3 SEO Plugins for WordPress That You Must Have

We all know that once our blog is up and running it needs to be helped when getting into the search engines. Let’s face it simply building a blog is not enough. If you want visitors you must go get them.

The best way to get visitors is by optimizing your site.  Lucky for us there are plenty of plugins that will help us do this.  Here are three that I use and feel will be most helpful to anyone with a WordPress blog. All of these are free.

All in One SEO Pack – Of all the thousands of WordPress plugins on the web this would be the one I would recommend to get first. It’s one of the most popular plugins ever for WordPress, and for a very good reason

The All In One SEO Pack allows you to make your home page title, home page meta description and meta keywords better.

Home Title allows you make your homepage title separate from any other pages on your site. It’s recommended to make your home title include the keywords you are trying to target for your site. This is the title that will come up in organic searches so you want it to be descriptive of your blog.

Home Description allows you to fill out the meta description for your home page. This is the description that will appear in search engine results for when your home page is being displayed in a search list.

Home Keywords are the Meta keywords you want to have included on your home page. These keywords should reflect keywords found within your site. Make sure you include any keywords you want to rank high for in search engines when filling this out.

Besides entering this information for your home page you can also enter specific title, descriptions and keywords for each post on your home page. The best thing about this plugin is that you can do so much on page SEO tweaking with very little effort.

Google XML Sitemaps – Ok, this may be my favorite plugin. This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search. Before you create your sitemap there are numerous option that you can select.

There are check boxes that you can check off to tell it what content to include when generating the sitemap. For example you can include homepage, posts, categories etc. You can also exclude and categories you want to by just checking the box.

The change frequency section gives you the ability to select when you want the different parts of your blog are crawled by search engines.  I know this is called Google XML Sitemaps but it does work for Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN.  Make sure to install this one asap so you can reap the benefits.

SEO Friendly Images – Not may bloggers think about optimizing their images. Images can actually get you more traffic since people are always looking for images of various subjects. This plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.

There are parameters that help you build relevant terms that people may be searching for.

Here are some parameters that you can set up.

%title – replaces post title

%name – replaces image file name (without extension)

Example:
In a post titled Car Pictures there is a picture named Ferrari.jpg

Setting alt attribute to “%name %title” will produce alt=”Ferrari Car Pictures”
Setting title attribute to “%name photo” will produce title=”Ferrari photo”

Well there you have it. By installing these three plugins you will have all the SEO bases covered or blog optimization.