SEO (search engine optimization) is, or at least should be a huge part to all websites out there looking to get organic (free) traffic to their websites via the search engines… primarily Google.

The integration of SEO plugins into your wordpress blog makes it simple to apply the on page factors you need to make sure your web pages rank for the keywords you are targeting.

What is the Best WordPress SEO Plugin?

• All in One SEO – This plugin is probably the most popular SEO plugin out there, although it does not have the most features and flexibility. If you are looking for a simple yet extremely effective SEO plugin that will handle your meta data like Title Tags, Description and Keywords this is great.  It is extremely easy to use, and does enough to make sure your website is SEO ready.

If you need an SEO plugin that does more than just the basics then take a look at…

• Headspace2 – This plugin is packed with features.  So much so that they could probably charge for it.  Luckily they do not.  With this plugin you can do all the basic SEO functions with ease, but there is more. You can change the page title for each of the Tag pages using special short codes.  Why does this matter? If you do not have unique titles on your tag pages and you have 300 tags in your blog each of those 300 pages may be seen as duplicate content by Google and your site be penalized.  At the very least they will not get indexed and you will lose the potential page rank power of each page.The same can be done with archive pages, category pages, error pages and more.

  Another great feature is you can active plugins and themes on a per page basis. One of the factors of SEO is essentially the efficiency of your page.  If you page takes a long time to load that can actually hurt your rankings.  Extra code that is not needed on a page will slow it down and too much of that will effect your position in the SERPs (search engine results page).   Headspace2 takes care of that issue.  Here is an example: Say you have a contact plugin, when you activate that plugin it loads its code on each and every page of your website.  With Headspace2 you can leave the plugin inactive, but activate it only on the contact page, the only page that needs the code.  Therefor you will not have the extra code on each and every page of you website slowing it down.

  This plugin will also import the settings from your old SEO Plugin. So if you have been using All in One SEO and want to make the switch you can.

  These are just a few of the features with this SEO plugin.  Definitively worth checking out if you need more SEO options on your website. You can watch this training video for Headspace2 right here.

Conclusion

If you are a beginner with SEO, do not overwhelm yourself with too much to early. All in One SEO is plenty good for 90% of websites out there. If you have some experience and want to really maximize your SEO efforts then give Headspace2 a try.

There are plenty more SEO plugins to review, which we will get to.

If you know of a different or better plugin then the ones listed feel free to share it in the comments. Or let me know what you think about the above mentioned SEO Plugins.