Do you use WordPress as your blogging CMS ? If yes, you would definitely love to know about the SEO Plugins that can help your website rank and index faster in Google and other search engines. If you are not familiar with the term “SEO” and new to WordPress blogging then here you go: SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is a optimization process that helps to get your website rank well in search engines and getting more organic traffic including Google, Bing and Yahoo. You may like to check this blog post at Searchengineland on SEO.  I Hope now you are clear about the term SEO and you might be interested to know the WordPress plugins that may help your blog to score better rankings in search engine results. Being a webmaster or a blogger it is everyone’s dream to be able to rank any posts, websites on any niche which is a part of Search Engine Optimization. And with the flexibility of WordPress we can tweak our blogs, optimize them using different tools and plugins developed by other people in the WordPress community. WordPress is always said to be one of the SEO optimized CMS as a result the blogs can be easily SEO optimized over it’s self optimization.

Before heading towards today’s topic i would like to say something which is important,”Although these plugins may help you to get your blog SEO optimized, the content in your blog is always the king in the matter of SEO. So prepare a well written content and apply these plugins in your blog to beat your competitors along with some off page stuff that is always mandatory.”

I would like to begin from the scratch (for a newly install WordPress blog) and you can too do them for any blog.

Step 1 : Fix your Permalink Structure

Navigate to yourblog.com/wp-admin/options-permalink.php and select any one options others than ?p=123 Recommended permalink structure is Custom with /%postname%/ on it.

Step 2 : Install XML sitemap plugins for posts, images and videos

Generating and submitting sitemap to Google and Bing is a plus point, so their bot crawls every pages of your website that are structured on your sitemap. You can create sitemap for posts, images and videos which you can submit to Google via Google Webmaster Tools and to Bing via Bing webmaster tools. Click on Install New Plugin and Search “Google XML Sitemaps”, you can install the one by Arne Brachhold. You can also install other sitemap plugins for images, videos and mobile site. After installing the plugin, activate them and configure. Now submit the xml sitemap link which looks like yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml (link may varies on your plugin) to Google and Bing via your webmaster tools account.

Step 3 : Install Combo SEO Plugin

Well i don’t mean any plugin whose name is “COMBO”, i want you to install a plugin that works as the backbone of your website from SEO point of view. You can choose any one from All in One Seo Pack or WordPress SEO by Yoast or SEO Ultimate. There are others too but i like these ones which had worked best for me.

So what does these plugin do ? Well they help you to manage your Meta Details of your Homepage, post pages and other archive pages, link to Google/Bing webmaster tools and make your blog search engine friendly. Configure the plugin you install correctly with the proper Title, Meta details so they can push your website to the top of search engine results.

Step 4 : Install Social Sharing Buttons

As the majority of online people are spending their time on Social networks and we should not forget that these social signals are taken into consideration by the search engines for ranking factors. Install any social sharing buttons which at least include Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and Pinterest.

Step 5 : Install Cache Plugin to Increase your Loadspeed

It’s long time that Google is taking page speed under consideration for ranking a website. So install a Cache Plugin WP Super Cache or W3 Total Cache and configure them. WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache are the popular cache plugins for WordPress available till date. After installing and configuring the cache plugin you can test your site’s page speed here.

So that was all about optimizing your WordPress blog for Search Engines. More factors like content, on page seo, off page seo, backlinks etc. are responsible for search engine optimization of a blog. So you should consider these too to get success and rank your websites on search engines.