WordPress

This is a guest post written by Izzy Woods. If you would like to write for WebGuide4U, check out guest posting guidelines here.

As a WordPress user whether is be for personal or business reasons, you will understand the value of plugins for enhancing and improving the quality of your site. It is quite likely you are also aware of SEO and its value in increasing traffic to your site and therefore boosting its popularity.

Whether you’re a technology blogger, you run an online gadget shop or even have a business through which you recycle mobile phones, SEO can seriously increase and improve the position of your site in search engine rankings and of course, increase traffic. There are many ways in which you can ensure your website is optimized for search engines but if you want a quick and easy solution, consider some of these great SEO plugins for WordPress.

WordPress plugins are the easiest and simplest way of ensuring your site is set for SEO and the ones discussed below are some of the best available on the market.

01) WordPress SEO

This plugin covers the basics of SEO. Once you find and install this plugin you can analyze every post and page of your blog in terms of keyword check. This plugin will tell you whether you are using your focus keyword correctly, whether the density is appropriate. Even more usefully, this plugin automatically generates a basic preview of how your post or page would appear on Google. It also allows you to have complete control over permalinks, XML sitemapping and Meta configuration.

02) SEO Smartlinks

This useful plugin links keywords on both your posts and pages to other pages on your site that specifically targets those keywords, improving the internal linking of your site for SEO. With an in depth and refined internal linking system your site will be easily found by search engines and also your visitors will be encouraged to explore more deeply.

03) SEO Slugs

This is a very sophisticated plugin which removes common words such as ‘a’ and ‘the’ from the URLs of your posts. The removal of said ones makes your pages and posts more search engine friendly and unnecessary clutter is only going to slow down traffic to your site. This plugin will strip all unnecessary words from your URLs which is both good for SEO and good for others linking to your site.

4. Google Analytics Dashboard

The majority of top professionals will testify that Google Analytics is one of the top programmers around for studying the analytics and statistics of your site. With Google Analytics Dashboard you can keep an eye on your site’s traffic from your WordPress admin panel. Before this plugin, you would have needed to login separately to Google to see the statistics. This extra convenience allows you to monitor your site from the same location where you deal with all your other plugins and it has been suggested that with Google Analytics Dashboard in place, users are more likely to review their analytics and make changes to improve their site.

5. Redirection

This plugin can assist in managing 301 redirections and also gives you the opportunity to manage and correct 404 errors. You can also monitor all redirects by offering logs of redirected URLs and RSS feeds for 404 errors. It also automatically adds redirection if a post’s URL is changed.

6. Simple Submit SEO / Social Bookmarking Plugin

This simple plugin adds links for Digg, Buzz, Stumble and Delicious submission to all pages and posts. You can customize it slightly to confirm whether you want it to show these links on your home page, post pages or specific pages only. The value of social bookmarks should not be underestimated and is something which can seriously increase traffic to your site as well as SEO.

07) SEO friendly images

This plugin offers a simple way of auto-updating tags for your images. It automatically updates all your images with the proper ALT and TITLE features required for good SEO. Your images are just as valuable as your text when it comes to SEO and can just as easily increase your positioning on any of the leading search engines.

These are just seven of the hundreds of SEO related plugins available for your WordPress site but they cover all the main bases you’ll need to consider if you’re hoping to make your site fully SEO-friendly.

Are you using any of the mentioned SEO Plugin? If yes, let me know which one you use and why? If you have any query let me know via comments and do not forge to follow WebGuide4U on Twitter for more updates on SEO Plugins.