We’ve seen a lot of blogs of late where SEO experts have spoken about the top plugins for WordPress to help with SEO, and most of them have mentioned the same plugins, such as All in One SEO, Google XML Sitemaps and SEO Smart Links. While yes, these plugins are important for SEO and you should be using them, or plugins like them, we thought we’d produce a list of the top 5 WordPress plugins for search engine optimisation that aren’t on everyone’s lists this Christmas.
We want to offer some WordPress plugins that you may not have heard of, and you may not have considered the use of in your websites. So, in no particular order, here are the top 5 plugins for SEO that we like to use.
Top Level Categories
When you set up a WordPress blog you’ll find that each category you create has the /category/ before it in the URL string. You can rename this, but finding a logical, relevant name isn’t always possible and it’s better for SEO if you can just remove it altogether. This plugin does that, no problems.
Similar Posts
This plugin is a truly genius little piece of code that automatically looks for related posts. You can place the code on your post page, and it will find posts that are similar in theme, so that every post you add to your site automatically creates links with related posts elsewhere on the site.
Google News Sitemap
Not to be confused with the Google XML Sitemaps plugin, this particular plugin creates a sitemap specifically for Google News. This plugin isn’t always required, but for those instances when you need to conform to Google News requirements, this plugin could just save the day.
Feed Locations
How many websites just use the RSS feeds, as is, without any form of monitoring? By using this plugin you can enter an alternative URL for your feeds, such as FeedBurner, across your entire website at once. Whenever your feed is referenced, this plugin will update it with the new URL. If you’re not using FeedBurner, why not?
Exclude Pages from Navigation
Why would you want to do this? Well, quite simply you may want to create landing pages for your SEO (or even your PPC) and you won’t want them appearing in your navigation. This plugin will create a simple tick box on the edit page screen to allow you to exclude it from all navigation. This is a very useful plugin, and allows you to have a greater level of creativity with your SEO.
This is just a small example of some of the more unusual plugins we use for SEO on WordPress websites. There is no definitive list of plugins to use for SEO because every website is different, and every SEO requirement is different, but if you give these plugins a try we’re sure you’ll see their benefit to your SEO.
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