Wordpress4Dummies, wordpress blog ,SEO, Articles, Templates, Plugin, Skin, Download, pdf

Are you interested in enhancing your blog posts with media, maps, images, and more?

If so, then this new Wordpress plugin called Yahoo Shortcuts, might just be your answer.

As you write your blog post, Yahoo Shortcutswill automatically detect pre-licensed content, images, and more to be added to your blog post, and thus enhancing the readers experience.

Here’s a quick video to learn more – I wasn’t able to embed the video so you’ll have to just visit the link:

http://fe.shortcuts.search.yahoo.com/wordpress/tutorial.html

Also, here’s a description from the Wordpress plugin page:

“Yahoo! Shortcuts for Wordpress plugin intelligently enriches your blog post with great content from Yahoo! Maps, Finance, and beyond. We are excited to make the software code for Yahoo! Shortcuts plugin for Wordpress available under the BSD license. Note, however, that the images, designs, logos, modules (including the content and services that flow through the plugin) are provided under the terms located here, which you agree to by activating the plugin.”

The Wordpress.org plugin directory contains 6,889 plugins as of today, October 13, 2009. Nearly 55 million plugin downloads have gone through the Wordpress system. With that many choices available, how is one to know which are the best for their blog, and which are beat? Everyone wants plugins that will help boost their blog in the search engines, plugins that will allow visitors to easily share the information on the site, and plugins that will make blog navigation and permalinks easy and efficient.

Well, Dandy Randy, you’re in luck. Today I’ve put together a list of some of the most popular and most effective plugins for SEO and Networking that will help you get your blog rocking. Of course, the most important part of a blog is the content – but the right content paired with the right tools can be explosive.

1. All in One SEO Pack

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

The most downloaded plugin available for Wordpress, this little gadget allows you to specify a name, description and exact keywords for every post and page you publish. It is very effective and automatically appends the information to the proper places to get your words spidered. It’s arguably the most important plugin you can have on your Wordpress blog, and if you only use one plugin, it should be this one. A few of the others on this list will duplicate features of this plugin but operate stand-alone – this one encompasses a variety of necessities for any blog.

-

2. Google XML Sitemaps

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

Those new to the blogging arena might not be aware of the importance of sitemaps. Using Google Webmaster tools, you can create a sitemap to basically tell Google exactly where every page of your site is located, allowing it to efficiently spider your pages and get them into search listings. Webmaster Tools will then present you with information about how your site ranks in the listings, what people are using to find your site and more.

Or, you can use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin to have this happen automatically every time you post, updating your sitemap and sending the information to Google, Ask, MSN and Yahoo. It even has a ton of options on calculating priority, which it can do based on comments, views, or user-defined criteria. Hardcore.

-

3. ShareThis

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/share-this/

ShareThis is a plugin you’ve likely seen all over the place. It’s a one-stop shop for posting a blog entry to dozens of social sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Digg, or e-mailing it to a friend. There couldn’t be a simpler way to offer your readers a mode of sharing on their favorite service.

-

4. Ultimate Google Analytics

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ultimate-google-analytics/

If you use Google Analytics as your means of collecting demographic information, like most people do,Ultimate GA is a great plugin. Simply tell it your UA# and it’ll throw the appropriate code into every post you make, allowing you to automatically track the stats on everything you do. It’s all about automation, son.

-

5. SEO Smart Links

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-automatic-links/

Do you ever feel the need to link people from one post to another? Sure you do. SEO Smart Links will help do that for you. If you type a certain key term from one blog post within the text of another blog post, SEO Smart Links will automatically make it a link for you. You can also designate a list of specific terms with specific targets, so any time you type those words it’ll become a link. Settings allow you to control the number of automatic links per post and more. It’s a dandy little tool, I do say. A dandy little tool.

