A Watershed Year for Online Video

In 2009, YouTube saw a 56 percent increase in traffic and finally hit a new benchmark – users are uploading 20 hours worth of video per minute to the site. This remarkable statistic may have something to do with the improved functionality of the webcam response tool that now allows users to start recording video with one-simple click.

And although online video is not quite ready to dethrone the venerable TV set, online video is almost a must-have element to any good online destination.

Here are three potent and easy to install plugins that will help transform your WordPress blog into a video-ready CMS:

wordTube for WordPress:

Per the developer site’s description: “This plugin manages the JW FLV MEDIA PLAYER 4.3+ and makes it easy for you to put music, videos or flash movies onto your WordPress posts and pages. ”

Well, let me say that “easy” is a relative term.  Compared to Viper’s Video Quicktags (see below) wordTube is not so simple.  It requires you to create an .flv (Flash video) file to begin with, or yes, you can link to an existing Flash video file (for example a YouTube link) and then drop a line of code into your post manually that looks something like: [media id="media id"]

That in itself isn’t so hard, but it can become a bit tedious when you just want to copy and paste something from another site into a post.  The adantages of wordTube, however are the extended power you get from integrating the JW FLV player into your WordPress installation; everything from building video jukeboxes, to custom skins for your player to integrating LongTail ads becomes available.  There is also a long list of plugins that add further functionality to the player available from the site at www.longtailvideo.com

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Another cool thing about wordTube and it’s ability to work with audio or images alone, is that you can create a jukebox for music or images and thus build a radio station or photo gallery to your liking.  Or even a music jukebox with cover art.  To see an example of this, visit the Streaming Indie Jukebox at LA music blog MusicZeitgeist.com

It supports .flv or .swf, sound files as MP3 and JPG, GIF or PNG grafic files.

Viper’s Video Quicktags

This delicious little dish makes serving up video from a wide variety of media sites as simple as copy and pasting the appropriate video link into an input field.  The plugin does the rest.

Sites currently supported include:

• YouTube Stay video (including playlists)
• Google Video
• DailyMotion
• Vimeo Son of Rambow
• Veoh
• Viddler
  
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• Metacafe
• Blip.tv
• WordPress.com Video / WordPress.tv NEW!
• Flickr videos
• Spike.com/IFILM
• MySpaceTV

Highly recommended for ease of use and selection.  Furthermore you can use the plugins WYSIWYG backend to alter the player’s behaviors – from disabling related videos, to offering high quality options to the color of the frame.

Smart Video Plus

A relative but powerful newcomer is Smart Video Plus which is very different from any other WordPress video plugin you will find on the net as it’s not dependant on using any [tokens] or [tags] to embed media, nor does it need a list of supported video sites for you to choose from as this plugin allows video embedding from absolutely every video site online that supports embed code.

It can be used as a standalone plugin or integrated with a free custom optimized theme available from the developers site.

Some of the plugins features include the ability to:

• Search Videos From Over 30 Top Video Search Engines!
• Choose Videos From Over 100 Million Pre Cached Media Files!
• Mass Embed The Media You Choose Directly to Your WordPress!
• Change All The Video Meta Titles, Descriptions & Keywords!
• No Downloading, No Uploading, No Copy & Paste, No Duplicate Media!

So there you have it – three ways to start becoming your own online broadcaster.  I’d love to hear from you if you have tried any of these and how they worked out for you.

About the Author:
Keram (follow him on twitter @ConstantChange) is a new media consultant, music producer, actor and writer who opines on SEO at blogging-fool.com and society at theculturepin.com. Listen to his podcast at KeramCast.com

There are thousands upon thousands of WordPress plugins with more cropping up every day.  Every once in a while something from the “Why Didn’t I Think of That” category pops up and I would like to share some of those with you.

Ever feel like you have a great idea for a blog but you either don’t have the time to develop it into a full post, or just haven’t formulated the full concept?  Rather than create a bunch of drafts, you can now sketch out a quick list of to-do posts and Aha! moments with Post Ideas by developer Aaron Robbins.

Where Post Ideas goes beyond the old method of saving drafts is that it allows you to track keywords and research URLS, and perhaps more importantly, sort your sketches by name, date or priority.  Love it.

How about batch processing for your blog?  Any photographer or music producer knows how important batch processing can be to both save time and keep consistency between a large number of files.  Well, here are again in the “Why Didn’t I Think of That” department because a blog, with its ever-growing number of posts develops in voice and direction over the course of its life and eventually you may want to go back and adjust a lof older articles to better reflect the direction in which your site is headed.

Enter Mass Post Manager for WordPress which enables you to delete all posts and comments in a category and / or reassign all posts from one category to another.  This is especially useful if you find that in the early days of your blog, when you were still working things out, you created too many categories or eventually found more concise categories with which to organize your content.

If you have ever been a fan of the Yet Another Related Post Plugin (YARPP), a tool that searches your database by categories, keywords, titles and other criteria and then outputs a list of suggestions to older posts at the end of your article, then you may have found that it can stress your shared server out if not handled with care.  Another solution is to create an effective and powerfully visual callback to a related post by placing  graphic sticky or Post-it note on top of your article.

