Optimizing your site as much as you can for the search engines can play a huge role in the amount of traffic that your site receives.  If you’re going to put forth the time and effort to create valuable content – you need to place at least some focus on SEO.  You don’t have to spend hours researching and reading about how to tweak your site to gain more traffic from Google or Yahoo!, with WordPress you have a world of tools at your disposal with plugins that take a lot of the work out of optimizing your site, simply install and activate them.

There are hundreds of WordPress SEO plugins available but I’ve rounded up some of the best out there that can help you start seeing better results (and more traffic) from the search engines.  While some of the plugins listed below offer multiple features, I have tried to group them according to their main function.

The Top 11 WordPress SEO Plugins

• All in One SEO Pack – This one offers just about everything and it’s one of the few plugins I install on every one of my sites and blogs.  It handles everything from META tags to indexing preferences.
• Platinum SEO – An alternative to solution to the All in One SEO Pack, this plugin offers some extended features, functionality, and makes things a bit more automatic
• Google XML Sitemaps – Adds a sitemap that automatically notifies the major search engines when your site is updated.  This is another plugin that I use on every site.
• Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – By cross-referencing your articles, posts, and pages you can gain additional benefit in the search engines.  This plugin displays related content on each page you specify.
• Robots Meta – Developed by renown SEO expert Joost de Valk, this plugin allows you to do all types of things in regards to indexing and managing robots.txt, .htaccess, and more.
• SEO Smart Links – A very cool plugin that I have used on several occasions.  It allows you to link words or phrases to any page or site.  Ideal for affiliate marketers.
• SEO Friendly Images – An often overlooked but good way to drive traffic, this plugin optimizes your images for the search engines.
• Redirection – Over time you may rearrange pages, delete, and rename them or you might be migrating pages or an entire site.  This plugin handles 404’s, 301 redirects, and more.
• Nofollow Case by Case – This plugin allows you to really take advantage of what sections of your site you want nofollowed ( comments, links, etc.)
• Breadcrumb NavXT – This will create breadcrumb navigation links at the top of your posts that should not only help with SEO, but give your visitors a reference point of where they are on your site.
• SEO Title Tag – Allows you to do all types of things from titles to 404, definitely one of the more popular and one you should check out.