How to Optimize your Blog’s Search Engine Ranking

Wordpress comes with several built in search engine optimization tools including .htaccess to create apparently static URLs called permalinks,blogrolling and pinging.

You can further optimize your blog by installing these four plugins.

1. Google Sitemaps GeneratorThis generator will create a google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. Currently homepage, posts, static pages, categories and archives are supported. The priority of a post depends on its comments. More comments, higher priority! If you have external pages which don’t belong to your blog, you can also add them to the list. This plugin will automaically inform Google whenever the sitemap gets regenerated.

   Download Google Sitemaps Generator

2. Optimal TitleUse this plugin to optimize your post title and display meaningful search engine results and browser bookmark names. It also reduces the chance of title truncation when viewed in search engine result pages by placing your post title in the beginning of the tag.

   Download Optimal Title

3. Head Meta DescriptionThis plugin allows you to add dynamic meta description automatically by extracting the first few words in your words. So it’s important to place your most important keywords in the first paragraph so that they are picked by this plugin.

   If you do not see your description tag, scroll down a bit because it’s possible that other tags may have pushed the tag lower down but still inside the tag.

   Download Head Meta Description

4. Add Meta Keyword TagThis plugin works similar like the Head Meta Description plugin except that it’s for the keyword tag. Add Meta Keyword Tag would output a default set of keywords, except on single posts. On single posts it would create a list of keywords based on the categories assigned to that post and any tags assigned to it. So you can simply pull the keywords from tagging plugins you already use such as Jerome’s Keywords and Bunny’s Technorati Tags.

   Download Add Meta Keyword Tag

Know any other WordPress Plugins that help in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your blog? Please let me know through comments.