Today I continue the series on plugins I use. This goes back to a question that was asked here. Today we will look at the plugins that allow interaction and why they are worth using.

Your questions are welcomed and can be asked in the comments and will be answered here in the future.

what are you top plugin choices for WP?

Allowing people to interact and spread your word can be a good way to generate extra traffic because you can reach other people that would not know about you.

Here are the plugins I use.

• All In One Bookmarking
• Comment Luv
• TweetMeme Retweet Button
• WP Facebook Like
• WP Google-buzz

All In One Bookmarking – This makes it easy for visitors to bookmark my post on a wide variety of places.

Comment Luv – Creates a link to your commenters last post which benefits the commenter and gives people an extra reason to interact on your blog.

TweetMeme Retweet Button – This allows people to tweet your post on their Twitter time line with a single click.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. Get the details at Profitable Blog Steps

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Google Buzz, interactive plugins, plugins, social bookmarking, twitter, wordpress plugins

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Today’s question has two parts. One about the plugins and one about the widgets that are created often by the plugins. If you would like your question addressed here leave a comment.

Are the number of plugins that are installed (NOT Activated) detrimental to the blog performance.

I like some plugins like “Simple Facebook Connect”, but it adds 19 widget plugins to WP. I really only activate 3-5 of them, but can’t uninstall the rest because they are all tied together. Will these effect my blog performance?

Thanks.

Plugins can add great functionality to your blog but they can slow it down too. The only thing that plugins do until activated is to take up hard disk space.

So you can have a hundred plugins and if they are not activated it will not effect how your blog works until you turn them on.

Now when plugins create widgets they have no effect until you use the widgets. When you drag them into the sidebar then they are activated and run whatever part of the script they use to display whatever they do.

Now I am not familiar with Simple Facebook Connect but it sounds like it creates multiple ways to display items. The plugin itself may or may not slow down your blog load speed but the number of widgets you activate may effect the performance.

You do need to be aware of how plugins effect your load speed and I do think that it is always a balancing act between the increased functionality and the decrease in load speed.

Always look at whether the benefit of the functionality increase out weighs any slow down of the load speed.

Because of that I tend to use plugins like All In SEO where the increased improvement in potential search engine rankings through proper title tags etc is extremely beneficial.

Compare that to some of the plugins that just create a neat feature but may hurt blog performance. Those I might think twice about as to how much benefit I get versus blog performance.

Remember you can ask your questions you would like answered by leaving a comment here.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. Get the details at Profitable Blog Steps

Technorati Tags: blogging, functionality, hard disk space, load speed, plugins, search engine rankings, widgets, wordpress, wordpress plugins

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Every so often I take some time to go through the topics that I write about through some of the Google tools. Just finished a series on using Webmaster Tools.

Today I figured to go do some research in Google Trends on the topics I wrote about here regularly. I started with the three major ones – WordPress, WordPress themes, WordPress plugins.

Found a very interesting fact that has caused me to add a new plugin here. Not sure how it will work but this is a good example of how you can find things using trends you might overlook.

First lets look at what I found.

For WordPress

For WordPress themes

Finally for WordPress plugins

The part that made me feel good was that all of the trends for these topics are going up. As those are some of my primary topics that I write about regularly it will pay me to continue.

The part that caught my attention is that English and the North American region are not the biggest draw any more. These topics have tilted to a much more south east Asia and Indonesian is by far the most popular language choice.

So it is time to look at the translation plugins and get my information available in other languages if I want to get as much traffic as possible.

The other big thing that I know from playing with some of the various language translators is that I need to be aware of using slang that won’t translate well.

The latter is probably a good thing to be aware of even if you are not using translation software as some terms mean totally different things in the US, Great Britain and Australia even though all are “English”.

Testing the Global Translator plugin but if anyone has a good resource for translating pages would love to hear from you.

