Intense Business

WordPress is one, if not the biggest open source  blogging platforms on the net and one of the best options with WordPress is just how customizable it is. From themes to plugins, you could spend days playing with WordPress and adding new ‘toys’ to help improve your sites looks or functionality. I have been blogging for years and compiled a quick list of my top ten favorite plugins that are a must have with any new WordPress blog site.

1. Akismet
   If you have not used this plugin yet, you have no idea what you’re missing out on. WordPress even includes it with every version of their blog software! In case you’re unfamiliar with Akismet, this is one of the best spam prevention plugins available for WordPress. Once you activate Akismet, you can see the stats of this plugin right on your dashboard under the “Right Now” table. It will show you just how many comments have been blocked (i.e. “Akismet has protected your site from 9,929 spam comments already.”)
2. All In One SEO Pack
   All In One SEO Pack is one of the most beneficial SEO (search engine optimization) plugins and is very, very easy to setup. From advanced canonical urls to automatically optimizing your page titles, AIO SEO is extremely powerful.
3. Google XML Sitemaps
   In addition to the two plugins listed above, I always install Google XML Sitemaps right off the bat. In short, this creates an XML file with links to each of your pages which allows Google to index and search your site easier. If you use Google Webmaster Tools, you will find that you can submit your XML here and make sure Google is not crawling any broken pages or incorrect redirects.
4. WP Super Cache
   If you run a blog with a lot of traffic, you will learn to love the WP Super Cache plugin, as will your server. This plugin will create static HTML files from your pages and posts so that your server is not making cpu intensive PHP calls every time a new person views your website.
5. HeadSpace2 SEO
   If you’re not a fan of the All in One SEO pack, check out HeadSpace2. This plugin allows you to control meta-data for almost every page/post on your site which can be useful to further optimize your blog. You can also auto generate keywords and tags, add a frame breaker code to get rid of that *pesky* Google image traffic, and a ton more.
6. WP-DBManager
   By the name of it, you may not have a clue what this is but I suggest EVERYONE to use this database plugin. This plugin is probably one of the most useful ever, and reminds me of insurance. Yes, insurance! Why? Well let me explain how WP-DBManager works. Not only can you use this plugin to optimize and repair your SQL database for WordPress, you can schedule it to automatically backup your database and have it emailed to you! No matter if your host offers backups or not, I’d install this plugin.
7. WordPress Related Posts
   One of the best factors that come into play when SEO’ing your site is internal linking and keeping visitors within your site. WordPress Related Posts will add a few related articles to the bottom of each of your posts, allowing visitors to stay on your site and read additional relevant posts.
8. WP PageNavi
   If you have a lot of posts on your blog, WP Page Navi allows you to click next, or choose a specific page number instead of clicking previous/older posts to navigate through your content. You can customize this plugin to fit right in with your site and design with a little CSS editing.
9. SEO Smart Links
   As I mentioned above with #7 plugin – WordPress Related Posts, interlinking is one of the best ways to SEO on site and SEO Smart Links will help with that in addition to the Related Posts plugin. This plugin will help interlink your articles by keywords throughout your site.
10. WPAds
    If you run a blog with any kind of advertising, a nice and simple ad plugin is WPAds. Although I wish it had more tracking options and a little easier setup, it’s a great way to quickly implement multiple rotating ad sections within your site.

As I mentioned, there are thousands upon thousands of plugins you can use with WordPress but these are my top 10 that I use on every blog I create.

If you have any favorite plugins or any that you use every time you setup a new blog, feel free to post a comment below! I’m always looking for new ‘tools’ to improve my sites.

Google has been in talks about a plethora of updates and changes coming in 2011 such as the named “Panda” update and we’ve already noticed quite a few that will forever change the way search results are displayed.

Some of these changes and/or updates may have a huge impact on SEO. From my personal research, I’ve seen a lot of people who were not too happy with the new algorithm and what has happened to their sites, but there were some whom were very happy with the changes and bump in traffic. I am no expert in SEO nor Google, but I will go through a quick recap of the major changes and how you will be affected by the “new” Google here.

