Out of the box, WordPress is one of the most capable and flexible blogging tools around. Its most powerful selling point, however, isn’t its ease of use or powerful built-in SEO features, but rather its vast array of freely available themes and plugins, all organized into handy searchable directories. Over the next few weeks we’ll be detailing some of the ones we find most useful for ourselves and our clients.
All-In-One SEO Pack
The top of our list is this little baby. Yes, WordPress already lets you specify a search engine-friendly URL for permalinks, and it provides several different ways to let crawlers get to content, and it uses a pingback service to inform the web of new content. What else could you want? Well, this this little guy takes it to the next level by:
- allowing you to specify a title, keywords, and description for each post (it will even populate your description automatically)
- automatically adding canonical tags to prevent duplicate content errors
- specify a system or rewriting page titles for page, posts, archives, etc.
- autopopulate keywords with a posts categories
- specify noindex for category, archive, and tag pages
- it’s sweet, and a must-have for any serious blog’s SEO effort
Check out the All-In-One SEO Pack plugin home page for more information or to download it yourself. And don’t forget to support the author by donating!
Next time we’ll cover Akismet, the built-in tool that helps prevent spammers from taking over your blog’s comments.