WordPress plugins offer great tools for your blog's SEO and Social Media implementation and overall productivity.

WPing.fm - This plugin, as you can probably figure out, works with Ping.fm. Every time you edit or publish a post (you decide to do one or both) it is sent to Ping.fm, which sends it to Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, MySpace and a ton of other social sites (again, you set all of these up). Great for pushing out new posts across the social world.

Raw HTML in WordPress - For those of us blogging about SEO, web design or development, this plugin solves a world of headache. Since WordPress won’t allow you to display raw code in a post without totally borking it, this plugin wraps itself around the HTML so that it displays as, well, raw code in your post. For example, take a look at my post Top 10 SEO Must Do Tips and you’ll see this plugin in action in tip #4.

Page Links To - This one is a must for any blogger’s toolkit. This plugin allows you to redirect a page or post somewhere else. For instance, let’s say you want to create a link to an external site in your main menu where your pages are listed. You can create the page, name it what you like and have this plugin redirect the link to that off site location. The link in your main menu will have whatever text you set up for the page, but when clicked on, the link will 301 redirect to the URL of your choice rather than open the page (a 302 redirect is available, too, for those rare times it is needed).

Canonical URLs - Simple yet powerful. This plugin allows you to override the default canonical tag on a post and set it for the URL of your choice. Great for SEO!

permaLowercase301 - Another great tool for your SEO kit. This plugin will look at the case in URLs pointing to your pages and if the person linking to you has added upper case characters to your all lower case URL, this plugin will 301 redirect to the correct all lower case URL. This can help conserve link equity for SEO. Just set it and forget it.

WP Facebook Like Button - Literally, that’s what it does. Your visitors can “Like” your posts and have that appear on Facebook. If you haven’t jumped on the bandwagon with your WordPress blog, this is a quick, easy way to do so.

Add Post Footer - Add a configurable footer to your blog posts. Content can include a paragraph of text, links, HTML, ad code or whatever. I use it to link out to some cool pages (See “Other Cool Stuff Online” at the bottom of this post).

Antivirus for WordPress - This isn’t like a full antivirus tool, but during the recent Godaddy.com attack (where this blog is hosted), it was the first to alert me that something was going on, which allowed me to work on counter measures quicker. I was able to find a tool online that would wipe the malicious code from my hosting account and check it every day from WP admin with this plugin to see if reinfection had occurred. Not exactly an SEO or SMO plugin, but can help you head off problems that could have an impact on them.

WP Google Buzz - Nice, easy to configure implementation. Allows your readers to push your content out to Google Buzz. Who doesn’t need more buzz these days?

Google Base Newsfeed - If you want to get informational articles and posts out on Google Base (not Google Merchant Center), this will create an XML file for News and Articles. You’ll need to create it as a custom category in Google Base admin since Google Base only includes categories for Events and Activities, Housing, Jobs and Vehicles these days. Of course, the plugin can be used for these as well, but for my case, the custom News and Articles is appropriate. A datafeed file called googlebasefeed-posts.xml or gbfeed-posts.xml will be created from your most recent posts that Google Base can fetch, so set up a schedule in Google Base to update it on a regular basis. Don’t expect a ton of traffic from it, but it can’t hurt to have your content out there.

This article is an original post from The Web Optimist – SEO in The Desert.

Handy SEO/SMO WordPress Plugins is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

When I started out in web development way back in the dark ages (1998), I was doing web design for an in-house agency. Primarily, we did sites for the publications that the parent publishing company produced, but we also took on local Palm Springs area clients and built web sites for them.

It went something like this. For a certain amount of money, like $500, we’d build a ten page static web site. We’d do the design work, but the client provided images and text. We’d do the SEO as it existed in those days (title, meta tags, submit to the search engines/directories) and then there would be a monthly hosting/maintenance fee (about $50). Quarterly changes (pictures and text) were part of the fee, anything else cost extra.