-

6. Twitter For Wordpress

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-for-wordpress/

Those who use Twitter know that with a solid number of followers, there is often no quicker way to get a bunch of traffic instantly to your blog. A number of Twitter plugins exist for Wordpress, but the simply named Twitter For Wordpress is the most effective one I’ve tried. It’ll automatically create a Tweet when you post, and even has plugin-plugins that will auto-create bit.ly links and do other fancy things. There is also widget support to display your recent public tweets on your blog’s sidebar, though the brand new Twitter Goodies is better for that, with its auto-refreshing widget.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-goodies/

-

7. WP-DB-Backup

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup/

I do some web maintenance for a guy who’s Wordpress-based site gets thousands of hits a month. I recently discovered he was never backing up his site, and didn’t know how to go about doing so. If you find yourself fitting that description, whether your site is as heavily trafficked or not, you should be backing up your goods. A hack or server crash that destroys your blog will set you back hours, days, or weeks – and replacing the content can often be impossible. WP-DB-Backup offers a one-click backup that can be stored on your server, downloaded to your machine or emailed to you. Scheduled backups are also possible on a multitude of frequencies so you don’t have to do it yourself. It’s just plain smart to do.

-

8. WP-Email, WP-Print, WP-PostRatings, WP-PostViews, WP-UserOnline

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-email/ – search the rest yourself, lazy bum.

These plugins are all by the same developer and add a level of interactivity to your blog. If you get a lot of traffic, why not show it off? People like to be in groups, and WP-UserOnline will show them how many other people are at the site. WP-PostViews and PostRatings will allow community members to see others’ feelings about a post, and which posts are most popular. Print and Email do what you’d imagine, and make easy to access printer-friendly versions of your posts available for those wishing to share them with others via digital or hard copy.

-

9. SEO Slugs

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-slugs/

So you’ve got a great permalink structure figured out that shows the title of your post and category in the URL. You don’t want to ruin it by having the URL include silly little words like “a,” “and,” “it” and “the.” This plugin will make it so those words are ignored when creating your post’s URL, because quite frankly, search engines don’t like those little words. You can also create a list of other words you want ignored if you choose.

-

10. Permalink Redirect

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/permalink-redirect/

If you haven’t set a custom permalink structure on your blog, you might want to. Creating a post with the title “Top 10 Chicken Restaurants” will normally create a post URL that simply ends with “/?p=124” or something uncreative like that. Put your URLs to work for you in the SEO department by having them pull in the words in your post title.

To do so, navigate to Permalinks in your Wordpress dashboard. On that page, select the “Custom Structure” option. In the box, type something like “/%category%/%postname%/” minus the quotes. This will use your category and name of the post for the URL instead of the default, which is simply the post number. Now when you post “Top 10 Chicken Restaurants” in category “Dining,” your url will be “/dining/top-10-chicken-restaurants/”

Before you click the save button, install the Permalink Redirect plugin. This plugin will reply a 301 permanent redirect if anything requests one of your old URLs, taking it to the new one, and ensures each URL remains unique. It also makes it so you can do this without editing your .htaccess file. This URL structure is much more SEO-friendly than jibberish.

-

11. Robots Meta

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/robots-meta/

You don’t want search engines crawling every single page of your blog. There are a lot more pages than you think, and it’s not ideal to have every page crawled because it results in duplicate content being indexed. That’s a bad thing and can count against your search engine ranking. This plugin lets you specify which areas should be crawled and which shouldn’t, letting you choose the content that gets indexed. It’s literally the only easy way to add meta robots tags to Wordpress pages.

-

12. Nofollow Case By Case

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nofollow-case-by-case/

You can add the “nofollow” command from your comments and apply it to particular comments, authors or strip trackbacks and pingbacks. You can also automatically set all links to open in a new window.

-

13. SEO Friendly Images

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-image/

With image searching constantly growing, more and more people make their way to blogs via the images. This allows you to easily add alt and title tags to your images and get them indexed properly by the search engines. It’s all about the indexing, Jeeves.

Use some of these plugins and your Wordpress blog will be all set to draw traffic and easily network your posts with others. Then it’s just up to you to write something worth reading.

