Having said all that, I usually can’t get away with less than 12-18 plugins installed per site. My main site has almost 3 dozen+ plugins installed at any given time. I’m going to give you some additional plugins that can really help you organize and plan and maintain your blog, just realize your mileage may vary – and only install the ones you think you will REALLY use. Don’t be the guy that installs everything just to check it out, and then just leaves them all installed. Wordpress itself only has 13 database tables on a default install. Sometimes plugins create their own database tables for their options and data. I once had a client that had 48 database tables for his wordpress site because of all the plugin he installed over the years, half of which he was no longer using.

Backend Plugins

Broken Link Checker: I don’t use this in all my sites, but over time links get broken and this plugin can help. It monitors when people click on links going outside your site that are broken, and broken images. You get notified in the dashboard when you have a broken link. If nothing more, this plugin is handy because if you have affiliate links anywhere on your site and they break, this plugin will tell you the next time you login to the dashboard.

Pending Review: If you have people writing and submitting content for your review, or if you’re scheduling posts for your review later – this will give you a list in the dashboard.

Dashboard Scheduled Posts: This plugin lists your scheduled posts, great if you’re using WP Robot or datafeedr to stack up posts for you to rewrite and publish. I believe the current 2.9 WP dashboard shows you recent drafts, I don’t know how that compares to this.

Scheduled Posts Calendar: Maybe you have posts scheduled for the month and you’re more of a visual person. This plugin provides a calendar and shows all of your scheduled posts throughout the month.

Cross Linker: Cross Linker is a great plugin because it boost your blog “inlinks” automatically. Let’s say you are selling an ebook with a custom workout. Add the keyword “workout” in crosslinker and the page you want it to go to on your site. Then every time you use the word “workout” in a post it will automatically link your landing page. You just give the plugin a list of words and pages you want it to cross link, and it will do all the work for you.

Go Codes: Need to add an affiliate link, and you want to track how many times people click on it and you don’t want everyone to see your crazy referral code and URL? Ever wonder how everyone else is doing it? Go Codes! Enter what you want the redirect to be, and what the affiliate URL is, and whether you want it tracked or not and voila! you get site.com/go/link!

Layout Plugins

Privacy Page: Honestly you really don’t need a plugin for this – you could (and should) create this page on your own. Try the plugin, see what it generates, and then copy the text and make your own privacy page, and deactivate and remove the plugin, lol. Why do you need a privacy page? Adsense, eBay, and nearly every affiliate program out there requires that your have one to promote their products.

Breadcrumb NavXT: I’ve been creating and maintaining web sites for 15 years, and I still don’t understand why Wordpress and most modern CMS system don’t have better navigation. If google isn’t a clue, EVERY SINGLE PAGE on your web site should have what we call “breadcrumbs” at the top. It gives visitors a way “home” at all times and it shows where they are in your site (if you have multiple levels or sub-pages). Users expect that. The biggest sites have it – why shouldn’t you? There is NOTHING wrong with having redundant navigation in your header, sidebars, footer, and breadcrumbs – so long as it doesn’t clutter your site and make it more confusing.

WP PageNavi: The last thing your blog needs is to have those nasty “previous” and “next” post links on your homepage and single post pages. Lester Chan’s WP PageNavi plugin adds a bottom page navigation more like google’s. This doesn’t work automatically – you have to edit your wordpress home or index.php and single.php theme files on your own.

Subscribe to Comments: If you haven’t already, install and activate the “Subscribe to Comments” plugin. When I comment on a site if I can’t “subscribe” to any replies to my comment, I just get really annoyed.

Customizing Your Theme

One thing that many wordpress web site owners don’t do is much more than create blog posts or an about page. I’ve written articles about the main things you should understand about your Wordpress site(s) and customizing or creating main theme pages. I advise you start here first: Hacking Wordpress Template Files

And then work your way through these:

Fixing your search results page: Custom Search Results Page and Template
Fixing your 404 Error page: Create a Custom 404 Error Page
Fixing your navigation: 10 Ways to improve your navigation
Fixing Categories: 9 things you can do with Categories
Fixing Tags: Hacking Wordpress Tags and Hacking tag pages
Fixing your comments: Rock Star Comments in Wordpress in 12 Steps

Search Engine Basics

Search engines send your traffic based on a multitude of factors – ranging from authority, to pagerank, the power of your backlinks, the amount of your backlinks – and even the sites you’re associated with. When someone types in a search google attempts to give it’s “best match” of relevant original contet results. Sometimes the results are people that actually “targeted” and tried to come up for that search, and other times it’s just a bunch of pages that accidentally ranked for that result. Did you know that 60% of all searches entered in google have never been entered before? That’s because more and more people are treating it like a question and answer portal and asking it a query as if google were some magical oracle.