Of course, the client was sort of at our mercy as they had no way to make changes themselves. They had to go through us. This could get frustrating for clients who needed frequent changes to their sites, like real estate agents or those with products that needed changing constantly.

Fast forward to today. Yes, if you really need a complicated site with a web designer, programmer and so forth, that option is definitely available more than ever. But, if what you want is a smaller site that you have complete control over and won’t cost a fortune, it can be had quickly and inexpensively.

Where you ask? Simple. Find yourself a hosting company that is WordPress friendly (most are) and that can easily install this free blog platform in the root on your hosting account (Hostgator.com and Godaddy.com are two that come to mind). Check on this before opening the account as some hosts want to place the blog in a subdirectory by default. Moving it to the root so that your domain points right at it can sometimes take some server side acrobatics that are beyond the scope of an SEO 101 reader.

What, you say, I don’t want to blog! I don’t have time to blog! Why in the world would I want to use WordPress?

The answer is that WordPress is more than just a blogging platform. It is also a content management system that gives you control over your content, pages and site features in an easy to use control panel. For instance, instead of sending text and photos off to a designer to place on your site, you just login to your WordPress admin and enter the text and upload the image in a WYSIWYG format, not unlike using a word processor (though HTML view is available, too).

And, WordPress offers the power and potential of thousands of plugins and widgets that add functionality you control that no web designer can hope to offer. For instance, I am also the editor of The Eye Zone, a blog about vision and eyewear. If you take a look at that blog, you’ll notice the large featured images section at the top of the front page. That’s a free plugin called Featured Content Gallery that installs easily. You provide the images and upload them to your hosting account. You have complete control.

But, how does this help you if you only want a web site, not a blog?

WordPress can be used as if it were a web site. You can create pages, just like on a web site and turn off comments until or unless you decide to start using the blog functionality. Since the front page of a WordPress site lists posts by default, you’ll either want to write a single post for the front page or make the front page show a designated page instead.

You do this in the WordPress admin under Settings > Reading. See image below.

Take a look at AddictionInterventionServices.com. This is a small web site that was recently changed to WordPress from my original (nice, but dated) design done several years ago. The site has eight pages, all of which the site owner can now edit himself. The video in the right nav was simply YouTube code pasted into the text widget that WordPress provides for placing code in nav bars. Simple cut and paste, no programming needed.

The same is true with the “Addiction Facts” section. That’s simply a plugin (Stray Random Quotes) code pasted into a text widget, just like the video mentioned previously.

If you look at the bottom of the pages, you’ll see social sharing links. These are provided by another free plugin, Sociable. The Link to this Page link is also a free plugin, LinkToThisPage.

This site points to the Intervention page as the home page (see image above). And, the site owner has indicated that he might want to do some blogging at some point, so he’s all set.

WordPress itself is fairly SEO friendly, but you can extend your search optimization through some great (and free) plugins like HeadSpace2, Canonical URL’s for WordPress and Google XML Sitemaps.

Need to do a redirection? With a WordPress site it’s easy with the Redirection plugin. No need to contact your webmaster/system admin.

And, there are literally thousands of themes for WordPress, free and paid, that you can use to get just the right look for whatever your site is about. There are e-commerce, real estate, SEO-ready and even Twitter-inspired group themes. Or, you have the option of hiring a theme developer.

Need something more than a few static pages? Let’s say you are an affiliate or want to pull a product feed. As they say, there’s and “app” for that, too.

For this article, I used one of my parked domains to create a shopping comparison site for Internet, wireless and wi-fi products. Using the same techniques above, the site features various pages of products all created by setting up a free DataFeedFile.com account, installing the Include It plugin, selecting merchants in my DataFeedFile.com account and saving the keyword search php code (generated through simple tools at DataFeedFile.com) in individual plain text files (example: voip.php) for the plugin to pull. I created each keyword based page (like VOIP) and pasted the Include It code (a simple text string) on each, which calls the php code from the designated keyword focused file (example: voip.php) and, voila, instant shopping comparison site!

By the way, that’s a free WordPress theme that is being used for the site. Check the footer on the site to find out which one.

