The question I would like to ask what is the best plugins out there for SEO and WP are the standard template good for SEO? The site I have is more like a product review ad I am wondering if anyone can help. Can anyone reccomend a good plug in or two that has helped in the serps?
I have 3 awesome plugins for SEO listed in a post on my blog; All in One SEO Pack, Category Base Removal Plugin, and Google XML Sitemaps. Download links included.
Right here: http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?p=3708201#post3708201 And this one - http://www.prelovac.com/vladimir/wordpress-plugins/seo-image (which came out after that post was written)
I used All in One SEO Pack until I found HeadSpace2. This plugin combines All in One and the old debunked Ultimate Warrior. It works with the 2.3 and above. Check it out, you will never go back to All in One. Here are my plugins that I recommend
First thing to do for SEOing Wordpress is to login as admin and in administrator panel do: Options -> Permalinks -> here you ought to change dynamic urls to static ones. You can do it by setting cusom structure to: Ok now you can move to some useful plugins: 1) All in One SEO plugin - this one is really needed. It will enambe you to change the description of your blog, titles, keywords etc ect and much more useful things. You should play with setting a little bit so it will suit your blog well. 2) Create robots.txt file and make sure that crawlers are allowed to crawl through your site. Fill in this into robots.txt file for example: Read Robots.txt specification for more information. 3) KB Robots.txt plugin is pretty useful to manage robots.txt without manually rewriting and reuploading the file 4) XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress 3.0.3 plugin is also useful. It will help you to create and manage your xml sitemaps for Google, Yahoo and MSN. I recommend creating the sitemap at least for Google. 5) I forgot about the most important thing. Submit your blog to search engines. 6) Sign in Google Webmaster Tools and tweak setting for your site a bit. Set prefered domain (the one without www is better imo), submit the sitemap you've created here and there are few more settings you can play with. 7) When writing posts, choose eloquent and simple titles (should contain keywords but don't overdo it). Also try using STRONG tag with keywords in the articles (you might set font-weight for STRONG tag to normal in stylesheet) because too much bold text doesn't look good. 8) You can also consider using social bookmarking sites to promote your blog (this doesn't have much to do with SEO but it will get you some extra traffic) like Technorati, Digg, Stumbleupon, Mixx and more - choose the ones you like the most
Sorry, but while the rest of your post is for the most part spot-on, I just cannot in good conscience agree with this. Not everyone will be using a browser that's capable of handling CSS (such as some mobile users), and there's no telling what the myriad of screen reader software will do either. Furthermore if you use <strong> in your markup but style it to appear normally, the search engines may flag your blog/site for human review - and there's no telling if you may get your blog/site banned from the index for it either. IN other words, use the markup appropriately, and write your pages/posts for your users, not the search engines.