Archive for the ‘Plugin Reviews’ Category
Recently I’ve been looking back into SEO for Wordpress since converting all my static sites into Wordpress blogs, and finding that my pagerank decreased and in some cases disappeared completely. I totally expected the opposite to happen. I had made some huge mistakes and unfortunately I did it to all my sites at once. The default settings in Wordpress was not only blocking search engines but even if they weren’t blocked, they were very poorly SEO optimised. Time to rectify! I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me.. this is what I’ve found so far, and if you have any suggestions or additions to add to this list, please share so that we can all benefit :)
Wordpress SEO Plugins
- Automatically optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).
- Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
- Generates META tags automatically
- Avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs
- You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
- You can fine-tune everything
- Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.
- Automatically creates an XML sitemap of your blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, Yahoo and MSN Search.
- This one is also less troublesome than the other sitemap generators that I’ve tried.
- After creating, I suggest you submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.
- Prevents you from accidentally spamming all the sites that you ping
- Prevents you from being banned and therefore, leaving more links in tact to your site.
- Won’t ping sites if you just "edit" a post
- Provides a timer so that if you post a bunch of posts at once, it doesn’t automatically ping everyone and make you look like a spammer.
- Shows you what people are searching for on your site so that you can create articles that match your visitors interests.
- Shows you exactly what search engine they came from and whether your blog showed any "related posts" for their search terms..
- You can also configure customized messages for them.
- Visually shows you how your traffic is going
- What terms were typed in the search engine to find your blog
- What page they landed on
- What browsers they were using, IP, etc.
- It’s a great light-weight plugin.
- Searches your post for keywords that match tags of other posts, in order to link to itself to encourage people to find relevant posts.
- Different than the "related posts" type of plugins, this just links keywords and is configurable depending on the type of site you have.
- Prevents extremely long urls when you have long titles by ensuring that all the useless words are cut-out of the permalink.
- Can automatically tag your non-tagged posts
- Find Related tags, and display related posts
- Allows you to mass-edit tags to get combine or remove
- Automatically generates meta-tags
- Related Posts in RSS
- Automatically finds related tags from sites
- If a page cannot be found, it will search your posts, pages, tags, categories for related posts and show them instead.
- Gives another link to a relative article, but mostly it keeps people at your site longer if they click to related posts and therefore looks ‘better’ in the search engines eyes rather than people closing their page a minute or so after visiting.
- You can replace the image with one of your own or use text in its place.
- The more people linking to you, the better your efforts in the search engines..and if search engines are indexing different versions of the same page, it may effect your SEO.
- By allowing people & robots to only see one "version" of you page www.pennybutler.com or pennybutler.com, it will make your search engine listings more uniform.
- I like this one better than Ultimate Google Analytics and Google Analytics for WordPress because Google Analyticator is tinier, the others - I tend to have to remove on occasion for memory leaks and I just haven’t had any problems with this one and it seems to do the trick, although most of the themes I’ve been using lately seems to already support google analytics.
- Depending on where the visitor comes from.. shows a message to remind them to do something
- If the visitor comes from Delicious, it will remind them to bookmark your page
- If they come from Google.. reminds them to subscribe to your feed.
- From Stumble.. to give your post a thumbs up
- Digg.. to Digg.. Twitter.. Yahoo.. Technorati.. and any custom domain you wish to add.
- That little reminder may be the reason your site gets "dugg" or "stumbled" more than others, etc.
- I have a post coming up that talks about customizing this, but am yet to implement it in my sites first to test.. stay tuned.
- Google cares if your site has PDA support, so do those browsing by PDA.
- This awesome plugin automatically converts your site into a PDA readable format
- I’ve only checked my sites in an iPhone, but it worked flawlessly, then I checked Google’s webmaster tools for their PDA checker and it worked in there as well.
- Converts all your site content into multi-languages, making sure that your site can be found by non-English browsers.
- It will also show all their results in the country’s search engine results. I have heaps of traffic coming from Japan on one of my blogs.
Add to header.php
- I found this somewhere.. (don’t know where, it’s in a text file in my "must do" folder, and I will obey)..
<?php if(is_single() || is_page() || is_home()) { ?>
<meta name="googlebot" content="index,noarchive,follow,noodp" />
<meta name="robots" content="all,index,follow" />
<meta name="msnbot" content="all,index,follow" />
<?php } else { ?>
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex,noarchive,follow,noodp" />
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />
<meta name="msnbot" content="noindex,follow" />
<?php }?>
This is my Robots.txt file..
