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WordPress has gazillions of plugins to perform a variety of functions. Here are a few that are my favourites, either because they save time or look good – or both.

While you may have come across some of these before, hopefully there’s something new.

1. Social

One of my favourites is the TweetMeme Retweet button. It easily allows your posts to be retweeted and shows a count of how many times. You can see it above this post.

And it’s used by TechCrunch, so you’ll be in good company.

2. Mobile

If you check your analytics, you may  be surprised how much of your traffic is coming from mobile platforms. WP-Touch is one of the most popular plugins to render your site for the smartphone screen size. There is now an updated version available, WP Touch Pro with more colour customization.

Here’s what a website looks like rendered on a smartphone without any plugin or mobile-enabled functionality – very difficult to use:

And here’s what a blog site with WP Touch looks like:

3. Sitemap

This site map is for your visitors. If your site is more than a few pages then it’s always a good idea to give your visitors a sitemap in the footer to supplement the navigation and help them find what they want. The one I use is Dagon and was recommended to me by Inspiration, a Dublin Web Design company that specialises in WordPress implementations.

4. SEO

With WordPress, you need an search engine optimization (SEO) plugin in order to customize your meta title and description tags. All In One SEO by Michael Tarbert is probably the most common SEO plugin, but Yoast’s WordPress SEO has more functionality.

5. Broken Links

Broken Link Checker is a handy one to tell you your broken links. Links can become broken either because of typos or because the site your linking to has changed. This one is a time-saver. It’s better for you to find your broken links than Google’s spiders.

6. Related Posts

If one of your readers gets to the bottom of your post, then they’re probably interested in what you have to say. So, offer them some other related posts. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin is great for this. It allows some customization so that categories or tags can be excluded and it can also display them in your RSS feed.

7. Widget Placement

This is one of my favourites. You can choose to display a specific widget on the pages/ posts of your choice. In this way, you can customize your sidebars to be more relevant to the page. It’s called Widget Context.

8. Back-ups

In anything to do with computers, back-ups have to be the most boring task. Let this plugin take care of it for you behind the scenes. BackUpWordPress can back-up your entire site, including database, each day. You can even choose to have it emailed to you. Email it to a gmail account and have Google store it for you for free.

You’ll find all of them at WordPress.Org.

What’s your favourite plugin?

Site Load times now a significant factor in Google Indexing

At WordCamp last weekend in Kilkenny, I asked the Google search representatives why a Posterous blog I maintain might be slow to be indexed by Google. Elena responded that she couldn’t comment on any individual site, but that the site load time is a significant factor in Google’s new algorithm.

In the case of the Posterous blog, it is being indexed, but is not being returned in search results for Ireland as it is hosted in the US. The load time is not an issue.

The SEO advice is always to optimise the site load time where Google ranking is critical to the site. The site load time is increased by running Flash (Adobe) visuals, and the number of Javascripts – the number of calls to the server in order to build the page. Obviously, there is a trade-off between design and making your site attractive to customer and ensuring that it loads quickly.  

For sites that run on WordPress, the WP-SuperCache Plugin (or WP-Cache Plugin), which is freely available, can be installed to allow the ‘caching’ of pages, so that the page is built and stored as a static file and served to visitors. In this way, the page is served more quickly as it does not require to build the page from the database again.

Check your own site and see if it’s unnecessarily slow. After all, Google’s bots are only put off by slowness because actual visitors are!

You can check to see how long your site takes to load by running it through Pingdom Tools. This will show you how long each part of your web page is taking to load.

Check your own site and see if it’s unnecessarily slow. After all, Google’s bots are only put off by slowness because actual visitors are!

Here’s the data from this site’s Home page:

Website information

Total loading time:    3.7 seconds

Total objects:  22 (165 KB)

External objects: 0

(X)HTML: 1 (13.9KB)

RSS/XML: 0

CSS: 2 (22KB)

Scripts: 4 (70.7KB)

Images: 15 (58.3KB)

Plugins: 0

Other: 0

Redirected: 0

Google speaks

I’m just back from WordCampIreland held in Kilkenny over the weekend and have a notebook full of juicy tips. This was the first WordCamp to be held in Ireland and proved to be a rich resource for the SEO-minded and online marketer. For those not familiar, WordCamps are a professional meet-up of individuals using, or interested in, WordPress as a site platform. So while it was primarily about WordPress use, the online visibility (SEO and Digital Marketing) of those users was a theme running throughout the sessions.

