SEO Plugins and SEO

WordPress is one of the most powerful content management systems on the Internet. There used to be a time when people looked at WordPress as a fun platform but not something one would use for a serious portal. That has changed dramatically with all the changes that the platform has gone through in the past few years. Nowadays, many top portals are taking advantage of WordPress. And I have to say those plugins are very addictive to play with.

WordPress may be a powerful content management system, but it is not going to get you to the top of the search engines all by itself. A lot will depend on your content, your keywords, and the optimizations you have done on your website. If you have been a student of SEO, you probably know the basic on-page, off page optimization tactics that you can take advantage of to give your website a better chance at ranking high on Google. What you dont’ want to do is forget about all those plugins that you are installing on your blog.

There are all kinds of plugins available for WordPress. Some don’t add any outgoing link to your blog. But you want to be careful with some of those that do. It’s always nice to link back to the official site of a plugin and give something back to the authors and developers. But you want to make sure the sites you are linking to are worth linking to. What if the author of your plugin is running a link farm or dubious website? Trust me, that approach has been tried in the past. Spammers know how to get the attention of bloggers. Spending a few bucks on developing a plugin that will link out without you knowing it could be an easy way to generate thousands of links to a blog or website.

Sometimes, it’s not tough to figure out whether you are dealing with a spam website, but you can always run a few test to figure out whether you are linking to a decent page. For starters, you want to make sure the pages you are linking are indexed by Google and other search engines. From my experience, you want to try the top 3 engines as sometimes one or two lag behind the other one(s). You also want to use tools such as Compete, SpyFu, SEOmoz to figure out what the site you want to link to is up to. When in doubt, you want to no-follow your link (by hand or using plugins such as Robot Meta) just to stay on the safe side.

I am all for giving credit to plugin and theme developers for WordPress. However, some of these folks bank on you not paying too much attention to what you have installed on your blog. Security issues aside, you absolutely don’t want to link to a dubious website, or your ranking could tank like a heavy piece of rock thrown in the water.