The key to start raking in traffic for your blog is to make sure that you exert much effort in building your site. With more than 120 million blogs in existence today, the biggest concern is to find your content in the web?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an art and a science to help search engines to find and discover your content and let more people visit your site most often. There are a lot of people who are on the look for the best methods to add more character and depth to your site.

Fortunately, the WordPress plug in community gives much value on SEO. There are a myriad of plug ins which can improve SEO for blogs. Here are 5 best SEO plug ins to facilitate optimization of post titles, choose the right tags and instruct search engines on what to work on.

Plug- in #1: Simple Tags – this is one popular plug in which gives attention in helping blog users to choose the most appropriate tags for a post by offering suggestions. This plug in has auto-completion capability of tags as you type in, mass tag editing, AJAX admin interface and a lot more.

Plug- in #2: Sitemap Generator – This plug in is a more customizable sitemap generator. This has options to support multi-level pages and categories, permalink support, category/page exclusion, options to show number of comments , choices on what to display and a lot more.

Plug- in #3: TGFI. Net SEO WordPress Plugin – This plugin will accomplish a lot when compared to the usual SEO work of optimizing keywords and titles. It can add a unique change on how it will mainly direct people who are using WordPress as a CMS.

Plug in #4: SEO Smart Links – Interlinking your blog is one of the best ways on how to drive traffic to your site. It is time consuming and tedious to manually interlink the blog. SEO smart Links is a plug in which does the interlinking to specific URLs.

Plug in #5: SEO Tag Cloud Widget – A lot of bloggers are using tag clouds for their blogs. This plug in converts tags into SEO-friendly HTML mark up which can be indexed by search engines.

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WordPress is an open source blog publishing application powered by PHP and MySQL which can also be used for basic content management for blogs. It has many features including a user-friendly workflow, a rich plugin architecture, and an advanced templating system.

Plugins can extend WordPress to do a lot of amazing features and functionality. In the directory you can find, download, rate, and comment on all the best plugins the WordPress community has to offer.

Here is a great list of WordPress Plug-in every blogger should have. These are the most useful and widely used plug ins for WordPress. Enjoy the list and pump up your sites!

1. Akismet – works a spam filter which can check your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not. This plug in can check the trackbacks for spam.

2. Exec-PHP – Execute PHP code in posts or static pages. Install this plugin so you can add php code to static pages or even posts.

3. Google Sitemaps – This plug in can generate and create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog

4. Ultimate Tag Warrior – this is dubbed to be the best Tag system for WordPress. It allows user to use categories and tag system on one website

5. No Ping Wait – This plug in speeds up your posting by moving generic pings to execute-pings.php.

6. PXS Mail Form – This allows users to create a mail form with multipart verification, various messages and an auto redirect on successful send. This plug in enables bloggers to contact the website administrator for questions and inquiries

7. Super Archive – This WordPress plugin can implement a dynamic archive

8. SRG Clean Archives – If you are on the look for a super clean archive then this is the best for you.

9. WP lightbox 2 – It allows users to overlay images on the current page for WordPress. Turn it on and all images are now working with it.

10. fQuick – Sidenotes, short notes for WordPress

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A lot of people are going crazy over WordPress. Bloggers enjoy most their experience with WordPress blogs but not everybody has the enough information on how to go about it.

For those who just started blogging and would want to know more about effective tips on WordPress , then read along. Here are top 10 general tips on blogging through WordPress:

Tip #1: Kick off your blogsite, by activating the akismet plugin. Though this plug in comes as a preinstalled feature with WordPress, you have to activate it in order to get a WordPress key. This process will take almost 2 minutes, very easy and quick.

This Akismet plugin works to block spam comments on your blogsite. If you want to achieve a wider scope of audience you must allow people to comment on your site but be vigilant to spam comments.

Tip #2: Your Blog should look good to achieve a good impression. Choose a theme which could add more personality to your site. You may use the default theme but there are a myriad of options to choose from. You must pick a theme which is user friendly and easy to navigate. A theme with good link visibility as well as attractive lay out can attract more readers. You can use the WordPress Theme Directory to avail of the best themes to use for WordPress.

Tip #3: Create a permalink that would show your niche outright. Permalinks are the specific links referring to your blog post. Keep your permalink SEO friendly by choosing “yourdomain.com/blog-post-title”.

