WordPress SEO plugins updated January 2008.
Working on making the SEO plugins I use on my WordPress blogs freely available to those who buy AdSense themes from this site.
Basically adding support to the AdSense themes so when one of these plugins (list soon) are installed the theme uses them. At the same time if a plugin is absent the theme will still work well.
Alinks SEO Plugin
Been using the Alinks WP plugin for a while, not specifically an SEO plugin (no plugin on this page is really an SEO plugins), but when used correctly it makes using internal linking easy.
Open up the SEO Blog Templates with AdSense page and you’ll currently find 8 text links within the content of that blog post. I manually added 2 of those links (the Rounders and the Scribe BlogSpot links) the remaining 6 links are automatically added by the Alinks plugin.
When Alinks is installed you open up one of the modules, add a keyword and list where you want that keyword to link to when that word or phrase is used within a post.
For example I want the word SEO to link to the home page of my SEO Consultant Services site (so yes you can link to other sites as well).
Very useful from an SEO point of view since manually adding links to a large site is a pain, this takes the hard work out of internal linking.
Download Alinks SEO Plugin updated: January 2008.
Post Teaser SEO Plugin
Found this WordPress plugin a while ago, out the box it’s OK, though the plugin creator used the anchor text More for links rather than the name of the post. More, Click Here, Home are terrible words from an SEO perspective to use for text links, so don’t do it, it’s bad, wrong, BIG SEO mistake 
)
My SEO version of the Post Teaser plugin creates an excerpt of a post automatically, like if you added the more tag within your posts and links to the main post using the title of the post as anchor text.
If you’ve bought an AdSense + SEO WordPress theme from this site you’ll have noticed they already automatically create an excerpt of a post (excerpts on archive pages reduces the chances of having duplicate content problems) so why do we need this WordPress plugin?
First let me say shut up and stop being observant I have my reasons for using this plugin .
Unfortunately the theme code used to create these excerpts does not work with the WordPress plugin Alinks (see above). Basically Alinks works on every page of the site, so will link from blog post pages, archive pages and the home page. when you use the excerpt code though Alinks no longer works on the home page or archive pages, potentially removing a lot of internal links!!
Installing the Post Teaser plugin gives you an excerpt and the option to use Alinks linking on all pages on the blog. Also the excerpt is a little nicer, you get some extra tags that gives info like-
Not essential, but looks good
Download Post Teaser SEO Plugin updated: January 2008.
Related Posts SEO Plugin
This is an amazing WordPress plugin for mixing your content up a bit. When configured correctly it will post a list of related posts somewhere (I use it at the bottom) on a blog posts page. What it does is look for related posts, adds a link to that post and a short extract. If you have a lot of posts this can make a significant difference to your sites SERPs.
As I write this post there’s not enough pages on this site to really take advantage of the power of this plugin.
Download Related Posts SEO Plugin updated: January 2008.
Popularity Contest SEO Plugin
With this plugin installed all your posts are rated according to various factors including the number of comments. This score as represented as a % is then shown at the bottom of each post with 100% being very popular.
The top posts are then linked on the menu giving easy access to your most popular posts to visitors and search engines (if a post is popular adding more links is probably a good idea).
Download WordPress 2.5 Popularity Contest SEO Plugin updated: May 2008.
Please note the original Popularity Contest plugin no longer works with WordPress 2.5. Fortunately I found 2 fixes which are included in the file above to bring this plugin back to life
Download WordPress 2.3 Popularity Contest SEO Plugin updated: January 2008.
If you haven’t updated to WordPress 2.3 please use the file below.
Download Pre WP 2.3 Popularity Contest SEO Plugin updated: January 2008.
WP-PageNavi SEO Plugin
This WordPress plugin adds a new navigation menu near the bottom of archive pages (home, category, monthly etc…). By default WordPress themes have a Next and Previous links which from an SEO perspective means deeper content does not get a great deal of PR/link power!
By installing WP-PageNavi archive pages will now link to up to 7 archive pages (can be configured to show more/less) including the first page and the last in that archive set.
What this means is search engine spiders will be able to find your deeper archive pages easier, so with LARGE blogs more of your deeper content should be indexed.
Download WP PageNavi SEO Plugin updated: January 2008.
SEO WordPress Plugins in General
You may have noticed none of the plugins above are real SEO plugins, this is because I put all the SEO into the themes. There are plugins that add meta tags, create better titles, but the WordPress template code is very versatile and so you don’t need these plugins as long as when making a WordPress template you know what you are doing from an SEO perspective.
If you’ve bought one of my templates and want to see how much effort goes into the SEO coding open up header.php into a text editor and compare it to a header.php from any other WordPress theme you have. All that code is how we get the targeted title elements in various types of blog pages rather than the standard title of most WordPress themes.
