Exploring Must-Use Plugins for SEO Best Practices

Here are the plugins that we cover in this chapter:

• All in One SEO Pack: Gives the user complete control of the search-engine optimization of his or her blog.
• Google XML Sitemaps: Generates an XML sitemap that's sent to Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and Ask.com. When your site has a sitemap, site crawlers can more efficiently crawl your site. One of the added bonuses of the sitemap is that it notifies search engines every time you post.
• Redirection: Can help when you move from an old site to WordPress or when you want to change the URL structure of an established site. It allows users to manage 301 redirections (when the Web address of a page has changed, a 301 redirect tells search engines where they can find the new Web address of the page), track any 404 errors (errors that are displayed when you try to load a page that does not exist) that occur on the site, and manage any possible incorrect Web address (URL) issues with your Web site.
• Yoast Breadcrumbs: This plugin allows you to easily add breadcrumbs (covered in Chapter 4 of this minibook) to your site. On most sites, you just need to add a line of code to your template to make the breadcrumb navigation links display on your site.
• WP-PageNavi: In order to achieve pagination for your WordPress site, this plugin gives you the ability to display page links at the bottom of each archive page and/or category page.
• Robots Meta: Using the Robots Meta plugin gives you the ability to control how your site is crawled by the search engines, allowing you to hide content that you don't want to be noticed by search engine robots and to ensure that search engine crawlers see only what you want them to see. It helps eliminate duplicate content by preventing crawlers from indexing category, author, and tag pages, only focusing on your main content. Also, this plugin allows you to easily add the verification tools from Yahoo! Site Explorer, Bing's Webmaster Central, and Google's Webmaster Tools. If you don't want to edit your header, you can easily use this tool to add the various code that these search engines request you to use to verify your Web page.