5 wordpress seo plugins for on site blog optimization
For on site search engine optimization I use a standard set of 5 wordpress plugins. When we are setting up a new site and use good content on a domain with a proper name matching the target keywords, a few backlinks and my 5 plugins put the blog on the front page of Google Search for the main keywords.
The standard routine in making content for a wordpress site is composing a article, linking it into the site and pinging the search engine so the indexing bot comes to crawl and index the post and it is listed with the search results at the portal of the search engine. When the post is updated I notify the search engine again, either when you yourself edit the blogpost or when someone posts a comment.
With blog software like Wordpress most tasks are scripted so you can get busy on writing. If you want better control, you can upload plugins. To tune how I want the search engine to index my site, I use the following plugins :
* MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer
* Google XML Sitemaps
* Robots Meta
* Akismet
* Spam Karma 2
These 5 plugins give me full control over pinging the engines, pinging the entire website in one go, what directives I give the search engine bot, and what comments others can add to the post before I ping them again.
MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer
www.maxblogpress.com/plugins/mpo/
Wordpress had a minor disadvantage, it pings articles with every edit, to notify the search engines the content has changed. It is a method from the starting days of the internet. With the XML sitemap, the search engines check the sitemap for changes and just crawl updated material. Wordpress however still pings the engines with every edit, and every time your page is scheduled for crawling by the search engines. After a while if there is no actual new content, your website might be registered as pingspammer and you loose rank. Ping Optimizer ensures you only ping thepublished material.
Google XML Sitemaps
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
Search engines locate your content through the links found on other pages pointing to the post. It could take time to get your page indexed. A major improvement was the invention of the XML Sitemap, a file with a list of all posts of the blog that the search engine bot crawls, so it does not have to search for pages. It will know exactly what contents the website has and can schedule the crawling. The search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask and Bing) also knows when they are ready crawling your site and know what pages your site really offers.
Robots Meta
yoast.com/wordpress/robots-meta/
Another classic plugin I use to give the indexing bot extra directives when it reads the page . It allows you to add the 'nofollow'and 'noindex' directives pages like category lists, tag lists, author and date based archives. More important, it can prevent indexing of search result pages. Should scriptkiddies target your website they can relly influence how your site is indexed by having the search engine index thousands of search result pages. If Google's bot counts every link to determine the rank of posts you loose control over your site profile.
If you wish to learn more about the nofollow attribute I advise you to search in Google on pagerank. Pagerank was at first the basis of Google search result ranking. Now it has become less important in determining how Google order content in the search result list on their portal, however it is still worth reading.
If Google notice you manipulate pagerank they can penalize or deindex your blog. Rule of thumb implies you set the backlinks you did not list yourself on the site (like links in comments and ads) on nofollow.
Another reason to read up on the 'nofollow' tag are spammers. They tend to pick sites that have not tagged comment links as 'nofollow' and distribute databases with thousands of target sites. If your blog ends up on such lists you get hords of spam comments every day.
That brings me to the next two wordpress plugins. Our search engine oriented site needs good spam protection. Your visitors are the clients of the search engine, if the search engine lists blogs full of spam comments, they get a bad rep and after a while people use some other search engine. The more comment spam on the website, the lower the search engines list the blog on the search result list.
Optimizing your blog for search engines requires keeping the website spamfree, that is why I upload thease two seo plugins to keep the blog spamfree.
Akismet
akismet.com/wordpress/
The original author of Wordpress also started the Akismet webservice, a spamblock service, it works brilliant to keep link requests and spam comments from being added on a page. For your private use it is free, for business use it has a usage rate based fee.
Spam Karma 2
unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/
Besides Akismet I use Spam Karma 2. That plugin is no longer maintained but still works excellent. It has a settings page where i can tune the level of protection. A captcha is optional and you can switch it off. People adding comments then do not have to enter a captcha before the comment is posted.
When deploying websites these five wordpress seo plugins are the standard plugins I use for on site optimization. There are many plugins to help you optimize titles, tags, keyword usage, page linking. It depends on the articles you write and your visitors wether you use these and what plugins are best for the task. Apart from that there are specific Wordpress seo related settings like permalinks, search engine friendly urls, and lists of pingservices. But that functionality is built into Wordpress, so that is a subject for another article.
About the Author
<a href="http://www.juust.org/" title="Link building and search engine marketing">Juust Out</a> worked as programmer and cost controller for major dutch companies in the steel industry. Then he got fed up with it, and became a sailor. He still likes programming, maintains websites and is an enthousiast SEO. |