Here are 5 wordpress plugins that will help you increase the time spent by readers on your blog.

1. List posts by category
   This plugin will list out an array of posts in each category (which you can select) thereby, helping the readers to find useful posts with less clicks.
2. Random Posts 
   This plugin helps you create a list of randomly generated posts from your archives every time the page loads. Incredibly good one to make your readers stick to your blog for that extra time. See the sidebar for a demo.
3. KB Linker plugin
   KB Linker will link phrases you specify to sites you specify. For example, you could make it so that whenever “Wordpress” occurs in a post it is automatically linked to wordpress.org. All you do is enter keyword/URL pairs into the Options=>KB Linker page in your admin menu.
   To make best use of this plugin, instead of specifying other websites, specify your own articles to keywords, so that whenever there is an occurrence of that keyword, an old article of your’s is linked to it. This plugin helps in distributing the page rank juice this way.
4. AJAX comments
   This plugin will make commenting a breeze, with no page loads or refreshs. Good one to improve your number of comments as well as encouraging readers to stay more time on the blog.
5. Related Posts
   Good old related posts plugin that enables you to show off some related posts from your blog based on keywords used.

Yahoo audio search is another favorite Non-Google application of mine, second to Live image search application. Now it’s got even better.

You can now search for audio files (MP3, WAV, MIDI, WMA or AAC)  on the Internet (Online music stores, the web or Podcasts), play the sample from within the search results and if satisfied with the quality and clarity, go ahead to download/buy the song.

In the more options menu, there are even more options to refine your search by selecting the file types you want (MP3, WAV, MIDI, WMA or AAC), the duration fo the song etc. Pretty handy options there!

Small hint here for music lovers: In case you are looking to buy tracks, select the “Online music Stores” option (default), but if you are looking for free downloading of MP3 music, select the “Search web” option.

Indeed a great piece of technology from Yahoo. Google has yet to catch up with it. Googlers..you there ?

Get the whole story here.

Photo courtesy Sunset Chaser

This is a bit off topic - hope you will cope up with it.

Blog Action Day is a new phenomenon happening at the blogosphere. Well, it’s for a noble cause so, I’m in.

On Oct 15, bloggers around the globe will blog about a common topic - Going green!

Well honestly, I’m somone who likes to think green be it at my home or at office. Here are a few things that I do. ( Excuse me for the self-promotion here, really not itended but they want me to )

• I walk to office and save on fuel and emission.
• I take the stairs instead of the lift.
• My office uses eco friendly furniture and less paper.
• I prefer paper bags to plastic.

So that’s my little bit to help the event.  Hope you guys will also support the event with your posts on how you go green.

More info on the event here

Cheers all !

With the advent of Wordpress and other arrays of blogging softwares, poor old forums have lost their charm. 3 years earlier, PhpBB was the most used software in forums, almost every webmaster had a forum about something. It was an instant hit since it’s launch because of it’s folksonomical nature, but in a more un refined way as compared to the latest softwares.

One major reason why a forum failed is because of it’s non SEO friendly nature.

• Forums did not have SEO friendly urls
• They did not allow bots to crawl the inner pages
• They had SEO un friendly titles
• Forums in general did not look at SE’s with importance at all, so they did not leave any room for tweaks as well.

With all these problems in front of us, let’s see how we can make the forums (PhpBB mainly) SEO friendly?

• Optimizing the page titles
  Page titles are a crucial factor for search engine optimization. Crawlers pick up the titles from every page and it’s important to give maximum information in this area in a non-spammy way. Here’s how you do it by some quick edits.

  - Edit file ‘templates/subSilver(or your template)/overall_header.tpl’

  Replace -

<title>{SITENAME} :: {PAGE_TITLE}</title>

with

<title>{PAGE_TITLE}</title>

or

<title>{PAGE_TITLE} :: {SITENAME}</title>

Edit Viewtopic.PHP

Replace -

$page_title = $lang['View_topic'] .’ - ‘ . $topic_title;  with
$page_title = $lang['View_topic'] .’ - ‘ . $topic_title;

• Tweaking the robots.txt file to allow better Search Engine indexing.
  Robots.txt can be used to control what pages is available to search engine robots and what pages are not. Generally on PhpBB, there are lot of sub directories that are allowed to crawl by default. But actually this is not required. We only need to allow certain folders and files to be crawled - so that only the necessary information is available to the crawler.