Vishal Monpara’s awesome WordPress Sticky Post Plugin shows the designated post on top every post on your blog.  It isn’t really a substitute or replacement for YARRP, but, it is a very cool way of drawing attention to another article by working over top of your existing theme.  It currently supports both WordPress 2.1 and greater and WordPress MU 1.1.   Check it out and see if you like it.

Speaking of WordPress MU (Multi-user) – an announcement came from San Francisco this week that WordPress MU will soon be merged into WordPress itself.  This is very exciting indeed as MU allows a standard WP blog to be transformed into a full-fledged social networking portal.  Tighter integration between the two will mean a lot of optimization and ideally, improved ease of use, adding to the eisting power of WordPress significantly.

Have you ever suffered from long URL-itis in your comments section?  Now that everyone seems to have wised up to good SEO practices, we are seeing URLs that can run the length of a long-winded sentence.  You know the kind I mean: http://whatever.org/this-post-is-about-the-time-I-went-to-Mount-Rushmore-and-took-a-picture-with-my wifes-family.html

WP-Chunk to the rescue! This plugin gracefully shortens URLs within submitted comments.

A final plugin to strongly consider for any blog is Secure Files

by Trevor Turk.  This definitely falls into the category we discussed earlier about things that should have come pre-installed with WordPress, in that it allows you to upload and download files from outside of your web document root for security purposes.

This is especially important for blogs that have multiple authors – since the nature of image and CSS that can be uploaded from a post-creation backend are not protected in the same way that your database is protected by being restricted only to registered users with sufficient access.

Placing the uploads directory outside of your install’s root directory can save you from malicious or to be euphemistic “accidentally uploaded” files that can damage or harm your site or server.

Have you ever tried any of the plugins on this list?  What has been your experience with them?
About the Author:
Keram (follow him on twitter @ConstantChange

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A huge part of success as a blogger is making it easy for people to share your content. Person to person recommendations are very powerful to a blogger, especially if a person has thousands of Twitter or blog followers. It’s important to make it easy for anybody to share your posts with people they know. Thankfully, there are many excellent WordPress Plugins for sharing posts.

Sociable

This is the mother of all sharing plugins. It creates a bar at the bottom of posts that can be customized to allow readers to submit a post to your preferred social networking site. You can completely customize the list and show as many as you want. It really makes submitting to sites like Digg and Reddit really easy. It’s a powerful plugin with a wide user base, so people know to look for it.

Download Sociable here

WP-Email

This plugin does one thing and one thing well, it allows readers to e-mail a post to a friend. It’s a great way for readers to share your best posts. I also find this to be a useful feature on many websites just to send posts to myself. It’s easy to install and doesn’t require and coding or template changes to get working. It also tracks every post that’s shared so you can see what posts are creating the most buzz with readers.

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Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button

This is a great all in one plugin. It allows you to easily let readers submit posts to over 100 social networking sites, bookmark with their browsers and popular bookmarking sites. It also has an e-mail post button built in. This plugin has a lot of functionality and is a great addition to any blog. Perfect if you don’t want to mess with several plugins to do different things.

Download Add to Any here

ReTweet Badge – Tweetmeme

Tweetmeme

is becoming the de facto tracking method for links on the huge Twitter network. The Tweetmeme website aggregates links on Twitter and keeps track of how many people have tweeted a post. This little plugin puts the ReTweet badge on all your posts so that you can see the current Tweet count. When the badge is clicked, it takes them to their Twitter account where they can then Tweet it themselves. With the popularity of Twitter growing bigger every day, this is an important plugin to have.

Download ReTweet Tweetmeme here A Room with a View

ShareThis

This is another all in one solution that you can customize. ShareThis is very similar to the ubiquitous AddThis button. It creates a widget on the site that allows users to share posts on a variety of social networking sites, e-mail them or send them across their instant messenger account. This is the only sharing plugin that integrates chat as well. Pretty powerful little tool, if you’re okay relying on a third party for your post sharing.

Download ShareThis here

So there are a few ways you can allow your readers to share your posts. What’s your favorite plugin for sharing your blog content?

Even as I write this the good people at Automattic are announcing a much-touted integration with Buddypress – a social networking plugin/addon for WordPress.  For a long while I have studied and experimented with transforming WordPress into a full-blown CMS like my much-beloved PHPNuke (now abandoned by its orginal creators) portal at freedom.constantchange.com The Name of the Rose movie full

but the solutions have been daunting or piecemeal.

There are countless articles written about how to integrate a forum into your WordPress blog, some which require WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) some that sort of work but don’t hook in well enough to the existing user base or require extensive modding and hacking to make it feel that way.

Some sites, including the famous power blogger Darren Rowse’s Digital Photography School blog use vBulletin, beautifully integrated by power-designers like Matt Brett Transsiberian video .  But vBulletin costs a grip of cash.

So after testing out a wide variety of forum solutions for WordPress, I finally stumbled upon an easy to install, free and perfectly useful plugin that sets up a phpbb style forum that hooks right in to your site’s existing registered user base and seems, by all appearances and my experiences thus far, to work beautifully.

That solution is Simple:Press.

To get it going, simply do a search for Simplepress from your Admin->Plugins->Add new search line, click install and you are good to go.

Almost.

Once the plugin has installed, you will see a new section in your Admin panel called “Forum”.  At the bottom it will offer you the option to install (again).  Click this and it will perform an extensive database update wherein it populated your databases with all the necessary tables for your new forums.