Google search home page

There were two representatives from Google’s organic search team there (Luisella Mazza and Elena) and the good news is that they listed a number of SEO tips for increasing your Google ranking and enabling easier site crawling for the Google bots. The bad news is that they stated that there are now over 200 factors used by Google in determining page rank!

And they didn’t list them all.

So SEO isn’t getting any simpler. But here are some of the points they made:

Keywords

Use words that people search for.

Categorise your content (blog posts) with keywords.

Use keywords in your URL path.

Have keywords in your Title (Meta Title tag).

Have keywords and ‘English’ description of your site in your Meta Description tag.

Avoid Duplicate Content and Indexing

Use canonicalisation: avoid duplicates by having only 1 version of URL ie. either www.name.com or name.com, not both so as not to have a situation where back-links are pointing to different versions of the same URL. This is to avoid the dilution of link popularity.

If using WordPress, select your preferred domain on the WP Admin panel.

Images

Google’s crawlers cannot ‘see’ images, so they suggest the following to allow them to index what’s on the page:

Give images relevant file names.

Add ALT attributes to your images.

Include a textual description of images.

Spammers, Nasties and Security Best Practice

Check using Google search to see if spammers have made it onto your site. Google gives a ‘malware’ warning if it detects dubious content. This is a sure-fire way to lose ranking.

Spammers hack sites for two reasons: 1) to add links 2) to distribute malware.

Security suggestions include:

• keep an eye on site
• add .htaccess file to increase security
• keep WordPress (or software) up to date

Site Maps and Navigation

Create an XML site map for Google and submit to them.

Create a sitemap for your visitors.

Ensure all pages are linked back to rest of site.

Facebook favicon as it appears on IE browser

A  good favicon is one that is obvious to the eye, will be readily recognisable as being related to your site. Bear in mind the small size you have to work with. You won’t fit many letters in and colour is key. A design or logo works best. It will add a professional look to your site by carrying through your branding.

The favicon appears in a number of places, including:

• the browser address bar
• the Favourites or Bookmarks -  making you a little easier to find (if your logo is strong)
• a desktop shortcut
• RSS feed
• Google Toolbar

A favicon can be created and added to a WordPress site quite easily using the following steps:

1. create, or use an existing, logo or image and make it square
2. use an online favicon creator, such as   www.favicon.cc  to shrink your image to a 16 pixel square image and then save it in  .ico format.
3. call the image favicon.ico
4. upload a copy of the file to your sites main directory of your site (public_html) using a FTP client.
5. upload another copy of the file to your sites main Theme folder
6. in your WordPress Admin, edit your header file, header.php by finding the line that begins with <link rel="shortcut icon" and ends with /favicon.ico" /> and overwrite with:                                   <link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?/favicon.ico” />                                                      (note no spaces between ’bloginfo’ and(‘template                                                          
7. Clear your browser cache. This is simply clearing out your temporary   internet files. Do this in Internet Explorer by selecting Tools, then Internet Options, then General by selecting  Delete Browsing History and tick the box for deleting ‘Temporary Internet Files’.
8. You’re done!

When you write a post to your blog, it has a permalink assigned to it, so that it can be found – a permanent link. This is the URL which links directly to the blog post. The unchanging nature of the link means that your blog post can be referenced by other blogs, articles and shared, at any time.

However, the way these permalinks are constructed is critical if you want your posts to be found by search engines.

Many blog posts will have a default structure which lists the URL as something like this:

     www.productsgalore.com/?p=99

and this will be your 99th blog post.

This is entirely uninteresting for search engines – and not many people want to know more about the number ’99!

So, customising your permalink is critical if you want to be found. The most useful format for most people will probably involve using the Category, and perhaps, Tag, with the post name. The category will give the search engines something relevant to use to index the post. The tag can further refine it.

If your blog is news oriented, then a date and post name based permalink might be more appropriate.

However, if your post belongs to more than one category, then it is the catetory which was created first that will be used. This is the one with the lowest Category Id no. If the post belongs to a parent and child category, then both will be displayed, parent first, then child.

To increase your SEO, have relevant keywords in your post title. This gives the search engines more to index.

If you have a long descriptive title, which will look too long and clumsy for a URL, then use a post slug. WordPress offers this means of shortening the post name to a name you want to appear in the URL. For instance, the title of this post has been shortened to ‘enhance-blog-searchability’.

For WordPress blogs, this customising can easily be done on the Settings panel, as part of the Admin functions, using variables. See the WordPress Codex for a list of the possible variables.

Once, the format is set, try not to change as you wil lose those that have linked to you and search engines are then not indexing you correctly.

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