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.

I’m always on the look for a new plugin and if you’re reading this post that means that you’re looking for some interesting ones as well. Here’s a list of the best WordPress Plugins / WP Plugins you were looking for.

Simply click on the Hyperlink to begin your download.

WordPress Toolbar is a unique plugin which will automatically enable a toolbar for all outgoing links from your blog post, similar to stumbleupon and facebook. Often the visitors on your blog clicks one of the outgoing link for more information. However, s/he often forgets to comment back or social bookmark your blog. WordPress toolbar will float on the top of all these outgoing links from your blog post, showing options for either visit back your blog post from where s/he came from, comment back on your blog, social bookmark you blog in one of the famous bookmarking sites and finally an option to leave this toolbar. Support for tinyurl and sociable are added since version 2.1.

This plugin is a result of day to day observations of my wordpress blog stat. I analyzed that 75% of my blog’s visitors were leaving my blog posts by clicking one of the out-going links. I doubt how many of them were coming back to leave a comment or to bookmark/share my blog post on one of the social bookmarking sites. I can say this because, even I too forget to press the browser back button and visit the blog again. Also, when you get 10k+ pageviews and 1 comment, something is wrong!

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on. See it live on our other domain Bloginity.

I tend to like this one much better then the other Contact forms that WordPress has offered me since it’s a organic looking form, nothing too fancy.

Featured Content Gallery creates an automated, fully customizable rotating image gallery anywhere within your WordPress site. Choose your images and display categories, pages or posts with custom overlay text and a thumbnail carousel. Custom options include gallery size, color, style and more. Featured Content Gallery home page: FeaturedContentGallery.com.

This I prefer better then NexGEN gallery for WordPress. Although it’s a bit more techy and you might think ” I’m not going to type these codes for every article I want to feature ” you actually get used to it, and it’s a very simple method. If you’re having problems with the installation of Featured Content Gallery they have a great forum support but mark my words before: You need to add a custom field name “articleimg” and specify the URL img you want the gallery to show. Also “featuredtext” for the short excerpt on the image. The rest of the setting are done from the application. In addition, remember that you need at least 5 listed for the Gallery to begin sliding.

See it live here

Google Sitemap Generator (XML) – This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content. This is a must for every website.

Breadcrumbs Easily add breadcrumbs to your template. If you’re using one of the supported WordPress frameworks, it’s as easy as enabling the plugin and checking the “Try to add automatically box”, if you’re not using one of those, adding it is as simple as adding one line of code to your template. This a must for every website.

RobotsMeta – There’s no easy way to add meta robots tags to WordPress pages, unless of course, when you install this plugin.

This plugin makes it very easy to:

• Prevent indexing of your search result pages, while still allowing the search engines to follow the links on them, by adding noindex,follow robots meta tags.
• Disallow indexing of subpages to your homepage, category pages, author pages and tag pages, to prevent duplicate content.
• Prevent indexing of your login, register and admin pages by adding noindex robots meta tags.
• Add noodp an noydir meta robots tags, allowing you to opt out of DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory descriptions.
• Prevent Yahoo! and Google from indexing your feeds by adding a meta tag to their head-section.
• Prevent indexing of just your comment feeds.
• Disable author and date-based archives.
• Prevent attachment pages from ranking in the search results over your articles.
• Enforce a trailing slash on archives.
• Edit your .htaccess and your robots.txt from within WordPress.
• Assign robots meta tags to individual posts & pages.
• Verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Add noarchive tags to your blog (Thanks to Henryk Gerlach).

WP SuperCache – If you’re aiming for speed then this is what you need. This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

@Reply – This plugin allows you to add Twitter-like @reply links to comments. When clicked, those links insert the author name and a link to the comment you are replying to in the textarea.

Link Juice Keeper – Mmmmm.. As you probably know, incoming links play important role in ranking well in Google and other search engines. Therefore you should assure that every incoming link leads to one of pages on your blog. This may be a challenge, because World Wide Web is dynamic and changes every day.