- If you have any suggestions to improve it, please let me know :)
User-agent: *
# disallow all files in these directories
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /z/j/
Disallow: /z/c/
Disallow: /stats/
Disallow: /dh_
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/backup
Disallow: /wp-content/wpau-backup
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/mbp-favicon
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/upgrade
Disallow: /wp-content/uploads
Disallow: /wp-content/themes
Disallow: /wp-content/files
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: */trackback/
User-agent: Googlebot
# disallow all files ending with these extensions
Disallow: /*.js$
Disallow: /*.inc$
Disallow: /*.css$
Disallow: /*.gz$
Disallow: /*.cgi$
Disallow: /*.cgi$
Disallow: /*.xhtml$
Disallow: */trackback*
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /z/
Disallow: /wp-*
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Allow: /
User-agent: duggmirror
Allow: /
User-agent: Adsbot-Google
Allow: /
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /
User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Allow: /
User-agent: ia_archiver-web.archive.org
Allow: /
Permalink Structure
Setup Permalink Structure (/%category%/%postname%) and Category/Tag base if required in Settings > Permalinks
Similar Posts Coming Up..
1. ) 404 Page Configuration
Coming soon, I’ll be writing a post on how to configure your 404 page to not lose visitors as soon as they come. The basic gist will be to add the Smart 404 plugin, a search form, related posts, category list, mailing list, comments form, etc.. so that you don’t lose that visitor.
2. ) My Ping List
I really want to get it right before posting, there are plenty of sites you can borrow from in the meantime that make a list of valid ping services, but I want to have the creme-de-la-creme instructions on exactly who you should ping, the extra steps you have to take for some of them to take notice of you, and for the list to be valid, etc. It’s an on-going work-in-progress.
3. ) WP-Greet Box Configuration
I’ll probably write this very soon, I’m testing it on one of my blogs at the moment to see if it helps build my social traffic, if I have good results, I’ll write a post on how you can customise it the same.
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Tags: 404 error | google | pagerank | ping | psychic search | search engine optimization | seo | Wordpress PluginsRelated posts
A vulnerability in the Snoopy library was announced yesterday. WordPress uses Snoopy to fetch the feeds shown in the Dashboard. 2.6.3 is available for download right now. If you don’t want to download the whole release to get the security fix, you can download the following two files and copy them over your 2.6.2 installation.
I was already running 2.6.2 so I just overrode the above files, but if you have an earlier version, you might find it easier to use the free automatic upgrade plugin, called, not surpisingly Wordpress Automatic Upgrade Plugin.
Also a good one to have is the Wordpress Automatic Backup Plugin which I’ll write about one day (having too much fun with the "fun plugins & themes")
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Tags: automatic backup | Wordpress Plugins | wordpress upgradeRelated posts
How to get an extra 65% revenue from your blog?
Auction Thumbs..
Found this neat plugin tonight and I can’t wait to purchase it tomorrow to install on my niche blogs.. currently I add my code manually to each post on my niche blogs which is driving me insane because I never have enough time, and I haven’t liked the other pay plugins for eBay, but this post won’t be to bag those ones out lol, I’m just excited to find something like this which I think looks great and will save me heaps of time.
Auction Thumbs displays highly-relevant thumbnail images of Ebay auction products in your blog, seamlessly working into your design. The thumbnails will either be displayed in the Post Footer of each post, in the Sidebar, or both, if you so choose. Each of the thumbnails has an affiliate link and the Ebay Partner Network cookie is dropped once a visitor clicks on an image. Mouseover text informs the visitor as to the item Title, Current Bid, and Auction End Date.
Auction Thumbs is designed to display highly-relevant thumbnails along with your content. The more relevant the items are to your blog post, the more likely a visitor will click on the affiliate links, the more revenue you will see.
Auction Thumbs’ powerful tag-based matching randomly selects tags from your post and matches the tags against Ebay inventory. You control how many tags are randomly selected. This is set globally and can instantly populate your entire blog with relevant affiliate links. You can override the global behavior at the post-level by providing fine-tuned search criteria if you so choose at the time of post authoring.
