Category: 
Wednesday, 21 March 2007 @ 11:15 pm (Chris Frost)OK, firstly this post relates to Wordpress blogs only and it’s idea is to serve two purposes;
1 - to remind me of what plugins and widgets I use, and where I got them from
2 - to help new bloggers on their way
It is not intended as a ‘Blog Guru Share His Secrets’ in any way, shape or form, and as usual if you have any handy hints and tips yourself, please do share and help myself and others learn whats out there.
SEO TACTICS
OK, so you have installed Wordpress and you posts look pretty meaningless such as http://www.webaffiliate.co.uk/blog/?p=123. Not exactly very informative of what the post is about and certainly not the most search engine friendly format available. If you choose OPTIONS you can setup how you ‘permalinks’ look like and how they are formed.
Full details here>>> http://seo.blorc.com/seo/permalinks/
Next up is the PAGE TITLE shown in your browser when reading your posts. As standard this is shown as BLOGNAME - ARCHIVE - TITLE. Again this isn’t the most friendly title when it comes to search engines. Search engines use your PAGE TITLE as the linking text in its search engine results page (SERP) therefore by changing the order to TITLE - BLOGNAME can help improve your SEO. It also makes it easier for users to know right away if you post is relevant to what they are looking for.
Full details here>>> http://seo.blorc.com/seo/page-title/
Sitemaps are important in helping spiders navigate their way around you website. A number of plugins are available, the 2 most simple and effective ones I’ve found are Really Simple Sitemap and Google Sitemaps.
Really Simple Sitemap simply creates and updates a sitemap.php page everytime a new post is created, meaning every page is no more than 2 clicks away for spiders to crawl.
Full details here>>> http://www.internetwealthmaster.com/really-simple-sitemap/
Google Sitemaps generates two “XML-Sitemap compliant” sitemap’s of your blog that is supported by Google, YAHOO and MSN Search saving them as sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz.
Full details here>>> http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final
Tagging is a world unto itself. Tagging can help populate your Meta Keywords tags, can help speed up searches within your blog and can also help identify related posts you have made in the past. The obvious plugin for this is Ultimate Tag Warrior and Tags In Head.
Full details here>>> http://seo.blorc.com/seo/tagging-meta-keywords/
PLUGINS
Backup
You may not be aware, but during an upgrade of Wordpress, the Backup utility has been removed and is no longer part of the standard install. Naturally backing up all your posts, database tables, etc is pretty much essential if you care about your creation. Wordpress Database Backup lets you manually run a complete backup of your blog, or if you prefer, you can automate the task hourly, daily, weekly or monthly. This plugin can then save the back or email it to you for safe storage.
Full details here>>> http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup
Search Meter
Search Meter is a nifty utility in that it shows what your users are searching for and what results are being returned to them. This is useful if you are creating a new affiliate website based on a blog, as it allows you to see what are the most common search terms and could help you improve your SEO.
Full details here>>> http://www.thunderguy.com/semicolon/wordpress/search-meter-wordpress-plugin/
Exec-PHP
This nifty utilit allows you to enter coding into your posts which otherwise would not function or show correctly.
Full details here>>> http://bluesome.net/post/2005/08/18/50/
Similar Posts
Does exactly what it says on the tin! It checks previous posts in your blog for similar words and terms and can then, if you wish, show 5 or more similar post from your blog.
Full details here>>> http://rmarsh.com/plugins/similar-posts/
WP-THIS WP-THAT
OK, so there isn’t actually a plugin call WP-THIS/WP-THAT but it is a collection of plugins designed by lesterchan, most of which I have used in websites of mine. They range from WP-Email which allows you visitors to recommand or send your blog posts to a friend, to WP-PostRatings that allows your visitors to rate each post using a nice AJAX GUI.
Full details here>>> http://www.lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming.php
There are plenty more wonderful and amazing widgets and gizmos, but these should give you a few to play around with for now.
Horaayy..there are 9 comment(s) for me so far ;)
Awesome posts, and I plan to implement a couple of those I didn’t have on my blog, thanks!
Other ones I use are the “recent posts” which you use but don’t mention here!
Great posts. I’ve really been getting into the whole idea of affiliate marketing for a while now but unsure where to start with it all! Have you done any posts in the past that resemble a beginners guide? Or is there somewhere you could point me to?
Geoff
The base address of this blog should give you a starting point;
http://www.webaffiliate.co.uk
Also, if you can, signup to attend one of the free seminars taking place in April/May this year;
http://www.affiliateprogramadvice.com/blog/2007/03/affiliateprogramadvicecom-launch-short.htm
Finally, pop along to the A4U Forum and ask for advice until your heart’s content, and again, if possible, try to make the A4U events so you can meet other affiliates, merchants and networks;
http://www.a4uforums.co.uk
http://www.a4uevents.co.uk
Rich
Yeah you are correct, infact I missed out the whole Side Widgets plugin. When I get a min, I will update this post and added it. Glad you like some of the ones I recommend and plan to implement them.
Let me know how it goes.
Thanks Chris, I’m sure those sites will be of help to me. I’m gathering lots of bits and pieces of info all the time. Now I just need get myself into gear and get a site up and running!
[...] Re: Wordpress Essential Pluggins Geoff Hopefully this will help; Blogging Necessities | Web Affiliate Marketing Blog | Affiliate Marketing In addition to these, I also make use of; wp-ajax-newsletter - Google Code SEO for your Wordpress [...]
[...] Frost came up trumps again with his Blogging Necessities list. Some great plugins [...]
Joost de Valk has done some very useful anti-spam plugins like the RSS Footer one.
I’ve been using WordPress for a long time and I use plugins a lot, but even so you had some on this list that I didn’t know about. Thanks for sharing!