  Including the below code in to your robots.txt will disallow all the unwanted folders from being crawled by search engines.
  This way only the necessary information (those in the posts) are available for crawlers and the junk is filtered out.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /db/
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /language/
Disallow: /privmsg.php
Disallow: /profile.php
Disallow: /search.php 
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /common.php
Disallow: /config.php
Disallow: /faq.php
Disallow: /viewonline.php
Disallow: /groupcp.php
Disallow: /login.php
Disallow: /memberlist.php
Disallow: /modcp.php
Disallow: /posting.php

• Plugins to help create sitemaps for PhpBB
  Here are some cool plugins/mods for PhpBB that will help you create SEO friendly urls and even sitemaps that will help you get more pages indexed on Google. Here goes -

1. Google, MSN and Yahoo sitemap generator mod for PhpBB - This mod will create a Google SitemapIndex and auto generated Google Sitemaps for phpBB
2. Google Puller - This hack creates pages with 500 links to posts on your community. The words are taken from actual posts on your community (from the search_word table) and they link to the post that contains that word.
   The aim of the hack is to help search engines like Google or MSN to index your pages.

Part 2 of this post will follow with more methods on how to optimize your forum software for more search engines.

Photo courtesy FotoRita

• Google introduces new robots.txt feature where robots.txt analysis tool is able to recognize sitemap declarations and relative urls better than before.
• Track where an user clicks on your webpage - WP plugin review by Daniel, Dailyblogtips.com
• How to stop people from stealing content on your blog - Kumiko’s tip to bloggers.
• 7 tips to blogging beginners - By Nirmal TV
• Search uploaded imags in the WP admin panel - “How to” article by Shankar Ganesh
• Three Wp security tips - By Arpit Jacob
• 10 ways to increase traffic - By Sizzledcore, pretty interesting one.

Photo courtesy fotoluvr

Seems like Matt’s White Hat SEO tips presentation is a goldmine. Every time you read through, you get more insights. Here is a new one from Matt’s presentation.

- Use keywords in your categories.

Matt thinks that using your targeted keywords in your category names will benefit your more. That’s indeed a great idea, why didn’t anyone think about it earlier?

I think it’s high time we checked our category names. How many categories do you have? How many of them makes sense and how many doesn’t?

I have a few like - Search Engine Optimization tips, Wordpress tips etc. And they are indeed my targeted keywords. What if i had something like - Misc? or Unrelated? or General ? Problem - right?

Matt’s tip says the same. Try to make your categories as natural as possible embedded with the targeted keywords. If you have one that makes no sense to the crawlers, change them today.

Example: -
“Misc” can be changed to “Non SEO tips”
“Blogging” can be changed to “Blogging Tips”
“Wordpress” can be changed to “Wordpress tweaks/tips”

The idea is to utilize your real estate and convert it to steroid filled keywords. Categories are one of the most repeated element in any page of your blog. They appear in ever page, and the click ability ration is high for them. As per Matt’s idea, making good use of keywords in categories will help Google to understand what your site is about. Other areas where Google looks into for getting idea about your site is your description tag and meta tag (to name a few). I think for wordpress users the category list is one good resource to feed the crawlers.

Impact of changing Category names
Let’s see what would happen if we change the category names overnight?

- Broken links if you are using the permalink in %category%/%posts% format.
If you have custom permalinks, with the above format, then get ready for dealing with some broken links. So you may not want to change the category names in this case.

- New sitemap
When the category names change, get a new sitemap in place for there is a significant change in the site structure and content.

- Meta tags
It will be a good idea to change your keywords in the Meta tags to match that of the categories, so that the keyword density for the particular keyword increases in the code. A good idea will be to just add the new category names to the Meta keywords.

Of course, the benefits of using keywords as metatags are many. In order to get the maximum advantage, my opinion is to use the custom permalinks to  - %category%posts  from %date%posts The most significant benefit of this is the SERP’s advantage. Search Engines would catch your keyword in the url, if not anything else.

