Ever since my initial SEO plugins for wordpress post almost two years ago, I get asked for an updated list a few times a month. Well since we’re up to wordpress 2.5 I thought the time has come. I’ll also put some of my other favorite plugins at the end, they either enhance wordpress features or just make things easier.

SEO

Meta Robots WordPress plugin - Adds meta tags automatically to posts

Aizatto’s Related Posts - Adds related post information to posts and feeds

Cross-Linker - Set up commonly used words to link to posts or redirects (also useful for affiliate links)

Sitemap Generator - Automatically builds and HTML style sitemap

Google (XML) Sitemaps - Automatically build and ping multiple sitemap services with an XML file

HeadSpace 2 - A monster plugin that lets you rewrite titles, meta data, and host of other features watch the video on the page for the full list of features

SEO Title Tag - Don’t need all the power of Headspace try SEO title tag

SEO Slugs - keeps slugs from becoming too long
Utilities

Secure Form Mailer - makes building and integrating multiple and custom forms easy

FeedBurner FeedSmith - Makes integrating with feedburner easy

Feed Footer - Adds advertising, copyright or other custom messages into feeds

Flickr Photo Album - Integrate your flickr photo’s, albums, sets, and groups into your website

flickrRSS for WordPress - add photos from any flickr RSS feed into your website

Future Posts Calendar Plugin - A calendar that shows which days you have posts scheduled to publish, very helpful for multiple authors and scheduled posts.

Full Text Feed - Lets you use the “more” tag and still publish full feeds

GoCodes Redirection Plugin - Add tiny URL style functionality into your blog

Got Banners - Makes adding advertising banners quick and easy without having to monkey with the template

Highlight Author Comments - Makes giving authors comments a different style much easier

Objection Redirection! - Makes setting 301’s (especially lots of them) easy as pie

Wordpress Organizer - Makes adding and managing uploads and images easier

Who Sees Ads - Makes ads or other elements conditionally displayed

Absolute Comments - Makes replying to comments and managing them much easier

Photo Dropper - Makes adding Creative Commons licensed photos from flickr quick and easy

Search Pages - Lets the search box search both posts and pages

Permalink Redirect - Keep urls with parameters from being indexed

WordPress Mobile Edition - Display a simple stripped down version of your site to mobile users

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin - Save yourself thousands of hours of time upgrading wordpress

WordPress Database Backup - Automate backups of your blog
Social

Increase Sociability Wordpress Plugin - Display custom messages for people who came from social sites like Digg and stumbleupon

Share This - add buttons for social networks under the share this icon

Subscribe to Comments - let people subscribe and be notified when new and follow up comments are made

What Would Seth Godin Do - Display a message to a new visitor on your blog

Twitter Tools - Integrate twitter functionality into your blog
Maintenance

Close Old Posts - Closes old posts keeps them from becoming spam targets and maintenance issues

Search and Replace - Lets you easily search and replace information in your database

Simple Tags - Manage and get tag suggestions for all posts
Reports and Analytics

Blog Metrics - Gives you comments and stats on monthly and author levels

Google Analytics and Feedburner Reports - get feedburner and google analytics in your wordpress admin section

Search Meter - Find out what people are searching for on your site Read More......

In the past few months I’ve gotten quite a few requests from people asking what plugins I use here and on other sites, and which ones I reccomend, so here’s my list with annotations.

Essential Wordpress Plugins

These plugins go on 99% of the wordpress installs I do. I’ll only leave one off if there’s a very specific reason for it not to be there.

Akismet - This one actually comes with wordpress you only need to get a liscence to activate it. Unless you have need for spam in your blog this is one the most effective tools for stopping it. Very little actually gets through and very little gets flagged as a false positive.

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator - Let’s be honest once you’ve got a site over 50 pages maintaining a sitemap by hand is tedious and inefficient. This plugin has quite a few options and takes care of all the grunt work for you.

Organizer - This plugin allows you to create and upload files from the web browser without having to fire up your FTP program. It’s especially helpful on blogs with multiple users who aren’t tech savvy. The only downside is if they don’t know the “rules” things can get messy and disorgainzed very quickly.