Linkbuilding Basics

Even if you were smart enough to find and target keyword phrases for your site, over time you end up getting ranked for all kinds of “long tail” searches and broad match terms you never thought about. Simply linking to your own internal pages, or creating your own “inlinks” (deep linking) can often times be enough to change your SERPs for some keywords from say the 2-5th page of google results to the first page! Just tagging complementary pages with the same tag can be enough. Linking a page or post in your sidebar dramatically help as well.

Enter SEO Booster Pro…

SEO Booster Pro is a premium Wordpress plugin that costs $39.95, and it’s purpose is very simple – to help you do better in the SERPs. It doesn’t do anything you can’t do on your own manually, and it shouldn’t raise the ire of google in any way. Once you install it, it monitors your incoming search queries. So far it’s captured results on 31,000 incoming searches for this blog.

You can view the top 10 incoming searches, it records the SERP page, your position on the page, what they keywords were, and which page it’s ranked for:

It also records the last 35 SERP visits. This is pretty handy, as it records the last top 35 that came in – and it really shows you that nearly all your incoming traffic comes from the first page of google results. You also get the total visits and the landing page they went to, but I think the handiest thing is the fact that you also get the link to the google results page in case you want to see what other sites were listed for that search, etc.

It has some very interesting settings. You can choose what SERP positions you want to try to boost higher, and how often you should run the cron job so the plugin can do it’s work:

It has some nice auto-tagging features as well. It can tag posts with phrases you might want to boost your search ranking for, and all the related posts as well. If you want, it can even re-write your post titles with incoming search phrases. The plugin creates a long and extensive log of everything it does, it will show you the last search positions it researched for you, and any rankings that have changed.

In addition to the tagging, it also has a widget functionality that you can use to put keywords in your sidebar (you choose how many) which helps your inlinks and boosts your SERPs as well.

Conclusion

SEO Booster Pro can help you get better search rankings, but the level of reporting and analysis you can get in just a few minutes (without digging through data in google analytics or some other stats) is awesome. There’s nothing grey hat about it, it’s not wrong to use it, you could create your own inlinks yourself to do the same thing (many people do). In my opinion, spending $39.95 one time (free lifetime upgrades) is well worth the money in the time alone it saves me – let alone the increased incoming traffic I’ll get from using it.

*Disclaimer: I’m an affiliate for SEO Booster Pro, and if you buy it from the link below I get a commission. That’s how we pay the bills around here!

Click to Visit the SEO Booster Pro web site

This post is part of my 30 Wordpress Hacks in 30 Days series!

Most Wordpress themes display full posts for the blog homepage. When Wordpress shows your homepage it looks for a file called “home.php” in your theme directory – and if it doesn’t find that it uses “index.php” instead. Look for home.php in your theme directory, if it’s not there edit index.php using “Appearance->Editor” in your wordpress dashboard admin.

Look for the following line of code:

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

This is where “the loop” starts. A little further down you’ll find a line of code like this:

<?php the_content(__('Read the rest of this entry...')); ?>

It may look a little different but you will find a line with the_content. Just change the_content to the_excerpt like this (and save), and your homepage will show excerpts instead of full posts. If you change the text “Read the rest of this entry…”, you can customize what it says at the end of the excerpt.

By default Wordpress posts are displayed from newest to oldest. Let’s say you want them to be in reverse order from oldest to new. I need this recently for a page of lessons – and I wanted them to display from the first lesson to the last. All you have to do is add one line of code just before “the loop” like this:

<?php query_posts($query_string . "&order=ASC") ?>

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Maybe you want to show more or less posts per page (the default is 10). You could use code like this before “the loop”:

query_posts(‘posts_per_page=5′);

<?php query_posts('posts_per_page=5') ?>

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Maybe you want to order your posts alphabetically – you could use code like this:

<?php $posts=query_posts($query_string . '&orderby=title&order=asc'); ?>

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

If you have an multi-author site you could use code like this to get posts for specific authors:

<?php $posts=query_posts($query_string . '&author_name=neo'); ?>

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Remember that you can use this code in any wordpress theme page to change the order or display of posts, like your single.php, page.php, index.php, home.php, search.php, archive.php, etc.

