The Best Seo Plugins For Content Management Systems

The most popular Content Management Systems give us an unprecedented platform for publishing and organising content. The likes of Drupal, WordPress and Joomla have become household names almost overnight within the tech community and wider public, but at the beginning, many CMSs were not SEO friendly. This was, of course, a problem; with search engines being the best way to promote and publicise your work, suddenly, our content wasn’t getting the attention it deserved.

However, it wasn’t long before people started to develop plug-ins for these various content management systems, leading to a boost in the quality of search engine optimisation. The market is now awash with plug-ins, some great, some not so great, but after trawling through them for you, here are our picks of the best SEO plug-ins out there:

SEO Plug-ins for Drupal

1. NodewordsThis plug-in allows you to give individual Drupal pages a number of META tags – improving your search engine rankings. Concentrating on keywords and descriptions with regard to your nodes is a great way to optimise your site, and this plug-in is the perfect tool to help you do that.
2. Page TitleThis plug-in is fairly self-explanatory, apart from the fact that many people get confused when talking about the word “title”. Here, we are talking about the title that is found at the top of the browser, in the HTML head inside the <title> tag, not the title of the content. This plug-in gives you granular control over the page title, meaning you can set patterns for structuring your titles and have different page titles and content titles. This type of page title is what is used on search engine result pages, and by using this plug-in, you should see a massive boost in your SEO results.
3. PathautoIf you don’t want to, or can’t manually specify the path alias from the various kinds of content on your site, then this is the plug-in for you. Pathauto automatically generates path aliases for nodes, categories, users, etc., based on a pattern system that you can control – basically, you oversee everything while Pathauto does all the work.
4. Google AnalyticsEven people who are not very SEO-savvy have usually heard of Google Analytics, so this is the ideal plug-in for adding a web statistics tracking system to your website. The module allows you to add lots of statistics features to your site, including the ability to track certain users, roles, and pages, as well as site search support.
5. XML SitemapHaving a sitemap of your site is vitally important to search engine optimisation. A sitemap is easier for search engines to crawl and can make a massive difference to your search engine rankings, especially if your site is Flash-heavy. This plug-in creates a sitemap that can be automatically submitted to search engines like Google and Yahoo without you doing anything.

SEO Plug-ins for WordPress

1. SEO Friendly ImagesA great blog is one that interests the reader visually as well as intellectually, and pictures are a great way to do that. However, if you do not optimise pictures in the right way then search engines cannot pick them up – here’s where this useful plug-in comes into its own. SEO Friendly Images automatically updates images with an ALT (which acts as a description for your image) and TITLE (which is what appears when you hover your mouse over the picture). This plug-in is great for optimising your blog without compromising on your content.
2. AddToAnySocial bookmarking is vital to your blog – the perfect way to spread your content and get what is basically free advertising. That’s why AddToAny is a must-have addition to your WordPress blog. This plug-in helps your readers share, save, email and bookmark your posts on over a hundred social bookmarking and sharing sites. The menu even orders the different sites with the ones that your reader uses the most at the top by using their browser history – pretty clever, eh?
3. WP BacklinksThis plug-in makes the trials of link exchanging a breeze. It installs a small module on your blog where other bloggers or webmasters can easily submit a link ready for link exchange. The plug-in will then spider the person’s website or blog for a reciprocal link and there you have it – a fruitful link exchange without any effort.
4. Google XML SitemapsJust as in Drupal, we cannot stress how important a sitemap is for good SEO, and with this plug-in doing all the work for you, there’s no excuse not to have one. This plug-in automatically creates a sitemap compatible with Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask, making it infinitely easier for search engines to crawl your blog. It also alerts the search engines when you create a new post, and with options to tweak and customise the sitemap, there really isn’t any reason why you shouldn’t use this!
5. All-in-one SEO PackNow, if that’s all a bit too much for you and you’re looking for a quick, easy, all-incumbent answer, then this is the plug-in you need. Working as an overall SEO plug-in, this little box of tricks is your one-stop shop for SEO. It automatically creates META tags, optimises your post and blog titles for various search engines and helps to prevent you from creating duplicate content. It also has manual options so you can include your own keywords, titles and descriptions for each post on your blog. The only thing this plug-in doesn’t do is make the tea, but you’ll have so much more time on your hands after using this; you won’t mind making it yourself!

SEO Plug-ins for Joomla

1. JoomapAgain, this plug-in is all about creating a sitemap that can be submitted to all the search engines. It can show everything from the menu structure and content to the categories and sections and can even create a Google sitemap list.
2. J!Redirect301This plug-in does exactly what it says on the tin – redirects your domain to one domain so that only one version of your site is indexed. This means no duplicate content and higher rankings!
3. Title ManagerThis plug-in makes it easy to manage and customise your browser titles, meaning that creating SEO friendly titles is a piece of cake. It also accepts an optional site name to use in your titles.
4. SEOSimpleOne of the more popular plug-ins for Joomla, SEOSimple will automatically produce META data based on the content of your page or let you create your own META data manually. You can even customise the META data for individual pages, making this plug-in, a must have for Joomla users.
5. JoomSEOJoomSEO has a real plethora of features (too many to mention here) but the important bit is that it will make the content on your site markedly more search engine friendly – what more could you want?

So, there you have it, plenty of plug-ins to keep you occupied, whatever content management system you use! Go try them for yourself, and before long, you will start seeing the difference a few small additions can make.