The Best SEO and Traffic Generating WordPress Plugins for 2011

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Everyone wants more traffic when it comes to their website. One of the easiest but sometimes misunderstood practice to build traffic is SEO. Even if you do not understand Search Engine Optimization, you can use tools to help with your SEO. Those tools are plugins created by WordPress users, SEO specialists, and developers trying to make our lives easier.

Today, I thought I would share with you some of my favorite SEO and Traffic Generating Plugins that I feel are the best of 2011 and will help in the pursuit to generate more traffic. The plugins listed in this article are either design to help with better SEO and the rest may not be SEO but they are designed to bring traffic to your site or keep them on your site.

There are mixture of premium (with affiliate links) and free plugins to choose from. All plugins have been test driven by myself or trusted bloggers and friends that recommend these plugins. A

As with any other plugins, research these plugins and decide which ones are right for you. You do not need all of these plugin and several of the listed plugins will not work together.

Do not use the following plugins together. These plugins are an all-one type of plugin and they all basically do the same thing. But each does it a little different and you should choose the one that you like the best.

• All-in-One SEO Pack
• Platinum SEO
• Worpress SEO by Yoast
• Headspace 2

SEO and Traffic Generating Plugins

All-in-One SEO Pack – is a plugin that adds SEO features that WordPress does not have by default. The default settings in the pack is great but, if you need to change those settings for some reason then you can make those changes. I only recommend making those changes if you understand SEO, otherwise the default settings work great. This plugin adds an additional  title, descriptions, keywords and then you can use “noindex” if you have duplicate content issues. So far, I have been happy with this plugin and as long as this plugin works the way it does and it continues to grows as WordPress does, I plan to stay with this plugin.

Platinum SEO – is another complete SEO package for WordPress. Platium SEO offers the same functions as All-in-One and more. I do not use this plugin, but I have heard good things about it. If All-in-One isn’t your thing, then you might want to look into this SEO plugin. – screen shot from Platinum SEO site.

WordPress SEO by Yoast – is considered to be the most complete SEO plugin for WordPress. It has everything from snippet preview that helps optimize our page titles, meta descriptions, and keywords, to XML sitemaps and lot of other features as well. The Yoast SEO plugin is a plugin that recently caught my eye. I recently found several great reviews of the plugin and plan to test this plugin on my next project. If you need a plugin for SEO, this is going to be your all around best choice.  – Image is from Yoast.com

Headspace 2 – is another powerful all-in-one SEO plugin. This plugin manages the meta-data and also a wide range of SEO tasks. You can tag your posts, change themes on certain pages, disable plugins on different  pages, create custom titles and descriptions  that can improve your page rank, and more. Check out video and see what Headspace 2 is all about.

SEO Pressor – is an on-page SEO plugin that will help optimize your on-page SEO for your articles. The plugin helps by making suggestions to your H1 through H3 tags, keyword density, and alt tags. SEO Pressor will check your placement of keywords in the first and last sentences of your articles and check for internal linking. check out the video to see what it can do it for you.

SEO Content Control – helps you identify and clean up week content on your site, such as finding duplicate content. All-in-one SEO plugins has  features like these. But if yours does not, then take a look at this plugin.  Print screen is from SEO content Control.

Keyword Winner – is a powerful plugin that was created by Dan Lew.  The plugin helps you find the perfect keywords for your article and makes suggestions throughout the article to help it rank well. Although I haven’t had the chance to test this plugin, but there are lot of bloggers that I trust who use this plugin and highly recommend this plugin. I plan on purchasing this plugin very soon.

All-in-One Webmaster – If you are a webmaster and love analytics or if you need to add certain code to your WordPress plugin, then this is the tool for you. This simple plugin will allow you to add code to the proper code for webmaster options for Google, Bing, Alexa, Yahoo, Facebook, and many more. The screenshot is from the All-in-One Webmaster WordPress page.

Google XML Sitemap –  generates a special XML site map for your site that will help search engines index your blog better. Using Google XML Sitemap will make it easier for the crawlers to completely crawl your site with a better chance of crawling the whole site and not missing any part of your site. Another great thing this plugin does, it will automatically notify the major search engines every time you ad a new article to your site. The screenshot is from the Google XML Sitemap website.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – is a true sitemap generator and not an XML version. I use this plugin on Evolutionary Designs and it works great. It supports multi-page generation, permalink support, and many other things you might would want to control on your sitemap.

W3 Total Cache – is considered to be the most complete WordPress performance framework. It improves the user experience of your site by caching your website. By caching every aspect of your site, it will improve server performance, and it improves page load times.

This plugin is recommended by web hosts such as: HostGator and more. It is used by mattcutts.com, mashable.com, smashingmagazine.com, makeuseof.com, yoast.com and many more.

NoFollow Free – removes the the “nofollow” attribute from your blog’s comment section (author link’s) and from the comment text links. This is a great plugin, for those that want to make their blogs ‘nofollow free.” The downside to being nofollow free is that spammers and random people will leave worthless comments on your blog in hopes that you will approve their comments. But this plugin has a fix to help combat those people. Simply configure the plugin so that a comment has to comment a certain amount of times on your blog before they get the attribute removed. That way, if one of those spammers gets by, then its nofollow.

ComLuv – is plugin that will automatically add a link of their last blog post at the end of their comment. Using this plugin not only helps the blog owner get more comments on their articles, but also helps the commenter by rewarding them with a dofollow link to one of their latest articles. The plugin also comes with a great support community that you can show off your site, upgrade your URLs and feed locations.

Insights – is a powerful plugin that helps you write better posts. It performs in real-time interlinking of posts, insert Flickr images, YouTube videos, search Wikipedia, search Google, Google news, Google Blog Search, Google Book Search and Google Maps and many more. Screen shot from Insights website. Check out my review of insights to learn more.

MBP Ping Optimizer – corrects WordPress’ pinging system and solves all the problems that come with WordPress ping system. For more information, I would take a look at MaxBlogPress site and learn why it’s so important to control WordPress’ ping system. If you’re like me, I am constantly making changes to my articles, sometimes several times right after I publish it. With the default settings of WordPress ping system, every time you make changes to your article, it sends a ping out to the ping service directories. If you send to many pings, you will be banned from these sites and not even know it.

SEO Smart Links – provides automatic SEO benefits for your site that include custom keyword lists, nofollow, and much more. What I really like about this plugin is that will automatically link keywords and phrases  in your posts and comments with related posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog. Screen shot taken from website.

SEO Friendly Images – gives all your images the ALT and Title attributes that is needed for SEO. If your images do not have ALT and Title tags set, then the plugin will add them using the settings that you set during the configuration process.

IGIT Related Post with Images – automatically adds a related articles section after the post. This widget shows at least 4 images at the end of the article with images and title of the article. I find this plugin to more of a way to introduce users to other articles. The plugin does try and match your article with similar articles you have previous have written, but I found it mostly grabs whatever it feels like.

Image source: DeviantArt