Most of the blogging software available these days, including WordPress, have pretty good content structures that allow robots (a.k.a. crawlers) effortlessly crawl and index pages. However there are a few additions one may consider that can make his or her blog* even a better tool for content organization and presentation. This article will cover some of the essential SEO plugins created by third party developers and distributed online free of charge. With the help of these add-ons you should get a better control of some important for SEO features that define good optimized web page.

META Tags, Page Titles and Duplicate Content

We will start off with the well known plugin called All in One SEO Pack. It helps managing page titles, META descriptions and keywords, as well as controlling no-index META page directives for category and archive pages.

Page title is probably the most important part of your page. It needs to contain keyphrases that define a given page. All in One SEO Pack will help you get a better control over the way your titles are displayed. Learn more about the importance of titles at Blog SEO Checklist.

WordPress and other widely used blogging platforms lack the feature of defining META description and keywords for your pages or posts. This plugin allows you to do just that on a per-page basis. It also gives one an option to enable auto generated descriptions (refer to plugin’s instruction). Again, to understand the importance of METAs check out Blog SEO Checklist.

When it comes to duplicate content, blogs are one of the “best” examples of what not to do. And although many modern search engines have learnt how to deal with such situations, one still should not trust them and try to control the issue by making sure that there are no two different pages with the same text (or at least there are no such two pages visible to the robots). Anyways, this plugin does provide some basic tools for excluding category and archive pages from indexing by crawlers. But for more advanced and strong features one should consider the following plugin, called Robots Meta.

Duplicate and Irrelevant Content

If you want to disguise your pages that have a high chance of becoming dupes of your content or hide pages irrelevant to the content (examples: login pages, rss feeds, links to archives and category pages), you may consider Robots Meta plugin. It also automates control of external links on the home page, other useful features.

Speed Up Page Indexing

With the help of the following plugin - Google XML-Sitemaps, one will keep his or her XML-Sitemap files up-to-date. These types of files are supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search and persistently scanned by search engines for new pages; which in turn makes one’s content easy to discover and properly indexed in timely manner. For additional information on XML-Sitemaps refer to Sitemaps.org.

*In this article we will concentrate our discussion around WordPress. We may edit this post later on to include other blogging platforms.

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