15 Most Under-Utilized Plugins for SEO

Search Engine Optimization is all about optimizing your blog to position it higher in the Search Engine Results and thus increase overall visibility. It’s one of the most, if not the most, important aspect of blogging.

In what I have come to learn, there are 3 fundamentally important factors determining the success of a blog, not in any order of importance as you can’t take away any of them from the equation.

1. Content
2. Blog Design
3. SEO

SEO Your Blog to Success

Basically there are 2 ways we can all SEO our blog to greater success either manually or automatically with the use of plugins.

If there is one plugin for SEO you can’t blog without, it’d be the indispensable All In One SEO. It’s the ultimate on-site SEO tool that works right out of the box. You can’t talk about WordPress and SEO without mentioning the All In One SEO.

But today I’ll be sharing with you 15 of the most under-utilized yet useful plugins to SEO your blog and rank higher in the search engine results.

15 Most Under-Utilized Plugins for SEO

1. Robots Meta
Creating a robots.txt file has never been easier with this plugin. You can control how search engines and crawlers index your site. What I like about this plugin is that you can edit your robots.txt and .htaccess from within your Admin dashboard.

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

3. SEO slug
Basically SEO Slug removes common words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’, ‘and’ from post slug to better optimize your keywords and improve search engine optimization. SEO Slug plugin strips common words out of your post slug to make it more search engine friendly.

4. RB Internal Links
This nifty plugin is a great tool for internal linking. An easy way to search and link to older posts and articles within your site category without the need to remember its URL. This is one of the plugins I can’t write a post without.

5. Nofollow Links in Posts
Nofollow Links in Posts plugin enables you to add the “nofollow” attribute into links in a post within a specified category. This plugin is useful if you are doing sponsored posts. You can set the plugin to add the “nofollow” attribute for posts older than “X” days.

6. Google Analytics for WordPress
Google Analytics for WordPress plugin automatically tracks and segments all outbound links from within posts, comment author links, links within comments, blogroll links and downloads. Did I say that you can also to track AdSense clicks using this plugin?

7. Duplicate Content Cure
A very simple, yet effective SEO plugin that prevents search engines from indexing pages that contain duplicate content, like archives and category pages. If you aren’t in the know, Google hates duplicate content.

8. TagMahal – Automatic Tag Suggestion
Firstly, I like its name. TagMahal is a plugin that suggests tags for a post using the Flaptor Tagger API. It works in a toolbox in the sidebar with a button that retrieves and recommends a list of possible tags and displays them in the toolbox. Now who says ‘tagging’ is that difficult?

9. WP DeliciousPost
WP DeliciousPost is a WordPress plugin that auto-submit your post and pages to del.icio.us as you publish them. How else can it be more convenient? How I wish I could do the same for StumbleUpon?

10. Link Summarizer
With Link Summarizer you can display a list of all the links you referred to in your post summarized at the end of the post. There is an option to exclude links from the summary by specifying regular expressions for links that shouldn’t show up.

11. Recent Posts
This plugin displays a list of the most recent posts to your blog in a highly customisable way with an options page which lets you change how the output is generated and displayed.

12. Clean Archives Reloaded
It creates a pretty list of all of the posts that you’ve made to your blog. An archive page is necessary for both your readers and search engines.

13. Nice Search
This is a really simple plugin that redirects your WordPress searches (?s=search-term) to the pretty-looking URI version: /search/search-term, and also converts spaces (%20) to plus symbols.

14. Technorati Incoming Links
Since the birth of WP 2.3, you have noticed that the Dashboard “Incoming Links” has been replaced from Technorati to Google Blog Search. For those who would like to restore the Technorati Incoming Links without removing the new Google Blog Search, this little addition to the dashboard might just be what you need.

15. Enforce www. Preference
Search engines often regard www.yourblog.com and yourblog.com as two different websites unless you take specific measures to signal to them that they are the same site. This is the simplest way to redirect your URL from WWW to no-WWW without the hassle of re-writing .htaccess.

There you have it. 15 of the most under-utilized plugins you’ll probably wouldn’t know about. I hope this article will help you reorganize your plugins and SEO your blog to the top.

If I Miss Any of Your Favorite, Please Suggest Here

Do I miss anything here? Do you use any other plugins I know nothing of its existence but you think I should include it into the list?

If you find this article useful, please Digg this for the benefit of others.

Related posts

• I Want a WordPress Plugin to.. WordPress is a powerful blogging platform and a popular one indeed. Nonetheless, at its core form, it is just too...
• A Beginner’s Guide to WordPress Plugins Without a doubt one of the biggest advantages of using WordPress is the ability to extend its functionality with the...
• Post Install To-Do List – 10 Plugins You Ought To Install One of the primary reasons WordPress is the preferred choice of blogging platform is the limitless possibilities one can expand...
• How To Add Post Date To Your List Of Recent Posts The WordPress function wp_get_archives(’type=postbypost’) displays a lovely list of posts, but sadly to say, it won’t show the date of...
• Where Did They Go From Here? Have you ever wondered where do your readers go after reading a particular post? Would you like to know what...