Blogs are an excellent tool for improving a site’s search engine optimization (SEO). For some excellent WordPress plugins that help set the stage, we refer you to our earlier post:

The best WordPress plugins for bloggers

However, using the wpSEO plugin will help you reach the next level. We explain our results and some other tricks we used on the way to improving our SEO benchmarks for this blog.

Step 1: Setting up wpSEO
We decided to give wpSEO a test drive – you can use it for free for ten days.

Yes, the plugin has a small price tag, but in return, after the initial learning curve of fine-tuning your work with it, time savings and more targeted traffic will come your way. This led us to conclude that the small cost was justified.

Download the wpSEO plugin here.

Tip 1:  Unless you are an SEO expert, start by using the options as described in these screenshots:
basic set-up steps. You can also download and install options on your blog (see above image).

Step 2: Title – a good one helps
Doing SEO is important, but it does not diminish the importance of a good title. An interesting title makes your target audience curious and tempts them to read the post. Because Google does not like titles beyond 65 characters (it cuts them off), you should limit your titles to around five to eight words.

Tip 2: Try to limit title length to 60 characters – 5 to 8  words.

Bonus tip: Make sure you use the right permalink set-up to further help with SEO.

Step 3: WordPress excerpt – enticing people to read
WordPress offers the use of a short description through the WordPress Excerpt Summary option. Google Alerts, for example, uses this summary.

However, search engines truncate your summary after 160 characters using an ellipsis (…) for the rest of the text. This could decrease a blog’s click-through rate (CTR). A compelling excerpt of 160 characters not only entices readers, but can also be used as a meta description with wpSEO (see image below).

Tip 3: Write a compelling WordPress excerpt of 160 characters that you can also use for the post’s meta description.

Bonus tip: Explaining meta tags versus meta description.

Step 4: Meta keywords
Yahoo! uses meta keywords for the description displayed in search results. While some may suggest five to eight keywords that match both content of and target for a blog post, others suggest limiting it to around 200 characters, since most databases have a default maximum size for certain fields of 255 characters. Hence, those search engines that see keyword meta keywords look at the first 255 characters. Google does not use meta keywords but Yahoo! and other smaller search engines do.

Tip 4: Choose about eight keywords and make sure you don’t exceed 200 characters.

The image to the right shows the fields that should show if you have activated the wpSEO options, including the choices we made (download pdf below).

Bonus tip: Download screenshots of how we set up wpSEO to get more bang for our buck(pdf file).

Step 5: Test the set-up
At this point, it is a good idea to see if it works the way you want it to. The link below allows you to enter any URL and test it (we recommend that you test posts, pages and categories) to see what works and what needs changing in the wpSEO options or the data you entered directly to get a more optimized solution (see above image).

Tip 5: After setting up, check if the blog post, page or category description settings work as intended.

Bonus tip: Test your site’s crawl-ability by search engine with the Search Engine Robot Simulator.

We love the wpSEO plugin and have paid for it because, after extensive testing, we believe it is worth every penny. Nevertheless, there are one or two things that could be improved a bit:

- Why defaults? The documentation is excellent – if you are a geek. Unfortunately, the explanation provided about the default chosen to optimize SEO when uploading the file (see screenshot top left of this post) is missing. For many people this might not matter, but understanding the logic behind a configuration, especially SEO-related, allows one to learn.

- Categories: When you go tohttp://YourBlog.com/wp-admin/categories.php, you enter the description (no brackets or anything needed) and wpSEO gets it. It would be great if keywords for post categories could also be entered using the same approach (see image at right). Currently, keywords can only be taken from titles or tags of posts. This does not allow a true fine-tuning, which would be more effective.

- Great stuff: Allowing the importing of preset options (see image top left), saving the xml file with currently set options, and a well thought-out user-interface make working with wpSEO easy. They also help provide a great user experience and make increasing targeted traffic simple.

Bottom line
WordPress does a great job of SEO out of the box. This post shows how you can improve this even further with a few tricks and thewpSEO plugin. The latter does what All in One SEO Pack does, and then some.