One of the beautiful things about Simple:Press is that it creates a new page for your Forums automatically.  It also creates a new field in your Posts pages so that any post can be turned into a forum topic.  Nice.

Once installed, you will want to go to your new Forum Admin section and start tweaking things to your liking.  This is actually quite important as the display, function and dynamic of your forums can be changed dramatically (and success or fail) based on your configuration.

Also take note of the Style tab where you can choose from a variety of pre-packaged color and design schemes, one of which will likely blend in with your site quite nicely.  Of course all of this can be further customized with some more advanced under-the-hood tweaking.

After working with the configuration, you will have to create the forums themselves.  This starts with creating a Group which is the top-level category, and then subsequently, the Forum itself.  A little planning is in order here, especially if you have never managed a forum.  The tendency is to make too many groups covering topics that should in fact be forums or even simply topics.

So if you think of Russian Dolls where a small version fits into a larger version, the Group is the top level, for example “General” then the Forums can be broken down into sub-categories like “Food,” “Entertainment,” “Tech,” and then you or your readers will create topics below those:

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Forums are an excellent way to build a community in and around you blog and keep people coming back for more.

One of the most important things to realize, however, when you build a successful community around you blog is that you are also building a brand, and that once that brand is being used by the public, it belongs to them as much as much as it does to you and with that comes greater responsibility.

For now, rest assured that Simple:Press is an easy and effective way to keep the conversation going at your blog into the wee hours, to nurture new relationships and to transform WordPress into a truly useful content management system, and more importantly, a community.

Download Simple:Press Forum for WordPress now.

About the Author:
Keram is a new media consultant, music producer, actor and writer who opines on SEO at blogging-fool.com and society at theculturepin.com.  Listen to his podcast at KeramCast.com

By now you have heard the famous story of actor Ashton Kutcher challenging CNN to be the first to reach one million followers on Twitter. The very next day the great Oprah herself signed up for a Twitter account live on her television program. Two days later Barbara Walters followed suit on the View.

There is no question that Twitter has invaded the mainstream and grabbed it piece of Web history. WE have discussed the importance of integrating Twitter into your website in various articles, so today I want simply to point you to one of the hundreds of options for using Twitter within your WordPress blog but in this case, with the focus of displaying how many ReTweets any of your posts has tallied up.

Retweets are, by definition, when another Twitter user likes a link that you have “tweeted” and re-posts it by giving you, or whomever the original poster was, credit for the link.

The Retweet button is for website and blog publishers that want to encourage their audience to Retweet their content on twitter by both offering a tweet button and a dynamically updating stat counter that shows how many times your post has been retweeted.

While implementing it is as easy as copying a small piece of javascript into your site.  Visit this page to see to code:

http://help.tweetmeme.com/2009/04/06/tweetmeme-button/

We are fortunate enough, however, as WordPress users, to have a ReTweet Button from TweetMeme as a WordPress plugin!

To find and install it, simply navigate to your plugins tab from your admin panel and click “Add New.”

In the searchline, enter “Tweetmeme Button” and it should come right up. Click install and then set the options to your liking from the settings section of your Admin panel and you are on your way!

About the Author:

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Keram is a new media consultant, music producer, actor and writer who opines on SEO at blogging-fool.com and society at theculturepin.com.

WordPress is an extremely powerful blog platform. The biggest reason why it is so powerful is because of all the plugins out there that take WordPress to the next level and completely change how it operates. It could be said that many of these plugins work to make WordPress more like a full fledged Content Management System, rather than just a blogging platform.

Each of these plugins adds advanced functionality to WordPess and each has a learning curve of it’s own. They don’t necessarily work right out of the box and will require some tweaking to get them to behave the way they are meant to.

But let’s face it, bloggers like to get our hands dirty and learn new things as often as we can. So I thought I would share 5 advanced WordPress plugins with you that you can utilize on your blog. Check them out:

TDO Mini Forms

Have you ever thought: I wish there was a way I could let people submit blogs posts or content, with custom fields that would automatically post? That’s what this plugin does. On a basic level, it’s a form builder. On an advanced level, it can help you create custom content that users can create on their own. It allows you to maintain complete control while opening a site up to user contributions. For example, this would be useful if you were creating some kind of informational directory that required user input. You can create a form with TDO Mini Forms that will have all the relevant fields and then publish it to the site.

However, it’s not that simple. This plugin is extremely difficult to learn how to use, especially when it comes to creating custom fields. Often times you’ll have to resort to hacking the form code itself in order to get it to do what you want. They make it easy to hack, but you’ll need to know your way around HTML to get things to work right. But once you get it to work, it can be an extremely powerful way to create content for your website.

Download TDO Mini Forms

WP Forum

Once your blog hits critical mass and has the readership to support it, a forum is great way to engage your readers. People love belonging to communities and adding a forum to your blog will do that. The problem is that WordPress can’t do this out of the box. In comes WP Forum, which aims to be a complete WordPress Forum solution. It integrates well with WordPress and gets the job done. Best of all, it’s under active development, unlike other WordPress Forum solutions.

Once you install this plugin, you’ll need to set it up and create some custom pages. Once you do this, the forum will live within your blog and you’ll be able to manage it within WordPress Admin. If you went with a standalone forum software, you would not be able to do this. Installed, you can do everything you expect do with a forum, create categories, create posts and more. It’s a great little package.

