In this article, I am going to talk a bit about various useful SEO tools, plugins, browser extensions and various other applications, that can can prove to be a blessing for any SEO analyst, or even bloggers to optimize their sites. I personally use most of these tools that I am going to mention here. This article will not just be a mere discussion of features and utilities of these tools, as you can find numerous such articles in the internet. Moreover, the official websites of the plugins and tools itself are enough to serve this purpose.

So, what I am going to talk about in this article is my own experience on using all of these tools. How useful they actually are and some criticisms that needs to be talked about. If you think, that you will get some how-to-guide to help you to get familiar with these tools or describe each and every single feature, then this article is surely not to be read.

This article will be a series article, which means that it will be divided into 3-4 parts and each part will come in Mondays of every week. It may not come, every successive week as, we have some other important articles to be scheduled sometimes, but be rest assured, that they will come every Monday. I didn’t want to make this article just too long to read, in mentioning all important  tools, plugins, applications and browser extensions, due to this reason, I thought to make it a series post. So, get ready to read the first installment of this series.

WordPress Plugins

Any article mentioning SEO tools, will be incomplete without mentioning WordPress Plugins in it. WordPress is the most famous blogging platform, and now-a-days because of intense competition in this field of blogging, you as blogger needs to learn and master SEO in order to bring valuable traffic to your blog.

1) WordPress SEO by Yoast

This is so far one of the best and the most popular WordPress SEO plugin. I myself am a proud user of this great SEO plugin. I must say, without this plugin, your blogs SEO will always be incomplete. Yes, definitely you can use several otherplugins to avail various features, but this is a single all-in-one plugin, which covers each and every aspect of WordPress SEO. So, just install this single plugin, configure it and forget the rest of the headache.

But the only thing because of which many users don’t like to use this plugin even after being the best in the class, is the expertise you need to have in SEO before configuring this plugin. You need to know, not only just the basics but also various advanced aspects of SEO in order to understand what this plugin does and configure it perfectly.

2) All In One SEO Pack

All In One SEO plugin for WordPress, comes second in mind just after WordPress SEO by Yoast. It is also a very good SEO plugin and most importantly a very simple one. After installing this plugin, you can configure the SEO of your entire blog in just a few minutes. I myself used to use this plugin on my blog for a long time. In the early days of my blogging career, I didn’t know much about SEO. Only the basics were known to me. So, I couldn’t understand most of the things in the Yoast plugin, and uninstalled it and moved to All In One SEO plugin.

Configuring things were really very easy, but I fell into a big mess as there were many problems like Image Attachments, replytocom, etc problems that I faced as this plugin didn’t offer any options to combat these problems. If you didn’t understand what this problem is, then don’t worry, I will be writing some articles discussing these problems. For now, just do a quick Google search to know more about these problems and how these can bring your website down in Google and get you penalized badly by the Panda.

So, if you are new to SEO and don’t know much about it, then you should go for this plugin, otherwise it is always a wiser choice to go for WordPress SEO by Yoast.

3) SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart links is one of the most important SEO plugin that you must use in your WordPress blog. What it does is very important and is must needed for every blog. It is very important to maintain a proper interlinking in every blog. It not only helps visitors to go from one page on your blog to the other, but it also helps the search engine bots and crawlers to crawl efficiently from one page to the other. Google also recommends to maintain a good internal linking structure in every blog.

But is is really possible for anyone to remember the article you wrote 6 months ago and make  a proper link to it in the current post you are writing. And this becomes an even more problematic when your site grows bigger and bigger. So, this plugin does an excellent job in managing the internal linking of your blog automatically. It uses efficient algorithms to link to various posts using important keywords. It also makes the job of managing dofollow, nofollow, open in new window, etc features easy and simple.

I myself, don’t like to give dofollow to every single webpage I link to. So, I keep them as nofollow. But what I do is, I keep a list in this plugin, where I mention those specific web pages which I want to pass link juice to. Thus this is an excellent way to manage your sites link juice.

4) Google Analytics for WordPress

If you use Google Analytics to track your site traffic, then this plugin is a must use plugin. What it does is very simple. It just adds the Google Analytics tracking code in your site so that Google can track your websites visitors. Now, you can also do this simple stuff by editing the template of your site. But everybody, is not well comfortable with editing HTML and PHP codes.

So, in this situation, this plugin comes in real handy. You can just add the tracking code with just a single click of a button.  This plugin has been developed by Yoast, so be rest assured to get the best performance out from it. This plugin ensures, that your data are tracked with utmost accuracy. It also ensures faster loading of pages and the elimination of tracking errors when the javascript of a site hasn’t loaded fully.

It also implements one of the toughest things, as Yoast exclaims, in this plugin, where you can make full use of the Custom variables feature introduced by Google a few years back. Now you can either track or eliminate the visits tracked for logged in users, track visits per author, see whether your old posts are still getting any traffic or not and many more.

5) Robots Meta

Don’t blame me, but I am a bit biased about Yoast plugins, as his contribution to SEO plugins is just awesome. So, lets get into the point. Robots Meta plugin is an another very efficient plugin that gives you even more advanced control on the SEO of your WordPress site. Some of the features of this plugin is already in the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin, but not all.

The best thing about this plugin, is the feature to add “noindex,nofollow or index, nofollow or noindex, follow of index,follow” options to each and every single posts. This makes it easier for you to prevent indexing or following or any post that is not of much quality. Sometimes, I use this feature to noindex some of my showcase article where the length of the article is very less andnumber of images are more.

Another important feature, is to redirect WordPress image attachments URL’s to parent post URLs. This is a great feature as it removes the bug in WordPress that can kill the SEO of any site by creating numerous low quality image attachment pages. There are many other great options like noindexing tags, categories, date-based archives, author archives, etc. but they are quite self explanatory.

In this article, I mainly tried to concentrate on WordPress plugins and tools for improving the SEO for your WordPress blog. These are the plugins that I myself use and I recommend my readers to use them too. In the next part of the series, we will focus on some of the most awesome browser extensions of Chrome and Firefox that can change the way you work as an SEO. So, stay tuned for the nest installment of this series. See you next week!