Above we outlined five tips that should help get your SEO work off to a great start. Sure, it takes time and effort for your work in SEO to show up. Nevertheless, once optimization is finished, maintaining SEO performance requires less time and effort. Most importantly, the Return on Investment (ROI) is substantial.

I am real excited about sharing this tip with you, because figuring this out, for me, was a huge. Recently Google updated Google SideWiki to include the option of sending comments to your Blogger blog. However, at this time, there is no option of sending comments to any other blog platform, more commonly, self-hosted WordPress.

While I was excited to discover that Google included an option of porting comments to Blogger, for me, it simply wasn’t enough. The comment I create in Google SideWiki are ones that I’d like to share with readers on my dot Com blog, rather than my personal Blogger blog. At any rate, here’s the steps on how you can send your GoogleWiki comments to your WordPress blog.

Visit Blogger.com and create a new blog. Name the blog whatever you want, but I would name: Your Name SideWiki Comments. And give it a permalink structure the same: yournamesidewiki.

On the “Choose Your Template” page, scroll down to the very bottom and choose “Simple II” Created by: Jason Sutter. The reason why you you’re choosing this template is not for looks, it’s because there is no sidebar. I’ll explain in more detail in the next few steps.

Create and publish a test post. Don’t worry about what to say, just say anything and speed through this process. The reason why you need to quickly create and publish a post is so that you can have an active entry in your RSS feed, which you will be using in the next steps.

Next, click on Settings and then Formatting. You’ll want to change the Show post on main page count from 7 to ZERO! The reason why you want to set this to ZERO is because you don’t want the content to appear on this blog. In fact, you don’t want ANYTHING to appear on this blog, thus the reason for choosing the theme without the sidebar. I’ll explain more in the next few steps. Don’t forget to scroll down and save your modified settings.

Next, click on Layout and proceed to REMOVE all of the Gadgets in your template. As mentioned in the previous step, you do NOT want anything to appear on your blog, and for sure, you do NOT want your Google SideWiki comments to appear live on the blog.

The only gadget remaining is the Blog Posts gadget because this can’t be removed. However, it doesn’t matter, because previously, showing ZERO posts was set. View your blog live to verify that your published test post is not displaying. Click the RSS icon and copy your RSS Feed URL to clipboard and save it for the next upcoming steps.

Next, login to your self-hosted WordPress blog. Navigate to the Plugins / Add New section and search for wp-o-matic. Install and activate it.

Copy the cron instructions and from cPanel, open your Cron manager, click advanced, and paste the cron string in. Add a campaign and in the Basic tab, title it: Your Name SideWiki Comments. In the Feeds tab, PASTE your Blogger ATOM RSS feed. In the Categories tab, I suggest creating a category called, SideWiki Comments. This will identify to your readers that articles published in this category are your Sidewiki comments.

Nothing needs to be done in the Rewrite tab, you can skip that. From the Options section, adjust the frequency to a time which fits your post frequency. If you know that you’re going to be creating a new SideWiki comment every four hours, then you might want to set the frequency to match that. You don’t need to Cache Images because there won’t be any.

I would suggest CHECKING the Use feed date option. You can leave Perform pingbacks UNCHECKED. You’ll want to leave the Type of post to create set to Published, unless you want to manually go back to your post editor and publish them. The Max items to create on each fetch, I have changed to 0 for unlimited. I would leave the Post title links to source? UNCHECKED and keep the Discussion options setting OPEN and CHECK Allow pings. At this point, you’re done. Click submit.

At this point, you’re going to want to FETCH the RSS data. When this happens, your data will automatically be published into your self-hosted WordPress blog.

Final product is a beautiful article that you retain complete credit, copyrights, as well as what I call, “indexable ownership.” Using Google SideWiki is a great way to express your views and opinions about web pages you visit. However, I believe that writers should retain ownership of their content contributions.

I can’t say that Google quickly recognized that, but I can say that it’s great that they opened up the feature to port SideWiki comments to Blogger. However, I also feel that it’s important to allow users the option to port the comments to other platforms as well. I also feel that my contributions on places such as in Google SideWiki can earn revenue.