Download WP Forum

Flutter

This plugin is a little difficult to quantify. So, I’ll compare it to a cousin. In the Drupal CMS, there is something called the Content Construction Kit. Basically it lets you create custom content that is different from blog posts. Flutter is CCK for WordPress. It allows you to create custom content that is separate than blog posts. That means that if you want to have content on your WordPress site that’s different from a blog post, such as an event listing or definition. You create the custom content with this plugin and then you’ll have the option to write a ‘custom post’ as opposed to a regular blog post.

In a way, it’s slightly related to TDO Mini Forms in that it will allow you to create custom content pages. The only difference is that anonymous users won’t necessarily be able to create the content on their own. Like I said, it can be a little difficult to wrap your head around this plugin, which is why Flutter has an informative little video on their website that explains it by example.

Flutter Download Site

Open Directory Links

A great way to drive traffic to your site and build its backlinks is to create a link directory. Until now, there hasn’t been a very good link directory solution for WordPress that didn’t require a lot of hacking to get it to function. Open Directory Links is a slick implementation of a link directory that will work just like directories such as DMOZ. When you install the plugin, it creates another part of your site that is a link directory.

It integrates well with WordPress and will display with your theme. It has the ability for permalinks. Users can submit their own links. You can create whatever categories you wish and all links will go into a moderation queue. The only thing that is missing is a way to accept payment for link inclusion; a feature I suspect is not far off. This plugin is perfect for including a link directory in your site quickly and easily.

Open Directory Links

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WPG2

There is a standalone photo gallery management system called Gallery 2 that is a free and open source way to create a photo gallery on your website. It’s very powerful and is actually used by some huge websites. Since it’s free, you can use it on your own website. WPG2 is a plugin that integrates Gallery 2 into your WordPress Blog.

It’s not an easy process, but it’s worth it. First, you’ll have to install Gallery 2 on your webserver and get it up and running on it’s own. Then you’ll have to set it up, setup some required modules and get the house in order for WPG2. Once everything is good, you’ll need to install WPG2 as a plugin, which has it’s own laundry list of requirements. When is all said and done, you’ll have an advanced photo gallery on your website that will be integrated perfectly with your WordPress website (and with your theme).

Download WPG2

As you can see, these plugins can add a lot of functiality your existing blog. Hopefully you will give some of them a shot and see how they work for you.

Do You Have a Favorite Advanced Plugin?

While blogging is intrinsically a very search-engine friendly medium due to its inherently dynamic nature (search engine crawlers love to feed on fresh, original content) and is further aided in this regard by comments and pingbacks to your article by readers and other sites, there are some things you can do to improve and optimize how you structure your posts to get the maximum impact with the search engines.  These are not dirty tricks, but rather best practices that will help ensure when someone does a search for something having to do with the subject you are writing about, they have a better chance at finding your hard-wrought post and not some lazy Splog.

Can You See The Target

Preparing for this requires identifying exactly what is the subject of your article and from that determining what key words, or Keywords, as they are better known, underline that subject.

Once you have identified your main and several ancillary keywords, look for the following areas within which to implement them (and as often as possible without letting it deteriorate the quality of your content).

Four Key Elements For Optimizing Your Content For Searches

The first and most important element is the Title of your article.  This is simply accomplished by incorporating your principal keywords into the title itself.

The next place to include your targeted keyword(s) is in the URL for your article.  Go to your Admin Section->Settings->Permalinks and make sure you have selected Custom Structure and input %postname% in the text field.  This is something that should be set from day one of your blog.  This will allow you to customize the URL for every individual post you publish.  At the top of of your post editing page, just below the title field, you should see:

“Permalink: http://yourblog.com/the-title-of-your-article“  and then an Edit button.  The text following your domain name should be a series of words based on your title, separated by dashes.  Make sure your keyword is among these words.

On the right side of your article entry is a section called “Tags.”  This is an obvious place to include your keywords.  You can also use a plugin like WP Auto-Tagger or Tag Suggest Thing , both which compare strong keywords at Yahoo and other search engines to tags based on:

The Content of your post feldene A Bunch of Amateurs movie full – make sure you are writing and writing well about what you want people to find when they search for your topic of interest.  You might fool them once, but they won’t come back for a second helping of the old bait and switch.

As a blogger you are providing an information service for which you strive to be the best provider of content on any given topic.  Even if it is a journal about your own little corner of the small town you grew up in, you should strive to be the best writer on that topic and build a site that helps people find it.  The best writers understand the most interesting stuff has to do writing what you know in your own voice – because it is your personal and unique idiosyncrasies that make you a specialist.  When you try to write about subjects you know nothing about, then you are an also ran.

I hope these optimization tips will help lead your audience to you.

About the Author:

Keram is a new media consultant, music producer, actor and writer who opines on SEO at blogging-fool.com and society at theculturepin.com. Listen to his podcast at KeramCast.com Lethal Weapon movie download and find him on Twitter @ConstantChange.

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If You Build It – Why Will They Come?

