Super Ghost Blogger

3 Important Plugins for Your WordPress Blog
By Pat Marcello

Some applications require more oomph than your generic “text widget” for your sidebar. For example, I have a widget for GoodReads, which shows off the books I’ve had published. The code for that widget is in PHP, but a regular text widget won’t parse the information. Or what if you actually want people to be able to follow the links in comments. What can you do? Find a plugin!

Here are three must-haves:

Daiko’s Text Widget

Just about anything you want to do with your blog has a plugin, and one of the most useful I’ve found for adding code that a text widget won’t handle is called Daiko’s Text Widget. Putting in that extra oomph was never so easy. Just copy whatever code you need to include and pop it into a Daiko’s widget and you’re all set.

Do-Follow

In 2006, WordPress decided that blog commenting was a haven for spammers and that so much comment spamming was going on, they programmed an automatic “no follow” into every comment made. Their heart was in the right place, but it stopped comments. People weren’t quite so eager for discussions when they knew they’d get no SEO advantage.

Of course, some comments were still made by avid blog commenters, but the volume was severely diminished. Then, along came the “Do Follow” plugin. Download and install it and search engine spiders will follow the commenter’s URL to the destination of their choice.

So what?

Well, it gives them a one-way link to their website, which is a boost for search engine optimization. The more one-way links a site has, the better it will perform in the results pages and the higher its Google page rank will be, providing the sites the links are from are quality sites. This encourages comments and brings that Web 2.0 spirit into your blogosphere.

When commenting on other blogs, you can tell whether or not they have “DoFollow” installed if you’re using a Firefox browser. The add-on called “Search Status” will highlight all “nofollow” links in pink, making it easy to determine. I’m not saying don’t comment on blogs with “nofollow” tags, but be more aggressive with blogs that do allow spiders to follow your link back to your site.

Google SiteMaps

This plugin automatically creates a sitemap for Google spiders. They can go to your sitemap and instantly see all the pages on your site. Good for SEO? You betcha. The easier you make it for the spiders to get around, the better they like it. Those are just three of the easy plugins for your blog that will help you with SEO, encourage commenting, and make the SE spiders do the happy dance.

These are three of the great plugins you can get for your WordPress blog. I’ll give you a few more in a future article. Be sure to keep reading!

Pat Marcello is SEO of Overcome Everything, Inc. and a professional writer. Check out her current teleseminar series about blogging as it applies to business. You’ll hear tons of great information from some of the biggest names on the Web. Register for this informative and entertaining series at http://Blogging4Boomers.com

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