• Author: admin
• Date: Sep 11,2007
• In: Wordpress

Pimp your wordpress blog

In this post I will tell you how to pimp your blog with the best wordpress plugins and as for themes, I posted a top 10 in a past article, which were chosen from my point of view. I am writing this post because I have a lot of friends that don’t have the necessary knowledge, info on some problems that make the blogging experience harder. Some have problems embedding video, mp3 files into posts, other can’t add meta keywords, description and also there are some problems in adding ads from amazon and even google. Before writing about the plugins that I am using, here is a list of websites that have the necessary resources you need for making your blogger live easier:

• First of all, the plugins section from wordpress .com, which is very easy to find under “EXTEND > Plugins“ or here is a the direct link
• A nicer website with more plugins is WP-PLUGINS.NET and on the .ORG version is a plugin repository

Now here is the list I was talking to you about, the plugins that have made my life easier:

First plugin and maybe the best against spam, is the default one that comes with wordpress - Akismet – to activate this plugin you need creat an account that is free on www.wordpress.com and then get the API key that they provide you.

For advertising, adsense, the best plugin you can find is Adsense-Deluxe that you can also use with other publishers programs such as affiliate banners and links from cj.com or AuctionAds. This plugin has some important options like enabling, disabling Ads in posts or on the home page so when your reader is on the index he can’t see the ads from the posts but when he clicks on the read more he will see them. This is good because you won’t load to much your index and if you want other ads, like banners to show up, you can edit your index template and add where your post starts an if clause functions such as is_home ( more info for this you can find here). Also, problems are with Konteras script, but you don’t need any plugin for this, all you have to do is add that little piece of script into your footer and as for the Amazon affiliate program you will need this plugin funny thing is that it’s the only one out there.

The following wordpress plugins are for your search engine optimization (SEO) > this is the most important part that most bloggers skip and for this reason they are losing a lot of traffic. First of all meta keywords and description are important > for this we have wpSEO ( the ultimate meta pimping plugin for wp  ). This plugin will add to your posting panel two new fields where you can type your keywords and description and if you want to pimp your post harder you have some nice options like labeling (Convert values of XHTML tags to keywords with em and strong tags), blacklist, use only nouns or choosing default values for pages, posts, home, categories etc. Another important issue is to submit your sitemap to google, so you can be indexed for this you have a little plugin called Google Sitemaps. Now to get more into SEO you need to have, let’s say five or ten random link posts attached to your post or into your sidebar and the easiest way to add them is using the following RANDOM AND RECENT Posts plugin.

Besides all the upper plugins all wordpress blogs should display some essential media such as video (flv, avi, mpeg or embed youtube, myspace … videos), audio, podcasts you name it … For This the best plugin is CoolPlayer that allows you to add any type of media into your blog and for embedded videos from youtube or other video sharing website it won’t display their player, you have a custom one for all, that you can change to your needs, colors or even add your own watermark if you know a little Adobe FLASH ( no more macromedia ).

In conclusion I hope you find all this info helpful and I am waiting for some comments if you have better plugins than the ones I have just mentioned.
PS: if the download links don’t work for your just write me an email to cosmin@acosmin.com or post a comment and I will send your the plugins.

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