Too often new bloggers mistakenly believe the now cliche axiom from the movie Field of Dreams based on the book Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa by W.P. Kinsella: “If you build it, he will come,” often misquoted as “If you build it, THEY will come.”  Well, they won’t.  With over a billion Google searches taking place every day and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of blogs out there, simply registering a domain and installing a WordPress Blog is hardly reason enough for the masses to come knocking at your virtual front door.  Even if you have discovered some relatively uncharted micro-niche, you have to realize that it is probably uncharted for a reason.

Planning, building and populating your little corner of the web is all important stuff, but letting people know about will take up the lion’s share of your efforts from here on out.  Fortunately, tapping into the free, powerful viral nature of the Social Web to promote your site is as easy as installing the right plugins, setting up a few social web accounts and then pinging those services whenever you post a new blog.

Sure, it’s a bit of an oversimplification to say that you can just SPAM away and people will flock to your content; Social networking is an art unto itself, and beyond the scope of this article, but implementing the technology into your site is a must.

There are several choices that stand out when searching for ways to make posting to the Social Net easier not just for you but for your readers.

Social Bookmarking Plugins for WordPress

Sociable by Joost de Valk lets you choose from ninety-nine different social bookmarking sites. You are able to determine which social networking or bookmarking sites to display via their respective logos below each post on your blog.

Socializer Zyblog Edition is similar to Sociable – it will automatically add links on your posts to popular social bookmarking sites. An enhanced version of Sociable, it features small changes to the code and adds many new bookmarking services. See which works best for you.

ShareThis is a little different in that it starts with a single button that, when click opens a drop down menu that has three separate tabs – one for social networks, one for social bookmarks and another for emailing the link to friends.  Adapted for WordPress by Alex King, ShareThis is actually a third-party standalone service.  To properly implement this into your blog, you will want to register at ShareThis

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so that you can get a custom code that reflects your site’s specifics.

The benefit of a single button/drop-down linker is that it takes up far less real estate and requires your site to make less calls to the server in order to upload all the individual logos like in the case of Socializer.  The downside is that readers may not think to click on the ShareThis button – it creates less of a “call to action” when you can immediately see the MySpace, Facebook, Digg or Reddit buttons.  ShareThis, however is used by many of the largest online magazines so you can rest assured when using it, that you are in good company.

Add to Any Share/Save/Bookmark Button

is a powerful social bookmarking plugin that features a lot of customization options.  You can decide how you want it to display on your site, whether or not you want large or small drop down menus, what icons to display up front, and what sites to feature.  An excellent alternative to ShareThis, that doesn’t require external registration, but I have had problems with some themes.  Try it out and see if it works at your site.  If it does, then this is a top choice.

Digg This O’ Mine by Phoenixheart is perhaps my favorite of the myriad options for adding a prominent “Digg This” button to the end of your posts.  Certainly do a search for Digg This in the WordPress plugins searchline to see what else is available, but don’t overlook this one.  Simple in its implementation, Digg This O’ Mine has various skinning options, lets you decide whether to open Digg in a new window and the ability to change the background color around the icon.  Tip: if you choose to implement this button on your site in tandem with Sociable, ShareThis or others, remember to remove the Digg option from the others so that you are not double dipping and potentially confusing your readers.

Tweet This

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which I mentioned in my article WordPress and Twitter Make Good Buddies, is like the Digg This O’ Mine plugin but for Twitter.  Best described by the author:

“Adds a “Tweet This Post” link to every post and page. Shortens URLs in advance through Th8.us, eating up only 19 of 140 characters.”

A recent update features similar implementation for Plurk, Yahoo Buzz, Delicious, Digg, Ping.fm, Reddit, and StumbleUpon.  To read about its extensive list of features, visit the plugin’s page at WordPress – I highly recommend giving it a once over to understand just how deep this simple to install plugin really is.

Don’t Leave Home Without It

There are many other options for making your blog not only more interactive but a part of the much greater social web.  Whatever options you choose, don’t shortchange yourself by overlooking this very powerful method for getting the word about your site out there.

About the Author:
Keram is a new media consultant, music producer, actor and writer who opines on SEO at blogging-fool.com and society at theculturepin.com

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Comments can be a great way to build a community around your blog. But they can also be a great way to build traffic and increase user participation. How do you do this? By turning your comments into do-follow comments.

What exactly does that mean?

No Follow and DoFollow

When people leave comments on a regular WordPress installation, the link they leave to their website is no-follow. That means that when the search engines crawl your website it will NOT follow those links and pass along pagerank. Basically the links are worthless from and SEO and link building perspective.

There is now a growing trend in WordPress blogs of people deactivating this feature. The reasoning behind it is that it will encourage people to leave more comments, especially from people looking to build backlinks for their own blogs. It doesn’t take many backlinks to help some sites, so a few comments left on blogs here and there can be a huge boost to a blog’s traffic.

How to Turn on DoFollow

Turning on DoFollow is simple. Simply download the DoFollow Plugin for WordPress, install and activate it. That’s it. Every time someone leaves a comment on your blog, it will now be a ‘dofollow’ link, meaning you’ll pass SEO and pagerank goodness.

If you prefer to do something more advanced, you can also install plugins that allow you to set a number of comments before someone’s comment becomes dofollow. In other words, people have to comment a few times before they get all the benefits of a dofollow link.

This works well to help combat those who leave a comment to strictly benefit their own blogs. The name of the plugin is the Lucia’s Link Love Plugin. Grab a copy of it here.