I am a professional blogger and it’s important that I have methods for earning revenue on the content I publish on the web. By porting Google SideWiki comments to a self-hosted WordPress blog, the author has full control over displaying contextual based ads. On average, I earn $20 to $25 on each article I publish per year and annual revenue double each year.

One of my visitor posted a question in 120 Do Follow Forums, his question is how to get exposure on giant search engines such as Google and Yahoo! for his carpet cleaning business but he doesn’t know anything about so-called SEO. I gave him a question that I believe would’ve been given by people who have concern on getting great rank in Search engines, especially Google.

My answer for him was: What you need now is SEO, it’s abbreviation of Search Engine Optimization, it’s the effort to optimize a website to rank very well for certain keyword in Search Engine, in return we will get an organic visitors from search engines that we can turn into potential customers or buyers.

In order to work with SEO firstly you need to have Wordpress blog, if your current site is not Wordpress, I highly recommend you to install it, then go download the latest Wordpress version there and install the script to your hosting.

1. And then download all useful SEO plugins go to SEO Plugins.
2. And change your default Wordpress permalink to SEO permalink, go to SEO Permalink.
3. And make your category SEO friendly: SEO Category.
4. And get backlink, from Social Bookmark, from dofollow blogs and Article Submission, feed submission and many more way you need to have your blog link listed to other sites,
5. Link exchange to other bloggers who have same niche with yours if you can, cause the more relevance link point to your blog the better, Google will value your blog more in this case. Or you make support blogs to support your main blogs.
6. Update your blog regularly.
7. Installing a SEO theme such as Thesis Wordpress theme and if you need a SEO leading firm to guide you deeper on market your website and capture search engines, I highly recommend you SEO Book.

Hope the above helps you to get your site rank well in Search engines.

WordPress in itself is a decent system but you can turn it on to a rocking beast. Adding plugins can make WordPress into the Swiss Army Knife of blogging: just pull out whatever functionality you need for your specific blog!

So I gather here the top popular plugins that every blogger should have, and a list of personal choices, and as a bonus a list of MUST have plugins for making money online blogging.

MUST have by default plugins
Askimet
This wordpress plugin is installed by default, you only need to activate it and follwo the instructions provided here on how to use it.

FeedBurner FeedSmith

Using some WordPress plugin magic, and user-agent detection, this plugin simply forwards all your feed traffic to FeedBurner. The plugin will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed, and optionally your main comments feed as well.

If you use several sources for feeds you should use this one.

Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress

This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search.

This is a plugin that will help you to get indexed fast on google, use it.

CForms

cforms is a feature rich plugin for Wordpress, offering convenient deployment of multiple Ajax driven contact forms throughout your blog or even on the same page.

If you intend to have a sales page or feedback page or contact page, whatever uses forms I recommend you to use this plugin.

All in One SEO Pack

This plugin is streamlined for some best practices for Wordpress SEO. While it gives you many options the defaults reflect the settings I recommend using.

A must HAve plugin for your SEO wordpress, use it and you can getgreat results from it for SEO.

Admin Drop Down Menu

One of the first things I wanted to improve in the admin area of my WordPress blog, back in the 1.5 days, was the header menu. I wanted to be able to reach any admin page in one click, instead of first clicking on the first level link (”Manage” for example) and then only on a submenu link (”Comments“) So came a very neat plugin : the Worpdress Admin Drop Down Menu.

If you are like me, who uses dozens of plugins, there will be a time you need a better organization on your menu. This plugin will help for sure.

Wp-Autotagger

This plugin uses the Yahoo API to suggest tags based on the post content. The plugin will add a `Suggest Tags` button to the `Write Post` page sidebar.

A very usefull plugin that will pick up the tags from your post for you. If you dont pick up the keywords (using All in One SEO Pack) this plugin will insert the tags picked up, and use them as your keywords in your psot/page for SEO.

