Catalyst Search Matters Search Marketing Blog

If you’ve come in through search, or feed and you haven’t read the 6 Tips to Boost your Blog then you should start there. Or if you’re just interested in these awesome plugins, then read on.

This is a evolving, regularly updated list of essential Wordpress Plugins, many of which aid in boosting your blog’s SEO friendliness. And who doesn’t want to be friends with a Search Engine?

1. Google sitemaps
   • This one autogenerates a google sitemap xml file and updates every time you post
2. Add META Tags
   • This one, well, adds meta tags to all your posts based on tags, it also adds a meta tag and description to your “index page”
   • The reason this is good is because, as I’m sure you know, Wordpress adds the exact same description (your tagline) to EVERY SINGLE PAGE by default
   • Search engines will dump you pages into the supplemental index lickety split when they see that, so I commented out my tagline and added this plugin
   • It also uses the first sentence of the post as the meta description tag (so every post has a unique desc tag)
3. Permalink Redirect
   • This one is awesome. It takes any incoming requests for http://yoursite.com and mod rewrites the the url to be the www.yoursite.com
   • This keeps Google and Yahoo (et al) from indexing two versions of your site
   • It works with 301’s so the redirects are search friendly
   • ALSO..You can put in your feed burner address and it will reroute all feed requests to your feed burner feed
   • Watch your subscriptions triple in one day PLUS you can now see every use of your feed (even the sploggers)
4. Sociable
   • Add up to 45 social bookmarking buttons to every post (dig, stumbleupon etc)
5. Wordpress db backup
   • Essential for backing up your blog (do it weekly)
6. Samsarin php widget
   • Now you can add php scripts to your sidebar (WP_polls won’t work without this if you are using widgets)
7. Optimal Title
   • This plugin rewrites your title tags on posts to put the post title in front of your blog name
   • Many templates like K2, do this by default so this is not necessary
8. Blogroll Page
   • This allows you to make a single page into your “links” page to all the links out of your sidebar

That’s it for now. We’ll keep adding! Feel fee to submit some.