The blog revolution has only been going for about 2 years, but regular blogging has become a major part of the web today and it has great benefits for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). But even in the worst case scenario where nobody reads your blog, the search engines still do. A bit of open source software, called WordPress has lead this revolution and has become the preferred piece of software used by bloggers. WordPress boasts a five minute setup for the basic package, although to implement it into a particular design which matches your site can take considerably longer, and even the basic package needs some programming experience. One of the main points of WordPress’ success is its ‘Ping’ list. This automatically informs a number of blog directories/search engines, that you have posted a new blog. With WordPress’ rise to power, has come alot of open source plugging and themes, in order to improve the value of the blog to the user as well as the search engine. In this blog, I am going to list what I consider to be the 5 best plugs for SEO and users.

1) All in One SEO: This allows you to tailor your META titles, descriptions and keywords to an individual article, thus giving it an improved presence within the search engine.

2) Sociable: In today’s social media explosion, sociable allows you to add buttons to you blogs, which allows your reader to promote them across the social media site, such as: Digg, sphinn, facebook etc.

3) Page Peel does what it says on the tin. This isn’t everyones’ cup of tea, but I think its great for marketing special offers. It adds a fold at the top of the page, which when you hover over it, peels back to reveal some text/ image.

4) Xml sitemap generator: This generates an XML sitemap which complies with Google webmaster guidelines, which is updated automatically when a new blog is posted.

5) Permalink Redirect: One of the problems of WordPress blogs, is the duplicate content issues due to the way in which WordPress archives blogs. This addon creates a 301 permanent redirect to prevent this problem.

All of these plug ins require development knowledge and should be run in a test environment before implementation onto a live site.

Related posts:

1. Why Use Wordpress as your SEO Blogging Solution
2. Social Media Marketing
3. Don’t be an SEO Sheep - Baaa!
4. 5 Open Source Content Management System Reviewed
5. Duplicated Content Uncovered