Feedburner Replacement Plugin - Let’s you keep your feedburner feed on your domain.

Objection Redirection - This plugin by Dax is one of the most powerful and useful plugins I use. It let’s you redirect old and broken url’s to clean and fresh url’s without you having to touch an htaccess file.

Google Sitemaps The Google Sitemaps Webmaster Central program by Google is absolutely one of the most helpful things Google has ever put out. If you are fixing your own site or someone else’s there’s no better way to figure out what a search engine thinks about your site. This plugin updates and rebuilds the XML file everytime you make a new post and ping’s google to tell them about it. It’s especially helpful if you publish on a predetermined schedule. Warning make sure you have the file permissions set correctly or this won’t work properly.

Wordpress Database Backup - If there is one wordpress plugin you absolutely need this is it. It gives you the ability to backup the core database tables and any other tables you specify. The backups happen on demand or on a nightly schedule. While it might be against TOS what I do is set up a dedicated gmail account for each wordpress blog. I then set this plugin to backup the tables every night and email the file to a gmail account. Viola a free daily incremental offsite backup. Read More......

I solved (at least partly) my problem maintaining rankings over time. Old pages that used to get traffic are once again seeing inbound search visits. I did it by tweaking my blog’s category pages, but I think the lessons are also helpful for ecommerce sites.

By default, Wordpress category pages show 10 posts. Similarly, most ecommerce category pages show 9 products per page (in a 3×3 grid).

This sucks for SEO, because your individual blog posts or category products get less and less internal linklove over time as they get pushed to the secondary category pages.

There are two types of secondary category pages - the extremely deep ones that no one will ever get to because it takes 10 “next page” clicks to get there. For this problem, Egghead created Wordpress pagination. Adding “1,” “2,” “3,” … links is just a partial solution, though. And as Rand highlights in this fantastic Whiteboard Friday (prompted by a question of mine, I believe ), pagination is still not great.

Search engines don’t have a particular reason to crawl deeper than the main category page, as a general rule.

This is more true for ecommerce sites where the products tend to resemble each other (e.g. diamond rings) and a deeper crawl is unlikely to make the results returned to searchers significantly better. Search engines also have that incentive in a Wordpress blog context since a percentage of the newer posts likely rehash older ones, though the rehash is less pronounced relative to ecommerce sites.

Further compounding the problem is the fact, as I just recently found out, that All In One SEO - probably the single most popular Wordpress SEO plugin around - adds a meta robots noindex tag to your category pages! (Or perhaps it writes to robots.txt; I didn’t pay exact attention but that’s a technical detail that is beside the point.) If I were a search engineer, I would treat links from noindexed pages as less valuable than those from pages meant to be in my index. No, I haven’t run this test scientifically - this part is just a hunch.

The Takeaway Tips on Optimizing Archival Material:

1) Go to Settings (aka Options in older versions of Wordpress) - All In One SEO - and remove the checkmark next to ‘noindex category pages’.

2) Go to Settings - Reading. Set “Blog pages show at most: ” to 100. Rand suggests (in that Whiteboard Friday) that this won’t solve all your problems, because it doesn’t scale. So here’s how to scale it…

3) Ironically, the answer is in another SEOmoz post. Consolidate the repetitive long tail post selection by moving all your content on a narrow subject to one particular post. This will reduce the number of posts (and hence the depth to which spiders need to crawl) as well as make for a single, more comprehensive post.

That makes it more linkable, incidentally. And it should help bring in more longtail traffic too, due to the mix of previously absent words with those already present! While we’re getting all Wikipedia style, why not throw in a table of contents for good measure, since your post is going to be getting longer?

4) Take Michael Gray’s tip on putting posts in just one category (see the vid below). This will enable you to maximize the value of each category page in getting posts indexed (or each subcategory’s power, as Rand cleverly advises in the Whiteboard Friday video).