Tip #4: Of you want a plugin which can take care of all the submission and updating of your sitemap to Google and other search engines, then you should download and install a Google XML Sitemaps Generator Plugin. Your site will be more accustomed to search engines if you install this into your site.

Tip #5: Search engine optimization is very important in order to achieve more traffic to your site. Traffic would entail an increase in the number of people visiting your site. The more traffic , the more probable customers who might be interested to make a purchase or avail your service. This can be done by downloading and installation of the All in One SEO Pack Plugin. This WordPress plug in can optimize your keywords and the site as well.

Tip #6: You must make sure that your WordPress blog should have a social bookmarking plugin. You can use ShareThis plugin which could go right after posting along with a specific reminder to inform visitors that they can make a subscription to your feed. In this way, you are providing your readers the opportunity to be updated of the posts and activities in your blog.

Tip #7: Always make the effort to introduce yourself to the visitors of your site. An About Page can be created to contain all necessary information regarding your background, products and services. Other details such as likes and what visitors can expect out from your blogsite itself is very important to enable customers to be more aware of your site. This will give your site a more personal touch. Include profiles of the company and even some personal information about you.

Tip #8: Provide an avenue for your visitors to communicate with you. Create a Contact Page so they can send you emails regarding concerns related to your site. You can use a contact me plugin e.g. Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form is a perfect plugin for setting up an e-mail instruction corner for your site.

Tip #9: You can allow users tgo use an RSS reader and email to subscribe to your blog. Create an account over Feedburner so you can give your visitors the option to subscribe to your blog and receive updates in the future.

Tip # 10: Create a clone blog or a password protected subdomain in order to avoid break down of stuffs on your actual site. This clone blog is just a blog installation which matches your actual blogsite with all the same plugins, same theme and few posts. In this way, you can do trial and errors before setting up your actual site.

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The first articles about superb SEO plugins earn multiple retweets so I made this continuation to provide another set of plugins that are widely used. These SEO plugins can help you very much to lessen the stress and effort of repairing your blog for some errors and to make your traffic generation more effectively. This is very helpful to the beginners in wordpress. SEO is a good key in attaining traffic, yet its hard and complicated, that’s explain why bloggers tend to avoid this method.

These are the other sets of SEO plugins that can help you greatly in building a better blog.

SEO Slugs

In search engine optimization, stop words are being ignored. That’s why your titles are meaningless to search engines. When your title comes this way “ What are the primary things in SEO Ranking” your permalink will be like this. “what-are-the-primary-things-in-SEO-Ranking” but this is the one you really want: /primary-things-in-SEO-ranking. Through SEO Slugs it will instantly remove stop words from the permalink, to provide you a better SEO rank.

This plugin automatically removes stop words from the permalink, helping you to rank better.

What is it doing?

1. Transform string into lowercase
2. Remove invalid characters (not alphanumeric or spaces)
3. Trim and convert multiple spaces into only one space, to get the best string.
4. Extract first 45 characters then trim spaces (in case the 45th char is a space)
5. Transform spaces into a hyphens.

Google Positioner

In wordpress blogging it is very important to know your keywords, through Google Positioner it allows you to track the keywords that you are searching for. Because its meaningless to just select a few keywords and including or writing it expecting that the rest goes right. SEO is about being proactive and tracing what works and what doesn’t.

In the last part you should be able to mark such keywords on  a certain page. In this way your webpage will rank better for a certain query or query-related keyword.

All in One SEO Pack

This is a very good and basic SEO plugin. This plugin let you set the basic SEO stuff for your wordpress blog. Like  page titles, meta tags, keywords, and descriptions. This plugin allows you to configure them for either your entire blog or on a post by post basis.

Here are some features of All in One SEO Pack:

• Canonical URLs
• Fine tune Page Navigational Links
• Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality
• Provides SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites
• Nonce Security
• Support for CMS-style WordPress installations
• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
• Generates META tags automatically
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
• For beginners, you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
• For advanced users, you can fine-tune everything
• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
• Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

Permalinks Moved Permanently

One of the major mistake in the blogosphere is choosing the wrong permalink structure. As time goes by and you start thinking about what is best for your blog then you want to change your permalink The problem with changing your permalink structure is that your traffic will come to a stop until your site is reindexed, and that could take months, a large amount of time will be wasted.This plugin is similar to redirect but is an easier and better way to manage permanent permalink changes. And it might lose to traffic due to changes of permalinks structure.

