If Your Wordpress Blog Isn't Running These Plugins, You've Messed Up

If you have any intention of using your new Wordpress-powered website for e-commerce, you're going to need to run a little plugin magic in the background. Unfortunately, with hundreds of good options for plugins, many providing almost identical services, populating your page with plugins can be a frustrating exercise in decision-making. There are dozens of excellent SEO-plugin options for your Wordpress website, so here I'll detail the most essential ones we use when setting up feeder websites for our clients.

1. Google XML Sitemaps Plugin.

This should be an automatic. This is always on top of my list when I start downloading plugins. This plugin will generate an XML sitemap that is read by search engines to be able to totally index your site and find every page on it. A page can't be ranked in the SERPs if it hasn't been found, so your first step should always be to ensure that every page on your website can be found with the Google XML Sitemap Plugin.

2. WP Super-Cache

Another automatic. The WP Super-Cache Plugin creates a cached version of your page that is stored on your webserver. When someone accesses your page, the cached version of your website is then served up instead of the .php files which are bulkier and slower. This will speed up load times on your page and is essential for your website if you plan on using Digg, Stumbleupon or any other social bookmarking service. You never think you need a cached page until something you do goes viral on Digg and a server-crushing wave of cripples your website and serves up load times that could give a 64K Modem a run for its money. Just get it. You'll never notice it most of the time and it'll save your life when that day comes that you need it.

3. Headspace2 SEO

This is the first plugin on my list you'll see that might be different from what you expected. The default plugin for this position in the plugin list for many is All-in-One SEO, and it's a great contendor. When it comes to getting the most bang for my buck, however, I use Headspace2 SEO. The first thing you need to know about Headspace 2 is that it's not the most intuitive plugin you'll ever use. The biggest advantage that All-In-One SEO has is its simple user interface and intuitive input method. It's more limited in options and comprehensive coverage of website optimization when compared to Headspace though. The Headspace2 Plugin does so many good things for SEO, it's hard to know where to begin. It allows you to override most of the wordpress defaults for page titles, meta-tags and robots instructions (including selective noindexing for duplicate content pages, like archives). It allows integration with Google Analytics and more than half a dozen other popular statistics programs for easy install of their tracking codes. It even allows you to import your current settings if you already have All-In-One SEO or some other similar plugin installed so you don't have to waste time re-setting everything when you want to upgrade. Headspace2 also allows custom 404 pages if your readers should ever try to navigate to a page that doesn't exist on your site. There is no excuse not to be running a comprehensive SEO plugin on your website, and Headspace2 is the best of the best.

4. SEO Smart Links

The value of this plugin is twofold, because it combines internal and external linking optimization into one very simple and intuitive program. The internal linking allows you to automatically set certain clips of text to link to other on-site pages. This improves your on-site linking and eliminates the annoying procedure of setting up on-site links. The external linking does something similar for snippets of text that you wish to point offsite. The input box is large, which allows a list of keywords and corresponding destination pages to be copied in from Excel, which is invaluable when managing our clients' websites and keyword lists. You can set SEO Smart Links to work with page publishing scraped content, or in a publishing network like My Article Network even with hundreds of automatic posts per day. You can also set how many links are set per day, per page, or per post, to ensure the impression of natural linking.

5. AddToAny Social Bookmarking Plugin

If your website is going to pursue social traffic, you need to have a plugin that offers your readers a chance to submit your site to social networks. AddToAny stands apart from the rest, because not only does it offer a submit feature for every major social network, but it has a smart menu that detects which social services are used by which readers and offers them the appropriate submit buttons. This is an easy add and can have great effect for your website.

6. SEO Friendly Images

Basically uncontested in the realm of SEO-optimization for images is the SEO Friendly Images Plugin. This plugin serves multiple functions by its simple task, which is to automatically generate picture titles and ALT text. This lets the website's pictures show up in Google Image searches, traffic that should never be ignored if you have a picture-heavy website. This also allows the page to be read properly by text readers if the page is being browsed by the visually impaired and at least gives the viewer an idea of what the images are about if they somehow fail to load properly in their browser. This is another plugin that's extremely easy to setup and run out of the box.

7. Contextual Related Posts Plugin

This one isn't so much of a necessity as a convenience. CRPP auotmatically generates links to other articles on your website on the bottom of each new post. This is very useful for a large, established website with dozens or hundreds of posts already in place that wants to improve its internal linking. Of course, you should still be using proper anchor text to link internally and boost your keyword credibility for those pages, but CRPP will also do the job very well, provided your post titles were well optimized. Beyond the SEO aspect, having relevant posts at the bottom of ever post may encourage readers to read farther into your website and spend more time looking at your content.

This guest post is written by David Fishman, blogger and SEO practitioner living and working in Atlanta, GA where he is employed at Response Mine Interactive, a digital marketing agency specializing in new customer acquisition. His hobbies include link-building, social media campaigns, and cooking and then blogging about how to make sushi.

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