If what you want to do is pull a feed into a WordPress site, take a look at the DataFeed Poster plugin. It’s not free, but very good at what it does.

I hope you can see just how powerful a WordPress driven site can be, even for those who only want a web site and have no interest in blogging. The tools, functionality and SEO capabilities that you can have yourself (no web developer needed) are incredible compared to just a few years ago, and we didn’t even touch on what you can do with Twitter and social media with plugins.

And, if you ever do want to begin blogging, something this SEO recommends, it’s just a matter of getting started because the functionality is already built into your site.

SEO 101: Need an SEO Friendly Site? Think Blog! is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

1. Keyword Tool - I have tried them all and this is the one I always go back to for my keyword research. Not only does it give you variations on the keyword phrase you are searching for, but also provides the WordTracker count and daily estimated searches on Google, Yahoo and MSN along with shortcuts to various tools like Google Trends, Keyword Discovery and several other online tools. And, you can export the thing as a CSV file. Way to go Aaron!

2. Check Server Headers Tool – Quick and easy way to check on whether your URL is being seen and followed properly by the spiders. For instance, I recently installed a WordPress plugin which appeared to work fine in a browser, but when I checked the page URLs that it produced here, I found that those pages were producing 404 errors, meaning the web surfer could see the pages, but the spiders couldn’t. Naturally, I ditched the plugin. The site also includes a batch URL processing capability (up to 25 URLs at once).

3. Web Page Analyzer – This online tool checks the speed of your site and lets you know what the download time would be at various connection speeds. Granted, most folks have broadband these days but you still don’t want a page to take several minutes to load on a 56k dial up connection. The test gives you suggestions on ways to speed up your site for visitors and spiders. Both will go away if your site is too slow.

4. Yahoo Site Explorer -Yes, Google gives you some information on sites that link to you, but not like Yahoo’s Site Explorer, which is easy to use and just requires a Yahoo login. You can filter inbound links to see internal or external linking, number of pages Yahoo sees and more.

5. Spider Simulator – Just one of many free online tools offered by this site, I jump here when I need a quick look at what the spiders are seeing. A more comprehensive spider simulator report is available in the iBusinessPromoter client software on my PC, but this online utility serves my purpose most of the time.

6. Tweetscan - These days keeping up with what is said about you and your clients is a must. I use Tweetscan to search for references to me or my clients in Twitter for reputation management, goodwill and networking opportunities.

7. SearchStatus - This is a Firefox plugin that, among other things, allows you to highlight and see nofollow links. This comes in real handy when checking backlinks or sculpting the links on your own site. The plugin includes utilities to check backlinks, Alexa rankings and so forth, but I primarily use the nofollow highlight feature.

8. MyBlogLog - Although the community aspects of the social site are free, I do use one paid service that this Yahoo owned site offers – statistics. For about $25 per year, I can get almost real time traffic stats coming off of web sites. I can see my site traffic nearly as it happens, where surfers are coming from and where they are going. From this, I can see if there is a trend or if something is wrong on a site now, not tomorrow when my Google Analytics stats are refreshed. I mentioned this service in my post on Web Analytics. This is the only non-free tool I mention in this list, but it’s such a bargain, I had to include it.

9. Google Chrome - Though not technically a tool, Google’s first attempt at a web browser has one feature that keeps it open on one of my monitors all day – the ability to log into different Google accounts in different tabs. I keep my domain e-mail, which is hosted through Google Apps, in one tab and Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics for my work accounts in other tabs. Now, if Chrome would just pick up some cool plugins!

10. Google Webmaster Tools - For something that I paid little attention to when first released, Google Webmaster Tools is now also open on one of my monitors all day. It just keeps getting better. From tracking down dead URLs on my sites to testing a robots.txt file, I can locate site issues that I wouldn’t otherwise know about. Though far from perfect, it’s just about the most valuable online tool I use these days.

