Use Lazy Plugins or Fix Your Own Post Slugs
There are a lot of plugins in the world and frankly there are many of them I just can’t recommend, especially to noobs. The first one is the All in One SEO Pack. This plugin is popular only for one reason, it is for the lazy blogger who won’t take the time to do any SEO themselves. In days past you could get by with using this method, but now it hurts as many people as it helps. Frankly if you are too lazy to take the two minutes or less it takes to do a good SEO job with your posts, then not only are you setting yourself up for an epic fail, you will deserve it. Forget about all the magic meta tagging, alter your post slug, write your page description, fill in your image info plugins that are out there. Disregard however popular they might be, even Vanilla Ice and NKOTB were massively popular at one point in time. If you want to do a good job with your blog you will need exactly two plugins. HeadSpace 2 and Tiny MCE Advanced.
Here is how to maximize your SEO using these two plugins.
First on the write window you will have a section right under the title called Permalink. This is your page slug. You want this to be as short as possible, but also to contain as many important words as possible.
If this had trash words like, if, the, but etc that have no SEo importance I would simply hit edit and remove them, making sure there is a dash in between each word left. In times past if you used special characters in your title your page slug would reflect them making your pretty permalinks very ugly and SEO unfriendly. I think there will come a time when Wordpress automatically removes trashwords from the permalink, but until then it is left up to you.
There are plugins that claim to fix your post-slugs by removing trashwords, but the one thing I have yet to see one do is fix your old links automatically. You still ave to open up the post delete the old slug and let it rewrite the new one. This is a waste of your time. If there was a plugin that would do this automatically then that would be worth getting, but as far as I know, none of them do and I have tried more than a dozen of them.
If you are editing an old blog you will want to add one more plugin to the mix, Redirection. Written by the same guy who brought us John Godley who also wrote Headspace 2, Redirection will redirect incoming hits from the old link to the new link. You don’t need any other plugin not even headspace 2 or redirection for change your old permalinks, but those two are very helpful, if you want people to find your posts easily. The best way to edit post slugs in my opinion is open up the manage meta data tab that Headspace 2 adds to WordPress.
The little green icon on the right will automatically generate a page slug for you if you have the pull down set on page-slug. In fact it will automatically generate almost any content based on the post that you need simply by pushing the button. That said it makes headspace no better than any other piece of automated crap. The power of headspace is it will allow you to quickly edit the information on anywhere from 25 to 200 posts at a time. I do suggest staying under fifty though for page slugs, because redirection can get bogged down trying to do too much at once.
If you don’t know what words to remove from your post slugs, by all means download a fix your slug plugin with a list and have a look at it. If you are proficient in the English language enough to write an adequate post though, you will know the difference between what is and isn’t an important word.
There you have it folks the fastest easiest way to fix all your post slugs not just your future ones. In part two we till talk about your other neglected metadata, page title and page description.
Free Wordpress Theme: Greenback
You can check out the latest free WordPress Theme from What is a Blog at Help The Harts Go Green. Once again this is based on a RevolutionTwo GPL licensed theme. This is the the third generation of the theme, the second generation which has mostly SEO improvements can be seen at WTF Parenting Magazine. Neither theme is quite ready for release. I also urge you to check out the magazine version of Blogging in Black and White at Local News and Newspapers.
12 Plugin Must Haves for WordPress 2.7
WordPress 2.7 is upon us and as I continue to tweak the Blogging In Black and White theme I am forced to deal with a few more plugin issues. I have already seen the idiot list of plugins out today claiming to be must haves for 2.7, but I am here to save you from yourselves and those idiots. First off anyone who suggests Managable, Ultimate Tag Warrior, and a number of other is simply full of crap and hoping to cash in on you being gullible. Mageable is now part of Wordpress and won’t function, in fact it probably will break your install and Ultimate Tag Warrior hasn’t worked since tags became a standard part of wordpress way back when. There a plenty of plugins in this category so choose them with caution and check them out at the wordpress extend site for yourself.
Here is my list of must haves:
- Google XML Sitemaps: If you want to be indexed by google this is a must have tool to get it done right.
- HeadSpace2: This is a far superior plugin to the All in One SEO Pack, even when that plugin was well maintained instead of the weenie version that is currently out. Check out Mani’s great tutorial on HeadSpace 2.
