SEO Friendly WordPress Plug-ins By Eric Gehler

SEO Friendly WordPress Plug-ins By Eric Gehler
From WordPress.org: “WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.” What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time. I couldn’t agree more. The beauty of WordPress is that you can customize and extend its functionality through the use of plug-ins and templates. For the most part, plug-ins deal with the behind the scenes issues while templates focus on how your blog is presented to the end user. WordPress is a good SEO platform to begin with, but can be improved tremendously with the addition and proper configuration of a few free plugins. This brief report will discuss which plug-in are vital and helpful for an SEO Friendly Blog. Hint: Double check your themes to make sure you are capturing all the aspects of categories, recent posts, header tags and footer tags. Once WordPress is installed on your site, here is a list of the plug-ins you should get and install before you make your first post.
AdsenseDeluxe Place Google AdSense ads in your WordPress Posts. Requires WordPress 1.5 or higer. For complete usage and configuration click on AdsenseDeluxe under the “Options” menu. Insert Meta Data into your Head – without the need to edit your template. Go to Options >> WP-Head to configure. Allows keywords to be associated with each post. These keywords can be used for page meta tags, included in posts for site searching or linked like Technorati tags. This generator will create a Google compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog.0.4 Acme Technologies

WP Head 1.0 Martin Hipfinger Jerome’s 1.8 Jerome Lavigne Keywords Google Sitemaps 2.7 Arne Brachhold

These plug-ins can be found at http://wp-plugins.net or by clicking the plugin names on the list above. The version numbers above are recent as of October, 2005.

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Installation of your Plug-Ins
Once you download these plug-ins to your computer, you need to transfer them to your site. If any of the plug-ins were packaged in a zip file, unzip them first and upload only the .php files in the wp-content/plugins directory of your website. Once the files are uploaded, you need to activate (and optionally configure) the plug-ins. To do this, go to your WordPress administrator panel and click on the tab marked Plugins. You will see the following displayed:

Plugin Management
Plugins are files you usually download separately from WordPress that add functionality. To install a plugin you generally just need to put the plugin file into your wp-content/plugins directory. Once a plugin is installed, you may activate it or deactivate it here. If something goes wrong with a plugin and you can’t use WordPress, delete that plugin from the wpcontent/plugins directory and it will be automatically deactivated. Plugin AdsenseDeluxe Version 0.4 Author Acme Technologies Description Place Google AdSense ads in your WordPress Posts. Requires WordPress 1.5 or higer. For complete usage and configuration click on AdsenseDeluxe under the “Options” menu. Action Activate

In the example above, only one plug-in (Adsense-Deluxe) is installed. As a protective measure, all freshly installed plug-ins are deactivated by default. To activate it, simply press the Activate link the plug-in will be highlighted green, indicating that the plug-in is active and ready to be configured. Install and activate all the plug-ins (Adsense-Deluxe, WP-Head, Jerome’s Keywords and Google Sitemaps). We are ready to delve deeper into each plug-in and configure them to make your site a spiders dream!

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Overview of Plug-ins and Functionality
Now that all your plug-ins have been installed and activated in WordPress, we will now review each plug-in to understand its purpose and configuration options.

Adsense-Deluxe
AdsenseDeluxe 0.4 Acme Technologies Place Google AdSense ads in your WordPress Posts. Requires WordPress 1.5 or higer. For complete usage and configuration click on AdsenseDeluxe under the “Options” menu.

The Adsense-Deluxe plug-in allows you to place Adsense adds directly into your posts. You can customize the colors and sizes of the adsense blocks in each post by placing a special comment tag inside of your article. Of course, you need to have a Google Adsense account to use this plug-in. Let’s get started. Click on Options from the Dashboard. You will see the following:

Options for AdSense-Deluxe Plugin v0.4 (Add New)
AdSense-Deluxe provides shortcuts for automatically inserting Google AdSense code into
your posts. Instructions are located at the bottom of this page. home page . . . . or visit AdSense-Deluxe

The AdSense Preview Tool will help you see which ads will appear on your pages. Login to AdSense . . . . . . read Google’s TOS Name Description
Block

AdSense Blocks Actions
delete | default | edit

On

 

The options below this line control where Ads will be shown. Enable Ads on Individual Posts

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Enable Ads on Home page Enable Ads on “pages” Enable Ads on any Archive page Globally enable/disable all ads
Update Enabled Options

New AdSense Block Name AdSense Code Description (optional)

Make Default

Discard Changes

Add AdSense Block

AdSense SandBox (Preview Tool) View AdSense for:
http://recovery-health.info Preview AdSense

This form allows you to preview the ads which would appear on a web page. Just enter any URL in the text box and the ads will display in a new window. Since they’re shown in test mode, none of the impressions are recorded and clicking them does not cost nor benefit anyone. Reward Plugin Author Reward AdSense-Deluxe Author with 5% of your AdSense Impressions
Update Author Rew ards

When this option is checked, approximately 5% of the ad impressions on your blog will use my [the guy who wrote and maintains this plug-in] AdSense client-ID. Doing this is not crazy, no… it’s a good way to help contribute to let the author know you appreciate how useful the tool is to you and motivate him to add more features.

AdSense Deluxe Instructions

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This plugin allows you to insert html comments in your posts and have them replaced by the actual Google AdSense code. You can define a single default code block to use, or as many variations as you like. Adsense-Deluxe makes it easy to test different AdSense styles in all your posts without having to edit the WordPress code or templates, or change all the posts manually. The designated default AdSense code is included in a post by inserting this: wherever you want the ads to appear. To insert an alternate AdSense block which you’ve defined by a keyword (for example, “wide_banner”, you would use: . Please restrict your keywords to the letters a-zA-Z, 0-9 and underscore (_). Matching is casesensitive, so you might save yourself headaches by sticking to lowercase keywords. Also avoid extraneous spaces inside the html comments; regular expressions (which could account for extra whitespace) are not used so that replacements when the page is serving are as fast as possible. Name This is the name by which you reference an AdSense block of code when creating posts. For example, if you name a block “wide_banner”, you would insert into your post ““. Whichever block is designated as the default AdSense block will be substituted wherever the default comment string is found (““), and also for any comment strings which reference it by its unique name (e.g., ““). You’ll want to set the default AdSense block to the AdSense code you will use in the most places within your posts. AdSense Code This is the block of AdSense code to substitute for the given keyword. Description This is for your own use to help remember what each block of AdSense code looks like. You might use something like “banner 468×60, white background” Please make sure you read Google’s TOS before using this plugin! *This plugin is loosely based on “Adsense” Plugin by Phil Hord, http://philhord.com/wp-hacks/adsense

Log into your Adsense account and copy your Adsense code. According to google reports, the most popular Adsense size is the 300 x 250 block. You may want to make a channel as well. Copy the Adsense block into the box labeled Adsense Code. Next, name the block in the left hand box (I usually name it “half-banner, 300×250, etc). Additionally, you can add a description to help you identify the code.
New AdSense Block

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