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Potential Issues With DoFollow

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The first issue that you can have with turning this feature on is that you’ll have people spam your blog with comments just for the backlinks. Most will just leave comments and try to engage with your writing. But you can never really count on people not to abuse something, so expect people to abuse it. Keep in mind, though, that you can always delete comments if people start to abuse their posting rights. You will also attract blatant bot spammers, but the trick to fighting them is to make sure you have Akismet protected and you should be fine.

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How Do Follow Can Help you

You’ll need to list your blog in directories like DoFollow Diver. This will make it easy for people to find your blog and then post if they think your blog will be relevant for their linking purposes.

It’s also a great way to search for dofollow blogs yourself. Leaving dofollow on is a courtesy and should not be abused. So feel free to post on other blogs, but don’t just push your products or website, actually contribute to the conversation taking place. Hopefully readers of your blog will do the same and you won’t spend all of your time deleting comments.

Posting on other blogs and allowing them to post on your isn’t about blatant advertising. It’s about anchor text and backlinks. Keep this in mind when dealing with spam comments and when you leave comments on other blogs.

With luck, you’ll see an increase in traffic and participation in your blog do to activating this little known feature.

To Tell or Not to Tell

Should you announce on your blog that it’s a dofollow blog? It’s entirely up to you. As long as the dofollow directories know, you don’t really need to publicize it. But your readers and link builders may appreciate the full disclosure and it will make it easier for them to find your blog. Again, letting people know out of the gate will open your blog up to abuse. It’s up to you to control that abuse.

Do You Have DoFollow Tuned On?

Too Much Stuff

For the average blogger, speeding up a typically sluggish WordPress site can seem one of the black arts. Tinkering around with your php code, optimizing CSS, re-organizing the hierarchy of your Javascript and Ajax files will likely feel like far more than you bargained for when you decided you wanted to get into publishing your ideas online.

There is a reason for thinking about speed however; the inconvenient truth about the web is that you have roughly between three to eight seconds to grab a new reader and keep them reading before they bounce off your page to somewhere else. If in that time your site is too busy loading up all sorts of flare, making too many calls back to the server and even just trying to figure out what its own messy code wants it to do – you are going to lose not just one reader but possibly hundreds.

I have discussed the basic arsenal for optimizing a site – using caching tools to transform your dynamic pages into static HTML files is one of the best ways to get started. The WP-Super Cache is one of the best at this, and the even more aggressive Hyper Cache can do the job as well. Additionally WP Widget Cache should go alongside your site caching plugins so that you can optimize those busy sidebars.

Spring Cleaning For Your WP Site

Remember when you first walked into your new WordPress home? You were so excited to furnish it with all the coolest new toys and sexy furniture so you went to the WordPress Plugin directory and found all sorts of great ideas for decorating the place? How many of those are you actually still using? Did any lead you to change your mind and deactivate them? Do you still really need that fancy AJAX sliding door thingy that displays every one of your Social Web accounts? How many different Twitter Widgets do you have to display to really feel you got the point across that you would like more followers?

Deactivate them. And then delete them. There is a theory that even deactivated plugins cause wordpress to scan over them to do a check for their activation state while loading up your page so you could be wasting precious milliseconds on an unnecessary process. Deleting the plugins won’t make your page speed up per se, but it will save you some space. You can always install them again later. If you don’t remember to, then you probably didn’t need them anyway.

Is your blog’s header an image? Is it an image with you blog’s title and byline laid over top by your theme? Consider making your blog header a static image or an image map if you need to define clickable hotspots on it, rather than having your blog have to pull the title and byline and display it. The static header with the text already built into it is straight ahead optimization.

Is All That Flare Really Making You Money?

If you run a site about high-priced ticket items like HDTV’s, DSLR cameras or yachts, then chances are those animated, rotating  flash ads that pull from a daily or weekly list of top sellers are a good idea. But if you are running a music or knitting site and selling yarn or mp3’s then those ads are likely making you pennies a month at best and at worst just a drain on your site’s load time. Consider removing them or using a static banner ad that can be cached. I found these to be one of the biggest culprits for my own sites’ load times.

Obsessive Time Sculpting

If you feel like getting under the hood and getting your hands a little dirty, going into your theme editor can reward you with some nice speed optimizations. Programmer extraordinaire Joost de Valk offers the following tips at his site for getting into the code itself.

As Joost explains:

“Because themes have to be easy to spread, they have to get almost all the blog specific info from the database. That results in a lot of queries for stuff that you could just hard-code into the theme.”

Go to your WP admin panel ->Appearance->Editor->header.php and look for the following code at the top:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" <?php language_attributes(); ?>>
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="
<?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?>;
charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />

You could replace it with the simpler:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr">
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />”

Similarly in WP admin panel ->Appearance->Editor->footer.php look for

<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>

and replace it with your Site Name

Look for:

<a href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>">

And replace it with your RSS2 feed. For example if you use Feedburner and your RSS2 feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/MyAwesomeWPBlogDude, you would put:

<a href=" http://feeds.feedburner.com/MyAwesomeWPBlogDude">

The same can be done for your Comments feed.

Note: you may want to actually copy and paste the RSS and Comments RSS feeds from your site before you do this since that is the easiest way to know what your feeds actually are.

