Thoughts from the Shelf

There are a number of plugins available for Wordpress blogs with more continually being developed to help bloggers get exactly what they want out of their blog. Lately I have been experimenting with popular plugins and am interested in getting any feedback from others who may have stumbled upon useful add-ons themselves.

When it comes to blogging with Wordpress, perhaps the most important issue for serious bloggers is the SEO of your blog, and subsiquently there are a range of plugins that can help. For those who may not be aware, the default install of Wordpress includes no robots information. This essentially means as well as the desired post pages, your blog achieve (as well as other things) can be indexed effectively duplicating the content of each post.

As well as this, and something I was not overly clear on at first, is that without any robots exclusion rules each post can also be duplicated with within each category that the post is tagged too. For example a post about a new IPod could correctly be tagged under the relevant categories Music, Technology and the Internet, but this provides three duplicate pages of identical content, one within each category as well as the original post page.

Such duplicate content issues are exactly why SEO should be the first port of call for anybody who eventually wishes to monetise their blog, or desires optimal search performance. To combat these issues I used a selection of plugins as well as some of my own graft.

Initially I put my own robots.txt file in place to combat the indexing of both archives and category listings. I have now altered it to be specific to Google and use a range of page specific meta robot tags through the All in One SEO plugin mentioned later. There is also the KB robots.txt plugin available for robots control but has limitation depending upon the directory your blog in placed in.

One of the preinstalled options I altered was the permalink URL structure that is in place by default. I changed these from dynamic URLs to a format that is easier to hack, yet more optimal for search. Another good SEO plugins I used was the SEO title tag that optimises the title of blog posts. In addition to having this I also used the head meta description plugin that dynamically generates a unique meta description for each page of your blog. This replaces the one single meta tag that is used as default across an entire Wordpress blog upon installation.

These plugins are all great at doing there individual jobs, but if you would prefer one plugin to do all of this through one manageable interface then the All in One SEO pack is the plugin for you.

Social bookmarking tools also account for a range of different plugins available for Wordpress blogs. In the past I have, and still use the Chicklet Creator plugin that allows the blogger to easily choose which social bookmarking sights they wish to make easily accessible on their blog. With a nice admin interface, the selected bookmarking sites are then displayed via an icon on your blog.

I have also included Digg and Del.icio.us links on individual post pages so that the content within each post can be spread across the blogosphere.

Lastly there is a nice popularity contest plugin that I have used that helps me to keep track of which posts are most popular amongst readers. I am currently looking for a nice keyword cloud and top blog plugin if anybody can recommend one.