- Redirection: If you are serious about your SEO you need this plugin. Whether you use a plugin to automatically shorten post slugs removing trash words, do it from the write window or do en masse from the manage meta data tab that Headspace 2 gives you, you will want redirection. Furthermore if you change to the more SEO friendly permalinks of blog.com/category/post-slug/ this becomes even more important. Wordpress can muck it up pretty badly if you don’t have this plugin.
- WP-PageNavi: This is the premier pagination plugin. If you are a noob you can get by with the standard previous/recent posts links because you lack enough content to make installing worth while. After you have a few pages though this makes navigating so much easier for your reader.
- WP-DBManager: This is one of Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan best plugins and he has a lot of really good ones including PageNavi. This is the one tool i don’t like being without. It provides complete management of your blogs DB from within wordpress, as opposed to going through the often confusing php Admin panel.
- Feedage Tracker: This plugin makes it possible your your reader to add your site to any number or feed readers quickly and easily.
- Auto Social puts you one step closer to being noticed by millions of more readers by bookmarking every post you make on del.icio.us
- Akismet: I have come full circle on Akismet. There are some better spam blockers out there, but many of those plugins actually go too far and have no means of rescuing potentially good comments. A note to all I recommended wp-spamfree to, it is one of those that works too well and also can cause pinging problems, despite the authors claims to the contrary. I use akismet in conjunction with Bad Behavior for the most effective results.
- Bad Behavior used in conjunction with Akismet is one of the most potent combinations for spam protection. The area where bad behavior really shines is when it comes to spam bots that akismet misses. If you are serious about your traffic and spam you might want to add Bad Behavior Log Reader.
- Sociable: When it comes to social bookmarking there are a lot of options and a lot of good plugin choices. I have flip flopped back forth between most of these choices and still use some of them on certain blogs because of style issues, but by and large Sociable is the way to go. You are able to add buttons from man many different sites and not just the popular English language ones. The one caveat I do make about this is before uploading it you need to fix the style sheet which has icon opacity set at 50% making many links hard to read on the page.
- WP Calais Archive Tagger: This is a must have for tagging old content, especially if you are importing it from another source such as Blogger or LiveJournal. It effectively tags your entire post archive by performing semantic analysis on the post text. On some sites I run this about once a week and let it add any newly important tags that might be potentially good for searches.
- Tagaroo: Where the Calaise Archive Tagger works the semantic tags for your previous posts, Tagaroo will work on your current posts. The second feature of this awesomely powerful plugin is it will associate your tags with Flickr images that you can directly insert into your post from the write page.
There you have it folks my must have list of WordPress 2.7 Plugins. These aren’t the only twelve plugins I use by any means, but they are the ones I use consistently through out all my blogs and would be sad shape without, and unlike many other lists out this week all of these actually work in WordPress 2.7. Look for my list of Comment Related Pluginssoon!
Blogging in Black and White
As promised two days ago I am releasing my edits and upgrades to Revolution Two’s Code Blue Wordpress Theme as Blogging in Black and White. My versions has extensive upgrades in the SEO and functionality, which may or may not have come with the paid version of this theme. Here is the quick list and you can expect posts in the coming days to discuss each of them in detail.
- Easy to insert keywords through the theme option menu. Adding the page title to these keywords creates an SEO feature that is hard to beat. I learned this technique long ago from Courtney Tuttle’s Keyword Sniping posts (no longer available on his site).
- Integrated tags to meta keywords. If it was good enough to tag your post with it is good enough to make a keyword out of
- Advertising Ready
- Plugin Ready
- Post Thumbnails Thumbnail added to every post snippet. Blogging in Black and White uses the limit content function to allow you to set the number of characters displayed. This is more versatile than excerpts.
View the Test Blog
Download the Blogging In Black and White. [download id="2"]
Check out the forum for support
Recommended plugins for this theme
- AdRotate This will rotate ads for you just place the code on the appropriate ad
- Custom Post Templates this allows you to use the included post templates
- Extra Comment Fields allows you to make use of the twitter comment field
- Profile Pic Allows you to use the author.php file as it is written. Move template it into the main theme directory to use.
- Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form this is the best contact form out there. Blogging in Black and White free Wordpress theme includes a custom style sheet for this plugin.
As always see what other plugins I am recommending.