For example, I recently wrote that my idea for measuring social media results could be coded using the Friendfeed API. Well, the Friendfeed API blurb is going to be integrated into the main post as soon as I find time. Similarly, a number of my link buying posts can be simplified and consolidated.
The Ideal Category Archive SEO Solution:
Ajax - 100 posts can be intimidating, especially when that scroll button gets all tiny. Instead, why not have 100 posts loaded, but only 10 or 20 visible? To get to the others you click an AJAX link. Only when you get to say, the 100th or 200th post does a new page need to be loaded. This makes for decent usability while keeping things search engine friendly.
Value-add tagging and sorting system - Essentially, you’d be able to tag something on the backend on a scale of 1-5 on how useful a post is. Alternatively, you could base this on user ratings of how good a post was, but this depends on having a large enough user base to sustain this.
Then, users viewing your category archives could sort them by how valuable or popular an individual post is. This ’sort-by-importance’ view would be the default for search engines, ensuring your best content gets the most crawler attention.

What do you make of these ideas? Would you do any of this differently? Have additional tips on this? Why does All In One SEO noindex category pages by default, and likewise Joost’s robots plugin?

Gab Goldenberg writes on SEO at his SEO blog. Check out his services if you’re in the market for something professional. Read More......

Using Adsense on your blog usually isn’t the most profitable way to monetize it, but it is fairly quick and easy, which makes it a popular choice for many website owners. Last week I moved one of my commercial blogs to Thesis, and was reminded of the importance of using section targeting on your blog.

Section targeting is an adsense approved method of telling the ad serving algorithm which parts of your websites to pay attention to and which parts to ignore. Because blogs sometimes have a lot of extraneous info, non essential keywords, or low profit keywords on them, Adsense isn’t always as profitable as it could be. However by telling Adsense to use only the contents of the post for determining which ads to show AND (that’s a big and) putting the ads in that section, you usually get the combination of on target ads that are going to generate the most profit.

Is section targeting worth doing … the graph below shows Adsense CPM for the month of February, the three days in the box are the days the blog didn’t have section targeting enabled.

Once the section targeting was added back in you can see the earnings returned to normal. I’m pretty sure you aren’t allowed to show actual dollar amounts, CPM, or CTR rates from your Adsense account, but since this is sanitized I think I’m ok.

Now on to the real part of the tutorial, we’re going to be using hooks to add Adsense section targeting. If you aren’t familiar with how to add thesis hooks, you should read Thesis Tutorial - Hooks for Dummies.

Inside of your custom_functions.php file you want to add the following code:

//adsense targeting functions

function open_adsense_targting(){

echo "<!-- google_ad_section_start -->";

}

function close_adsense_targting(){

echo "<!-- google_ad_section_end -->";

}

That adds the functions to open and close the section targeting tags. You could use shorter names but I’m a big proponent of easy to understand programming, and if you come back 6 months from now it’s going to be really easy to tell what that programming is and what it’s used for.

Next we need this code:

add_action('thesis_hook_before_post','open_adsense_targting' );

add_action('thesis_hook_after_post', 'close_adsense_targting');

This uses the hook locations to tell it to open the tag before the post and close the tag after the post. If you are looking for a list of all hooks here’s a nice reference. That’s it that’s all there is to it.

I’m a big proponent of thesis, and and am going to move my blog onto it as soon as I stop being so lazy busy. The real benefit of thesis is it acts like a management layer for your design, so you don’t have to go into the template files to make your changes.  You don’t have to worry about messing up and breaking tinkering with core wordpress functions. It also makes it easy and painless for people who aren’t exceptionally skilled with programming to make changes. If you do know your way around the code it just makes it easier to get things done. It’s $87 for a personal copy or $164 for the developers license (which for me was a no brainer) if you were thinking of buying it feel free to use my thesis aff link or you can go straight.

Thesis has an incredibly powerful and helpful community of supporters so it’s something I have no problem reccomending.

Read More......

I had seen Make Easy Money with Google (aff) being mentioned in quite a few spots and was pretty interested in reading it. Due a problem with something else I ordered I received a credit, so I applied it towards the purchase of this book.

Make Easy Money with Google is written by Eric Giguere who’s website can be found at EricGiguere.com. He’s written a few other programming books, none of which I’ve read (not my subjects). The book has a companion website/blog MakeEasyMoneywithGoogle.com.

