SEO Page and Site Optimization with WordPress – Part Two

January 25th, 2010

Well I’m continuing my three Part series on Page and Site Optimization with WordPress. Today I’ll discuss a few more WordPress plugins that can help your SEO but are little known.

SEO Friendly Images
SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress plugin that will automatically update your new images with the correct ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have (ALT and TITLE) already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them based on the options you set in the settings. This will also make the post W3C/xHTML valid.

ALT attribute is important part of search engine optimization. It describes your image to search engine and when a user searches for a certain image this is a key determining factor for a match.

TITLE attribute will have a lessor role but is important for visitors as this text will appear in the tooltip when mouse is moved over the image. It can actually be quite verbose if so chosen. In fact as an example, check out the image I have in the upper right hand corner of this post.

SEO Smart Links
SEO Smart Links searches for keyword phrases that match the titles of your posts and pages and these phrases are then turned into the links. You also have the option of creating links for your tags and categories. The matching is case insensitive and the original case is preserved. There are examples in the first paragraph of this post. The words Site Optimization and WordPress plugins are also links to tags of this blog.

Everything happens transparently and you can be edited in the options from the administration settings panel.

SEO Super Comments
The complet concept behind this plugin is presented in Presenting SEO Super Comments Concept which explains it in much more detail.

For each user comment that gets created a new dynamic page on the blog, holding the actual comment information will be generated. This page will not actually exist in the database, but will be created dynamically using this WordPress plugin.

This then makes the site’s comments visible to search engines. This is possible because blog comments are crawlable, indexable and rankable content! So by just implementing this plugin, your comments will get crawled and indexed.

All three of these plugins are written by Vladimir Prelovac. You can check out his site at www.PRELOVAC.com

I will finish up with the plugins I now use for SEO within the next couple of days. Till then, have a remarkable day!

SEO Page and Site Optimization with WordPress – Part One

January 21st, 2010

I had promised that I was going to provide you with some WordPress plugins I use for page and site optimization. Instead of having a huge list I thought I’d give a few of the 6-7 plugins that I use for SEO purposes each of the next few days or so. While most of these are no-brainers and will never have to worry about again, some will have to work in conjunction with a few minutes of extra time per post. I will explain each in detail. These plugins are for on-page and on-site SEO Optimization. Because the nature of SEO is always evolving, the use of these plugins sometimes go obsolete because they get incorporated into other plugins and sometimes into the WordPress base product itself. So feast your eyes on these first two:

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer The ability to PING is what makes blog software highly favorable to static sites. So what is the definition of the word PING?

What WordPress does is it PINGS or notifys various web servers/sites that you have published a new blog post. These PING sites then do a variety of things. Some add your blog to their directory. Some notify the search engines to come and index your new content. Some add and update blog directories. Basically pinging notifies sites that there is new content. By default, WordPress give you ONE site that does the pinging. That is http://rpc.pingomatic.com . To be honest this site then notifies several other sites, but I prefer a more comprehensive list. I use 147! Here’s the list. (Do a right click Save As)

So if your like me, right after you figure you’ve got your post completed and hit the Publish button, you go to look at what it looks like. Firstly you should be using preview to see what it looks like, but I know we still forget something, discover a mis-spelling, want to add boldness to a phrase, create space between a paragraph, you name it. So when you hit publish, you are pinging to the list. Then when you bold some text and click update, you are pinging your list. When you add an image and updating you are pinging your list. In fact every time you publish or update you are pinging. This tends to create several pings within a very short time. What can end up happening is the ping sites can BAN you for excessive pinging. Not if you install MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer. With the plugin you can limit excessive pinging and control how many times you can ping in a given duration. I have mine set at 1 every 15 minutes is the maximum. You do have to register to get the plugin. You can find it here.

SEO Slugs
Wordpress has come a long way since it early versions with the use of permalinks and url structures. As great as using %postname% is, there is still something that you can do to even further optimize your urls. Enter SEO slugs. What does SEO slugs do? This plugin strips several of the common words like “what”, “you” or “can” out of your post slug to make it more search engine friendly. With SEO Slugs plugin activated, the slugs appear optimized for SEO. As an example, a post titled “What You Can Do Immediately For Higher Rankings” will become http://www.chriskilber.com/immediately-higher-rankings/. You still have the ability to override it by editing your url slug.

I’ll be back tomorrow with a few more.
Enjoy and have a remarkable day.

48 WordPress Plugins I Can’t Live Without

October 21st, 2009

Down below I have the forty eight or so plugins that I use on this blog. I have a little blurb about what they do. Because wordpress is so customizable and most of the themes are different, there may be reasons to include one that are missing here and reasons I have some others don’t. But for the most part these are essential. I am almost positive there are new one’s out there that I should have but these have been serving me well. Feel free to suggest others.

Akismet
Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. You need a WordPress.com API key to use it. You can review the spam it catches under “Comments.”

All in One SEO Pack
Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog. As a fan of SEO, I think it’s like putting together a three dimensional puzzle, I like this plugin and it is one of the mainstays of SEO for wordpress. Of special interest is the “Dynamically Generate Keywords for Posts Page:” option. The plugin even has it’s own forum if you’d like to learn more.

(http://semperfiwebdesign.com/forum/)

CommentLuv
Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commenters blog by parsing the feed at their given URL when they leave a comment. Rewards your readers and encourage more comments.