SEO Tools & Tips is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

1. BT Active Discussions – This neat utility allows you to give your blog comments a forum-like interface. This makes it easy for site visitors to zero in on discussions they want to check out and go right to the post to read and submit their own comment. I’ve tried a couple of actual forum plugins for WordPress in the past and never could get them to work properly. This one was a breeze. Check out my search engine optimization discussions.

2. WordPress Link Directory – Create your own directory. This plugin gives you the choice of accepting only reciprocal links or any links. You can create categories and sub-categories and even check for dropped reciprocal links. I recently installed this plugin on my blog as a fledgling resource directory.

3. Spread The Love Link Builder – This plugin tracks pages you link to in your blog and sends an e-mail to the site owner notifying them of the link and encouraging them to link back.

4. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – Need I say more? This plugin creates a spider and user friendly index of all posts by category with the number of comments for each. You install the plugin, create a page, paste some code and you’re off and running. See it in action at The Web Optimist sitemap.

5. Link To Me Text Box – This plugin will set up a “link to me textbox” with HTML code in your blog posts. Simplicity at its best. You can find examples of this plugin in action at the bottom of any post on this blog. For instance, take a look at Free eBook: 65 Quick S E O Tips Even Your Mother Would Love and you’ll find the link box just above the “Leave A Comment” section.

6. Ask Me – I don’t know if this plugin is even supported currently, but used it for an “Ask Me about SEO” section until I switched hosting companies and couldn’t get it to work again. It basically extends the comment function into a Q&A format perfect for any question and answer oriented page.

7. Khanh’s Quick Feeds – Want to add a page of news feeds to your WordPress blog? This is your plugin and it’s AJAX powered! Take a look at my own Search Engine Optimization News Feeds page for an example. I didn’t just create this page for my users, but for me, too!

8. Random Quotes – This plugin is perfect for randomly displaying any type of text on your blog pages. I use it for my S E O Quick Tip box found on the right navigation of every page on the site. A different tip is displayed each time a page loads. The plugin has a really nice, easy to use interface.

9. Redirection – Makes page redirects simple. Easy to use interface, logging options, tracking of redirects and simple drop down redirect options made this a life saver when my former hosting company imploded and I had to recreate recent posts and redirect the old URLs to the new ones.

10. WP Sticky – Got something you want to stay at the top of your blog for a while like an announcement or notice? WP Sticky is kind of like a yellow sticky. It sticks to the top of the main blog page until you pull it off.

These are just a few of the neat plugins I am currently using. Naturally, there are a zillion out there, which is what makes WordPress so great. If you need something for your blog, chances are there’s already a plugin for it or close enough to work with.

Yet Another SEO WordPress Plugins Post is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

It was magic. It was innovative. It was fun.

It had power! Thousands of musical artists and acts got their careers started with music videos and a lot of forgotten acts were rediscovered. For example, a simple weekend marathon of the old Monkees TV show resulted in the once trashed group getting together for what turned out to be the biggest summer tour of the year 1986. New records by the group, more reruns and the rebirth of a made-for-TV band followed.

But most of all, MTV was exciting!

That’s where I see social media today. Like MTV in the beginning, social media is all of the above with innovative features being rolled out right and left and the ability to connect with folks around the world 24 hours per day. It’s like magic!

But, again, most of all, it’s exciting!

And, it’s now a part of SEO, which some have also likened to magic.

Unlike MTV, which was one-way, social media is about interaction. You connect with folks who connect with other folks and everyone provides user generated content and links that help bolster your SEO, traffic and conversion goals. You do this through photo or video sharing, news and networking sites as well as blogs.

There’s the power!

And, like the young MTV viewers of the 1980s, social media users tend to be cutting edge, comfortable about innovation and technology. Using sites like YouTube, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg and del.icio.us, etc. just comes naturally.

So how do you tie your SEO efforts into all of this excitement and power?

1. Tune in regularly. Join some of the social media sites and commit to participate every day. Yep, it’s very time consuming, but there are no shortcuts.

