4 WordPress Plugins that increased my PageRank

Since my last SEO post entitled Easy SEO tips and tricks for bloggers from Stephan Spencer at WordCamp 2008, my Google PageRank has increased from a 0 to a 4. In that time, my overall traffic has increased by 300% and my organic search engine traffic increased by 500%.

Organic Traffic: Web traffic which comes from unpaid listing at search engines or directories is commonly known as “organic” traffic.

When I started, only 4% of my web traffic was organic and now it’s up to 45%.  People are actually finding my content in searches. Yay!

Considering how little work I’ve actually done to see these initial results, it’s pretty exciting.

I’d like to share the 4 WordPress plugins that I rely on to make this possible.

1. SEO Title Tag *UPDATE: Not compatible with WP 2.7*

Use the SEO Title Tag plugin to hand craft titles for blog posts that appear in the <title> of your page.  If you read the post Easy SEO ips and tricks for blogger from Stephan Spencer at WordCamp 2008 it explains how absolutely invaluable this is.

2. All in One SEO Pack

I use the All-in-One SEO Pack to make sure my category, tag and author pages have great SEO titles and meta data.  Changing WP themes can change the way your titles are shown in the code, so using this plugin is a great way  to keep titles consistent regardless of themes.  Use it to add unique meta data (keywords, description) to EACH blog post. This also makes your search listings come up with a great recap underneath them.

** Note: I don’t use this plugin to format my title tags because I like to handcraft each post’s title using the SEO Title tag plugin above, but this is not yet compatible with WP 2.7 so this is a great alternative!

3. Google Analyticator

Google Analyticator makes it insanely easy to add your Analytics tracking code and not have to worry about hand coding it into whichever WP theme you are currently using.

4. Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress

Google Sitemaps Generator creates XML sitemaps from your site structure. You can customize how the priority of pages occur (for example, give higher priority to the most commented posts).  I just used this with its default settings right out of the box.  Make sure to evaluate your sitemaps at Google Webmaster Tools.  It also submits your changes to yahoo, msn and ask.com.