On-page SEO site link management - WordPress Plugins of Note

Advanced Permalinks, Redirection and HeadSpace2 WordPress Plugins from the Urban Giraffe and Stuff by Sarah.

Advanced Permalinks

• From the Urban Giraffe
• Last updated (as of this post) May 4, 2009
• Author wrote a note saying no longer able to offer support and that development is unlikely to continue
• Lives under the Settings menu
• Supports multiple permalinks with or without 301
• Removes category base (no need for the WP No Category Base plugin)

Redirection

• From the Urban Giraffe
• Last updated (as of this post) September 12, 2009
• Lives under the Tools menu
• Supports WordPress and Apache based redirection
• 404 error monitoring
• RSS feed for 404 errors
• Full logs of redirected URLs
• Redirections based on URL, browser, referrer or login status
• Full REGEX support
• Exports all redirections to CSV, XML or Apache .htaccess
• Imports Apache .htaccess
• Canonical www./- support

Headspace2

I've been an avid user of PlatinumSEO WordPress Plugin for control of titles, description, nofollow, robot directives, etc. I had a bout of trouble with AllInOneSEO at one point and PlatinumSEO met my needs, even though the author is not particularly responsive to bug reports.

Enter HeadSpace2, the extremely functional and highly configurable SEO WordPress plugin.

Besides the basics of Meta, Description, Keywords, etc., etc., HeadSpace2 does a number of things that a few other plugins and other settings do. My guess is it has a bit of the kitchen sink, which is certainly fine with me. This plugin allows me to remove several other single feature plugins as well as management of tracking codes and a particularly troublesome checkbox on the user account pages. Beyond these conveniences, HeadSpace2 I consider to be the best SEO plugin on the market.

Two items that I no longer need are the No More Frames plugin and the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin (though there do appear to be more setting options in the GAW plugin, my setup does not require them).

In addition there are options for the Google, Bing and Yahoo webmaster tracking codes, the Feedburner Stats Pro (obviating yet another WordPress Plugin) and a checkbox to disable visual editing sitewide (especially useful if you use Exec-PHP or Markdown Extra.

Even more, the memory limits, script timeout and php error reporting can be managed (instead of manually editing the wp-config.php file), page count limits and excerpts or full text on search and archive pages, and several other settings are available.

Headspace provides a Meta-Data editor under the Tools menu for changing the Page Title (from Post Title).

Page Menu Editor

The Page Menu Editor allows for a different menu label and anchor text of any page link using the Template Tag. Very awesome.

Why all the tools?

Good SEO practices requires a number of different tools for several reasons:

• The web has grown up in a distributed way so sewing together all the various optimizable components of a website has become a complex task.
• Most tool developers focus on a smaller set of problems to solve (which is the best approach for speed of development and performance).
• SEO and the tools which support it are evolving and changing rapidly

Simply put, there are too many moving parts. From an on-page SEO perspective, there are several kinds of optimizations which can occur and we need to manage each of the components individually in various circumstances.

Next post will discuss all of the different link/title components and optimizations for each.

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