I decided to make a post on WordPress blogs, this is especially made for those starting their first WP blog & don’t know from where to start, but I hope it’ll be helpful for others too, I will focus on SEO (Search Engines Optimization) plugins + some additions and tips, if you have any addition or remark, that would be very nice from you to let me know.
First & before looking to plugins, you need to know that it’s very important in order make your WP blog SEO friendly, to change the default (or ugly) permalink structure based on posts IDs, instead of that it’s very recommended to use your posts titles in URLs. To do that, go from your WP blog dashboard to Options tab then Permalinks tab.
Full info about permalinks on WordPress.org (A must read).
to install most of WordPress plugins, you need first to download the plugin in a .zip format, then to unzip the file & to upload its content to your blog /wp-content/plugins/ directory, depending on the plugin, you may have to upload one or more files and / or directories.
The next step usually is to activate the plugin, for that, you need to go from your adminstration panel to Plugins tab, to find the name of your new plugin & click on it for activation.
More or less complicated steps might be required depending on the plugin you install.
This is the first SEO plugin you need to install, Google Sitemap is a XML file that lists your blog or site pages & set indexation priority for each, the file is used by the 3 major search engines (Google, Yahoo! & MSN) while indexing websites.
Google Sitemap Generator automatically & in real time creates & updates the Sitemap, so that you’re never bothered again by updating it manually. Here are the plugin features listed by the author:
Get the plugin from ArneBrachhold.de
Don’t forget to submit your sitemap to Google via your Webmasters Tools Account. If you don’t have an account, create it & follow instructions to let Google verify that you are the owner of your site.
In addition you should have a robots.txt file to tell search engines which pages & folders should be indexed & which not (administration folders for instance), you can generate robots.txt using an online tool from MCAnerin.com (Also an introduction to robots.txt and a guide about it there).
Then before uploading the file to your root, add this line to it:
Sitemap: http://videotutorialspot.info/sitemap.xml
Replace http://videotutorialspot.info/ with your site URL of course.
One more addition concerning Yahoo! search engine, create a urllist.txt file, it’s a simpler file than robots.xml because it only lists your site URLs one under each other, you can make it using GSiteCrawler, a software that makes all kinds of Sitemaps, get it from GSiteCrawler.com, see VTS urllist.txt file as an example.
Once created & uploaded to your root, submit it to Yahoo! HERE. (there’s a compressed version of the file too “urllist.txt.gz“, also upload it & submit it).
This plugin does the following:
This plugin though is not used on VTS, you may need it especially to add custom Meta Descriptions to posts.
More info about the plugin, download, help & support on WP.UberDose.com.
SEO Title Tag plugin, has the most important feature of All in One SEO Pack: adding individual SEO friendly Title Tags to all your posts & pages & is very easy to use & to customize.
Title tags are the titles that appear in the top bar of the browser & are important for SEO because they are used by search engines to index your website and shown in the search results.
Get SEO Title Tag plugin from NetConcepts.com.
This plugin will output a series of related entries to each of your posts, based on keyword matching, this is a great way to cross relevant links within your site, it’s SEO friendly & will help to share the PR between all your pages, & also your visitors will love it.
For instalation, and after uplaoding & activating the plugin, you will notice a Related Posts Options tab under your Plugins tab. Click the link for index table setup script at the bottom of the options page.
I will suppose the previous steps went fine, now look for this file: single.php in the directory of the theme you’re using for your blog (under /wp-content/themes/ directory), open single.php file using notpad and look for this line:
<?php the_content(); ?>
Add related_posts(); to it, so that it looks like this:
<?php the_content(); related_posts(); ?>
Save and upload the file.
Advanced instructions & download on Wasabi.PBWiki.com
When you create or edit a post you can assign one or more categories (and even sub-categories) to it, with SEO Siloing plugin you can create static pages containing lists of posts under specific categories.
Example: If you have some posts under a category named Adobe Photoshop, and after installing SEO Siloing, create a static page, give it a descriptive title, example Adobe Photoshop Video Tutorials, then you’ll have to add a code to the page & to publish it, and the pluging will auto-add the list of all your posts under Adobe Photoshop category into that page.
Such pages may be very useful for your readers & also are search engines friendly.
Download & all information on requirements & installation on MEMWG.com
This plugin allows you to create a HTML sitemap for you blog, it’s a very powerful plugin & very customizable.
Some of its features include: support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more.
Download the plugin from DagonDesign.com.
As an example, checkout Video Tutorials Spot Sitemap
A must for any WP blog, but not required if you have WordPress 2.2 or higher (included in main instalation).
As its name stats, Sidebar Widgets plugin allows you to add various widgets to the sidebar(s) by default you can add a lot, including up to 9 text widgets allowed in which you can type whatever you want, such as HTML or Javascript codes. There are many plugins available to add many other kinds of widgets.
Some of users & SEO friendly widgets are:
Get the plugin from HERE.
This is not really a SEO plugin, but very useful especially if your posts are heavy & containing graphics etc.
Post Teaser will generate a preview or “teaser” of a post for the main, archive and category pages. Users then can click on post title or on a link under it generated by the plugin to see the full post.
This will help to save your bandwidth, to make your blog load faster & allow you to put more posts on each page as they’ll be smaller.
Get the plugin & more information about it from Dev.WP-Plugins.org.
End of article … well, in fact SEO efforts are endless, so I guess I have a lot to add to it, anyways, I hope this information was helpful, again please let me know if you have any addition or remark, thank you! ![]()
Annilatan Evol I.
Great list! I use the SEO WordPress Plugin as well as the google sitemap generator.
Thanks again!
This is my first post
just saying HI
Hi all!
Very interesting information! Thanks!
Bye
emm.. just wanna say thank you
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
Don’t agree with what?
I would like to see a continuation of the topic
very interesting.
i’m adding in RSS Reader
Nice post, very interesting.
Thanks for a useful post. Despite the fact that this was posted more than 2 years ago, I picked up a couple of useful tips, particularly regarding esoteric stuff like robots.txt and urllist.txt files. Pity you haven’t done more stuff regarding WordPress!