Panda is Here

First off, “Panda” has been one of the major updates, first rolled out in the United States, then across the seas into other countries. If you’ve been keeping up on the constant changes, many SEO’ers have named the newer Google updates as Panda 2.1 and 2.2, which seem to be rolling out fairly quickly. Panda was rolled out with changes specific to “scraper” sites. Scraper sites are essentially spam sites that get most, if not all of their content from other sites in hopes of generating ad revenue (Adsense) or manipulating search engine results. These sites are cranked out one after another with no attention to quality, only quantity.

Social Media

Another huge change in Google was the addition of social media. Social media is everywhere now and there is no stopping it. The overall power of social media is unbelievable. Think about it – a few years ago when MySpace was in its prime (R.I.P.), it was constantly on the news, everyone and their mothers spoke about it and us SEO’ers sat back and watched as the new social media platform climbed the Alexa ranks and started grabbing up serp listings left and right. Now, with the addition of sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and many others, most of the content that you find will be linked to and/or from these social media sites. Major news networks, celebrities, and even the President are on Twitter.  All in all, Google has taken this in and decided to create a new algorithm that will be ran more by social media and user input over scraper sites and useless content.

+1 Rating System

You may even notice the “+1″ next to many search listings now. This is your way of telling Google which sites you enjoy and are relevant. I have a feeling this may be almost useless though. If you find what you’re looking for, you’re not going to go back to the search listings and click “+1″, you’re just going to move on and continue on with your day. I almost feel a “-1″ would be more beneficial. If you find a site that has nothing to do with your search results (Which happens quite often!), you click back and now you’re back at the search listings – furthermore allowing you to “-1″ that site. If you take advantage of Google’s Webmaster Tools, you will also notice the +1 impact on your site(s) here now as it officially live. It reminds me of user reviews for restaurants. You don’t have many happy or satisfied customers leaving reviews, stating how much they loved the restaurant, but yet you find a ton of reviews from unhappy customers. You may also notice some of the additional graphical user interface changes within Google as well. They’ve recently changed the top navigation bar, and changed up the side bar navigation menu a bit.

Edit: Well, there is no “-1″ option per se, but I just found that once you click on a result, click back, it gives you the option to “Block all www.—-.com results” below the green link – above the description of the site.

I also came across an interesting scrolling text box towards the top of the listings a few days ago listing all of the newest updates of whatever I had happened to be searching for and noticed it was all links from social media sites which was updating very fast. I cannot find that again for the life of me and almost thinking it was a temporary test on their part. I will update when I find out more about this feature.

Google+

If you haven’t heard yet, Google is planning on rolling out its own social media network, again. This time they’re calling it Google+ and you may start seeing it in your search engine results as shown above. What you see in the screen shot above is the author of the site SearchEngineLand.com, Danny Sullivan featured next to his site within the serps. When clicking on Danny’s avatar photo, you end up at his profile on Google+ which you can view by clicking here. With the tremendous response to Google+, they’ve temporarily disabled the invites stating “We’ve temporarily exceeded our capacity. Please try again soon.” If you want an invite for Google+, visit Plus.Google.com and you can join a mailing list and wait patiently for an invite or find someone who has invites which is the way Google usually does things.

More Updates to Come

Between the scraper sites and social media, that is not all Google is dishing out this year and I have a gut feeling there is a lot more up their sleeve than many of us think. They’re still focusing on your basics such as; time spent on your site or page, bounce rate, CTR from the serps, as well as your diversity and quality of inbound links. Let’s not forget that internal linking is yet another factor that the big G seems to enjoy in the new updates as well. I wouldn’t suggest against focusing on building your internal and inbound links, but add social media to your list if you haven’t already and if you have, branch out to additional social media sites, do not limit yourself to Facebook and Twitter.

Any thoughts or comments would be greatly appreciated, so be sure to leave some comments below and let me know what you think!