How Do People Find YOUR Content?

December 8, 2009 by Kathy Drewien · View Comments
Filed under: Tips & Tricks - Sites, Software, Shortcuts, WordPress - Blog Tips, Plugins & How-To

How do people find YOUR content on the Internet? The key starts with great search engine optimization (SEO). Here are 5 of the best SEO plugins.

SEO friendly and HTML valid subheadings

Some themes for WordPress will confuse your sub-header tags based on the page they are to be displayed on, but this plugin will automatically reset them to make them more SEO friendly by moving them down one spot in the hierarchical tree. In other words, h2 becomes h3, h3 becomes h4 and so on.

SEO Friendly Images

Images can be a great source of traffic as people search for images of various subjects, and this plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.

SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin

If you must have duplicate content on your site for whatever reason, SEO No Duplicate will allow you to state which version of the post search engines should index while ignoring the others.

SEO Post Link

The post slug is the blog title you see in a browser’s URL bar, and if it’s too long, search engines won’t take a liking to it. SEO Post Link comes with an already populated list of words to cut from a title when it turns into a URL to make your post addresses that much friendlier. You can set it so that it’s limited to a certain number of characters, cut short words, cut unnecessary words and more.

SEO Smart Links

Interlinking your blog can be the key to getting more people to read more of your posts, but it is time consuming and tedious to do it by hand. SEO Smart Links does this for you automatically when you tell it what words to link to what URLs, and it also allows you to set “nofollow” and “open in window” comands for the links.

Do you have SEO favorites? Share them in the comments.

WordPress Plugins You Need to Know About

October 23, 2009 by Kathy Drewien · View Comments
Filed under: WordPress - Blog Tips, Plugins & How-To

WordPress plugins enhance the features of sites we work on. We’re always on the lookout for the best WordPress plugins to better respond to our client’s needs. Here’s a list of a few favorites you may not know about:

Exclude Pages

We often receive client requests on how to hide pages from appearing in navigation bars. Sometimes there are pages you don’t want the public to see, but you still want those pages to be accessible through other posts or pages. That hidden page could be a thank you page, a product download and confirmation page, or a page you only want to show up after the reader has viewed some other page. The Exclude Pages plugin allows you to check a box that lets you include or hide the box from main menus.

Duplicate Widgets

Sidebars have come a long way since WordPress first started being popular. Now, many themes come with multiple sidebars and often not just along the sides of the screen. They could appear in the headers, footers and content areas. The problem is that sometimes, you’re limited in which widgets appear in each sidebar. Wouldn’t it be nice to duplicate a widget instead of only being able to use it once? The Duplicate Widgets plugin lets you do just that. Simply choose which widget you want to duplicate and voila!

Tweet This

The Sociables plugin used to be our preferred social networking plugin of choice, but since then we’ve discovered the Tweet This plugin. In fact, you can see it in action at the end of this post. The buttons are much more attractive and easy to recognize, and the dashboard interface is simple to use, limiting selection to the most popular social networking resources available.

Google Analyticator for WordPress

Don’t want the hassle of adding Google Analytics code to all the pages of your site? Want to get up and tracking quickly? The Google Analyticator for Wordpress plugin automatically inserts the code throughout the site and tracks stats for all outbound links, comment author links, downloads and more.

Page Links To

Many people want to add links to outside sites to their main navigation. A forum, another blog, a sales site… The Page Links To plugin lets you create that link without having to fuss around with figuring out how to get people over to that other site without hand-coding the link in. Point out all you want!

My Page Order

You can set the order of the pages in your main navigation easily by assigning them a number. That means going into each page and manually assigning order. The My Page Order plugin makes assigning page order even easier, giving you the ability to drag and drop pages (and sub-pages) right in your dashboard.

My Link Order and My Category Order

My Link Order and My Category Order allows you to set the order in which links and categories will appear in the sidebar. Uses a drag and drop interface for ordering. Adds a widget with additional options for easy installation on widgetized themes.

Contact Form 7

There’s a lot of contact form plugins for WordPress, and the most popular seems to be the CFormsII plugin. That plugin can do a lot of stuff and really let you design your contact page like a pro, but we’ve also found that CFormsII isn’t that user friendly. The Contact Form 7 plugin offers an easier option for most needs.

WP Super Cache

Now that you’ve got this great list of plugins, you’re going to have to make sure your blog runs at optimal speeds and doesn’t suck too much CPU usage from your host. Too many plugins have the potential to drain a server and bog it down. The WP Super Cache plugin helps alleviate the issue, generating static html files from your blog that make it easier for the server to process, which in turn helps speed up load time.