Optimize Your Web

People have made wordpress plug ins for everything, but there are certain ones that every blog needs. The following plug ins are compatible with WordPress 2.6.1:

Askimet – http://akismet.com/ and use your Wordpress API key http://wordpress.com/api-keys/
aLinks – http://alinks.headzoo.com/ – Automatically links keywords
All in One SEO Pack – http://semperfiwebdesign.com/ – Add SEO techniques to your blog. Change your settings once, get the benefit each time.
cforms – http://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin
Google XML Sitemaps – http://www.arnebrachhold.de/redir/sitemap-home/
Sociable – http://yoast.com/wordpress/sociable/
SRG Clean Archives – http://www.idunzo.com/projects/clean-archives/
**Replace Smart Archives on nickswitzer.net

Subscribe to Comments – http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/
WWW Redirect – http://www.justinshattuck.com/wordpress-www-redirect-plugin/
WP-Cumulus – http://www.roytanck.com/2008/03/15/wp-cumulus-released
or Another Tag Cloud Program

Optional Plugins
FlickrRSS – http://eightface.com/wordpress/flickrrss/
Exec-PHP – http://bluesome.net/post/2005/08/18/50/
LinkXL – http://www.linkxl.com/wp_plugin/ – for TLA

This is just a quick little list, if you have any questions or want some advice, please contact me.

For those that are constantly reviewing site visitors with Google Analytics (or any web site analyzer), there are a few things you should realize about their measurements.

Avg. Time on Site.
-This is calculated when they first request a page, and then when they request another.  This is not a true indication of the time.  Say if a person wants to read one of your posts (say a really lengthy and informative post, and it fulfills their needs) it doesn’t say actually how long they sat there and read it.  So it counts it as 0 time on your site if they do not click something else on your site.

Bounce Rate:
Many people don’t go to a website to find specific information and while they’re using that information for their intended purpose, do they continue to search your site unless either A) they’re returning to find out what else you wrote or B) complete finished whatever task they needed to accomplish at your site, and was curious about more.

So in conclusion, these are not great indicators of how your site helps people unless you have 20 articles written about similar subjects.  Because there is not a way for them to see (unless the person clicks something after reading the article, which many don’t).  If anyone has a good alternative or way to determine these and other measurements better, please feel free to share with all of us.

One main reason that you should require authorization for every comment and trackback/pingback for your blog is this:  If you don’t, spam will get through and that will negatively rank your blog/website.  It even has the possibility to show up your search results on search engines.  I have seen this first hand, and it makes your site look very unprofessional and very spammish.  I would take the extra 2 minutes and look through your comments and approve or mark as spam.  This is minimal effort with great benefits and should be undertaken by any serious blogger or website administrator.  Setup your options so it notifies you of any comment awaiting authorization and keep your blog looking great and appearing professional.

Trying to get the most out of your blog?  Want to inform a lot of XML-RPC site update services of your latest posts?  Well you need to enable a few things in your WordPress wp-admin and then use a long list of sites that have been compiled for your convenience.  But first, you need to have the following updated in your Settings.  Go into Settings -> Writing and look for the following:

To post to WordPress from a desktop blogging client or remote website that uses the Atom Publishing Protocol or one of the XML-RPC publishing interfaces you must enable them below.

Remote Publishing

To post to WordPress from a desktop blogging client or remote website that uses the Atom Publishing Protocol or one of the XML-RPC publishing interfaces you must enable them below.

Then you need to add the list of update sites for XML-RPC to this part further below in the same section.

Update Services

When you publish a new post, WordPress automatically notifies the following site update services. For more about this, see Update Services on the Codex. Separate multiple service URLs with line breaks.

Here is the list:

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Here is a table that I found recently about Google’s Page Ranking based on incoming links. I am not sure how accurate it is since Google keeps changing their algorithm, but it is a very interesting thing to note about how many links should be incoming in order to get a certain page rank. This doesn’t seem to factor in content or other things that are (or should be) heavily weighed in Google’s algorithm, but again it’s just very interesting.

Needing to get your website indexed? Well below is a list of the top search engines and their corresponding urls to get your site submitted. While all of these allow you to manually ask to be indexed, the exact time of your index is not certain and it is also not certain whether manually adding your website will have it crawled faster. But it cannot hurt right? (continue reading…)

The first thing to do is to have a site. You can either go to one of the top blogging spots and get a site off of their domain, or what I would recommend, buy a domain. If you plan on either blogging for fun (family, etc.) or for business, a unique domain name is the way to go. Take a look at a few sites which you may want to take a look at which also offer hosting of the site also: (in no particular order) (continue reading…)