Top 6 FREE WordPress Plugins for SEO

WordPress is without a question the most popular stand-alone blog platform. It is flexible and customizable; there are lots of useful plug-ins providing any functionality a blogger can think of. However, a fresh installation of a WordPress blogs leaves a lot for improvement. For instance, search engine optimization and duplicate content proofing.

With WordPress SEO Plugins you can more optimize your blog for search engines

#1. WordPress SEO

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-seo/

The most complete all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog, this plugin has a huge list of features, including:

• Post title and meta description meta box to change these on a per post basis.
• Taxonomy (tag, category & custom taxonomy) title and meta description support.
• Google search result snippet previews.
• Focus keyword testing.
• Meta Robots configuration:
  • Easily add noodp, noydir meta tags.
  • Easily noindex, or nofollow pages, taxonomies or entire archives.
• Improved canonical support, adding canonical to taxonomy archives, single posts and pages and the front page.
• RSS footer / header configuration.
• Permalink clean ups, while still allowing for, for instance, Google Custom Search.
• Breadcrumbs support, with configurable breadcrumbs titles.
• XML Sitemaps with:
  • Images
  • Configurable removal of post types and taxonomies
  • Pages or posts that have been noindexed will not show in XML sitemap (but can if you want them too).
• XML News Sitemaps.
• .htaccess and robots.txt editor.
• Basic import functionality for HeadSpace2 and All in One SEO.

#2. HeadSpace2 SEO

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/headspace2/
HeadSpace is a powerful all-in-one plugin to manage meta-data and handle a wide range of SEO tasks. With it you can tag your posts, create custom titles and descriptions that improve your page ranking, change the theme or run disabled plugins on specific pages, and a whole lot more.

Because the configuration of meta-data can be a complicated and tiresome process HeadSpace provides several shortcuts to reduce your effort:

• Meta-data nesting – data is collected not only from the page itself, but nested parent pages
• Dynamic data extracted – why repeat yourself when you can extract data from the post itself?
• Full GUI interface – data is entered alongside post content, and with a full auto-suggested AJAX interface for tags and keywords
• Mass-editing – now you can edit meta-data for all pages and posts at one go!

#3. All in One SEO Pack

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
Features:

• Advanced Canonical URLs
• Fine tune Page Navigational Links
• Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality
• ONLY plugin to provide SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites
• Nonce Security
• Support for CMS-style WordPress installations
• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
• Generates META tags automatically
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
• For beginners, you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
• For advanced users, you can fine-tune everything
• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
• Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

#4. SEO Friendly Images

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-image/

SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well.

ALT attribute is important part of search engine optimization. It describes your image to search engine and when a user searches for a certain image this is a key determining factor for a match.

TITLE attribute play lesser role but is important for visitors as this text will automatically appear in the tooltip when mouse is over the image.

#5. Platinum SEO Pack

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/platinum-seo-pack/
Features:

• Optimized Post and Page Titles for search engines
• Generates all SEO relevant META tags automatically
• Helps you avoid duplicate content
• Lets you override any title and set any META description and META keywords, for any post or page
• Compatible with most other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.However you may have to disable All in One SEO pack
• You don’t have to fear changing permalinks. If you are not satisfied with the current permalink, change it through Settings–>Permalinks in your admin panel, without worrying about loss of Page rank or google penalty.Platinum SEO plugin will take care of issuing a 301 redirect to the new location.This is a new essential feature, not present in All in one SEO
• Add meta description and meta keywords tags to WordPress Categories and WordPress Tag pages.
• Add index, noindex, follow or nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet, noodp, noydir meta tags to any post/page.These options are not available in All in one SEO Pack.

#6. Extreme SEO

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/extreme-seo/

This plugin has several functions that are all run without any effort on your part.

• Provides your site with one way, content related, dofollow inbound links from other sites in the extremeseo network.
• Provides links to related posts under your post content that open in a new browser window so you dont lose your visitors upon clicking the related post links.
• Increases your site’s search engine ranking and Google Page Rank by providing static inbound links to your posts from related posts on other sites within the extremeseo network.

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