Shoot me an e-mail if you’re having issues with the installation or would like to suggest that I will add anything here.

There are plugins – and then there are plugins. During the whole of my blogging career I’ve customized a fair amount of plugins, I’ve also cultivated a fair amount of fine head aches that are only found while reading those fine prints of HTML. The core of what I’m trying to say is I did not have that extra £ £ £  to hire a coder. I spent a large part of the day after sundown and before sunrise, impartially trying to figure out why things are not working the way you want them to.

It’s safe to say I had a can of worms in my hand, but I always tried to give it my old college try. I told my father, “I’m now an entrepreneur.” Because I hear that’s what you’re called when don’t have an actual job. I’ve commit oneself to open my own domain where I will tell you exactly why you shouldn’t be doing what you’re doing on your site. I will go into detail and illustrate what you’re ought to do. I made this short list of the must-have WordPress plugins for every WordPress site. These are the plugins I apply even before setting up a FeedBurner.

Choose the right WP theme.

If I had someone teaching me why it was better to use Flash then HTML when I first started.. I would have rescued approximately a year that’s gone to waste, let’s not even mention the stress and effort spent. There are certain things you must know about choosing the theme. Use organic, anatomical, basic and most of all natural theme. Not the ones that look cool, and slide up and down when you move your scroll bar.

Get these WP plugins.

Sitemap Generator by Dagon Design – Everyone should have this plugin. A site map is a list of pages of web sites accessible to crawlers, spiders, monkeys, or whatever you want to call them. Think about it as your Family Tree. But in this case, it’s your “Family Forest”. (Double click to view image)

Smart 404 – Michael Tyson – You never ever wish to hand your readers a nice 404. Instead of quickly giving up and moving to the next site, this plugin redirects them to the homepage. No matter how cool your 404 image is, or if you think to yourself “Hey, this is will go so viral on SU !!” <- That’s a bold No.
Theme Test Drive – by Vladimir Prelovac – Do you really need a reason why? Here’s a reason: I don’t want to see you test how your new theme might look. (Only logged admins will be able to see the new look, this way, you could tweak and code what ever you want and only when you’re ready – Activate!)

SEO Friendly Images – yet another fabulous plugin by Vladimir Prelovac. If you’re looking to have an entertainment blog, or a fashion blog or actually, any blog with images this will draw you a lot of traffic on the long run. You need to make sure that you do add a description to your images, and do title them for what they are. For example let’s say you’re about to upload a this image below – but it’s titled: n1507600716_8844.jpg don’t leave it like that, that’s just wrong! What you want to do is just the title to “Fat cat” and add a description again, “White cat, fat cat”.

User Locker – Daniel FrużyÅ„ski – Not much into it. This is a brutal way of dealing with site hackers. Simple, 5 times wrong pw and you’re account gets locked.

FeedBurner – You must feed your readers. Must.

Blogroll NoFollow – James Morris – This plugin will help you maintain your Page rank. It adds the nofollow value to the rel attribute of a all blogroll links. If you’re not sure what “nofollow” is, read article here.

Platinum SEO Pack by Rajesh – Certain themes are not fully supported by this plugin which is why I chose to list it last. This plugin is to create homepage title, description, title tags and so on. I’ve had a few issues using this plugin. It resulted by me re-coding it and making it better so if you’re interested let me know and I will instruct you. Make sure that ONLY your header gets the title you chose and not every article you’ve posted.

SEO Title Tag – You don’t really need a plugin for this, you can manual it by choosing custom structure and type %postname% this way, you will get a permalink with the post names, and that will help search engines find your posts as well as title tags.

There are more plugins that I can recommend using like Link Juice Keeper, User Photo. If you’ve got any issues installing any of the plugins, or questions regarding custom coding feel free to shoot me an eMail! and please don’t forget to burn my Feed :)