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Top 8 Free WordPress SEO Plugins

This is the sixth part of An Essential Guide To WordPress SEO – in this post I’d like to highlight the best WordPress SEO plugins that you can download and start using today.

There are lots of SEO plugins around at the moment – each with its own strengths and weaknesses – and this can make it hard to filter out the good ones from those that are not so great.

The eight plugins that I list in this post are well worth checking out – all make the job of optimizing your site much easier and help automate some of the tedious tasks that you might otherwise have to do yourself. And best of all – they’re all FREE

All In One SEO Pack

The All In One SEO Pack is probably the most popular WordPress SEO plugin around and comes with a range of different tools that you can use to optimize your site. Some of its features include the ability to use canonical URLs, automatic optimization of post titles, dynamic generation of meta tags, and the ability to manage duplicate content. An alternative to the All In One SEO Pack is the Platinum SEO Plugin – it provides a number of similar functions, so it’s worth looking at if you’re not keen on the All In One SEO Pack for any reason. However, I’d recommend against using both simultaneously as things could start to get messy – pick the one that you prefer and go with that.

Google XML Sitemaps Generator

This is a useful plugin for keeping the search engines informed about any new content you’ve added to your site. Once installed and activated, it will automatically create an XML sitemap for your site that can be submitted to all the major search engines (including Google, Yahoo!, Bing/MSN, and Ask.com). This sitemap will also be automatically updated by the plugin each time you add a new post – moreover, it will then inform the search engines about that new content for you! This used to be a very tedious task – you’d have to create the sitemap yourself (normally through the use of an external tool) and then manually submit it to the search engines. However, with this plugin you don’t have to do anything – just activate it and leave it to do its job.

HeadSpace2 SEO

HeadSpace2 is another very handy plugin that allows you to easily configure all meta tags on your site. For instance, it allows you to manage the meta tags for posts, pages, categories, author and search pages. It also allows you to configure a wide range of other things including descriptions, page titles, your site name and description, noindex and nofollow meta tags, and much more. You should be aware that much of this will already be covered by the All In One SEO Pack (if you’ve installed it), so there’s no need to configure these things twice. However, the main strength of this plugin is the extra control it gives you over configuring your meta tags – it’s therefore well worth checking out if you want this level of control over your meta information.

SEO for Paged Comments

If you have paged comments implemented on your blog (i.e. if your comments are spread over multiple pages) this can be seen as duplicate content by the search engines and your site could potentially be penalized and moved down the rankings. The reason for this is that when paged comments is enabled it generates several different URLs that all have the same content as your original post. So, for example, if you have a post entitled “10 Best WordPress Themes”, the following unique pages would be generated:

http://www.website.com/10-best-wordpress-themes/
http://www.website.com/10-best-wordpress-themes/comments-page-1
http://www.website.com/10-best-wordpress-themes/comments-page-2
http://www.website.com/10-best-wordpress-themes/comments-page-3
http://www.website.com/10-best-wordpress-themes/comments-page-4

… and so on!

The content on each of these unique URLs will be exactly the same – the only real difference is the comments that are displayed at the bottom of your post – certainly not ideal from an SEO perspective! This is where the SEO for Paged Comments plugin comes in handy – it works by replacing your post content on each of the comments pages with excerpts that are different from your original content. This helps to differentiate the comment pages from the original post which in turn reduces the risk that search engines will perceive your site to have duplicate content.

Broken Link Checker

Having broken links on your site is quite common and can easily happen without you really noticing – especially with older posts that you haven’t touched in a long time. This isn’t ideal as the search engines are not keen on broken links and they may give your site a lower ranking if they come across too many of them. The Broken Link Checker plugin is a helpful tool that can help address this potential issue as it enables you to easily locate any problematic links on your site. A nice feature is that you can configure how often the link checking process takes place. This is useful as it can take a long time for the plugin to process your site and check your links, so it’s certainly not something you want to be doing on a daily basis. How frequently you perform the check is up to you, but I’d typically look to do it on a monthly basis.

Redirection

If you need to redirect pages from an old website to a new one, or if you want to change the directory of your core WordPress installation for some reason, this plugin will come in very handy. It enables you to manage your 301 page redirections and to keep track of any 404 errors that are being returned by your site (i.e. a page not found error). Whilst changing the directory of your core WordPress installation is not recommended for several reasons, you may find yourself in a situation where you need to do it for some reason. If this ever turns out to be the case, this plugin will allow you to monitor that the process has gone smoothly (i.e. that you’re not receiving 404 errors) and will help to reduce the risk of losing any PageRank that you might have with Google.

Robots Meta

This is a useful for plugin for configuring which pages on your site can be crawled and indexed by the search engines. This is helpful if you want to deal with potential duplicate content issues – for instance, this plugin makes it easy to prevent access to a number of pages that may be deemed to have duplicate content on them (e.g. the category, tag, author, and archive pages), yet at the same time allow the search engines to follow the links on those pages (which is useful given that search engines like strong internal linking in your site).

SEO Friendly Images

This is a nice plugin that automatically ensures the images displayed on your site have alt and title tags attached to them. As discussed in part four, incorporating your keyword phrases into these tags can potentially bring you some additional traffic when people are performing image searches via the major search engines. However, adding these tags is one of those things that’s very easy to forget when publishing some new content on your site – using the SEO Friendly Images plugin will help you address this.

Conclusion

Installing these plugins on your WordPress site will help to save you time and effort in your SEO endeavors – however, don’t feel that you need to install all of them – each has their own strengths, but you’re pretty well covered if you only install the All In One SEO Pack! In the next part I’m going to focus on a number of different approaches you can use to help market your site and drive more traffic to it. The focus wont directly be on SEO, but there will be lots of useful suggestions that you can start using straightaway to attract more visitors to your site.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction and Guide Overview
2. Researching Great Keywords To Help Drive Traffic
3. 10 Ways You Can Generate Quality Backlinks To Boost Your WordPress SEO
4. Ten Quick Power Tips To Drive More Visitors To Your WordPress Site
5. WordPress SEO Issues – Managing Duplicate Content Effectively
6. Top 8 Free WordPress SEO Plugins
7. 8 Tips For Promoting Your WordPress Site
8. Great Tools For Analyzing The Impact Of Your WordPress SEO