SEO Ultimate

SEO Design Solutions “SEO Ultimate” plugin is fast becoming our favorite SEO plugin, it’s installed on all our main sites now.

In our opinion what makes this the overall superior SEO Plugin is the ongoing product development which means that since we started using the plugin there have been at least 4 upgrades adding functionality all the time, and which now sees basic autolinking functionality included in the version 1.81  release, it is both very simple to understand and use, but extremely powerful and has all the onpage SEO-related functionality you need in one plugin, in our opinion this is now the truly superior “All in One” Plugin.

Headspace 2

From UrbanGiraffe the extremely comprehensive and advanced Headspace 2 SEO plugin,  a very good product, but possibly a little over-complicated for anyone but advanced SEO practitioners, thoroughly recommended if you want to try it. Offers very advanced features such as nesting illustrated to the right here.

Redirection

Also from UrbanGiraffe the excellent “Redirection” plugin which allows you to use 301 redirects to tidy up old posts, change URLs, cloak affiliate links and has many  more SEO uses.

Contextual Related Posts

Ajay DSouza’s related posts  plugin is our favourite because it looks at post context to suggest related posts, rather than using the tag system as most do.

Broken Links Remover

This is a great plugin, one of those you wonder how you managed before once you’re using it. Not only does it automatically check your site for broken outbound links and allow easy fixing of problem links, we also use it to remotely monitor other sites, ie if you’ve linked to a site, and it gets hacked or goes down for any reason , you’ll be automatically notified of problems (via the site running the Broken Links plugin) whenever you log into it.

Nofollow Case by Case

We didn’t like “nofollow” much for outbound links even when it was thought you could “sculpt pagerank” internally using it, we always believed that if a link deserves to be there at all, it should be live. WordPress comes with nofollow implemented as standard on comments, this plugin makes everything live as default, and you simply add /dontfollow to any URLs you may want to kill linkjuice on for any reason.

XML Sitemaps

The default XML sitemap for WordPress plugin, it rebuilds the sitemap every time you create or edit URL structures and auto-pings to ensure you are re-crawled / indexed as fast as possible. Install it, run it, forget it.

SEO Booster Lite / Pro

This is an interesting plugin we’re testing the Lite version of but think we’ll be buying the Pro version shortly, and it seems to do what it’s supposed to, i.e. advanced whitehat automated SEO.

It works by monitoring 2nd page hits you’ve had from search engines, and auto linking to them using the search term as anchor text, to try and elevate that term from second page to first, for a traffic spike. We’ll be going into more detail on this on upcoming blog posts, but suffice to say its promising enough to make this list.

Then all you need is:

The Best WordPress SEO Theme

..which in our opinion is Thesis – v1.7 and you’ll be away.

Wordpress SEO firepower

But SEO for WordPress is not just installing all the goodies..

Lots of people are under the impression that SEO is all automatic on WordPress, and this just isn’t true, because just like a championship winning race car, not everybody will drive it the same.

Although it is true that if you know how to write and optimize content properly WordPress does look after the technical side for you, simply having the best plugins, theme and set up is not enough, you will still need engaging and effective content, and a correct site structure to deliver superior seo performance.

For the “..How to’s ” please see our SEO Tips Series