On Monday I reviewed Google webmaster tools in Part 1 of my series on optimizing a site for SEO. If you’ve never used Google webmaster tools please read that post first, and then come back here to learn how a few free WordPress plugins can help make those SEO updates quickly (and in some cases, automate them so all you have to do is install the plugin).
Canonical URLs
- Platinum SEO Pack – Very configurable – manage title, description and keyword meta tags at the post level as well as category and tag pages. Includes automatic 301 redirects for permalink changes.
- All in One SEO Pack – Meta keywords and descriptions and titles.
Crawl Errors
- Redirection – Automatically adds permalink 301s when you rename a page. Allows manual management of 301s as well. Monitors 404s and allows easy mapping to 301s.
Sitemap
- Google XML Sitemaps – Creates sitemap.xml and a zipped version. Automatically regenerates whenever a post is added or removed as well as when a permalink changes. Pings Google, Bing and Yahoo.
Robots
- Robots Meta – Edit robots.txt from within WordPress. Also allows granular control at the post level if you want to add robots meta tags to specific posts. Disallow indexing of category, comment, and feeds.
As you see there’s a lot of overlap in features – redirects, meta tags, titles, etc. When deciding what to install, make a complete list of features and install accordingly. Don’t be afraid to test drive and install something else.
I should mention that I run this blog on the Thesis theme and several of the features of the above plugins are provided in Thesis as well. However, in the WordPress world there’s always “a plugin for that” so I wanted to focus on free plugins for this review.
Come back on Friday for Part 3 when I’ll explain what the above concepts are in more detail and discuss why they’re so important.
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