That being said, if you’ve bought a WordPress theme from the site and feel it would benefit from a specific plugin support (for SEO reasons mainly) please let me know. I wasn’t going to add widget support, but customers kept pestering me about it
WordPress Widget Plugins
As of January 2008 all WordPress themes on the site are widget ready. Don’t say I never listen to my customer base, many of you had contacted me asking for widget support which I’d over looked completely since I’ve always edited the WordPress theme files manually when I want something moving around I’d never needed that plugin (with WordPress 2.3 no longer need a plugin, 2.3 has built in widget support).
A customer had a problem with a theme (I’d made an error) and I noticed he’d used Widgets for the menu and this removed the optimisation added to the menu of his theme. Fortunately for this customer he had manually SEO his category/archive names etc… (keyword Category sort of thing, which is how I used to do it) and so it shouldn’t have a negative impact on his SERPs.
Using widgets with my themes will no longer be a problem since all menu items are now widgets and so when you use a GAT widget (all my optimised widgets end in GAT like “Categories GAT” for Categories menu item) they will still be fully SEO optimised.
I have to admit widgets are very helpful, I own dozens of blog sites and this will make making each a little more unique/interesting much easier.
David
8 responses to WordPress SEO Plugins
Thanks David,
You have just saved my time, my efforts and my all frets (from SEO perspective) using wordpress.
Hello Dave,
I have just couldn’t find the term on which the ‘related posts plugin’ sorts for related posts.
secondly – I realized that alinks does not work when simple tags is activated.
please advice,
Nissim
Related posts plugin needs setting up first, so check the readme file for instructions. If setup correctly there is no term to add or anything it’s all automated. This means sometimes you don’t get related posts listed on blogs with little content or on posts that you or I would expect to have related posts on. Like this page, there’s no related posts listed despite this page being related to lots of posts!
The aLinks and Simple Tags problem I’ve no idea what it could be, I’m running the aLinks (downloaded from this page) and Simple Tags 1.6.4 (slightly out of date) on http://www.elvincountry.com/ with no problems. Probably installed the Simple Tags at WordPress version 2.6 so maybe something changed, I only use it on a couple of sites.
I don’t offer support for these plugins as I didn’t write them.
In the readme files there are links to the original authors sites, maybe others have run into this problem and found solutions. Unfortunately the aLinks plugin authors site no longer works.
David Law
WordPress SEO Plugins
Greeting David,
I have installed the theme and I tried install plugin alinks but it gives me a fatal error when I try to activate it. After I download the plugin I unzip it and FTP to sites/wp-content/plugins file. I have download it from your link twice and twice I get triggering fatal error. Any suggestions.
I activated SEO Post Teaser but it tells me that there is a 3.11.3 Version upgrade from 3.8. I presume I should not upgrade to 2.11.3 am I correct.
Thanks.
WordPress SEO Plugins
Hi,
Just tried to activate Related Post SEO and it is also giving me a fatal error. I am using Word Press 2.7.1.
Appreciate your help.
Hi Serge,
Not had that error with those plugins and have a lot of sites running the latest version of WordPress (2.7.1). Because you are getting multiple plugin problems suggests it’s not due to the plugins directly.
This is what I’d try.
Deactivate all plugins and trying those plugins independently, sometimes 2 plugins can’t run together?
Download the full version of WordPress 2.7.1 and upload it over your current files: if you have a corrupt file or an out of date file (messed up upgrade) this will fix it.
Note down the fatal error and do various Google searches see if others have had this problem.
Although I don’t think it’s the plugins at fault, unfortunately the original author of the aLinks plugin (headzoo.com) no longer updates the aLinks plugin, the domain above is no longer even live! As WordPress updates issues are going to develop, so far I’ve personally not had any problems with aLinks, but I’m sure eventually this plugin will stop working (WordPress 3.0 maybe
).
Every few months or so I take a quick look at what’s new in WordPress plugins, but so far not found a similar plugin to aLinks to replace it, I prefer to use plugins that are kept up to date, (right now I think 3 of the plugins above are no longer updated by the original authors) even if I find a new one that’s updated today there’s no guarantee that will be the case a year from now. So far been lucky with not having problems or been able to find sites online with new bug fixes.
My SEO version of the Post Teaser plugin has significant code alterations to make it work for better search engine rankings, I wouldn’t use the original plugin without the modifications since the link to the full post has terrible anchor text (“Read More” if I recall correctly).
Are you sure you are looking at the right plugin when you say it’s updated to 3.11.3, when I go to the site I got the original from it still says it’s version 3.8?
Hmm, looks like there is another plugin with the same name that is based on the original Post Teaser plugin (original no longer updated). WordPress plugin authors don’t make things easy
I’ll take a look at it and see if it’s better than the original Post Teaser. From the text seams there is a difference, original would clip the post at X characters, the new one cuts at the end of a paragraph. As long as your posts aren’t one big paragraph this could be a small improvement (it’s also kept up to date).
David Law
WordPress SEO Plugins
Thank you for the very and interesed plugins
Hi
Just to ask if you are doing AdSense customization. Want also to include into my existing website, thanks.
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