Site Map Generation

This plugin creates a sitemap for your WordPress powered site. This is not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator which is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel. Some of its features include: support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more.

Stats Press

The first real-time plugin dedicated to the management of statistics about blog visits. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers etc.

Very detailed traffic statistics.

WordPress Super Cache

WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.

I havent used this one, I have it installed but not configured it yet.

WP-DBManager

Manages your Wordpress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

MUST have for traffic plugins

This list if for plugins that will help you on the long run to drive more traffic (visitors) to your site.

Signature Manager

This simple little plugin gives each author on your blog the ability to setup a signature and to include it at the bottom of their posts.

This is a great tool. I advise you when usign this plugin to make sure your feeds will display the whole text and not just part of it. Why? Because when displaying the full text it will ALSO display your signature which turns into a natural backlink to yrou site (good for SEO and raking keywords)

RSS Footer

This very simple plugin let’s you add an extra line of content to articles in your feed, defaulting to “Post from: ” and then a link back to your blog, with your blog’s name as it’s anchor text.

If you are like me who doestn like at all to show the intire content on you feed, than use this plugin. Just look at my feed “http://www.onlinemoneytricks.net/feed” and check the link under each post

Tweetmeme

The tweetmeme button plugin allows you to easily integrate the tweetmeme button into your wordpress blog. The plugin will put the button into both your content and you feed.

This is the plugin I use on my posts, the green badge on the top of the post. Very usefull

Twitter Tolls

This plugin that creates an integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account. It allows you to pull your tweets into your blog (as posts and digests) and create new tweets on blog posts and from within WordPress.

This is a MUST have plugin for sure. Every time you get a new post on yoru blog it automaticly post it on your twitter account as well. Good to drive visitors to your blog. Just like I do

Sociable

Automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites!

I personally dont use this plugin, due to design issues, but this is a must have plugin, if you have thousands of visitors you will want them to bookmark your post on the top social bookmarks sites.

WP-EMail

Allows people to recommand/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend.

I tried to use this one, but didnt had the time to configure it, so I dont really know how good it is, but for what I have seen it is good.

Atomic Blogging

This plugin was geniously built in a way that it wont get hurt by google.
It uses a system built by Alvin himself, a very sofisticated way to automaticaly submit your posts into the most popolated social bookmark sites. This way you at least get 3 link backs to your blog with a single post.

I use this plugin on every blog I built. Using on this one itself. This is mandatory if you want to drive more traffic into your blog. This is kinda like the twitter tools, but it bookmarks your posts directly to 5 random sociable bookmark sites.

HELP Money Makers Plugin

Heres the good part, and what the pros dont tell you. ATTENTION most of this plugins are paid, but ei if you dont have money to invest a bit, why are you reading my blog?

OIO Publisher

OIOpublisher is an ad manager with a focus on performance, control and ease of use. Serve advertising on your blog or website and keep 100% of the revenue you bring in.

Get this trough the link and get $8 off using this Coupon “SPRING-MMPLUGIN” without the ” ”

KB Linker

KB Linker will link phrases you specify to sites you specify.

I use this plugin on all my blogs and its a MUST, you will never miss again an afilliate link.

For now thats it. Hope you enjoy it.

One of the most important things to change on your blog for seach engine optimisation or SEO is your slug.

Just in case you have been living under a stone like our erstwhile friend the slug and do not kjnow what SEO is, then a quick definition is in order.  Search engine optimisation is the the process of making your blog or website as attrative to Google and it’s chums yahoo and MSN so that when someone type in a phrase, for example wordpress coaching (give it a go and see who is there) you come out on the first page near the top.

What is A Slug

The slug is the bit that follows your domain name and points to your post, for example:

wpdude.com/this-is-a-slug

By default on a WordPress blog, the slug looks something like this:

wpdude.com/?p=22

As far as a search engine is concerned this is not a very useful, it says nothing about the post, there are none of the key phrases people would type in to identify the post, in short, you are going to have a very hard job to drag people in from Google with a slug like that.

