One of the biggest reasons blogging attracts the attention of business owners is because of it’s ability to boost search engine rankings and direct streams of highly targeted traffic. But it takes more than just setting up a blog and starting to post regularly to get results.You need to have a solid Business Blogging Strategy written out. And you definitely MUST have done your keyword research, have your Killer Keyword list, and be ready with the right strategies and tactics to apply on your business blogs.

With all that setting the stage for great results — there are WordPress plugins that help to optimize every SEO action you take. In fact, no other blogging software that you can use for your business gives you as much flexibility, control, and optimization as WordPress does!

And keep in mind that organic search engine results are just the first step in building a massive list and making more sales. You need to quickly an ethically grab the attention of people coming to your site through organic search results.

So here are four of the best WordPress plugins to help in this area.

WORDPRESS PLUGINS FOR SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and TRAFFIC CONVERSION

Search Hilite

Here’s a simple plugin for grabbing a searchers attention. But don’t let it’s simplicity fool you. It helps fulfill a critical attention grabbing step that many business owners ignore when blogging.

Study after study has shown that when a person is searching for a product, service, or solution (whether it’s through organic search results or pay-per-click ads) — the more related a site seems to be when they land there, the more likely it is they’ll take action.

When you’re marketing with business blogs, your target audience will usually find your blog through organic search engine results. The faster you can make your site/blog appear more related to the search term they entered, the more likely it is they’ll stop and spend more time. That time is critical for you to put high priority marketing techniques to work building your list (like name capture, report downloads, etc.)

What Search Hilite does is automatically highlight the keywords on your blog that the person was searching for. If you’ve completed your Killer Keyword Selection Playbook in Lesson #6 http://www.marketingwithbusiness blogs.com and you’re using your top keyword phrases properly, whatever page that searcher lands on is going to be screaming “you’ve found what you’re looking for!”

Here’s the page for downloads and updated information on this WordPress plugin.
http://wp-plugins.net/plugin/search-hilite/

Technorati Tags Made Simple

Simple Tags is a WordPress plugin that allows you to quickly and painlessly create Technorati tags at the bottom of your blog entries. This helps with general search engine optimization on your business blog. And it automatically makes your posts more relevant in Technorati searches.

Although there are several other plugins available for this purpose, they all require you to use custom fields within WordPress templates. The Simple Tags plugin eliminates this requirement making it a breeze for non-techies to put this marketing tactic to work.

Here’s the page for downloads and updated information on this WordPress plugin.
http://www.broobles.com/scripts/simpletags/

PodPress ****

If you’re going to be using your business blog to it’s full potential, you’ll want to be using multimedia (audio, video, PDFs, and regular blog posts.) And there is hands down no better way to make that multimedia posting easy than this great 4-star plugin called PodPress.

Dan Kuykendall over at MightySeek.com
has done an outstanding job with this plugin. His passion for podcasting shows in the work he’s put into this WordPress plugin. He’s got the most extensive installation and configuration instructions and help pages I’ve eve seen for a free plugin. He even has an (active) support forum setup!

There’s really too many helpful features of PodPress to list here, but trust me — this is THE plugin you want if you’ll be using multimedia. It makes adding a podcast to a WordPress post a snap.
Here’s just a few of the many time saving, viral multiplying features:

Full featured automatic iTunes feed generation makes integration with the most popular podcast service a ‘no-brainer’

• Auto Generation of enclosure tag for fully compliant podcasts
• Automatic Media player for MP3, MP4, MOV, FLV, and more, with inline and Popup Window support.
• Control over where the player will display within your post.
• Support for various formats, including Video Podcasting
• Easy way to link to your podcast within iTunes
• Preview of what your Podcast will look like on iTunes

Here’s the page for downloads and updated information on this WordPress plugin. PodPress
Plugin

Tag Cloud

OK, now here’s where things get a little heavier when it comes to keywords.

“Ultimate Tag Warrior 3″ (designed by Christine Davis) makes adding advanced tagging (another word for keywords) to your WordPress business blog relatively easy. I say relatively because this is not a plugin for the technologically challenged. You will need to do some work in the coding of your WrodPress blog templates to make even the basic version work.

(If you consider yourself ‘technologically challenged’, I would still say that this is a plugin that is worth paying a programmer to install/customize for you.)

Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) is designed to increase the number of ways you can keyword tag posts and expand your site navigation. UTW does it through the creation of ‘tag clouds’ and other graphic representation such as a long tail graph and/or weighted bar arrangement. Search engine spiders love this type of keyword rich navigation, and human visitors love it too!

This may not necessarily be one of the first plugins you’d want to use to keyword optimizing your business blog, but it should be something you consider once you’re up and running.

Here’s the page for downloads and updated information on this WordPress plugin.
http://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/

If you’ve tested or developed additional plugins for boosting search engine optimization or optimizing traffic (flow or capture,) plugins that would be particularly helpful for business owners blogging with WordPress — please share them below in the comments sections. Anything that can help busy business owners save time is a BIG plus!

Copyright © RPM Success Group Inc. 2002-2006. Other bloggers and journalists are allowed to excerpt and link to posts (as is common with bloggers,) as full credit/attribution is given to AdvancedBusinessBlogging.com and RPM Success Group Inc.

Learn how to unleash the maximum marketing power of business blogs, podcasts, and RSS (in any industry, profession, or niche) with Marketing With Business Blogs™.

John-Paul Micek is known as the “Communication Commando.” He and his partner Deborah have developed a simple scientific code for maximizing your persuasion, power, and influence in business. John-Paul is a published author and weekly columnist for the Honolulu Star Bulletin. As a Click-and-Mortar Business Coach he helps small business owners integrate offline and online marketing strategies for rapid, reliable business growth. You can reach J.P. directly via [communicationcommando@gmail.com].