Archive for January, 2010

Essential Plugins for WordPress Sites

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 11:27 am  
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The list below represents a small group of WordPress Plugins that I install on every single blog I run!  They all have a specific purpose that either increase the usability of wordpress, remove risk of losing visitors or data, or make the administrative tasks easier! This is not ALL of the plugins I use, just those that are essential!

Askimet – You won’t need to download this one, it is installed as part of the WordPress build and helps to control spam on your blog. You need a free API keyin order to use it, but the process is simple and easy! On this blog, Askimet has blocked 21,710 spam comments in just over 1 year!

All in One SEO Plugin –  It really picks up where wordpress left off and gives you the ability to optimize your WordPress website, using basic SEO strategies.

Google XML Sitemaps- This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO

Redirection for WordPress- Having this redirect plugin gives you the ability to handle current and future changes to your site. It logs ALL 404 errors and provides a very user friendly area to manage 301’s for your site pages.

WordPress Automatic Upgrade- It couldn’t get easier than using this plugin! While I am guilty of not keeping my own blogs updated all the time, this plugin turns a feared practice into a point/click/done process!

RSS Footer- This plugin adds a small snipped to the bottom of your RSS feed. Every time you publish a post, this snippet is inserted with a permalink back to your site. It is NOT visible to website visitors and comes in most handy when people scrape your content. Heck, I don’t mind someone copying my work, as long as they link back! This plugin takes that out of the equation and automatically provides the link back for you!

WordPress Database Backup- You MUST have a daily backup of your work! If your server fails… pardon the french, but your f**ked! I have mine setup to automagically backup every morning at 3am and email the database to me in my gmail account! At worst, I lose one days worth of info on the site!! This plugin ONLY backs up your data and you always keep local copies of themes, images etc, on your site.

WP-Cache- Hopefully, you will have a post that gets hit up on Stumble, Digg etc, and gets 10,000 visitors in an hour! If you don’t have the cache plugin in place, only the first 1500 will see it… the rest will get the dreaded 500 error when your hosting account dies a painfully fast death due to the traffic overload! Install it and forget it… your pages are cached on the server and your visitors are delivered mock-static content, completely in the background! After you activate this plugin in WP, make sure you visit the settings page for the plugin and click on the “Enable” button to turn it on.

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Blog Commenting 2

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 11:05 am  
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In Blog Commenting 1, we covered finding active, relevant blogs that will bring you initial traffic and in most cases, indexing.

Now we are going to discuss all other methods of blog commenting as well as a few tricks which will help in your link building campaign. There are actually 2 more steps, and they will be cover those in this post.

For the next phase, we will be looking for blogs that are dofollow as these comment links will count with Google. There are a number of free tools you can use for finding dofollow blogs. Here are at a few.

CommentHunt.com is a free search engine that will help find dofollow blogs. Simply enter your search term and it will find blogs on your topic.

You can also go to Google Images and do a search for “U Comment I Follow” (with quotes) and it will bring up sites (most likely blogs) with these images. There are also a number of dofollow blog lists online. Just do a quick Google search for dofollow blog list and you will find many to choose from.

Now for the tips. You will also want to find blogs with the Top Commentators plugin. You can do this easily by searching for it in quotes on Google. If you want to be niche specific do your search like this:  “Top Commentators”+”your niche”  It will not matter if these blogs are nofollow or dofollow. You are going to want to leave 2 or 3, maybe even more, quality comments on these blogs. When you do and you are listed as one of the top commentors, your link is normally dofollow and many times, it is from the front page.

Last but certainly not least, there is one more very important thing you will want to do when leaving blog comments. Add the pages where your comments appear to social bookmarking sites.  This is something you should do for every comment you leave that gets approved.

Some of you may be asking why you would want to bookmark a page on someone else’s (even a competitor’s) site. I am going to try my best to explain and hope that you will see the benefit.

Let’s say you just left a comment on a dofollow blog post. That’s great, you just gained a backlink. But if the page the post is on is not ranked, has no traffic or even worse maybe not even indexed, it may be of very little value to you. The simplest way to combat this is submit it to some of the top social bookmarking sites using a tool like SocialMarker.com.

This benefits you in several ways.  First, even if the site is a busy one, it will have the bots crawling all over that particular post and the comments. In turn, it brings them once again to your site. As well, you just never know – the post you submit may just become very popular on one of these sites and attract a huge amount of visitors. If these visitors read the entire page including the comments (most will), and you have left an intelligent, thoughtful comment, these visitors are likely to click through to your site. Trust me, this happens more often than you could possibly imagine.

So yes, you are helping out the other site owner by giving their post a few backlinks, but the benefit to you can be much greater. And it only takes a minute or two.

The other way it benefits you is that social bookmarking sites do not like it when you only bookmark your own urls. In many cases, doing so can get your account suspended or deleted. This way, you mix it up a little by adding other sites to your lists. And the best part is that the page you are submitting is not your url, but it still has your link on it. Some may call it a bit sneaky, I call it working smart.

Do this enough times and you will be pleasantly surprised with the results. You will end up with a lot of high quality backlinks and you should definitely be pleasantly rewarded with the effort you have put in.

 Have fun commenting and  I would appreciate your thoughts.

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