Ultimate Tag Warrior
http://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/
I can’t say enough good things about this plug-in. Mainly because it makes my blog more “findable” by both search engines and people who follow tags. Plus, the tag cloud it optionally creates increases my page views – instead of sending my visitors off into cyberspace, it sends them to a page that is a collection of posts I’ve written on that subject.
What makes it so killer isn’t just that it has the potential to be a huge money maker for your blog. It’s really about making your blog super easy to manage. You can assign a keyword – any keyword – to a link. From then on, any time you write about that word or phrase, it’s automatically linked to any link you want. You can change the link or the word, and if it was linked to something else before, it reverts back.
So now, whenever I want to link to a product of mine, or a friend’s site, I can just write naturally, and know it will get picked up and linked when I publish the post. And I can set it up to hyperlink to that keyword once, or five times. Doesn’t matter. Plus it tracks the number of times the link is clicked.
There’s tons of ways you could use this and I am thinking about dedicating a special post just to this.
WP-ShortStat
http://blog.happyarts.de/WP-ShortStat/
I love testing and tracking everything. This lets me know at a glance things like, where my last visitors came from, where I get the most links just to my blog and not the whole site, what the top keyword phrases for my blog are, and for different search engines.
It’s very handy when I suddently get a spike of traffic, and want to know, live, where the increase came from.
With the automated blog comment posters out there, I want to protect the integrity of my blog so I can respond to comments when I’m around. Akismet knows the spam pattern somehow, and catches spam before it gets posted to your blog. Nice.
As of today, Akismet has caught 3,864 spam for me since I installed it in March of this year.
Sweet.
Feedburner Feed Replacement
http://www.orderedlist.com/articles/wordpress_feedburner_plugin/
I adore FeedBurner. I just can’t say it enough times. This plug in makes sure all my main feed traffic goes through FeedBurner.
DoFollow
http://kimmo.suominen.com/sw/dofollow/
Now, when a legitimate person leaves a link on my site, they get the full reward of a link back. It disables the default nofollow tag, so that search engines recognize any link on my site as a real link. On the rare occasion that Akismet doesn’t catch a spam comment, I have a day (or more if I like) to read my comments and make sure they are real, so I don’t have to do any real time comment moderating.
If an imposter comes through, I just delete the comment.
Related Posts
http://www.w-a-s-a-b-i.com/archives/2006/02/02/wordpress-related-entries-20/
I don’t use this on all my blogs, but it’s quite spiffy. I can choose to automate the process of directing people to more information on the same topic. On blogs where I’m not using tags (like some of my private blogs), I can still send them to other posts on the same topic. This increases my page views by increasing the usefulness of the blog to my visitors.
