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

E-mail and social media work great together for marketing your website.

Whenever you are researching how to start and run an Internet business, you should include research into integrating your business with social network sites. There are many ways these sites enhance your email marketing campaign and drive traffic directly to your site.

Once you get your business website going, you should also link in with sites such as the ones mentioned above. While it is true that the social sites such as Facebook and MySpace are less formal, you should still set up your page and profile with the same level of professionalism as your site.

You can use these sites to promote brand recognition and loyalty, which is the main reason why you want to stick with a more professional appearance. You want your customers to recognize you and your products.

Social networking sites give you a level of insight into your customers which has never been available before now. Not only can you get immediate feedback from them, but you can also respond just as immediately to that feedback. On these sites you have the opportunity to directly interact with them.

Once you establish a good customer base, those customers will help you spread the word via these sites. When you have a good “fan base” established, you will see how these sites drive traffic to your website and get more people to sign up to receive your emails.

Speaking of emails, remember your autoresponder tool? Your autoresponder is one of the best tools that you have available to you. Once you have driven traffic from social networking sites to your company website, they have come because they are interested in your product or service. If they choose to sign up to receive your information, they will still need to choose what they want to receive from you. Your autoresponder handles this for you.

It can send them a special welcome greeting thanking them for their interest. These greetings are no longer bland text format. Nowadays you can send them welcome videos with personally recorded messages.

You can also use networking sites for other email marketing such as press releases. These sites have newsfeeds on which you can let your customers – and any one of their friends who can see those newsfeeds – know about any new information you have coming out.

These are just a few ways that social networking sites and email marketing campaigns can work together. So don’t choose one or the other when you can both.

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

How To Make Websites Work With Social Networking Sites is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO

Social news sites are about content for the reader, not self promotion.

This is part two of my series on Optimization for Social Media Integration, this time covering social media news.

The top two social media news sites today are Digg and StumbleUpon, so I’ll concentrate on these. However, Propeller.com, Reddit.com, Mixx.com (do-follow links) and Buzz.Yahoo.com are all worth a look.

The main thing to remember about social media sites is that the news on these sites is chosen by the users, making popular items even more so because bloggers look at this content for cool, link-worthy stuff and then re-post or write about them. The stories get great visibility and natural editorial links. In addition, the content is targeted, making it great for boosting your ranking and authority.

In brief: Digg utilizes outside voting, requires LOTS of votes for an item to go popular, generating less illegitimate content. StumbleUpon features toolbar voting, send page to a friend ability (which pretty much forces a view) and even includes the option to buy more views at a whopping 5 cents each.

Here are some general guidelines to make your social news more popular and to provide those nice surges of traffic to your blog or site. These spikes can be fantastic!

Content

• Give quality. Readers (voters) appreciate hard work, like learning, hate spam, SEO and marketing. They strictly want news, not fluff, so make sure that news, not self-promotion, is what you’re presenting.
• Be concise. Save time for everyone by not overdoing the amount of text. Social news readers like to skim without too many clicks. In other words, they are anxious to vote and want to get it done right away!

SEO

• Use titles in your blog posts that are positioned for back links with great SEO text. Page titles can have more keywords.
• Post regularly. Keep that great content coming.
• Don’t be tempted to 301 redirect old content to new posts. Let the content be.
• Garner trust because trusted domains are more likely to hit the front page of Digg.
• Stay on topic.
• Make your news linkable.
• Adhere to the Terms of Service for the news site.
• Optimize, rework and monetize your articles 30-60 days after they have gone viral.
• Utilize RSS feeds to help drive links from other sites.  RSS feed links are not nofollow.

One final thought. You can actually dominate longtail results with proper social news optimization even if your site isn’t optimized, a terrific byproduct. Links generated to your news article can push even pagess with no SEO to speak of higher.

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

Optimization for Social Media Integration: News is a post from: SEO in The Desert | More about Palm Springs SEO