I’ve complied this list of my best SEO plugins for WordPress to download and install for your website or blog. Can you believe I first started writing this post on the 28th of September 2009! I never really got the time to finish writing it until now.

All these plugins have been developed for one sole reason, to allow you to improve your SEO on your WordPress site with little or no SEO knowledge. It does helps if you understand how to use these plugins to your advantage, however they will help you, even with a limited or basic knowledge of SEO.

If you need help understanding the basics of SEO, I suggest you read my blog post 10 Golden Rules of Search Engine Optimisation.

The Top 5 SEO Plugins for WordPress

1. All in One SEO by Michael Torbert - All in One SEO, is one of the most popular WordPress plugins of all time. Any WordPress blogs that I think rank well or tend to be popular online usually have installed the All in One SEO plugin. It does what it says, it helps you with all of your SEO. The plugin can help optimise your page titles, meta descriptions and keywords. (Note: I don’t add meta keywords into website code anymore, since Google stop reading them). This plugin will also auto-generate meta descriptions for you based on your post content. Download.
2. Google Analytics by Joost De Valk – Joost De Valk, or Yoast as he’s know online, is the king of WordPress SEO. I’ve been an avid reader of Joost’s blog now for a while and his Google analytics plugin is one, if not the most popular WordPress plugin out there. Joost’s plugin allows you to easily add the Google analytics tracking code to your website. I am an absolute believer in measurement, measurement and more measurement. Google analytics is a free web analytics tool,which will help you track your search engine traffic and referring links so you can monitor, A. What referring links you are getting? B. What Keywords people are finding you by? and C: How much traffic comes from search engines? Download.
3. XML-Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold- With this excellent plugin you make it easier for Google to read your website and faster. This plugin will automatically generate an .xml sitemap for your website to help Google crawl and index your website more quickly and efficiently.
4. Redirection by John Godley - It’s important when keeping track on your website SEO that you monitor and correct any broken pages or links. If you’ve moved any old post blogs or pages, you should do an appropriate 301 re-direct to inform Google where the new page/post is located. This plugin helps you create simple 301 redirects and monitor any pages that are missing so you can correctly redirect them. Download.
   
5. Keyword Statistics by Alexander Müller - This plugin can do very much the same as the All in One SEO plugin. I wouldn’t recommend running both plugins together, unless you know to customise the Keyword Statistics plugin settings. Essentially, I only use this plugin to track the density of keywords that I’ve written into my blog posts. It works extremely well, by telling you what the highest count for single words, 2 word phrases and 3 word phrases are. Useful for determining how effective your blog post is written in terms of keyword density. Download.

Hopefully, these plugins will help you improve your own search engine optimisation on your own WordPress website. Good luck!