10 WordPress Plugins to Make Your SEO a Slam Dunk

One of the biggest benefits of using WordPress as your CMS is the plethora of plugins available to optimize your blogging experience. Plugins can help add cool new features to your blog, simplify SEO, and make blogging easier for you. Unfortunately, the large amount of plugins available also means that many of them will turn out to be duds. Plugins work kind of like smart phone apps in the Apple Store or Google Play – anyone can create one. Many experienced bloggers have written their own reviews of their favorite plugins to help guide you, but you can also use the rating system attached to each plugin.

If you’re looking for plugins to help with your blog’s SEO, look no further! We’ve tried out the best and worst and come up with a list of WordPress plugins for SEO that every blogger needs:

1. Google XML Sitemaps – Having this plugin will better help search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com index your blog.
2. WordPress SEO by Yoast – This plugin is a freemium that helps you with the technical side of SEO, such as Meta content, XML sitemaps, page analysis, RSS optimization, and more. It also includes some social media functionality. This plugin has an incredibly high score among WordPress users: rated 4.7 out of 5 stars.
3. Free Guest Post – The Free Guest Post plugin accompanies the related website that connects writers and publishers for guest posting opportunities. Normally, finding a guest posting tradeoff can be very difficult and time-consuming. This plugin eliminates all of the usual stress involved in this process, as well as some of the Google penalties.
4. Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin – If you’ve deleted a page or post without creating a redirect for it, Google will find these broken links and punish your page for them. This plugin helps you easily find and redirect those URLs, steering you clear of Google’s SEO penalties.
5. All In One SEO Pack – The All In One Pack is similar to SEO by Yoast, but better for beginners and ecommerce WordPress sites. It automatically generates Meta data, titles, and keywords for you, but also has the option for you to fill them in manually.
6. Automatic SEO Links – This plugin makes it so you no longer have to manually insert links. All you have to do is select a word and a URL.
7. SEO Rank Reporter  – Every three days, this plugin will track your Google rankings and report the information back to you.
8. NoFollow Links – Not every one of your links should be followed by Google’s spiders. This plugin adds the “nofollow” to the rel attribute of your link.
9. Broken Link Checker – This plugin is similar to the Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin, except it focuses more on finding the broken links. It also has the option of preventing search engines from following a broken link, keeping you safe from Google penalties.
10. Google Plus Authorship – Using Google+ Authorship connects your Google+ account to your blog posts, giving you credit as the author. When your blog post shows up in a Google search result, your picture and author profile will show up alongside it, making it more appealing and earning more clicks. Google also favors those with an authorship account, which will only improve your SEO.

What are some of your favorite WordPress plugins? We’d love to hear!