Changing Your Slug To Something Useful

All is not lost, you can change the default slug to something far more useful.  From your WordPress blogs’ admin console, scroll down to settings and  click on permalinks.

From there select a custom permalink structure and set it to be /%postname%

What this does is to change the default slug configuration to be the title of your post, for example this post would have the slug:

how-to-change-your-slug-for-seo

The search engine has been fed much more information about what my post is about.

Removing Useless Words

There is a school of thought in SEO circles that you should remove all useless words from your slug and leave only hardcore keywords.  The things to remove are “a, the, it, then” etc etc.

There is a plugin to do this for you, imaginatively called Seo Slugs, download it and activate the plugin.  From that point forward your slugs will be trimmmed down by default. My new slug for this post now becomes:

change-slug-seo

The superflous words are cut down and hopefully Gooogle juice will flow in plenty.

Quick Get The Table Salt It’s Eatin’ The Lettuces

Don’t pour salt on your slug and kill it off, treat is nicely and you will be rewarded with organic search traffic from Google.

Get creative, think what people will type into google to find a post like yours, and match this to your slug.

Original : here

With more than 120 million blogs in existence, how do people find YOUR content on the Internet? The key starts with great search engine optimization (SEO), which is an art and a science that helps search engines discover your content and understand how relevant it is to specific search queries.

You can blog your heart out, but if you don’t have good SEO, then odds are you won’t have many readers.  Luckily, the WordPressWordPress reviews plugin community values SEO and has developed a number of plugins to help. Here are 20 of the best SEO plugins to help you choose the right tags, tell search robots what to work on, optimize your post titles and more.

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

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 “GoogleGoogle reviews,” 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.

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.

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.

SEO Tag Cloud Widget - Love ‘em or hate ‘em, a lot of people use tag clouds on their blogs.  Since their inception they have been fairly unreadable by search engines, but with this plugin they will be converted to an SEO-friendly HTML markup that can be indexed.

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.

WordPress is a great blogging platform, one of the reasons being the immense community support. It is this community that develops plugins and hacks for WordPress and makes life easier for everyone. In this post, I have compiled 10 of my favorite WordPress hacks. Some of these posts linked to have multiple hacks available, so make sure to check out the other hacks in the page too.

And while you’re at it, please stumble or float this to let more bloggers and designers know about these hacks.

Split category list

BlogohBlog’s post has, among others, a hack to split category list. This is useful when the list is displayed in a sidebar (and you want to save space).

Also see the hack to show your most commented posts in sidebar.

Author bio

Multi-author blogs will find the author bio hack useful. Once the basic code is in place, you can use CSS to style it up.

Exclude ads on specific posts

Many ad management plugins offer this functionality, but if you have hardcoded ads into your theme, you can use the “Hiding ads in posts” hack (instead of switching to a plugin just for this functionality.

Membership directory

WPDesigner has a useful tutorial on creating a few theme files and using plugins to turn WP into a membership directory.

FLIR plugin

23Systems’ free FLIR plugin replaces headings with custom fonts using FLIR technique.

Breadcrumbs plugin

mTekk has a WordPress plugin for breadcrumb navigation.

FeedBurner feedcount PHP code

Hongkiat has the updated PHP code required to display Feedburner feedcount in text (works for any system using PHP). If you have been frustrated by problems with Feedcount plugin, this is a worthy alternative. Note that it requires PHP 5.

Login form overlay

Pro Blog Design features a tutorial on making a login form overlay using a mod of Lightbox.

Automatic Stats plugin

Automatic Blog Stats is a WordPress plugin that gives you shortcodes to embed anywhere in your post and display stats. Most of the common stats like FeedBurner feedcount, post and comment stats, Alexa, Pagerank, Technorati authority and Google/Yahoo/Delicious backlinks count are available.

Twitter bar, random stats

Paul Stamatiou has code snippets required to pull in Twitter status to, and list random stats on your blog, and.

Of course, this is just the tip of the ice berg - there are lots of other useful hacks. Suggest your favorites in comments.