Cleaning That Code, Compressing CSS: indocin

I have also seen people suggest the CSS Compress plugin that “automatically removes comments, new lines, tabs, and gzip compresses (GZIP) any CSS file called with “<?php bloginfo(‘stylesheet_url’); ?>” – but use it with great caution. While it may help shave off some milliseconds from a rather simple theme like Kubrick, I have seen it wreak havoc on more complex themes.  It isn’t the fault of the click-and-go plugin, but the fact that sometimes one-stop solutions aren’t the same as one-size-fits-all solutions.

Which leads me to a very important point: make sure you have a database backup plugin installed – I recommend Lester Chan’s DBManager:

Not only can you backup your database in the event of a misstep, but after you have cleaned out your WP closets, as it were, you’ll want to bust out the vacuum. Click that DB Optimize button to get things sparkling again.

Speed Tests

If you want to check up on how your site is doing, consider installing Firebug for Firefox and then the YSlow plugin (Yslow needs Firebug to run).  Then when you visit your site, click the YSlow button at the bottom of your browser and check the site’s performance. You will get a report showing you where things can be improved.  If you aren’t using Firefox, you can also visit Pingdom

‘s site to check your blog’s loading time and get a detailed report about how it loads.

Thanks to WordPressGarage.com for sourcing the above.

Sitting Back

Optimizing your WordPress site is a very important but also delicate job.  Make sure to research the effects of any plugin beforehand and to backup regularly.  The list of optimizations in this article is by no means comprehensive or even right fo everyone, but I hope it serves as a fair introduction to making your site really shine.

Please share your own thoughts, tips and experiences with get your WordPress site clean and zippy.  I would love to learn about other techniques people have found useful.

About the Author:
Keram is a new media consultant, music producer, actor and writer who opines on SEO at blogging-fool.com and society at theculturepin.com. Listen to his podcast at KeramCast.com and find him on Twitter @ConstantChange.

Google Adsense is the quickest and easiest way to monetize your blog. If you’re new to WordPress and not comfortable editing your themes, then you’ll need some useful plugins to help you insert your Adsense codes into your blog. Some of these plugins have similar features, but I wanted to create a rundown to help you make the best choice for your needs.

It’s best to play with many Adsense solutions and find the one that works best for your needs. There is no one size fits all solution for integrating Google Ads into your blog, other than manually editing template files.

Here is a breakdown of the best WordPress plugins for Google Adsense:

Adsense Manager Quicksand release

Adsense Manager is a very robust Google Adsense Plugin for WordPress. It generates the ad code and allows you to control the look and feel of your ads automatically. It lets you place your ads all over your blog using widgets. It also works with several other ad networks. It has a bit of a learning curve, but it’s a great tool.

Download Adsense Manager Here

Adsense Under Image

This Google Adsense tool does one thing and one thing will, it will automatically insert an ad block under the first image in a post.

Download Adsense Under Image Here

WP Simple Adsense Insertion

This is a simpler plugin that automates insertion of Google Adsense block by using text triggers that call the ads. That way you don’t have to keep cutting and pasting the same ad code into new posts. The major perk of this plugin is that you can control when you want an ad to appear instead of just throwing ads on every post.

Download WP Simple Adsense Insertion

Easy Adsenser

Easy Adsenser is my favorite Google Adsense Plugin for WordPress. Once you set it up, it will automatically insert your ads into your posts. But the best feature, by far, is the ability to automatically insert an ad block into the middle of your larger posts. The middle of the post is a great converting ad slot, and this plugin inserts the ads automatically if the blog post is long enough (a setting you can control as well). One quick tip, though, be sure to clear out all the default Adsense ad codes that are in the plugin right after you install it, that way you don’t accidentally give another AdSense account revenue.

Download Easy Adsenser

AdSense Integrator

This is another robust Adsense Manger for WordPress. It has many features that are useful to monetizing your blog. It can also be used on more ad networks other than Adsense. It’s a little more complicated than Adsense Manager, but it gets the job done.

Download AdSense Integrator

What’s your Favorite Google Adsense WordPress Plugin?Christmas in South Park movie download

One of the more interesting alternative to Google’s Adsense or Linkshare’s banner ads is ContentLink – a JavaScript-based solution from company Kontera that offers a contextual in-text advertising system capable of scanning your site’s text and displaying carefully selected hyperlinks to affiliate advertisers after the site has already been published.

Until recently the only way to implement Kontera’s ContentLink was to generate the code at the company’s site and then paste it into your theme’s code.  Although the Kontera system puts no strain on your server or load time by running as Javascript, it had a tendency to include all text on your page, including site name, footers, comments and sidebars!  It also had a way of claiming too much space, that is – adding too many of its trademark double-underlined links – something that could only be restricted by requesting a limit to the amount of links with the company itself.

A plugin called Kontera Ad Wrap for WordPress emerged that aimed to fix this by adding “ad zone” div tag as follows:

<div class="KonaBody">
...Content we want ad links appear here...
</div>

It worked, to an extent, but because it was a set-it-and-forget-it solution, didn’t offer much in the way of control.

But all that is behind us now as Kontera itself, certainly due to the overwhelming success and ubiquity of the WordPress platform, has released an official Kontera plugin for WordPress 2.7

• watch transsiberian in divx

and upward.

