There are a great many WordPress SEO Plugins available and they will help make your site as search engine friendly as possible. Here I look at some of the key WordPress SEO Plugins and what they will do for you.

However, before doing that I must stress that these plugins will not help if you make basic mistakes with your SEO. The vital thing here is choosing your keywords. If you pick the wrong keywords you might get your site perfectly optimized and still not be able to get a high search engine ranking because there is too much competition. Before you start setting up your site you should undertake proper keyword research and find keywords with a reasonable search volume that are not too competitive. You should then select a primary keyword and include that in the domain name. Only them should you setup your site.

Before thinking about WordPress SEO Plugins you should:

• Pick a theme designed with SEO in mind.

• Change the Permalinks to "postname" (so that the page/post title appears in the URL).

• Create your standard pages with links in the header or footer (these are important for SEO purposes and should include About Us, Contact Us, Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, Anti-Spam Policy etc.).

At this stage you may want to keep things simple and in that case you should install the following WordPress SEO Plugins, "All In One SEO Pack" and "Google XML Sitemaps". In both cases you can start with the default settings. In the former you just need to enter the meta data for the home page (that will appear on the search results).

There are alternatives to "All In One SEO Pack" which have additional functions and if you intend to get into the detail of SEO you may prefer to install one of these such as "Platinum SEO Pack".

You can then add other WordPress SEO Plugins to undertake functions such as shortening URLs, control of title tags, managing redirections, generating links automatically, controlling paging of comments or caching the site to speed up page loading. Whilst all of these can help, at the outset your efforts may be better directed towards content.

The most important part of on page SEO is to have good unique content which is written in a way that is search engine friendly. It is important not to go overboard with this and write primarily for the search engines as this can result in poor content from a visitor's point of view and can be viewed negatively by the search engines.

To help produce good optimized content you can install one of my favourite WordPress SEO Plugins "SEOPressor".