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Receiving comment spam when first starting a blog can gain such traffic that could be alarming for beginners. For this reasons we don’t have the access to prevent spammers to read our blogs. In just a minute your blog can be spammed by thousands of comments. This article introduces 6 proven useful plugins that is available in wordpress to help you fight and eradicate spam.

• yaCAPTCHA

It is a CAPTCHA plugin designed for WordPress, it helps you block comment spam from automated bots. So if you post comments, users have to write down the characters of an image provided. It is planned for automated programs to find it hard figuring out those characters, a great help in preventing comment spam.

These are the requirements to have yaCAPTCHA in your computers: WordPress 1.5 or above, PHP 4.0.6 or above with GD2 library support, Theme must support the ‘comment_form’ action.

• Trackback Spam Resources

A very simpl e b ut effective test on all trackbacks in order to stop spam. The TrackBack Validator, a plugin for WordPress that are sent by people commenting on your weblog that go along by a URL that points to that commentary. Spam TrackBacks are accompanied by a URL that points to a pay-per-click affiliate website or other irrelevant material. The Validator exploits this key difference:

1. When a TrackBack is received, the plugin retrieves the Web page located at the URL included in the TrackBack.
2. If the page contains a link to your weblog, the TrackBack is approved.
3. If the page does not link to your weblog, the TrackBack is flagged as spam and rejected.

Because TrackBack spammers do not set up custom Web pages linkin g to the weblogs they attack, this simple test will quickly reveal illegitimate Trackbacks.

• WP-SpamFree and Trackback Validator

A very powerful anti plugin for WordPress that eradicates comment spam, have a good performance in eliminating trackback and pingback spam. It works invisibly without CAPTCHA’s, or other inconvenience to site visitors. The plugin includes spam-free contact form feature as well.

Features

1. It’s completely free for both commercial and personal use.
2. The beauty of this plugin is the methods of blocking spam. It takes a different approach than most and stops spam at the door.
3. Powerful trackback and pingback spam protection.
4. It works like a firewall to ensure that your commenters are in fact, human. Virtually eliminates comment spam from bots.
5. It has a counter on your dashboard to keep track of all the spam it’s blocking. The numbers will show how effective this plugin is.
6. Includes drop-in spam-free contact form. Easy to use — no configuration necessary.
7. No false positives, which leads to fewer frustrated readers, and less work for you.
8. You won’t have to waste valuable time sifting through a spam queue anymore, because there won’t be much there, if anything.
9. Easy to install — truly plug and play. Just upload and activate.
10. The code has an extremely low bandwidth overhead and won’t slow down your blog (very light database access), unlike some other anti-spam plugins.
11. Completely compatible with all cache plugins, including WP Cache and WP Super Cache. Not all anti-spam plugins can say that.
12. Display your blocked spam stats on your blog.
13. Helps keep your database slimmer and more efficient.
14. Works in WordPress MU as well.

• Invisible Defender
  

This plugin specializes in protecting registration, login and comment forms from spambots by addin g two extra fields hidden by CSS. This approach gave me 100% anti-spam protection on one of my sites.

The idea behind this plugin is simple: SPAMBOTs either fill every form field they find (generic spambots) or fill WordPress-specific fields only (spambots which will recognise WP or are targeting WP only). Therefore it is sufficient to add two extra text fields to form (one empty and one with predefined value), and check their values after the form is submitted. 1st field (empty one) will be filled by generic spambots, and 2nd one will not be filled by spambots targeting WP only. With these two simple checks probably all spambots can be easily detected, so WP can return error “403 Forbidden” for them.

These two extra fields are hidden with CSS rule, so they will not be visible for most users. Only users with text-based browsers (and very old ones which not support CSS) will see them. Invisible Defender also shows number of blocked spammers in Dashboard, so you can see that it really works.

• Akismet

Akismet is quite possibly the most important and useful plugin you will ever install. It has been developed by the actual team behind WordPress, if that is not enough of a seal of of approval and a guarantee, I don’t know what is. In a nutshell, Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.

Requires WP2.0 or higher and is compatible up to WP 2.8.4.

• Maximum Security for WordPress

Maximum Security for WordPress is packed with strong protection that makes your site extremely secure. It guards against intrusion; tracks a plethora of events; blocks malicious content that could harm your readers and your search engine ranking; and includes a strong Web application firewall along with a full blown intrusion prevention system, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. No other security plugin for WordPress comes anywhere close to matching the powerful features of this tool.