2. Have a hook. Like an MTV VJ, learn what is popular in each specific community and segue your content and participation in that direction.

3. Be anonymous. Just as you voted for your favorite MTV videos using different phone numbers (remember that?), don’t make it obvious that you are promoting yourself. That’s a big breach of etiquette. Promote from a different IP and account. Get your friends to help. If your office is participating, be sure they all cast their votes and submissions from home and NOT on the office IP. Too many coming from the same IP address can get you into trouble.

4. Become a groupie. Connect with influential users of the service. Later, take a look at their friends and see who else might make good connections.

5. Vote for your fave. Cast votes for good, quality content, not just yours, every chance you get and Stumble at the same time.

6. Have variety. Let’s see…rock or rap? Submit quality articles, content or videos from a variety of sources. If all you do is submit your own, you’ll be labeled as a spammer or your submission will just get killed.

7. Promote. Got a new gig? Social networks are great for introducing your blog to your network of friends.

8. Get subscriptions. We’re not talking 16 Magazine. Social news traffic is short term. What’s on the front page is gone tomorrow, so to keep some of those viewers coming back, get them to subscribe to your feeds.

9. Use Twitter! No, Flock of Seagulls hasn’t released a new album. Twitter is what you’d call a mini instant messaging system. I have to admit that when Twitter first came out, I thought it was kind of silly – 140 characters to alert your friends about what you were doing? Didn’t make a lot of sense, but it sure does now. Tie your Twitter account into your social accounts to let people follow you automatically. For instance, you can use a WordPress Twitter plugin on your blog called Twitter Updater to automatically send a Twitter status update to your Twitter account when you create, publish, or edit a WordPress post. A similar web-based service, Twitterfeed, can be used as well. Facebook has a Twitter application that you can install that will feed blog entry status to your Facebook status updates. Twitter is also great for customer or visitor communication. Feel free to follow The Web Optimist on Twitter.

10. Name the band. Register your company profile on all of the social networks. Grab your company name as quickly as you can to prevent someone else from doing it and pretending to be you.

Where to go from here? Once you are established as a reputable social media user, you’ll find that connecting with the Linkerati, influential social media linkers, bloggers and journalists, will be easier. Your doors will open wider. Hey, make a video!

So, it’s an exciting time to be in social marketing and SEO. Let’s just hope social media keeps its focus on what it is and doesn’t do an MTV on us.

I miss my MTV!

Social Media & SEO: I Want My MTV! is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

For instance, a site owner can create a plugin with information relevant to the site including images, phone numbers, links and other data such as reviews. A user can load the plugin from a gallery so that when the site comes up in a search result, the link will not just be a link to the site, but sort of a blended result with an image and additional links similar to what Google now serves up as One Box results.

Sort of personalized universal search results.

Yahoo! Open Search Platform will focus on “completing tasks” rather than dishing out results. Users can share results with others, add or remove enhancements or even report sites as abusers of trust.

According to Yahoo!, it’s “All about users choice.”

Site owners can add buttons, galleries and marketing info to create a richer experience for visitors. The new service, which is free, will be open to all sites by way of an API or feed upload.

More information, including example images can be found at http://tools.search.yahoo.com/open . Also see the Yahoo blog for updates.

Yahoo! Open Search Platform is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

Once you retrieve your recorded comments, Evoca gives you HTML code that you can use to put the recording in your blog if you think it’s worthy of blogspace. I’m still playing with that function. So far, unless I paste the code in a separate comment, my header, footer and sidebar disappear. I’ll keep working on that.

One thing I’d like to see them implement – the ability to resize the recorder. I also think that it’s a bit awkward to have to hit the “Send” button after the recording is made. The way the box is organized, it looks like the “Send” is for sending a note by e-mail. The first time I tried recording, I didn’t know I had to “Send” it. Minor things. You do have to open a free account with Evoca, but hey, it’s free.

So, got comments on SEO or my balding head? Jump down to the bottom of this page and give it a shot.

Evoca releases new voice comment plugins is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO