It seems like since tag clouds are getting more and more popular with Wordpress blogs everyone is getting those mixed up with their categories.

You should choose your blogs categories carefully.  Not that I am some self-proclaimed “blogging pro” (haha) but I do know a bit about site functionality and allowing your visitors an easy way to navigate your site.

I don’t know… maybe I shouldn’t jump the gun like that but don’t you agree with me?  I mean some blogs are just getting ridiculous with their category list.

Next time you have a minute you should make sure your categories aren’t getting out of hand.  I get that you don’t want to be too generic but also don’t get so fine tuned with your categories that it starts to get overwhelming.

So this turned out to be quite the random post/thought but I think this is important to keep in mind with a brand spanking new blog or a blog you have had for years.

More to come…

Top 5 Wordpress Plugins Ya’ll!

I thought it would be helpful for people to have something like this if you’re using Wordpress.

These plugins are more for SEO, functionallity and usability of your site.  Having these wordpress plugins will help with SEO efforts, spam and of course the “end user’s” experience.

Obviously the Top 5 are my opinion but I would love to hear any feedback or suggestions on other wordpress plugins that should be in the list. Maybe I can post another one that is the “Top 10 Wordpress Plugins”

Here we go… Top 5 Wordpress Plugins.

1. Ah yes, the All in One SEO Pack. Love this plugin.

Some features:

• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
• Generates META tags automatically
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs
• For Wordpress 2.3 you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.

Download the All in One SEO Pack.

2. Google XML Sitemaps – Easy 1 Click Sitemap Installation.

This is a very important wordpress plugin for any blog.  This should just be required for crying out loud!  It gives your site the ability to display a nice little road map for the search spiders to crawl through your whole site.

This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

Download the Google XML Sitemaps

3. Akismet – Life saving spam filter

Send those damn comments to the cleaners.  I’m so over all of the spam I get on a daily basis.  This spiffy little wordpress plugin checks against Akismet to see how dirty the comments really are.  If they look at all suspicous… peace out nasty comments.  Brilliant, you’ll love it.

When you install the Akismet Wordpress Plugin there is a bit more setup then adding the plugin to your (wp-content/plugins directory) and hitting activate.  You will need to setup a wordpress account.  Once you do that they will give you an API key which you will enter to complete the installation.

Don’t worry it’s very simple and like wordpress always does they hold you hand along the way… making installation much easier for you.

Download Akismet

4. WP Super Cache – Cache like you’ve never cached before!

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts…

…As this plugin is based on the older WP-Cache plugin you can switch off the Super Cache static html caching. Caching will still be performed, but every request will require loading the PHP engine. In normal circumstances this isn’t that bad, but if your server is underpowered, or you’re experiencing heavy traffic you may run into trouble. Super Cached html files will be server more quickly than PHP generated cached files so there’s very little reason not to use the Super Cache feature.

Did that make sense to everybody?  Basically, you should install this plugin because visitors & subscribers of your blogs will have a much more enjoyable experience when they don’t have to wait for everything to load when they visit your site.  Your pages will load much faster as Super Cache does it’s magic, creating a much better blogging party.

Download WP Super Cache

5. Share This – Post to Social Media Sites in Seconds

Let’s face it… We are some social SOB’s!  The society is taking it all in and laying it all out.

I like this wordpress plugin over other Social Media wordpress widgets for two reasons.

1.  It doesn’t take 10 million years to load all of the fancy logos and what not.  I have used Sociable and others in the past, but they were bogging down my site like no one’s business.

2. It offers more then just allowing users to post to social media sites like the others.  You know like Digg, Propeller (Netscape), Stumble Upon, Reddit, etc.  You can also post it to Facebook, Myspace, Twitter.  And the last thing is you can simply email it if you like.

I think that offers much more to the user, especially since everyone might not have accounts setup with the usual social sites.  I like having options…

Download Share This.

Well there you have it.  I hope that was informative and helped point you in the right direction.  This might be more of a beginner’s post but you’d be surprised how many people don’t take advantage of these simple plugins.

I would love any feedback on other plugins.  I am sure I am not utilizing all of the plugins I should be using as well.

More to come…

I was on Wordpress.org today asking a question on a forum about the Audio Player plugin.  Of course I got side tracked and started snooping around the site right.  We all do it.  Anyway, I found an interesting post on the development section of Wordpress.org.

It looks like the Theme Directory is going to be revamped here, wordpress.org/extend/themes/

It’s been a long time since themes.wordpress.net stopped accepting new themes. Since then most theme authors have been distributing their themes from their own sites, without a good centralized place for people to browse, search, comment on, and rate themes. With the success of the plugins directory, we’ve wanted to have those same benefits in a theme directory. Today is the day we start making that happen, with the introduction of wordpress.org/extend/themes/.

I thought this was cool enough to let all of you know.  It will be nice to have one structured, legit wordpress theme destination.

I will still be featuring Wordpress Themes on my site to help you all from having to digging through the masses of Wordpress Themes they have on there.

Good luck finding your Themizzle!

If you follow my blog regularly you noticed last night I decided I would start featuring Wordpress themes on my blog.  Particularly ones I felt like were decent, functional and professional looking wordpress themes.

I wrote a post last night featuring the Aesma Pro Wordpress Theme

Today I was going through my Google Analytics account like usual and notice a ton of traffic already from terms like, wordpress, wordpress themes, pro wordpress themes.

I did a quick check in google for a few different variations on the above keyword terms.  So, I come to find out that I am on the 1st page of Google for the keyword, pro wordpress theme and pro wordpress themes

Anyway, not that I haven’t been ranked for any keyword variations in Google before but for such a competitive niche I thought that was pretty crazy to be on the first page of google for.  I am going to dig some more into other keyword variations but pretty cool stuff huh?

This post is from SEOmoz.org and when is comes to all things SEO these guys really know their stuff. Pretty basic stuff but surprisingly most people don’t follow a lot of these tactics…

A comprehensive, in-depth list of blog-specific marketing strategies designed to drive traffic from search engines, referrals and brand building. Includes descriptions of how to implement each tactic and pitfalls to avoid.

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