SEO plugins contribute a lot in improving the search engine ranking and visibility of a site. Here’s a list of the 10 best SEO plugins that will help your blog get good position in SERP:

Headspace2

An all-in-one plugin, HeadSpace deals with meta-data, enabling a variety of SEO tasks. With Headspace, you can create custom titles and descriptions to optimize your site, flip themes or even use it to work disabled plugins. The plugin provides several shortcuts to make configuration of metadata easy. Here’s the list of what this plugin can do:

• Handle Meta-data – Data collection takes place from nested parent pages as well.
• Cull Dynamic data – Enables you to easily extract data from the post.
• GUI interface – Post content and data are posted simultaneously, with AJAX powered interface for tags and keywords
• Editing large amounts of meta-data– Easily edit meta-data for several webpages or posts in one go.

The plugin can be installed by downloading it, uploading the Headspace directory, and enabling the plugin from the plugin management page.

A fantastic add-on for a highly impressive WordPress blog.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/headspace2/

All in One SEO

This tool focuses on the on-page ranking factors. It helps you optimize your post titles and content.

All in one enables you to rewrite titles and include words from your blog title to do some branding. For keyword optimized posts, you can generate keywords and even change the meta title. It also includes an auto-generated description feature. Finally, to avoid the problem of duplicate content you can use the non-index feature.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

Redirection

This plugin provides a simple method of managing pages of the site that have been changed or moved. One of its features is it can redirect folders that don’t exist, enabling you to set-up permanent or temporary redirects.

Redirection can also be used if you want to create a few affiliate links using the redirect method, cutting down on time and effort required. It is also a great tool for tracking.

Manage 301 redirections and keep a track of 404 errors with Redirection.

http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/

SEO Friendly Images

As the title indicates, this plugin simplifies navigation for image-loaded web pages. How does it do that? It automatically places relevant text on ALT and TITLE attribute in the images uploaded. This comes as a boon for those who always forget to put ALT and TITLE text in images, when posting them in their blog.

This is an awesome plugin for newbies.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-image/

NoFollow Case By Case

This plugin enables search engines to easily distinguish which parts of your page are written by you and which are written by other people. ie. the hyperlinks. This leads search engines to present related and relevant pages by adding the “no-follow” attribute to hyperlinks. NoFollow also serves to reduce spamming through comments and trackbacks.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nofollow-reciprocity/

Robots Meta

This plugin facilitates addition of meta robots tags to your pages. Using this plugin can prevent indexing of your search result pages. It can also stop Yahoo! and Google from indexing your feeds by placing a meta tag to their head-section. Robots meta also enables you to edit your robots.txt and .htaccess from within WordPress.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/robots-meta/

SEO Slugs

The SEO Slugs plugin takes any long post title or a sentence and removes the stop words. Stop words are the words like ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘and’, ‘it’, ‘is’ etc. Nobody wants these stop words in the domain name, but sometimes you are bound to use them in the post title.

This is a highly recommended plugin for better SEO.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-slugs/

SEO Smart Links

Smart Links can form a link between keywords and phrases in your posts and comments, thus giving a boost to internal linking. The plugin also enables you to place your own keywords and the corresponding URLs. Moreover, it provides a caching feature. The transparency of Smart Links makes it all the more desirable.

Interlink your existing pages with proper keywords with this highly useful plugin.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-automatic-links/

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator

This plugin creates a sitemap for your site. Highly customizable, you can swiftly make changes from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel. It provides support for multi-level categories and pages, allows multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, display options, etc.

Get the best of sitemap generating features in the plugin.

http://www.dagondesign.com/articles/sitemap-generator-plugin-for-wordpress/

SEO Title Tag

This plugin greatly simplifies the process of optimizing the title tags. You can easily edit the title tags of posts, pages, category pages, tag pages, all in one go. By placing title tags that contain variations of keywords and their synonyms, one can significantly improve a site’s search engine visibility.

The easiest way to optimize title tags across WordPress blog is to install this plugin.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-title-tag/

Buddypress refers to a group of WordPress MU specific plugins. Each plugin provides a different functionality. Though it has all the features that are associated with WordPress, it enables social networking. Since its modules can function independently, this means you can choose the features you want to. Buddypress also has a core plugin required by other plugins. It enables sharing of functions and helps to make functional changes to the WordPress MU interface.

Features

One of the best features of Buddypress is private messaging. This works like internal site email. Members can message people on their blog network as well as forward and respond to received messages. Through the administrative section, you can send messages to multiple friends as well as to people throughout the network.

Members of a Buddypress network can easily interact with one another as on popular networking sites, by adding a particular person as a friend. Each member can view a list of ‘friends’ and you have the option of making certain posts private.

To allow members to post on a particular content, Buddypress has a section called Wire. This can also be used by members to leave messages on a particular person’s profile. Moreover, you can check out what others are doing on Buddypress, since every activity is recorded. What are the activities within Buddypress? Wire posts, Blog comments, blog posts and more.

The package of plugins also offers status updates for each member logged on. The blog functionality of Buddypress means that one can conveniently find blogs by another member or read the comments on his own.

Finally, installing Buddypress enables one to create and share photo albums. If you are convinced about its features, here’s how to install the set of plugins.

Bloggers just love its multi-user functionality while posting content.

Installation

WordPress MU can be installed just like WordPress. A word of advice – do not edit the name of the wp-config-sample.php file. Doing this will result in a blank page being displayed at your site. The name will be changed during the setup process.

The first step is to download the installation package at http://buddypress.org/download. This will guide you to the most recent release of  the plugin package. After separating the components from the ZIP file, transfer these to a directory on your computer.

To install the components, upload all the component directories and files to the wp-content/mu-plugins folder. Go to the Buddypress-theme folder. You will see two folders inside: Buddypress-member and Buddypress-home. Click on the wp-content/themes directory of the installation. Remove the home folder from your server and upload the two directories to the themes folder.

Go to your WordPress MU admin panel. Provided you have copied all of the plugin files and directories to the correct location, you will see sections under Site Admin titled Buddypress, Profile Fields, etc.

Finally, you need to activate the Buddypress Home Theme on your site. Select the Themes option from Site Admin panel and activate the Buddypress Home Theme. Now go to Design option under Themes and click on Buddypress Home Theme to activate it for your site. If you have done all this right, you will be able to see the new theme through your site URL.