Search Engine Optimization is a very important asset of blogging and it should not be handled with levity especially we have over 125 million blogs out there and several thousand being created each day,  and these blogs are also competing for a search engine, searching and placement and getting your content found.

The key to beating your competitions and getting your content found is proper SEO. If your blog is properly fine-tuned for search engines, you will surely have an edge over your competitors. Luckily for us, the WordPress platform is a search engine friendly framework and it becomes, even more, Search engine friendly with several SEO plugins that have been developed by the selfless WordPress community.

Here are 10 of the best SEO plugins for making your blog search engine friendly.

1.  All in One SEO Pack – This plugin is one of the most popular plugins ever for WordPress. This plugin is a must have plugin that helps you to fine-tune your blog for search engine traffic.

It allows you to optimize your blog title, add Meta descriptions, add Meta tags and it as will lets you control how search engines index your blog.

2.  Google XML Sitemap – Having an XML sitemap is very important, XML sitemaps makes the crawling of your blog pages easier for search engine bots and it helps them to detect new changes on your blog quickly.

The Google XML sitemap plugin will automatically create and update XML sitemaps for your blog. The sitemap created is not only for “Google” just because of its name, rather it is for all search engines.

3.  Google News XML Sitemap – This plugin will also create a XML sitemap for your blog but in this case it is a Google news XML sitemap format which is use by Google news network to track latest news from around the web.

I have discovered this plugin to help in quick indexing; it is one of my favorite plugins I use on all of my blogs.

4. Redirection – For one reason or the other, you may have to edit, delete, or change a page’s permalink and this can result in a 404 error when people are taken to the old URL of that page and it can have a negative impact on the rank of that page in SERPS.

The Redirection plugin is created to help you solve this problem, it will create 301 redirects, it will redirect old links to the new links or the new place you have moved them.

5.  SEO Friendly Images – Images in your blog can be a source of good traffic for you as millions of people search for images and this plugin will help you to optimize your images for proper search engine indexing and traffic generation.

This plugin will make sure that you add “alt” and “title” tags to all of your images so that search engines can properly index them.

6.  Meta Robots WordPress Plugin – This plugin makes adding of robots Meta to any page on your blog a breeze. This plugin lets you control how search engine bots index your blog pages; you can use it to add “noindex” to a particular page (especially private pages or landing pages), “nofollow” to a page, and lots more.

1. SEO Blog roll – This plugin will come handy for bloggers that have a blog roll, this plugin will let you control which blogs on your blog roll that link juice are passed to. The plugin will let your add “nofollow” to any link on your blog roll. This way, you can conserve your link juice and page rank

1.  SEO Smart Links – Interlinking of you blog is really important, it can help to reduce your blog bounce rate as well as improving the crawling and indexing of your blog posts. To be frank, interlinking ones blog posts can be time consuming but with this plugin, you can set it once and forget about it.

The plugin will automatically link keywords and URLs that you set.

9.  All in One Webmaster – the All in one webmaster plugin is a great plugin I use on all of my blogs, This plugin makes the verification of your blog across various platforms (like Google Webmasters, Google analytics, Clicky, Alexa and so on) easy.

It also helps you to submit your sitemap to search engines.

10.  NoFollow Link – This plugin will add a button to the post editor to add “nofollow” attribute to any links in the post. Select a link in the post and click the No Follow button, the nofollow attribute will be added to the link.

All the Plugins listed here are free, and they are all available through the WordPress plugin library. Just search for them and install them.