19 of the Best SEO WordPress Plugins of 2012

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It’s the start of the year, so why not take your Website to the next level. If you are having issues getting the search engines to find your website, then you need to concentrate on SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in the new year.

Basic search engine optimization for any website isn’t all that complicated and once you understand the always changing rules then you can optimize any site. That’s right, I said always changing rules. In general the rules do change, but there are few basic things you can when writing your articles that will always help the search engines find your content.

If you are using WordPress, then working with SEO is easy. There are plenty of free and premium SEO plugins that can help you get more search engine traffic. With all the plugins out there, there are a lot that are junk plugins, then there are those that every WordPress Site owner showed have on their site.

Below, is a list of the best WordPress plugins from last year.  All of the plugins listed have been updated recently except for a few that haven’t  been in a while (but still work with recent versions of WordPress). All the plugins listed are in my opinion some of the best available to the WordPress community.

Over the next year, I will continue to look for more great SEO plugins to add to the collection.

SEO Plugins – Main SEO Plugins

Below is a list of SEO plugins that control the main functions of SEO for your WordPress sites. Most control the on-page SEO that you have to setup for each post while some may have features that will add SEO features to each page/post automatically and the overall SEO on your site. Please only install one primary SEO Plugin. If you install more than one, it may cause issues.

WP SEO by Yoast

WP SEO by Yoast is my favorite WordPress SEO plugin and I now use it on almost all my sites. “This plugin is written from the ground up by WordPress SEO consultant and WordPress developer Joost de Valk to improve your site’s SEO on all needed aspects. While this WordPress SEO plugin goes the extra mile to take care of all the technical optimization, more on that below, it first and foremost helps you write better content. WordPress SEO forces you to choose a focus keyword when you’re writing your articles, and then makes sure you use that focus keyword everywhere.”

All in One SEO Pack

All-in-One-SEO Pack is another great SEO plugin and its one of the more popular ones available. It’s a basic plugin with a premium option.

HeadSpace2 SEO

“HeadSpace2 is an all-in-one meta-data manager that allows you to fine-tune the SEO potential of your site. Visit the HeadSpace page for a video demonstration.”

WordPress SEO Secondary Plugins

Below is a list of SEO plugins that can be used along side the primary SEO plugins such as WP SEO plugin. Some of the plugins in this list are mostly free with a few premium plugins worth adding to your website. Just remember,  you do not need all of these plugins and some do the same thing. So do some research and see which ones will work best for your needs. These plugins work great along any of the above primary SEO plugins.

Some of the plugins listed, may not necessarily be SEO plugins, but they in some way help with the SEO process on the site.

SEO Smart Links

“SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.” This works great for deep linking articles. By deep linking I mean, link your current article to a relevant older article or page. Please keep in mind that if you add to many deep links to your articles, this could effect your SEO. So adding one or two deep links to each article you write should ok.

SEO Friendly Images

“SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well.”

SEO Scribe

“The all new Scribe 4.0 brings you a battle-tested content marketing process with an integrated, holistic approach to online marketing that maximizes your return on investment.” This a great premium plugin that will help get the hang of SEO by giving suggestions to your content on how to be get better a better SEO score. Plus it has many new features that will help your site.

SEO Pressor

SEO Pressor is a premium plugin that helps analyze and automate the SEO process during the contention creation process.

SEO Auto Links & Related Posts

“Automatically create auto links, related posts, and slide out related posts when user reach the end of article.”

Yet Another Related Posts Plugins

“Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.”

WP-HypnoLinks

WP- HypnoLinks is a new plugin on the market and was created by Andy Baily the creator of CommentLuv Free/Premium. This plugin is a great plugin for deep linking to your older articles. This plugin was designed as a tool to automate affiliate links by keywords. But you can also setup key words to link to any page you want.

Broken Link Checker

“This plugin will check your posts, comments and other content for broken links and missing images, and notify you if any are found.“

SEO SearchTerms Tagging 2

“With displaying incoming search terms linked to your blog posts from single post and side wide sidebar, you will strengthen the on page SEO of your web site, therefore your SERP will be better than before.” This is a great plugin and it will help index your pages faster but be careful how often you use this. This tool could be more harmful than good.

Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin

“Redirect Pages/Posts to another page/post or external URL. Has edit box as well as global options. Specify the redirect Location and type. For PHP5+. “ Need a way to redirect some pages on your site? Then is a plugin you might want to check out.

RSS Footer

“This plugin makes it easy to add a line of content to the beginning or the end of all the articles in your feeds, for instance to display a link back to your blog.” This plugin hasn’t been updated in over two years but its still works and is compatible up to WordPress Version 3.0.5. This plugin was created by Joost de Valk (Yoast.com) so we know it’s a great plugin and it will be updated if there is ever a need.

Google Site Verification Plugin

“Verify your blog with Google with only a couple clicks! No need to copy and paste tokens anymore; this plugin makes calls to the Google Site Verification API to automate the entire verification process.” This is another old plugin that has been updated in a while, but it should still work. I would run some tests if you really want to run this plugin on your site. But you can always verify your site manually on Google’s Webmaster Tools.

Google XML Sitemaps

“This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. With such a sitemap, it’s much easier for the crawlers to see the complete structure of your site and retrieve it more efficiently. The plugin supports all kinds of WordPress generated pages as well as custom URLs. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.”

CommentLuv

Commentluv Free is and CommentLuv Premium plugin that “rewards your readers by automatically placing a link to their last blog post at the end of their comment. Encourage a community and discover new posts. “ “CommentLuv Pro has even more amazing features that can bring even more traffic and comments to your blog by giving you the ability to fight spam, add keywords, integrate twitterlink, add a top commentators widget, social enticements and by having it installed on your site, you get advanced backlink features on EVERY CommentLuv blog when you comment (there are 10’s of thousands of CommentLuv blogs)” I have been using CommentLuv Free for years and recently invested in the premium version and I have found a lot good reasons why it was worth making the switch. Check out my review of CommentLuv Premium to learn why I love it and why I recommend this for any serious blogger looking to build more traffic and get more comments on their sites.

Author hReview

“Writing and publishing reviews is a good idea, ranking your reviews on the first page of Google is great, but what’s more important than that is to actually review and recommend good stuff, never share something spammy with the community!” Do you like to write reviews on your sit?  Then this is the plugin for you. My good friend created this plugin using the rich snippets features that Google now uses in their search. Check out my review and an article/infographic on what Rich Snippets are.

Keyword Winner

Keyword Winner is premium SEO plugin that is designed to help you find the best keywords for your articles.