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WordPress Simple Paypal Shopping Cart is a very easy to use wordpress plugin created by Tips and Tricks HQ which allows you to sell products or services online in one click from your WordPress blog. If the wordpress shopping cart plugin by Instinct is too complicated for you, this plugin might be a good alternative.

WordPress Simple Paypal Shopping Cart lets you add the shopping cart (“Add to Cart” button) anywhere in a post or page or sidebar easily. The shopping cart shows the user what they currently have in the cart and allows them to add or remove items. This plugin requires WordPress version 2.5 or above.

After the Payment has been processed by PayPal the customer will be redirected to a page (you can set your desired target page URL from the options menu of this plugin) where the customer can see download link of the product or instructions or a simple thank you etc.

• Plugin: WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart
• Author: Tips and Tricks HQ
• Installation, Demo, Usage, FAQ
• Download latest version

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Block advertising (125×125 ads) has become one of the most popular ways to monetize blogs. Top blogs such as Tech Crunch, DoshDosh, ReadWriteWeb all use block advertising as a method to generate revenue from their blogs. As great as block advertising is for monetizing blogs, if you use block advertising, then you know that adding new advertisers or changing out old ones can be a tedious and time consuming task, especially for the new blogger who is not very familiar with editing source code.

Time consuming practices like those are a thing of the past. With smart, easy to use features, three wordpress plugins below will help you manage the advertising more effectively than manually editing code, leaving you with more time to write new posts.

1. Show125

Features :

• Customizable title
• Show (or not) a title for your ads block
• Optionally add the target=”_blank” attribute to links
• Control number of ads ( 1 to 8 )
• Available in English and French
• Display all your ads together, or in an eye-candy Mootools slideshow
• Easy to install
• Custom css class

Author : x-or
Download : http://www.x-or.be/blog/?download=Show125

2. WP125

Features :

• One or two column ad display, and support through template tags to implement your own unconventional design.
• Show as many ads as you want, and in either manual or random order
• Keep track of how many times an ad is clicked
• When creating a new ad, you don’t have to calculate the end date yourself. Just input how many days you wish the ad to run for, and the correct date will be applied. The ad will be automatically taken down when the time comes.
• When an ad run is over, the record is archived on the Inactive ads screen, so you can check on the final click count, or revive the ad for another run.

Author : webmaster-source
Download : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp125/

3. UBD Block Ad

Features:

• One column or two columns display, with a maximum of 10 ads
• Automatically rotate your ads.
• Fully widget compatible.
• Live previews of the ads before they will be published
• Available in English and French
• Display all your ads together, or in an eye-candy Mootools slideshow
• Easy to install
• Custom css class

Author: http://www.uniqueblogdesigns.com/blog/2008/ubd-block-ad-plugin/
Download : http://www.uniqueblogdesigns.com/download/ubd-block-ad-plugin/

Conclusion

Based on my experience, WP125 is the best choice with their great features : clicks tracking, ads rotation and auto expired ads management.

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If you’re using mailto:your-mail-box links, it is not a wise move because your email will be scanned by spammer viruses. Contact form is one of the most effective anti-harvesting method from spammers. The contact form provides a textarea for the message, and an input for the sender’s e-mail address. The server-side script that processes the posted form data, is then responsible for sending the actual message, which means that the e-mail address of the recipient is never exposed.

If you’re using wordpress, you’re in luck. There’re many different wordpress plugins you can use to create a contact form to reduce spam. I’m including some of the most common ones below:

WP-ContactForm Akismet Edition

The basic purpose of WP-ContactForm Askimet Edition is to make it easy to have a “Contact Me” form on your WordPress blog. Additionally, if you have Akismet installed, all messages will be checked for “spaminess” before being sent to you, effectively keeping the spammers out of your face. The reason why I listed it here because I like the idea of this plugin as combining with Askimet. With this plugin you don’t need any annoying image verification codes or checks to see if the user is “human” or not. If anyone attempts to spam you, it will likely never reach your e-mail box. Only one note for you, this plugin is not currently compatible with WordPress 2.5. He said that he was going to update it but there’s no update since April 22, 2007

WordPress-Ready Contact Form

WordPress-Ready Contact Form is an easy-to-install contact form with many accessibility, usability, and security features. If you use some of the more popular WordPress Themes such as Green Marinee, Connections, Ocadia, … contact form themes have been provided to get you up-and-running faster than ever. I’ve just noticed that Brian Gardner, owner of Revolution Themes is using this one.

