Top SEO Plugins for WordPress Every Webmaster Should Have Installed

There are several plugins that I’ve been going with since day one for every WordPress installation I’ve done but their customization could be a bit more painful then you’d think – that’s right. Having SEO plugins is not just installing them and checking your Google Analytics and waiting for results – it takes patience. One of the biggest steps in the ‘SEO Cycle’ is patience, monitoring after all.

I’ve made a collection with a few SEO tips for all WordPress users. Please notice that this takes a bit more then just installation – so web-masters prepare yourself for some hard work :)

My first one on the list is

SEO Title Tag by net-concepts. Title tags is perhaps the most important thing in current web optimization. You should also work very hard on your titles and make sure you include a good juicy keyword and maintaining the 69 characters (note that anything like space, periods, dashes or pipes are considered a character. In my opinion characters like &%$#@ are considered sometimes 5 characters.) This plugin takes a bit of installation and touches HTML and PHP. You will need to re-construct your current “” command inside your header.php or single.php

See instruction below on how to incorporate SEO Title Tag plugin with your post.

Afterwards you will be able to mass edit the title tag for all of your tags, posts, pages, categories.

After the installation of SEO title tag comes another favorite plugin of mine called Headspace2 by urban-giraffe. This plugin can help you auto-edit all of your posts, pages, categories, 404, search results etc but what’s good about this plugin is if you don’t define a title it will not edit it. This is something All In One SEO plugin does not do. When you activate All In One SEO if you check the box where you’d like to “rewrite titles” it will rewrite it for all. For headspace, it’s only what’s defined. That’s a great add-on.

For your site optimization I recommend checking WP-Cleanup made y JortK it’s a simple plugin that helps you manage your MySQL optimization. For example let’s say you’ve installed a plugin last year, set it up and then deactivated it. Most likely the MySQL tables still exist incase you will ever activate the plugin again. These tables grow your MySQL to a monster-size and affect your site speed, it is highly recommended that you will optimize your MySQL and make sure you avoid all unused MySQL data – always. It’s a simple clean up, you check what you want to remove there is no danger involved.

Ok, the next one on my list is Simple Tag it is THE perfect tool for mass editing tags, auto-tagging articles (and avoiding stupid tags) some of it’s really cool functions include auto link tags in post content, type-ahead input tags which could be a bit annoying, related tags, you can define it that it will only tag untagged posts and to tag posts with only pre-existing tags if the keyword is found in full. You can also define that anytime a keyword appears in your post that is an existing tag it will auto-hyperlink it to the tag itself eventually creating a beautiful SEO crawl. It also helps mass editing tags, organizing and even getting rid of unused tags.

Automatic SEO Links – that’s a nice tool to have if you understand the concept of anchor texting. It works pretty much the same way Simple Tags works that when ever a keyword is found and appears as a tag it will auto-link to it’s tag however automatic seo links work in a way that when ever a keyword is found (that you select) it will link to a landing page – which you choose. So, define the anchor text, define the link (no-follow do-follow target_blank etc) and it’s landing page.

Redirection – another plugin from urban-giraffe. Redirection plugin for WordPress is a nice tool to carry as it manages all the 301 redirection and keeps track of your 404 errors. I personally don’t like it because it carries a JS file with it and a heavy database which increases my loading time but overall it’s a good plugin to have, don’t get me wrong it’s only a tiny second loading time that bothers me.