There are a lot of plugins for Wordpress floating around and only in the last few months have I really started to explore and experiment with what is out there. Amongst my playing around, there was also a bit of serious work too, I have discovered my 5 plugins which I consider to be very powerful, useful, simple to implement and use and above all very Search Engine Friendly. I can honestly say that on every WP site I have built in the last couple of months (approx 4-5) I have used these 5 definitive “must have” Wordpress plugins. And here they are (in no order):

1. Google XML Sitemaps – This plugin dynamically generates an XML sitemap for your website. It pings and notifies all major search engines which can help increase the crawl rate, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask etc. You can add custom URLs to the sitemap, modify the Priority, Change Frequency and furthermore you can also submit this sitemap to your google webmaster tools (or equivalent).
2. Platinum SEO – Simply, Platinum SEO optimised your blog/website for search engines. Features include; canonical urls, automatic 301 redirects for change in permalink, automatically creates meta tags and loads more.
3. Broken Link Checker – Broken Link Checker crawls through your blog looking for broken links. If any are found you will be notified on your dashboard and be presented with a couple of actions in attempt to rectify the problem. It also picks up missing images.
4. Top Level Categories – This plugin’s task is simple yet very effective. Use it to remove the prefix before the URL to your category page. E.g. “yourdomain.com/category/latest-news/” would  simply be “yourdomain.com/latest-news/”
5. The Excerpt re-reloaded – This plugin does a little bit more than the standard Wordpress excerpt function. It allows you to choose excerpt length, html tags, the link text to full post and the html container of the excerpt. Makes for much more userful and prettier exceprts.

Sometimes the results can be quite interesting.

I love looking through my top queries, you sometimes get some amazing long tail key phrases that people are somehow finding you for. For example I am found for the following:

“executive ball clicker” => Position 2
“hell clicker” => Position 16
and my personal favourite… “my girlfriend’s mother” at a strong 15th position

I am not the only one to notice these interesting results a few friends of mine have been found for some… interesting tags like “fat people f**king“, “fat people hugging” ,“f**king fat f**ker hugging” and the amazing “young boobs“. In each of these occasions the site has nothing to do with the phrases mentioned.

I guess these, and many more freak occurances, show how easy and potentially useful long tail key phrases can be in drawing fresh traffic to your website. If one would apply only the simplest of a range of certain keyphrases in content more regularly, I could image some very strong results may come out of it in the long run.

In the past when I had deleted a page on a website for one reason or another, I deleted it and that was it. I had no thoughts about what search engines have indexed it, what external sites may have been linking to it or even the overall power and relevancy of the page itself.

These days as soon as one page has been deleted or moved, I ALWAYS perform a 301 redirect to the new URL, a related URL or back to the homepage. This ensures any value the page had is not entirely wasted and may be transferred over.

To perform the redirects I use a .htaccess file with the following very simple code:

301 redirects using htacess can be very powerful. If I have moved an entire 200 page web site over to a new domain using the exact same structure and I plan to transfer all existing search engine rankings across, my best bet is to perform 301 redirects for each page.

Obviously, we don’t want to create 200 redirects manually so this can be easily avoided using the following.

This code would sit in the htaccess file of the OLD domain name. If I had this htaccess on my current URL (web-design-melbourne.net), any URL would be redirected to newurl.com.au. For example:

http://www.web-design-melbourne.net/testurl.html
–> would become –>
http://www.newurl.com.au/testurl.html

This is a powerful 301 redirect script using htaccess and I have used it without error countless times.