One of the most discussed areas things people talk about (after social media nowadays probably) is search engine optimization or SEO. The most popular CMS in the world is WordPress and so it is important for us to discuss SEO in regards to WordPress.

WordPress does a great job with SEO from a standalone perspective, but there are a lot of other things, such as plugins that can make it better. Using just WordPress you can add meta tags, insert keywords, optimize images for SEO via titles and captions, and change the permalinks structure of the website to use full titles as the URL.

But there are some limitations, which could be for simplicity sake and to not confuse new users, or it is because for most people it simply isn’t necessary.

Luckily for power users and fanatics about SEO WordPress has a huge set of available plugins, both free and for pay that can enhance your websites search engine ranking.

Check out these 4 plugins to start on your search engine ranking journey!

All-in-One SEO
This is considered THE SEO plugin for most people. The plugin sits on the post and page editor and provides users with options for title, description, keywords, and more allowing you to customize what shows up in the Title (rather than just using the default title). An extremely handy plugin and best of all it is free, so there is no reason to not have this installed and working for your blog.

WP Google Analytics
Site metrics aren’t normally talked about when talking directly about SEO plugins, but having a Google Analytics plugin that allows you to track where your traffic is coming from and from which keywords is a great way to refine your strategy and thinking about SEO. Seeing the real results will help motivate you to continue your SEO campaign. There are a few plugins to help with Google Analytics setup so make sure you search the plugins on WordPress.org to help you out.

Google Sitemap XML
This plugin allows you to generate a .xml sitemap to submit to Google Webmaster Tools to help Google crawl your site when it visits. An easy one time thing the plugin serves the purpose great and is a must have for a new or established site.

WP Auto Tagger

I’ve been following this guy for sometime called Yaro Starak who is from Australia and writes a blog called entrepreneurs-journey.com from which he writes about affiliate marketing and how to make money online, quite similar to what i write about.  He as been online for a long time and shares his experiences of how he makes money online.  His blog has become so popular he currently has at the time  of this writing – 78,778 RSS subscribers and currently gets 80,000+ unique visitors a month, 138,000+ page views a month.

Yaro has been working online since 1998 creating websites and has sold several successful online businesses.  He now teaches people online how to make money from running their own website business.  He now gets to travel around the world with his laptop living the ultimate .com lifestyle just from blogging.

Yaro first started out online like most of us by selling old items on ebays auction site selling items he had in his garage he no longer wanted.  He then moved onto creating a website selling and trading gaming and sports cards online and then later sold this website business for a large sum.

These days he makes money from his mastermind training program and affiliate marketing adverts he has spread accross his blogs and other websites he manages and makes on average $40,000 a month.