I tested it out and am thrilled with their solution!  The plugin’s admin panel simply requires that you enter your Kontera ID, select the color you would like for you affiliate links and presto you are ready for showtime.

But the real value of the plugin comes in its extended options that allow you define which categories, static pages and tags to exclude from displaying ads, whether or not the links should appear on posts and even how long it should wait before displaying ads on new posts.

You can even choose to have the links display only on comments (perhaps because you want to keep the links in your posts front and center, and to avoid any confusion or frustration on the part of your reader who trusts those links to be pointing at legitimate resources related to the content itself).

Finally, the plugin allows you to easily toggle the Kontera option on and off right from your WP admin panel, rather than having to go into your code and chop it out.

Kontera is an excellent alternative revenue stream that really works.  John Chow gives it his big thumbs up as do hundreds of other publishers.  Because of its negligible load on your site and the efficiency of its very advanced patent-pending technology for finding the most contextually relevant ads, I strongly urge you to check it out.  Now with the company’s new official plugin designed explicitly for WordPress – there is no reason to wait.

Direct Download to Kontera-Wordpress Plugin for WP 2.7

About the Author:
Keram is a new media consultant, music producer, actor and writer who opines on SEO at blogging-fool.com

WordPress is great in that you can install and run a successful blog right out of the box. You don’t need to add a lot of extra plugins to make it work (unlike Drupal). However, WordPress has a very active developer community and there are many WordPress Plugins out there that will make your life a lot easier. So much easier, that you should install them from day one, so you don’t have to wait until you have a problem that needs to be solved.

Without further ado, here are the 10 WordPress plugins you should install on day one:

All In One SEO Pack

Many bloggers don’t realize how important Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is to the success of their blog. This plugin makes a little of the SEO easier by allowing you create site wide meta content as well as meta content for individual posts. It’s very necessary and very easy to use.

Download the All in One SEO Pack Hard Rain movies

Database Backup

WordPress stores your blog content in a database. Databases can get corrupted, deleted or crash. So you don’t lose all of your blog content, you need to have a backup plan for your database. This plugin simplifies it greatly. Once you activate it, just set it up and it will automatically back up your database on a schedule you choose. I have my database backed up weekly and e-mailed to me. That way there is a backup in multiple locations (locally on the computer, Gmail’s servers, Webmail, etc)

Download WordPress Database Backup

Google Sitemap Generator

This is another key search engine optimization tool. An XML sitemap tells search engine bots what to look at on your site and how the architecture is laid out. If you don’t have one, search engines may ignore all your wonderful content. This simple plugin, once activated, will automatically keep generating a new XML sitemap when you write new content. In turn, the search engine bots will be notified of changes. Very powerful tool. It’s not uncommon for new blog posts on many of my blogs to be indexed within minutes by the search engines and appear in search results all over the world.

Download WordPress XML Sitemap Generator

One Click Plugin Updater

Once you start collecting your range of plugins, it becomes a pain to keep them up to date as you need to deactivate the plugin, upload new version and re-activate. This plugin automates the whole process and allows you to update all of your plugins at one time, automatically.

Download One Click Plugin Updater

Sociable Zyblog Edition

Taking advantage of social media will be a huge part of your blog’s traffic once you get established. It’s important to make it as easy as possible for people to share your content on their favorite social networks. This plugin puts a widget at the bottom of all your posts for the most popular social networks. You can also customize which ones you want to appear.

Download Sociable Zyblog Edition

Statpress

Most bloggers rely on Google Analytics to keep track of your content, but it doesn’t track everything. Some people have the scripts blocked that GA uses to record data, so sometimes traffic stats are slightly off. Also, GA won’t tell you if you’re continually getting pinged by spambots. Statpress shows you everything, including the IP’s of anyone that may be abusing your bandwidth. It also provides, let’s say, better sounding numbers for your blog because it catches so much more. Those better numbers will become useful when it comes time to sell advertising space.

Download Statpress

WordPress Related Posts Plugin

When you have a lot of content on your blog, it’s important for people to be able to find it. This little plugin will add a related posts widget at the bottom of all your posts and recommend other posts that readers may enjoy reading. It’s pretty dead on with it’s recommendations and if it can’t find anything to recommend, it just shows random posts.

Download WordPress Related Posts Plugin

WP Super Cache Plugin

When you are starting out, you don’t really need to worry about hugh traffic surges, but it’s good to have the tools in place in case something makes it the front page of Digg or another popular social networking site. This plugin creates static pages of your most trafficked pages so that if you get a surge of traffic, you don’t have millions of requests pounding your server, using your bandwidth and possibly taking down your server.

Download WP Super Cache Plugin

Google Analytics

The easiest way to install Google Analytics on your WordPress blog is to install this simple plugin. All you have to do is give it the GA code and it will install the code on all of your WordPress pages. Couldn’t be easier than this.

Download WordPress Google Analytics Plugin

Automatic Upgrade Plugin

In addition to keeping up to date with your plugins, you need to also keep your WordPress installation up to date. Each WordPress upgrade brings new features, increased security, stability and much more. This tool automatically guides you through the process of upgrading your blog. A process that can be rather difficult to do manually.

Download the WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin

What WordPress Plugins would you recommend people install first?