Take advantage of trends for all of your blog topics as it is a great tool for bloggers and you may be surprised at what you find out.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. Get the details at Profitable Blog Steps

Technorati Tags: google trends, translation plugins, wordpress, wordpress plugins, wordpress themes

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Don’t you just love an open ended question that there is no right answer for everyone? Really I went through a few of my blogs and run between one plugin and over twenty.

Now to be truthful the blog with just one is really not a blog but a membership site that is password protected. It is not being indexed and I don’t want it to be. All I need there is a secure place to deliver the content to the subscribers.

Now on the upper end, the blog with more than twenty is a test blog that I use to check compatibility with groups of plugins and themes. I do not like to test plugins on any of my good blogs until I have used them on the test blog.

That being said when you have over 20 plugins it will slow down the blog.

That is why the perfect answer will always be a trade off. The trade off is slowness versus how much you want the feature the plugin adds to your blog.

That is why there are certain plugins that have a higher priority than others. Plugins that deal with spam and making the blog more search engine friendly area much higher priority than those that add a neat feature.

Even here it depends on the feature and how well it works for you. My exit light box pop is very effective in adding subscribers so that has a greater value than the new Google Buzz button on this blog.

Now I use them both but if my speed becomes a problem (one reason why you need to be using Google Webmaster Tools) the Buzz button would go first.

Now adding WP-Super Cache was a case where an addition speeded up the blog load speed. ( A quick note on this plugin turn it off when you are editing your themes. Drove myself nuts, a short trip I know, when I changed the theme on my other blog until I turned it off <oops>)

So ultimately the optimum number will depend on what they are doing, what effect do they have on load speed and how high on your priority list they are.

For me on average it ends up at 12-14 plugins on my niche blogs and closer to 19-20 on my marketing blogs. How many do you think is your optimal number? Let me know and I’ll get into the plugins I am currently using by category and rate them in the future.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. Get the details at Profitable Blog Steps

Technorati Tags: how many plugins, optimum number of plugins, plugins, wordpress plugins

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Twitter can be a great source of traffic to your blog and with plugins it has become very easy to integrate the two. Integration makes it easier and saves you time because it automates things leaving you free to do what is most important on your blog – Create Great Content.

Here are 3 plugins that can make your blog more interactive and save you time.

• Tweet My Blog
• Tweet Meme
• Twitterlink Comments

Now lets look at what each does.

Tweet My Blog – This will automatically tweet each time you add a post and allow you to display your latest tweets on your blog. This lets your Twitter followers know about your latest post which can draw extra visitors depending on the size of your Twitter followers. Having your tweets displayed in your side bar helps you to always have fresh content for the spiders if you are active on Twitter.

Tweet Meme – This will add a button to your posts (you can see it above right here on the blog) that allows your readers to retweet your post with a single click if they are signed into Twitter.

When this happens your new post shows up on all of their followers timelines. Now at the time I am writing this I have over 18000 followers so if I click this on your blog it goes out to all of those people.

Now it is very easy for me to click that button if I like your post (back to having great content) but the odds of me telling my followers about it if I need to do it manually are slim and none unless you really wowed me.

Twitterlink Comments – This will allow you to reward your commenters. It adds a box where commenters can add their Twitter id and it will add a link to their Twitter page. This is another way of helping your commenters and as long as they are adding to the conversation. Anything I can do to reward those that take the time to add valuable content to my blog and get them to comment more is a plus.

These 3 plugins will definitely help you integrate Twitter with your blog but it is only valuable if you are adding good content and active on Twitter. Two things you should be doing anyhow.

Your questions and comments are always welcomed.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. Get the details at Profitable Blog Steps

 

 Integrate WordPress and Twitter [2:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Technorati Tags: blogging, twitter, Twitter plugins, wordpress, wordpress plugins

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Yesterday I talked about the advantages to blog commenting and one of the comments mentioned that the only comments they get are spam.

With WordPress and some plugins you can eliminate most comment spam and here is how to do it.

First use two plugins.

• Askimet which comes with the basic WordPress install
• WP Spam Free which I have found to be quite effective

With Askimet you will need to get an API number to activate it. If you go to the configuration page in the top paragraph is a link to go register to get the API.

Just add the key into the box and update and you are running.

WP Spam Free just needs to be activated after you have installed the plugin and you are ready to go.

Now these two will stop the automated systems quite well so the only other spam comments are those that are done manually. These are the cretins that use the “Great post” etc types of comments.

For me if they come in once I just mark them as spam. Quite often that is enough and Askimet starts picking them up as spam. It is the ones that continue to come back that can become a pain. For those just ban the ip number and that will stop them.

To ban an ip from commenting just go to settings – discussion and towards the bottom of the page is a section called comment blacklist. Here you can add the ip as a separate line and it will no longer be able to comment.

You can also add in any name that will automatically keep a comment from posting as you can see in the image below.

These 3 things should allow you to stop wasting time with spam comments so that you can use that time to interact with those that are adding quality comments to your blog.

As always if you have an additional way to avoid comment spam or if you have a question on WordPress or blogging please leave you comments below.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. Get the details at Profitable Blog Steps

 

 Protecting against comment spam [2:08m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Technorati Tags: Askimet, blacklist ip, comment spam, wordpress, wordpress plugins, wp-spam free

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I am continuing the series of answers to questions that were asked in my pre-Christmas post. You can ask your questions to be added to the series by commenting on this or any other post.

Today’s question:

What is the best plugin to convert a blog to DoFollow

Do Follow is the plugin I use. It is easy to set up. Just upload it, activate it and go to settings.

You can set it to automatically remove the no follow from comments or trackbacks or both. Personally I remove them from both because I want to reward those that add quality comments or link back to my blog.

The downside is that you need to moderate your comments because you will get more spammy trackbacks and comments because you are using do follow.

As always your questions and comments are welcomed.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. Get the details at Profitable Blog Steps

Technorati Tags: do follow, do follow plugin, wordpress, wordpress plugins

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As the year and in deed the decade rapidly comes to a close I have been reviewing the plugins that I use here. I will be continuing to answer your questions too so feel free to ask them in the comments below.

Yesterday I discussed the plugins to help you protect your blog and today I will discuss improving the on page SEO of your blog and the plugins I use.

The one thing you can do that will help your search engine ranking more than any other thing is to be using custom title tags. The default script in WordPress does not allow for that and so the first thing you need to address is that.

All In SEO Pack will allow you to add custom title tags, descriptions and keywords to each of your posts and is a must have in my opinion.

Maxblog Press Ping Optimizer – This plugin will keep your blog from over pinging. If like me no matter how well you double check your work you always find a mistake when you edit the post it will ping again. This can cause you to be banned by the ping services and this will eliminate the problem.

Google XML Sitemap Generator – This will create, update and ping a sitemap to the various search engines and will make your blog easier for the spiders to index it. Creates a sitemap compliant with all of the major search engines automatically.

Simple Tags – Allows you to tweak the settings of your tags and to add related posts to each of your post to increase the internal interlinking structure of your blog.

WP Tags To Technorati – Will convert your standard tags into links to the tags on Technorati one of the largest blog directories.

Now there are probably at least 3 or more plugins that will do each of these items available but one of the great things about WordPress is the open source nature and the variety of plugins available to tweak your blog. The biggest downfall is that too many plugins can cause conflicts with others.

The key is to find plugins that will do what you want them to without raising havoc with some of the other plugins you are using. These all play nice together on all of the themes that I have tried them on. (Another thing to worry about but that is a topic for another day.)

Leave your questions and comments below in the comments. Those questions help drive the content here so if you ask make sure to stop back as I try to address them all.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. Get the details at Profitable Blog Steps

Technorati Tags: sitemap, tags, technorati, wordpress, wordpress plugins, wordpress seo

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Plugins really enhance what your WordPress blog can do so I will be doing a series of posts on plugins I like and use regularly. It will cover three main topics.

