We have big plans for our blog. Big plans. One of them is moving away from Blog.cfc and to WordPress. As such we’ve been racking our brains over what SEO stuff we need in order to make sure that our blog maintains as much of its juicyness as possible.
Fortunately WordPress has a ton of plugins to make sure that your blog is as optimized as possible. Below are some of our favourites:
Titles and Meta Tags
All in One SEO pack
A true superpack. Including canonical URLs, fine tuning of navigational links, title and meta description generation, and more, it has more options than I care to count, and yet can be setup easily by a newbie like me.
Headspace
Much like All in One SEO Pack, Urban Giraffe’s Headspace manages metadata and titles. Providing a tag based system that manages data across your blog, headspace takes a lot of the hassle out of titles and metatags.
URL’s and Redirection
Redirection
At some point you are going to have to redirect a page. You’ll change a post URL, or maybe a date, and then you’re going to find that in the 10 seconds that some one like SEOmoz grabbed your post out of your RSS feed and is now linking to it from. Then you’re either going to have to contact them and change to the new link, or redirect that old page to the new one.
Redirection makes this a breeze. It monitors 404 errors to let you know where you need to redirect from and creates an RSS feed of them so that you can see what’s going on. It automatically creates redirections based upon URLs, browsers, referring sites, or login status. It automatically does a 301 redirection when a post’s URL changes. Basically a must have.
SEO Slugs
Maybe not as good as writing your own slugs, but a hell of a lot easier. SEO Slugs removes common words (such as ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’) from your posts.
Google XML Sitemaps
We’ve already talked about the importance of XML sitemaps. This plugin generates them automatically , allowing crawlers to more easily see your site, as well as notifying major engines every time you create a post.
Links
RSS Footer
This wonderfully simple plugin does one thing: it adds a line of content to each article in your feed with a link back to your blog. Why do this? When scrapers collect your content it directs search engines back towards the original content, helping Google know what the original is, as well as providing some nice link juice.
Internal Link Building
Internal Link Building lets you assign keywords to specific URLs, then automatically link sto those URL’s when that word appears on your site—similar to wikipedia—creating link-juice flow across your blog.
Misc
WP Super Cache
One of these day’s you’re going to get something on the front page of Digg or Reddit or what have you, and traffic is going to spike on your server. With wordpress generating each page through calls to the php data base this can quickly overload your server. WP Super Cache generates static html pages out of your wordpress blog, keeping your server running and your visitors happy.
Yoast Breadcrumbs
Yoast is a proponent of breadcrumbs. As such, he has created a plugin to provide rather nice breadcrumbs to wordpress.