Comment Relish
Increases your readership and RSS subscription rate by simply sending a short ‘Thank You’ message to users when they first comment on your site.

Contact Form with Captcha
Simple Contact Form with Captcha Enabled

Custom Field Redirect
This plugin will do a 301 redirect on any page where you set the “redirect” key in a custom field. The value you set will be the URL to where the plugin will redirect you. In the dashboard when you create a post you have the ability to enter a custom field. If you create a “redirect” key is will go to the location designated.

Dewplayer
Insert Dewplayer (Flash Mp3 Player) in posts & comments. There are a lot mp3 players. This happens to be the one I’m currently using.

Disable Revisions
Disable revision functions in WordPress and delete all entries of revisions in database. It is extremely important to back up your database before install this plugin. I always hate when there ends up being 8 revisions of the same post. This should be a custom option built into wordpress to begin with.

Exclude Pages from Navigation
Provides a checkbox on the editing page which you can check to exclude pages from the primary navigation. IMPORTANT NOTE: This will remove the pages from any “consumer” side page listings, which may not be limited to your page navigation listings.

Facebook Sharecount
The Facebook Sharecount plugin shows the number of shares on Facebook your posts get and allows users to share it themselves.

FeedBurner FeedSmith
Originally authored by Steve Smith, this plugin detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

FeedBurner Widget
Adds a sidebar widget to easy customize and display your FeedBurner subscribers stats RSS button.

Get Recent Comments
Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar.

Make sure you configure this plugin after activation.

Google Friend Connect Integration
Easily integrate Google Friend Connect with WordPress. To get started, please enter your Google Friend Connect Site Id number in the GFC Integration admin page and choose whether to turn on the social bar or not. You can add Google Friend Connect gadgets to your sidebars by visiting the widgets page. For help and support see the official Google Friend Connect integration for WordPress page.

Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.

Homepage Excerpts
Homepage Excerpts are great when your theme doesn’t provide this functionality.

LinkWithin
Displays recommended stories and associated thumbnails from your blog. This is at the bottom of all my single posts. It provides nice pictures you see below.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer
Saves your wordpress blog from getting tagged as ping spammer by installing this plugin. The reasoning behind this is your blog will ping technorati and many other ping services. If you edit your blog, let’s say a typo or misspelling or indentation etc, every time you hit publish you are pinging the services. You may be banned and didn’t even know it. When this goes, so does your SEO. Visit plugin site

One Click Plugin Updater
Upgrade plugins with a single click, install new plugins or themes from an URL or by uploading a file, see which plugins have update notifications enabled, control how often WordPress checks for updates, and more.

ONW Simple Contact Form
This Plugin creates a simple contact form.

Popularity Contest
This will enable ranking of your posts by popularity; using the behavior of your visitors to determine each post’s popularity. You set a value (or use the default value) for every post view, comment, etc. and the popularity of your posts is calculated based on those values. Once you have activated the plugin, you can configure the Popularity Values and View Reports. You can also use the included Widgets and Template Tags to display post popularity and lists of popular posts on your blog.

Random Pages widget
This is a widget that displays a list of random pages/posts on your widgetized sidebar.

Recent Posts
Returns a list of the most recent posts.

Robots Meta
This plugin allows you to add all the appropriate robots meta tags to your pages and feeds, disable unused archives and nofollow unnecessary links.

RSS Shortcode
Makes it easy to display an RSS feed on a page

SEO Smart Links
SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.

SEO Super Comments
Use your blog comments to get more traffic.

SexyBookmarks
SexyBookmarks adds a (X)HTML compliant list of social bookmarking icons to each of your posts.

SimplePie Core
Does little else but load the core SimplePie API library for any extension that wants to utilize it. It is needed for the Single RSS Colleague plugin found below.

Simple Tags
Simple Tags : Extended Tagging for WordPress 2.3, 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7 ! Autocompletion, Suggested Tags, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Mass edit tags !

Single RSS Colleague
A plugin to feature a colleague or tribe member for syndication. You will find it under by social badges on the right hand side bar labeled “Visit My Colleagues”. I will be making this available to everyone sometime next week.

Subscribe To Comments
Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.

Translate
Adds a sidebar widget to display languages into which you can translate your blog.

TweetMeme Retweet Button
Adds a button which easily lets you retweet your blog posts.

Ultimate Google Analytics
Enable Google Analytics on your blog. Has options to also track external links, mailto links and links to downloads on your own site.

What Would Seth Godin Do
Displays a custom welcome message to new visitors and another to return visitors.

wp-cache
Very fast cache module. It’s composed of several modules, this plugin can configure and manage the whole system. Once enabled, go to “Options” and select “WP-Cache”. One note of caution. TURN this off anytime you are changing anything. Then when you are done, turn it back on.

WP-Cumulus
Flash based Tag Cloud for WordPress

WP-DBManager
Manages your WordPress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

WP-PageNavi
Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog.

WP-Print
Displays a printable version of your WordPress blog’s post/page.

WP-Sticky
Adds a sticky post feature to your WordPress’s blog. Modified from Adhesive by Owen Winkler.

WP-UserOnline
Enable you to display how many users are online on your WordPress blog with detailed statistics of where they are and who there are(Members/Guests/Search Bots).

WP Security Scan
Perform security scan of WordPress installation.