This post is first post of a series we titled, ‘Best of WordPress’. In this series we will discusses best WordPress plugins, themes, hacks and tips.

Here is the list of 5 best WordPress SEO plugins for webmaster to get make their blogs SEO friendly and get top rankings.

1. All In One SEO Pack

My favorite SEO plugin of WordPress, a must have for every blog powered by WordPress. According to statistics it is the most popular plugin in the whole WordPress Extend repository. This plugin has a roboust feature set. In my opinion this is the best WordPress SEO plugin. This plugin allows you to optimize various things like home title, post title, page title, keywords and much more. It also generates meta keywords automatically based on the content. Another handy feature is to help remove duplicate content from your site by using no-index for category and archives.

2. Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin creates a well-defined sitemap of your entire site with one click and also notifies search engines of your sitemap. You can also use a priority system for your posts, tags and archives. I’m using this plugin at all of my blogs and it gives great results.

3. HeadSpace

A plugin with many great features and quite populer in WordPress community, HeadSpace. It has some similar features as that of ‘All In One SEO Pack’.  This plugin has the ability to generate post meta tags and its also capable of importing data from other plugins like SEO Pack.

4. SEO Smart Links

Internal links in your blog are very important for its SEO.  SEO Smart Links create automatic links in posts based on keywords to corresponding posts and pages. That helps in increasing page views and distribution of PR in site.

5. Robots Meta

Robots Meta help you add meta tags for search engines to hide certain sections of your site from search engine robots. It can add tags to prevents indexing of your all feeds including comments feeds, you can also prevent indexing of admin pages.

Are you using another plugin? Please use comments to share your opinion.

It was a bit scary for me to change URLs due to SEO problems (I’m already having a problem with Google at the time of writing this post, more on it later). However changing URL proved very easy for me.

Here is the process,

1. Go to settings > Permalinks in your WordPress dashboard.
Here in ‘Custom Structure’ field enter, /%postname%/

2. Now open up your favorite FTP program, longin to FTP account of your WordPress install, open .htaccess to edit and enter following code.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
Options +MultiViews
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On

RedirectMatch permanent ^/[0-9]{4}/[0-9]{2}/[0-9]{2}/([a-z0-9-/]+) http://crunchpress.com/$1

RewriteBase /
AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

Change CrunchPress.com with your domain, save .htaccess and you are done!

I’ve assumed you are using domain/year/month/day/post-name structure, if your structure is different please tweak it accordingly.

NOTE:
1. If you are using Super-Cache or any other cache plugin for WordPress, please clear your cache before doing this procedure.
2. If you have a sitemap plugin installed, update/rebuild your sitemap manually.
3. 6) Add your blog to Google Webmaster Tools. Make sure that the sitemap was accepted and keep an eye on crawl errors periodically.