• Protection
• SEO
• Integration

Today we will start with protecting your blog.

The nice part of WordPress is the power of open source but unfortunately that comes with a downside – the scum that like to go mess up things just because they can. Because the source code is readily available these curmudgeons will work quite hard to find any hole that they can to hurt your efforts.

Sometimes it is done to take advantage of you for their benefit and other times it is just because they can. The former I can at least understand the why but the latter befuddle me.

The first thing to protect against is the spam comments. This is especially true if you work hard to get comments and give people a reward for adding to your content with quality comments by using do follow and plugins like Comment Luv.

Plugins alone won’t take care of all of these only moderation is 100% but these two plugins will eliminate all of the automated comments and save you moderation time.

Askimet – This comes as part of the package when you install WordPress and you only need to sign up at WordPress.com for a key to make it work.

WP-Spam Free – This works well and eliminates the vast majority of spam without making it hard for people to comment on your blog.

There are other things to protect yourself again too so lets look at what I use for those things.

Antivirus – This plugin checks for malicious injections and lets you know about them right away. Finding these right away makes it much easier to fix them so I really like this plugin.

WP-Security Scan – This plugin will check your installation and show you any vulnerabilities and continue to scan daily and let you know if anything has changed.

Finally when all else has failed having a good data base backup is a God send. Add in this plugin and use it to regularly download your data base so you always have a current backup.

WordPress Data Base Backup – This will allow you to download your data base easily.

This saves you having to go into your Cpanel and using phpMyAdmin to create data base backups and can be automated to email you the data base. I use a special email account for these but you do need to check the email to make sure that it is actually working.

These plugins will help to protect your blog. Next time I will talk about the plugins to maximize your SEO efforts. Your questions are always welcomed just leave it in the comments below.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. Get the details at Profitable Blog Steps

Technorati Tags: blog protection plugins, data base backup, protect blog, spam plugins, wordpress, wordpress plugins

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Yesterday we discussed 3 ways to get more comments and today we need to talk about the flip side – Protecting your blog from comment spam.

The first step in this process for me is to use two plugins to help with this.

• Askimet – comes with the WordPress installation
• WP Spam Free

Now there are numerous others and I have not tested them all for sure but these two eliminate the vast majority of spam.

Set up both of these (you will need to register for a code for Askimet) and you will be well on your way. These will virtually eliminate the automated spam.

On my blogs I set them up that all comments are moderated. It takes a bit of effort but becomes a habit.

There was a time when I was allowing automatic approval from people who already had an approved comment but that went by the way side.

I was getting manual comments and the first time someone would leave a quality comment and from then on would just add the usual garbage like “I really enjoyed your blog.” or “Thanks for the great information”.

That is spam the same as the automated commenter that leaves me 20 links to a variety of Viagra and breast enhancement products. That caused me to go back to all comments being moderated.

On a side note I always wondered about the latter as I have never figured out why if I would be interested in Viagra I would also be interested in breast enhancements. Of course no one ever said all spammers were smart.

There is a way to eliminate those what I call “good job” commenters. If they do it once I just spam it. Do it a second time I will ban the ip.

Go to settings – discussion and scroll down towards the bottom and add their ip number (One per line), click save and you won’t hear from them again.

That is how I combat the slime that want to spam my blog while still making it easy for those that want to participate to do so.

Finally I was a bit surprised yesterday. A few people commented but nobody had another way to get more blog comments. There are many more than 3 ways. I have a few more but won’t release them unless others are willing to share their ideas too.

So tell me what other ways you can generate more blog comments by leaving your comment below. (yes I am tryinmg to not only get you to comment but add value to my blog. Imagine that

Have a great weekend.

About the author

Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy. After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably. Get the details at Profitable Blog Steps

Technorati Tags: blog, blog comments, blog spam, comment spam, wordpress, wordpress plugins

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