Learn how to use WordPress plugins, widgets, and themes to customize your site

You will learn how to create relevant content, build an audience, and turn your website into whatever you want it to be — a business development tool, your very own online publication, a community hub, a multimedia journal and more. We’ll chat about what you want to accomplish with your website and tailor the session to fit your specific needs.

There will be lots of time for Q&A and one-on-one attention, so bring your laptops and as many questions as you want.

When you leave this session, you’ll know how to get your WordPress website set up the way you want it to be, and why you want it that way.

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SEO Title Tag – Your tags are an important part of your site for making sure that search engines know where to place your posts, and SEO Title Tag focuses exclusively on this.  Unlike some other plugins, and WordPress itself, this extension will allow you to add tags to your pages, your main page and even any URL anywhere on your site.

Simple Tags – An extremely popular plugin that focuses on helping you choose the best tags for your posts by offering suggestions, auto-completion of tags as you type, an AJAX admin interface, mass tag editing and a whole lot more.

Sitemap Generator – This is a more customizable sitemap generator than most with options to support multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, permalink support, choices on what to display, options to show number of comments and more.

TGFI.net SEO WordPress Plugin – This particular plugin will do most of the usual SEO work of optimizing titles and keywords, but it adds a unique twist as it is mainly directed at people who use WordPress as a CMS.

What did we miss? Let us know in the comments.

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Nofollow Case by Case – This plugin allows you to strip the “nofollow” command from your comments, and then you can apply it to only the comments you don’t wish to support.

Platinum SEO Plugin – The Platinum SEO Plugin offers you such features as automatic 301 redirects for permalink changes, auto-generation of META tags, post slug optimization, help in avoiding duplicate content and a host of other features.

Redirection – For any number of reasons you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, but then you risk losing that page’s status in search results.  Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more.

SEO Blogroll – Do you worry that the people you link to in your blogroll are feeding off of your PageRank?  With SEO Blogroll you can make separate sections for various groupings of links, with an unlimited number in each, and all of them will receive the “nofollow” attribute.

SEO for Paged Comments – With the introduction of paged comments in WordPress 2.7, there was a potential problem with search engines thinking you had duplicate content as the post would appear on each page.  This plugin aims to take care of this issue for you until the folks at WordPress change things up.

Have another SEO plugin to recommend? Tell me about it in the comments.

Did you miss these?

• 10 Crucial Social Media Widgets To Improve Content Traffic And Awareness
• Embeddable Waves: The Google Wave WordPress Plugin
• (Anti) Social Lists 11/22/09

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All in One SEO Pack – One of the most popular plugins ever for WordPress, this plugin does a bit of everything for you from helping choose the best post title and keywords, to helping you avoid duplicate content and more.

Automatic SEO Links – Automatic SEO Links allows you to choose a word or phrase for automatic linking, both internal and external, set anchor text, choose if it should be “nofollow” or not, and more.  One of the best features of this plugin is that it will only do this for the first occurrence of a word in a post so you don’t have to worry about spamming your post with numerous links to the same thing.

Google XML Sitemaps – An essential tool in any blogger’s armory of SEO tools.  While the name only mentions Google, this plugin creates an XML-sitemap that can be read by Ask, MSN and Yahoo also.

HeadSpace2 – This plugin allows you to install all sorts of meta-data, add specific JavaScript and CSS to pages, suggests tags for your posts and a whole lot more.

Meta Robots WordPress plugin – An easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page you choose on your blog.  You can use it to make your front page links into “nofollows,” prevent indexing of search pages, disable author and date-based archives, prevent indexing of your login page and numerous other features.

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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.

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