Auction Thumbs is a plugin for self-hosted Wordpress blogs. Installation is a three-step process:
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Upload the plugin
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Activate the plugin
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Configure the admin page with your ebay tracking numbers/campaigns, default search criteria, image size, and # of thumbnails to display
I’ll update this post to give you a demo of what it looks like on my blogs when I get around to doing it, but in the meantime, he’s only just released it and the first 50 orders can get $10 off by using the Special Code “promocode" when ordering, so thought I’d better post because it’s already down to 25 orders..
(Actual size of small thumbs, I resized the other images down a bit out of habit)
Click here to view more details
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Tags: auction thumbs | ebay | Wordpress PluginsRelated posts
Can’t believe I haven’t found these plugins sooner.. I guess I didn’t have a need for it before, but I do now for some of my affiliate blogs.
I wanted to have a page that redirects users to signup for the Isagenix program or buy the Isagenix product when they are reading about my weight-loss success on my lose-weight blog.. I realized from doing a survey that my blog readers couldnt find where to buy the products. My intention for that blog was only to record mine & others success stories through using the product and so I only had a couple of links (as pictures) on my sidebar to buy the product, but if you are looking for a "Buy" button and dont find it.. well it turns out they were getting frustrated and went back to Google (eek!) to find the product.. = missed sales for me!
Anyway, I needed a way to easily edit the page links to point to the buy site as well as my new flickr "before and after photos" gallery, and while I was at it, was on a mission to find something that can remove some of the pages from my nav link.
Found 2 neat little plugins that did the job easily and quickly, saves me having to go through the code (I detest going through code).
Plugin One: Page Links To
Page Links To is a plugin that allows you to make certain WordPress pages or posts link to a URL of your choosing, instead of their WordPress page or post URL. It also will redirect people who go to the old (or “normal”) URI to the new one, using a redirect style of your choosing.
On each page.. down the bottom, it adds an "Page Links To" form box.. you just type the url in and it creates the page and when users click on it, will automatically redirect them to that URL. (You can do this with code, but why - when this plugin does it for you?)
Download Page Links To Wordpress Plugin
Plugin Two: Page Link Manager
Page Link Manager Plugin is a Wordpress plugin that adds an administration panel that allows users to pick which page links are included in the site navigation. It’s very simple.. the options page just lists the pages, and you "uncheck" the boxes of the ones you don’t want appearing in your site navigation. Simple, fast. Does the trick.
Download Page Link Manager Wordpress Plugin
I’d be very interested to hear from anyone that has any similar plugins to the above.. I know I’ve seen some pay ones that allow you to also add squeeze pages and optin forms, and do the above in one, but can’t find the link.. I think it was profitblogger or something similar to that where I saw it.. maybe it was a theme or something, I forget.. anyway.. do you use a plugin similar to the above or have a better way of managing your posts/pages? Feel free to comment.. I’d love to hear about it.. I’m a wordpress plugin junkie lol..
Technorati: wordpress plugins
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Tags: page link manager | page links to | redirect | wordpress pluginI just wanted to give some Kudo’s to the support team @ MaxBlogPress.
I recently bought the MaxBlogPress Ninja Affiliate plugin from them (which is a pretty awesome plugin that is "similar" to what is out there for free but Ninja Affiliate is way more advanced).
I have a lot of affiliate blogs and wanted a better way to manage my links and be able to "instantly" update all of the links "at will" if I found a better affiliate program or if the affiliate program died (*shudder*.. just remembered the loss of commissions and almost 11 domains when that ebay and the commission junction disaster happened)..
Anyways, all was well, I installed the plugin.. setup my first link, and tested it out..
And it didn’t automatically update all my past posts, etc, from the keywords I chose.. :(
I wrote them a support ticket, thinking it was something I had done, or that I had mis-interpreted their sales pitch.. they replied back promptly, logged into my site, found the problem, and created a special update (for everyone) to enable it to work with my incompatible plugins (well, they didnt actually tell me what the problem was, but since I’m a plugin crazy girl, it was most likely my combination hehe).
Anyways, so glad that there are programmers out there that also know how to give great customer service and rather than giving me excuses, they made it their problem and made me a very happy customer.
They have a special discount on it for the next few days, so if you haven’t yet checked it out (and you’re an affiliate marketer that has a "need" for this product) then check out the video demos on their site.
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Tags: MaxBlogPress | Ninja Affiliate