Category: WordPress Plug-ins
WordPress & HookPress
Mitcho created a great WordPress plugin and a video tutorial on WordPress.tv.
The great features of HookPress were well explained clearly by Mitcho, the HookPress author.
With HookPress on WordPress, you can
- create Post webhooks
- create push notification (it supports both actions...)
- create filters
The bottom line is that you can extend WordPress without PHP
Here's the video:
Mitcho is a MIT Linguistics PhD student. He has another "must-have" WordPress called "Yet Another Related Posts Plugin", also popular among WordPress users. Way to go, Mitcho!
To install HookPress, just go to "Add New" Plugins menu in your backend (Dashboard), and search for "HookPress", then you can have it automatically downloaded and installed with a couple of clicks. If your hosting server does not allow you to do that, you may go to http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/hookpress/ to download and install it.
Matt Cutts:WordPress Hero
We have been search for WordPress heroes (top WordPress users), but forgot Matt Cutts, who himself may not realize that he is one of the WordPress heroes.
Why? First of all, his speech on WordPress at the WordCamp San Francisco and the great SEO results with WordPress inspired and encouraged a lot of people (business website owners, Web developers, SEO experts )including me and many of my clients to switch to WordPress from other platforms. At that WordCamp, he confirmed my early observation was right. Matt notes “WordPress takes care of 80-90% of (the mechanics of) Search Engine Optimization (SEO).” at his slide 12 of the 50 at "SEO for Bloggers"
Second of all, his only Website is running WordPress with an Alexa ranking 4,193 (as of this writing)
.
It proves that WordPress can handle pretty heavy traffic with ease. (Alexa says 50% of sites are slower )
If you are serious about SEO with WordPress, you should watch this video over and over again:
These points should be noted
Plugins recommended by Matt Cutts:
- Akismet
- Cookies in Comments
- WP Super Cache
- Enforce www. Preference
- Feedburner Feedsmith
Avoid Backlink Obsession (BO): Sometimes fewer links are better than more. (check out slide 18)
Don't forget image search, videos, etc. ( this point encourages us to think of add some more images for our posts and create more video tutorials for Youtube or other video sites.)
Find some more tips by yourself at his page: "Matt Cutts on WordPress".
Top 10 SEO Plugins for WordPress
Although WordPress publishing platform is already pretty SEO friendly with lots of built-in features:
- auto RSS generation ( for off-page SEO)
- permanent link setup via "wp-admin/options-permalink.php"
- search engine pinging via "wp-admin/options-privacy.php" and "Update Services" at the bottom of wp-admin/options-writing.php (notifying search engine indexer via http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ )
We may use some good SEO plugins to improve our WordPress site SEO. We may just install 5 or 6 of the top 10 WordPress SEO plugins to really optimize our sites. The following is the top 10 in no particular order
- SEO Ultimate (downloaded 211,981 times , 4 of 5 stars based on 76 ratings)
- WordPress SEO by Yoast ( download 214,556 times, 4 of 5 stars based on 459 ratings) special feature: Google search result snippet previews, let your editors improve your SEO!
- Greg's High Performance SEO ( although downloaded only 90,299 times, it got almost 5 of 5 stars based on 23 ratings)Special about this plugin: it provides built-in support for titles and keywords left behind by alternative SEO and other legacy plugins such as:
- All in One SEO Pack
- Autometa
- HeadMeta
- Headspace
- Platinum SEO
- Related Posts
- SEO Title Tags
- SEO Ultimate
- wpSEO
- Platinum SEO Pack(downloaded over half a million: 535,551 times! 4 of 5 stars based on 88 ratings). The features I love: Automatic 301 redirects for any permalink changes (Platinum SEO plugin will take care of issuing a 301 redirect to the new location.This is a new essential feature, not present in All in one SEO, the author said); Lets you override any title and set any META description and META keywords, for any post or page.
- Google XML Sitemaps( We will list more top SEO plugins next our next article. Stay tuned.)
We will also create some video tutorials on WordPress SEO, the best publishing platform that can get your site to rank higher in the search results.
Google XML Sitemaps
WordPress For Dummies, 3rd Edition
recommends one of the most popular WordPress Plug-ins: Google XML Sitemaps, which has been been download 5,177,093 times as of this writing.
This must-have plug-in can build site maps for the robots of Google, Yahoo! and Bing and notify these search engine whenever you post new contents to your WordPress sites. For example, WP89.com site maps is at https://wp89.com/learn/sitemap.xml , generated with the great plugin.
You may find more details of Google XML Sitemaps at:http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/ and this video tutorial on Youtube:
Page Links To
"Page Links To" is another must-have WordPress Plugin, which we find very handy when we want to create a hand-crafted menu that links to pages, posts, categories, or anything within your site, just like the "WordPress Tips" item in the top menu of this menu. We actually use it to create a link to point to "WordPress Tips" category page.
Some people also find it useful when needing to redirect an old page (301 permanent or 302 temporary redirect to a new page or post.
The plugin was created and maintained by Mark Jaquith, and you can find it at
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/page-links-to/
SEO Ultimate
Great free WordPress plug-in to improve your site SEO.
I love its additional functions
1) Link Mask Generator
2)redirect to new URL for old URL modified
Where to get it?
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-ultimate/
Must Have WordPress Plug-in:Configure SMTP
If you have problem sending email from your WordPress for "reset password", "register (new users)" and notification, your hosting server may have turned off php mail() function. A great solution is to install WordPress plug-in named Configure SMTP and use your own SMTP server to send mail.
Read the Rest...