much control to your clients. You set it up and away it goes adding and amending titles and descriptions of pages, its easy to set up and is so good that I’d estimate about 90% of websites using wordpress looking at SEO use this plugin. Its pretty good.

Google Sitemap Generator SEO Plugin for WordPress

As an SEO you will no doubt be aware how handy an XML sitemap can be for indexation of both new and old pages and posts on a website. This plugin is pretty simple to use, install and click build. There are more advanced settings, such as setting up priorty of pages and posts, you can even do it based on comment count – you can also set exclusions. Its a good companion to AIO SEO above – though not needed for WP SEO by Yoast.

WP Smush.it SEO Plugin for WordPress

A handy little tool based on Yahoo’s Image Smush.itwhich is handy for squishing images down and compressing them to lower filesize for transit across the internet. Small images and filesizes means faster loading web pages – which can in turn lead to much happier users who are more likely to return. It works by stripping meta data from images such the location the image was taken and the camera used to take it – additionally it will convert some files in certain circumstances to image types which have a smaller file size or are easier to compress.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin for WordPress

A great plugin for it’s simplicity in use is YARPP. It adds a small section to the bottom of your blogs and links to what it considers related articles. You can also configure the plugin to be more accurate or ignore certain articles. There are others that do this but this is probably the best out there.