CForms II

Cforms II is a highly customizable, flexible and powerful form builder wordpress plugin, covering a variety of use cases and features from attachments to multi form management, you can even have multiple forms on the same page! I personally use CForms II on my blog (you can see it live on my contact page) because I love its features. The only thing I do not like this plugin is its size (900KB+) then I do not update it regularly! Anyways I highly recommend this plugin for building your contact form.

Main features of cForm II plugin

• Customizable fields with optional checkboxes, radio buttons, …
• Several fancy “styles”, change the look of your form with a single click
• Create multiple contact forms and display them on however many pages you want.
• Tell-a-friend form support.
• Backup and restore custom forms to other sites.
• Visitor verification questions, along with CAPTCHA support

That’s about it. Hopefully you find my post interesting and if you have any other great plugins for me then I’d like to see them. Do not forget to subscribe to our feed to stay up to date with all of our free themes and tutorials!

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The WP e-Commerce shopping cart plugin for WordPress is an elegant easy to use fully featured shopping cart application suitable for selling your products, services, and or fees online.

WP e-Commerce is a Web 2.0 application designed with usability, aesthetics, and presentation in mind.

WP e-Commerce plugin is perfect for: Bands & Record Labels, Clothing Companies, Crafters & Artists, Books, DVDs & MP3 files

Some features you can’t miss are:

WordPress Integration

You will install WP e-Commerce plugin in minutes. You simply download the plugin, copy it to your WordPress Plugins folder and activate it via your admin panel.

Social Networking

WP e-Commerce plugin provides you with a range of tools that allow you to import your products into the Facebook Marketplace and Google Base. WP e-Commerce also utilises the populor “Share This” plugin so that your happy customers can bookmark and promote your products too!!!

Payment Options

WP e-Commerce plugin makes it easy for you to accept payments online. WP e-Commerce plugin integrates with Google Checkout, Paypal, Authorize.net, Payment Express and many other trusted payment processors.

Design Perfectionist?

Not only do you get to choose from a range of slick store front styles but you can customize and tweak your site to look however you want. We have made it easy for you by utilising WordPress PHP template tags, WordPress shortcodes and WordPress Widgets.

For the full features list, head over to their Feature page.

P/s: I’m using this plugin for one of my small PHP projects and it works great like a charm

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Tired of default wordpress admin themes? Looking for something to spice up your wordpress’ admin section? Here is a great list to help you get started. The order of these admin themes is based on my opinion (#1 is the best )

1. Fluency wordpress admin theme

Features

• Smooth grey color scheme
• Menus rearranged, main menus down left, sub menus across the top
• Easy installation
• v1.1 is fully compatible with the stable release of WordPress 2.5
• v1.2 is fully compatible with the stable release of WordPress 2.6

2. Admin Drop Down Menu wordpress admin theme

Features

• Hide the various admin menus that are splattered all over the place in WordPress 2.5
• Insert a new menu on the top dark grey bar, which is unused (wasted space!) otherwise
• Remove a few useless links on the upper right corner
• Tested with Firefox 2.x, Opera 9.x and MSIE 6
• Easy installation

3. JP Admin Stylish Blue wordpress admin theme

Features

• Keep the same default admin structure
• Professional dark blue color scheme
• Easy installation

4. Leopard Admin wordpress admin theme

Features

• Links have been moved to the sidebar with icons
• Professional design
• Easy installation

5. Baltic Amber wordpress admin theme

Features

• Create your own colour scheme by specifying only two base colours
• Have the theme colours change randomly every time you reload the page, or at any time interval you choose
• Improve the scanability of the plugin list by replacing the darker background colour with a green ribbon on the side for the activated plugins.
• Easy installation

Hint

We will get a killing wordpress admin theme when combining Fluency (#1) and Admin Drop Down Menu (#2) into one. Yeah, I’m using this admin theme

Conclusion

Customizable admin color schemes are an awesome addition to WordPress 2.5+ and you can be assured that another large design overhaul won’t be applied again any time soon.

Actually you can create your OWN wordpress admin color scheme by reading the explanations and sample code of planetozh.

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