First & before looking to plugins, you need to know that it’s very important in order make your WP blog SEO friendly, to change the default (or ugly) permalink structure based on posts IDs, instead of that it’s very recommended to use your posts titles in URLs. To do that, go from your WP blog dashboard to Options tab then Permalinks tab.

Full info about permalinks on WordPress.org (A must read).

Plugins:

General Plugins Instalation:

to install most of WordPress plugins, you need first to download the plugin in a .zip format, then to unzip the file & to upload its content to your blog /wp-content/plugins/ directory, depending on the plugin, you may have to upload one or more files and / or directories.

The next step usually is to activate the plugin, for that, you need to go from your adminstration panel to Plugins tab, to find the name of your new plugin & click on it for activation.

More or less complicated steps might be required depending on the plugin you install.

1. Google Sitemap Generator:

This is the first SEO plugin you need to install, Google Sitemap is a XML file that lists your blog or site pages & set indexation priority for each, the file is used by the 3 major search engines (Google, Yahoo! & MSN) while indexing websites.

Google Sitemap Generator automatically & in real time creates & updates the Sitemap, so that you’re never bothered again by updating it manually. Here are the plugin features listed by the author:

• WordPress 2 compatible
• No PHP skills needed
• Has a user interface where you can customize all parameters like change frequencies, priorities etc.
• Available in fourteen languages
• Generates a static XML file in your Blog directory (Filename is customizable)
• Can generate a gzipped version of the sitemap
• Generates a sitemap for homepage, posts, static pages, categories and archive pages
• Calculates a priority for each post, based on the number of comments (You can also turn this off)
• The XML file gets automatically rebuilt if you change/edit/create/publish a post
• Tells Google automatically about changes via Google-Ping
• You can include external pages which aren’t generated by WordPress or are not recognized by this plugin
• You can define a minimum post priority, which will override the calculated value if it’s too low
• Includes a WordPress filter for other plugins which can add their pages to the sitemap.

Get the plugin from ArneBrachhold.de

Don’t forget to submit your sitemap to Google via your Webmasters Tools Account. If you don’t have an account, create it & follow instructions to let Google verify that you are the owner of your site.

In addition you should have a robots.txt file to tell search engines which pages & folders should be indexed & which not (administration folders for instance), you can generate robots.txt using an online tool from MCAnerin.com (Also an introduction to robots.txt and a guide about it there).

Then before uploading the file to your root, add this line to it:

Sitemap: http://videotutorialspot.info/sitemap.xml

Replace http://videotutorialspot.info/ with your site URL of course.

One more addition concerning Yahoo! search engine, create a urllist.txt file, it’s a simpler file than robots.xml because it only lists your site URLs one under each other, you can make it using GSiteCrawler, a software that makes all kinds of Sitemaps, get it from GSiteCrawler.com, see VTS urllist.txt file as an example.

Once created & uploaded to your root, submit it to Yahoo! HERE. (there’s a compressed version of the file too “urllist.txt.gz“, also upload it & submit it).

2. All in One SEO Pack:

This plugin does the following:

• Generating META tags and letting you define them
• Automatically optimizing your titles and letting you specify your own ones
• Avoiding indexing of duplicate content

This plugin though is not used on VTS, you may need it especially to add custom Meta Descriptions to posts.

More info about the plugin, download, help & support on WP.UberDose.com.

SEO Title Tag:

SEO Title Tag plugin, has the most important feature of All in One SEO Pack: adding individual SEO friendly Title Tags to all your posts & pages & is very easy to use & to customize.

Title tags are the titles that appear in the top bar of the browser & are important for SEO because they are used by search engines to index your website and shown in the search results.

Get SEO Title Tag plugin from NetConcepts.com.

3. Related Entries:

This plugin will output a series of related entries to each of your posts, based on keyword matching, this is a great way to cross relevant links within your site, it’s SEO friendly & will help to share the PR between all your pages, & also your visitors will love it.

For instalation, and after uplaoding & activating the plugin, you will notice a Related Posts Options tab under your Plugins tab. Click the link for index table setup script at the bottom of the options page.

I will suppose the previous steps went fine, now look for this file: single.php in the directory of the theme you’re using for your blog (under /wp-content/themes/ directory), open single.php file using notpad and look for this line:

<?php the_content(); ?>

Add related_posts(); to it, so that it looks like this:

<?php the_content(); related_posts(); ?>

Save and upload the file.

Advanced instructions & download on Wasabi.PBWiki.com

4. SEO Siloing:

When you create or edit a post you can assign one or more categories (and even sub-categories) to it, with SEO Siloing plugin you can create static pages containing lists of posts under specific categories.

Example: If you have some posts under a category named Adobe Photoshop, and after installing SEO Siloing, create a static page, give it a descriptive title, example Adobe Photoshop Video Tutorials, then you’ll have to add a code to the page & to publish it, and the pluging will auto-add the list of all your posts under Adobe Photoshop category into that page.

Such pages may be very useful for your readers & also are search engines friendly.

Download & all information on requirements & installation on MEMWG.com

5. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator:

This plugin allows you to create a HTML sitemap for you blog, it’s a very powerful plugin & very customizable.

Some of its features include: support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more.

Download the plugin from DagonDesign.com.

As an example, checkout Video Tutorials Spot Sitemap

6. Sidebar Widgets:

A must for any WP blog, but not required if you have WordPress 2.2 or higher (included in main instalation).

As its name stats, Sidebar Widgets plugin allows you to add various widgets to the sidebar(s) by default you can add a lot, including up to 9 text widgets allowed in which you can type whatever you want, such as HTML or Javascript codes. There are many plugins available to add many other kinds of widgets.

Some of users & SEO friendly widgets are:

• Recent Posts: Displays the most recent posts
• Categories: Displays the list of all your categories
• Calender: Displays clickable dates which sort posts by date
• Archives: Displays links to your posts sorted by month
• Pages: Displays your static pages.

Get the plugin from HERE.

7. Post Teaser:

This is not really a SEO plugin, but very useful especially if your posts are heavy & containing graphics etc.

Post Teaser will generate a preview or “teaser” of a post for the main, archive and category pages. Users then can click on post title or on a link under it generated by the plugin to see the full post.

This will help to save your bandwidth, to make your blog load faster & allow you to put more posts on each page as they’ll be smaller.

Get the plugin & more information about it from Dev.WP-Plugins.org.

End of article … well, in fact SEO efforts are endless, so I guess I have a lot to add to it, anyways, I hope this information was helpful, again please let me know if you have any addition or remark, thank you!

Annilatan Evol I.