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Lots of business websites use WordPress for more than just blogging. In many cases, it’s a full-blown content management system.  That’s why it’s crucial that every post you make is tailored to squeeze every drop of “ranking juice” from the search engines whenever possible.

Fortunately you don’t need to be a search engine optimization specialist to add SEO functionality to your blog.  Finding good plugins is even more important now that the most popular WordPress SEO plugin, the All in One SEO add-on, is no longer actively being developed (although support is still on-going).

In the meantime though, you can still get your optimization fix by trying out the following plugins.  Install them by uploading them to your wp-content/plugins folder (or have your web developer do it for you).  The default settings will get you by straight out of the box, but if you’d like to tweak something, your new SEO plugins will likely be listed in the Settings section at the bottom left of your WordPress blog dashboard.

1. Platinum SEO Pack - Developed to take over where the All in One SEO Plugin left off, this search engine optimization plugin helps keep your blog’s structure up to date with the search engines while optimizing each post’s keywords and description for maximum ranking. 

Also adds several tags that search engines can read which will prevent them from using their own snippets of content in place of your (better written) keywords and descriptions.

2. Permalinks Moved Permanently - Permalinks are how each post to your WordPress blog is recognized as its own individual entry.  You’ll often see permalinks show up in search engines, as well as other blogs.  When you install WordPress for the first time, your blog posts will have a default (and non search engine friendly) link structure – something like www.example.com/blog/p=5 which tells your visitors and the search engines nothing useful.

Instead, you’ll want to maximize each blog post to include the category name and choose those keywords wisely, such as www.example.com/blog/SEO-plugins-for-WordPress.  Unfortunately, if you change your mind after you’ve published heaps of posts under the old method, there’s no good way to update all of your links to look attractive, like the example above. 

Permalinks Moved Permanently helps your visitors and the search engines find your newly structured posts quickly and easily without throwing them the “Not Found” error that normally happens.

3. Google SEO Positioner – See what keywords your blog ranks highly for and find new ones you may not have known about.  But remember, don’t just focus your blog posts on the keywords you find.  Have a clear, consistent message with each post and feel free to sprinkle in some relevant keywords along the way!

4. SEO Slugs – Remove words like a, an, the and others from your WordPress slugs (the words used to make each post unique).  So for example, if your latest post is titled  “What You Can Do Immediately for Higher Rankings”, WordPress will automatically create a post with the link title:
http://www.example.com/blog/what-you-can-do-immediately-for-higher-rankings/
SEO Slugs shortens this to a more concrete piece that’s easier to rank for:
http://www.example.com/blog/immediately-higher-rankings
You can also check each post before you publish it to change it if you’d like.

Try these plugins on your WordPress blog and watch your search engine results grow automatically every time you post!

Tags: blog seo plugins, wordpress plugins seo, wordpress seo