The post in question is my Artisteer review How to Create YourOwn Wordpress Theme in Minutes. This was a post that took many hours to write. So, the first thing I did was find out where he was hosted (theplanet.com). First I should tell you what you have to do if you’re in this situation. Go to a site like Network Tools. Do an nslookup on the spammer’s site, as well as a traceroute, and last a “whois” query. Two out of the 3 didn’t tell me anything. The nslookup came back blank – because he’s a spammer and he turned it off. The whois query came back that he was regsitered through an anonymous web service, also no help. But the every trustworth “traceroute” can’t be turned off! And guess what – his site traces back to theplanet.com hosting on American soil! That little bastard is now worthy of a DMCA takedown to get his site offline ASAP! If you ever need to do this read my post: How to Submit a DMCA Takedown Notice

So, I realize that it may take a short bit of time for theplanet.com to respond to my request through their legal department – so since this little stupid spammer is sucking off of MY bandwidth using MY original images – I decided to fix his little red wagon once and for all. I could have just renamed all the images in the article and deleted the original ones. But I went one better than that. I renamed the images, and then I uploaded a nice version of the original for his viewers to read as soon as my article loads on his site:

Sorry spammers – this round you lose!

It’s pretty easy, in fact so easy – you might kick yourself. All you have to is add these 2 lines to your wp-config.php file:

define('WP_HOME','http://example.com');
define('WP_SITEURL','http://example.com');

That worked for me! There are other fixes (like going into the database), but if the easy one works – why do something that requires more work? If that doesn’t work for you – check out these other options in the WP Codex.

If you have a Wordpress powered web site probably the most important page on your web site is your contact page. I’m a Wordpress consultant – and sometimes even I forget this. Case and point, I have one web site that gets 25,000 pageviews per day. Two days ago I got a post comment that said “I want to advertise on your site and have no way to contact you – please get ahold of me at this email”. doh! It was also a blog I’m not in every day and the comment was 3 WEEKS OLD! I was just lucky he was still interested when I contacted him, and it was a $400 advertising sale! Not having a contact form almost lost me a sale!

On another web site I had a contact form, but it was on my about page. I wanted to get approval to get my product on that web site listed on Clickbank – so I applied. They said I had to have a page called “Contact”, and I had to link to it from both my sales and features page. I did that, but I did one better – I placed the contact form in my sidebar as well. Guess what, within 48 hours I got 3 emails asking questions about the plugin (before they purchased). All 3 people that asked questions bought the product. Who knows how many other sales I lost by not having a contact form that was easy to find and use!

You have no idea how many people might want to contact you – or what for. Sometimes people want to trade or exchange links, some want to hire you, others want reviews, some want to buy advertising, some people just have a question. You never know, maybe some big corporation wants to buy you out (if your site is really popular). You NEED a contact form on your web site, and not having one (or having one that’s hard to find) is like not having a mailbox on the front of your house!

If a future post I’ll go over my favorite contact plugins details in depth, but for now here’s 2 links:

Contact Form 7: This contact form is lightweight, easy to use, and updated frequently. Many people are very happy with it, and it is popular.

Cforms II: Hands down – this is the best contact form plugin I’ve ever used. But it has TONS of features. If all you want is a single form with a name, email, and comment field – go back and use Contact Form 7. With Cforms II you can build anything from small forms to big surveys. It has a dozen+ styled forms (including one for the sidebar). It has a refer a friend feature, it can save form submissions in the database for review on a reports page later either in place of – or in addition to getting form results in email (which can fail). You can even have this plugin handle all the comments on your web site! It’s my favorite, but it’s a heavy duty plugin for heavy duty work!

Do you have a contact form on your web site?

Check it out – isn’t that weird? I did fix what I thought the problem was with the google indexing, and I did request reinclusion to try to get back into the google search engine. But even if your web site doesn’t have google indexing problems – you want to make sure that your site is “registered” in all 3 search engines. You might not even get listed in Yahoo! or or Bing if you don’t register your site (and your sitemap!). I’ve blogged about all this before, but I have many new readers since the last time I mentioned it, so I may have to revisit it in a future post series.

In the meantime – if you don’t already know it all 3 search engines have a “webmaster tools” login where you can register both your site and your sitemap.

1. If you don’t already have a sitemap, install the Wordpress plugin Google XML Sitemaps

2. Register your site and sitemap with Google Webmaster Tools

3. Register your site and sitemap with Yahoo Site Explorer

4. Register your site and sitemap with Bing Webmaster Center

Maybe Bing.com or one of the other search engines can bring your site back from the dead!