The book is written in conversational style, with the author talking and explaining things to three fictional characters. Each has different styles, goals, and approaches to building a website with Adsense. While you will probably identify with one character over the others, all of them are important to the story. This approach makes for a book that’s very easy read and understand (KUDOS Eric!), and at just over 250 pages you can probably get through it in few days or a long weekend. In the first part of the book the authors spends considerable time and effort explaining how to register a domain, get hosting , build a simple website and publish it. In the second part of the book he goes into explaining the basics of the adsense program, how to get different size ad units, choose colors. He very briefly goes into design, placement, and keyword theory.

The Good: This book is very easy to read and comprehend. If you’ve never published a website before and want to learn how to do it, and make some money using adsense, this is the perfect book for you.

The Bad: If you have built more than 6 websites in your life, or are already meeting adsense’s minimum monthly payment threshold, there’s probably not much in here for you.

When all is said and done this is a good book, and is best suited for new or inexperienced web publishers, or people with little or no experience with contextual advertising programs. If you read some of the reviews from amazon or other places you’ll see this book isn’t well received by the “techie” types who think it’s too basic, which is unfair, as I don’t think the book was intended for them. However the reviews clearly show there is “demand” for a book covering advanced contextual advertising concepts, implementation and theory, if someone is willing to go after it. Read More......

I was hoping to find more adsense tools to review and recommend, however I never received anything so we’ll go with what I was able to find.
Adsense Script Tools

These are the tiny little programs you install on your server (blech!) or locally on your machine that help you analyze your adsense clicks, CTR and earnings. Some of them are easy, some of them are difficult, and some of them help you make pretty graphs. To be honest none of them are worth recommending. You could do just as good a job by setting up your channels properly and dumping a CSV file into excel. If someone has a specific one or wants to send me a review copy of thier software, I will look at it. DO NOT send me anything that has to be installed on a server. I run multiple websites on multiple hosting companies, so I don’t need something that requires more maintenance thank you very much.
Adsense Preview Tools

The Adsense Sandbox comes via Digital Point. You put in a URL and it lets you preview what ads are most likely to appear on a URL. Pretty handy IMHO.
Adsense Tracking

While not set up to be an Adsense tracking tool per se, the free log analyzer from AddFreeStats is actually pretty good. You put a small graphic tracking bug on the bottom of each of your pages and it gives you standard logging reports. You can also activate adsense tracking to find out what ads are being clicked on what pages. Combine this with an excel spreadsheet and channels and you are good to go. You can upgrade to a paid version and get an invisible tracking bug. TIP: Lock down your stats under a password, I’m fascinated how many people leave that open.
Adsense in Action

Probably one of the best things you can do to increase your adsense earnings is to go and look how other people are doing things. The adsense case studies are one place. While these are Google approved you really don’t have an idea how successful they are. So you’d be much better off finding someone you know is in the UPS Club. Jason Calacanis who runs Weblogs Inc is on a quest to make 1 Million dollars a year from Adsense. While I do give Jason a hard time sometimes, I do actually admire what he’s built, and think there are some very valuable lessons to be learned from looking at the websites owns. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger also has two sites I really like the Digital Camera Review and Camera Phone Review. Don’t be a wanker and copy exactly what they’ve done, it’s bad form. Instead look at them, learn from them, and use it as inspiration. Read More......

My Adsense ads are horrible, they only pay out (insert low dollar figure here)

My Adsense CTR is horrible, I only get a (insert extremely low CTR here)

To be fair these comments weren’t coming just from bloggers, but bloggers did make up an overwhelmingly large percentage. I think this stems from a misconception on the part of the bloggers that they are entitled to high payout and CTR. I’d like to spend a little time to share my feelings on this subject. In the early days a blog may just have been an online diary or journal, but like the days of the Nehru jackets, they are gone. What a blog is now is Chronologically Structured Content Management System, as opposed to the classic web hierarchical structured implementation. Let’s be clear, you can still use a blog as your online diary or journal, but nowdays it’s just as likely to be used as a commercial blog. Yes, I did just say commercial blog, and no the earth didn’t open under my feet and swallow me whole for saying it. Let’s take some time to look at a your typical blog.

You may post about commercial related subjects like your job, what you like to buy, or even your hobbies. However these posts are all about your life, they are no more commercially viable or attractive than say Aunt Millie’s Holiday Newsletter. Yes we all have an Aunt Millie in our family, every year she sends out a finely crafted newsletter in a coordinating envelope she ordered from paperdirect.com telling us all about her family. We learn how hard her husband works, how many activities her kids are in and how good they are at them. We also read the details of how her scrapbooking business hasn’t taken off yet, but she promises to spend more time on it right after New Years. So if you were a business owner would you want to advertise anywhere on Aunt Millie’s Newsletter? Then why would a business want to pay you top dollar to advertise on your blog? What’s that, you say your blog gets (insert a high number here) of readers per day, surely that has to be worth something? Well did you know Aunt Millie sends out over 800 copies of her holiday newsletter to 17 countries, on 4 continents? Now before you get all fired up about it, understand that I don’t have a problem with you having a personal blog or sharing it with the public. However your expectation that it has value outside of your family/friends/community, is a serious misconception.

So what exactly is a commercially viable blog? Don’t think of it as publishing a blog, think of it as publishing an online magazine. You need to start out with good content or articles about a small area or niche topic. You will need lots of content, and unless you are well known, don’t expect much to happen until you’ve written at least 100 and more likely over 200 articles. Yes you will have to devote some time and effort to publicizing and marketing it as well. Once you’ve got a significant focused reader base, that’s the time to slowly ad in the advertising. Now here’s the one that causes lots of people to freak out. BE PREPARED TO GIVE UP SOME PRIME SCREEN REAL ESTATE, IN THE CENTER, ABOVE THE FOLD, TO ADVERTISING. If you’ve worked with print media at all you will know the middle of the right hand page is the most desirable spot inside of a magazine (excluding the cover pages). I’ve sat through meetings where people have said ” … you know we need more right hand pages …”. If you want people to click on your ads, you will need put them where they can see them, above the fold in the center of the screen, in a prominent location. Yes I can almost here the keys typing for the flame comments and emails now. Before you hit that send button though, ask yourself this, are you building a space sough after by advertisers, or are you working on Aunt Millie’s Newsletter? No I don’t think your pages should be filled with ads, in fact quite the opposite, there should always be more content than advertising, ALWAYS!

Next thing, lose the fancy graphics and eye-candy from your template. Yes I know you may have paid for a fancy template, maybe you had your niece who’s a graphic artist design something for you, or you really like the way that spinning flaming platypus looks in your page header. Here’s the thing, it’s detracting from your content. Graphics should be simple, understated, and support the content, not overpower or compete with it. Now before some art student wearing a beret, corduroy jacket with elbow patches, and smoking a pipe or French cigarette, writes and calls me a Philistine, stop and think. Are you designing a commercially attractive and viable space, or are you designing an intricate macrame border for Aunt Millie’s Newsletter? Remember keep it simple and to the point.

Yes I know you feel like I just ripped off the band-aid, and now it hurts. Sorry but someone had to do it. I know some of you are still out there reading saying ‘but can’t I still have this … do we have to get rid of this … I really like that …’. Well I’m not your second grade teacher who’s going to tell you everything’s all right, that you don’t have to change a thing, and put a scooby-doo sticker on your shirt to make you feel better. If you want a blog that makes you more money than you spend at Starbucks every Tuesday, you will need to get serious about what you’re doing.

If none of this sounds incredibly fun, and really sounds pretty close to actual work, here’s the way I see it, getting an Adsense check for $5 is fun, getting an Adsense check for $500 or $5000 is work.

Disclaimers:
I don’t actually have an Aunt Millie, she’s a fictional character. But like you, I do have relatives who send out holiday newsletters.

Yes I know the minimum Adsense payment is $100, so you never could get a $5 check, but I was just making a point, mmkay? Read More......