Ex:- If earlier your URL was something like - dailyseoblog.com/date/postname, it would be dailyseoblog.com/keyword(category)/posts

So along with your keyword research for articles, save some keywords for the categories too. And change your custom permalinks to %category% format from %date% format. Thanks Matt.

Photo courtesy bojassem

You blog I blog. Okay, all of us are the same ( well almost! ). We use readers, subscribe, draft, post, publish, link edit and blog. Yet, some are popular, some are Z-listers, some A list, some in-between, some spam some gurus, some are bald ( No not him! ) while some are superman like . Why the differences?

There are two ways of doing it buddy. 1) Hard Work and 2)Smart work

If you ..
- Spent hours together searching for topics on the net to blog about
- Post articles regularly and try to get online everyday to post articles
- Do not write anything negative about any blog/product
- Create original articles
- Spent most of the time looking at your statistics and not commenting on other blogs

You probably fall into the first category a hard working blogger.

But if you ..
- are impulsive and find topics just like that on any topic
- draft articles and publish it with time stamp edited
- write about your disagreements and honest opinion about products or other blogs
- rather than creating completely original articles, get inspired from others posts (while crediting them for it)
- spent more time commenting on other blogs and not your statistics

You’d fall in to the second category - Smart blogger.

I’m unsure which one is better. Sometimes, i prefer the smarties are like John Chow, but when they have a problem with Google, i think the hard working types are. Whatever it is - being consistent and connecting to your audience is the name of the game. Just that there are two ways of doing it. Which one are you and are you comfortable that way?

Photo courtesy pinklovesbrown

There’s happy news for Indian users this Independence day from Google. On the official Google blog, M T Raghunath and Gokul Nath Babu Manoharan, Software Engineers, Google has made this official announcement.

Happy 60th birthday, India! We can’t wait to celebrate, but we’re going to wait a few days for the formal unwrapping of our gift to Indian users. Check back and we’ll have news shortly.

Hmm… what could it be? Here are my guesses..

1. Blogger new features update
2. More features on AdSense
3. Tricolour ipod for top AdSense publishers

Yeah, they are wild guesses, i know. Any clues?

Recently in the WordCamp 2007, Matt Cutts talked about making your wordpress blog Search Engine friendly and the importance of practising White hat SEO. He had released his powerpoint presentation file too, in which he recommends some must have power plugins for Wordpress. Some of them are the ones he is using currently while some  are those that he’s considering to use in the future. All these plugins are SEO friednly ones, that help you avoid duplicate content and climb your way up the SERPs. Here, I’m providing you all those wordpress plugins that Matt Cutts recommended with the links to the websites where you can find them.
Photo courtesy cinefilo

Plugins Mr.Cutts uses currently - Strongly recommended.

• Akismet - For spam protection
• Math Comment - For spam protection. This one asks for the 3+2 question before you comment on his blog.
• Google Analytics plugin - Adds Google Analytics JavaScript to each page on your weblog for tracking.
• Feedburner feed replacement
• Democracy  - For adding a poll to your sidebar.
• SEO title tag plugin - Makes SEo friendly titles
• WP - Cache plugin - Makes your blog faster and responsive.

Plugins Mr.Cutts is considering to use in future

• Brian’s threaded comments - Where you can reply to comments.
• Comment Karma - Where users can rate other user’s comments
• Highlight author - Where an authors comment will be seen highlighted.
• WWW redirect - Allows you to set various url redirect options and thereby control how users access your blog.
• Permalink redirect - This plugin replies with a 301 redirect to urls that’s different from what is requested on archives (or direct entries).
• Related posts - Shows links to related posts from your blog

I suggest that you use all the plugins he recommends, they’re all hand picked by the Google man himself !

Windows live has been exceptionally good for image searches. With their sleek new UI and quick search, I had in fact preferred them to Google for searching images (only for images you see). And thanks to the team at Live! the image search has gotten even better.

They’ve added three new operators that helps you search pictures of personalities better. You can now search them and get the results sorted by

• pictures with their face ( personname filter:face )
• pictures that are portraits and ( personname filter:portrait )
• pictures that are black and white ( personname filter:bw )

This is indeed a great feature and I’m looking forward to have more improvements in this area from the Live team. In fact they’ve promised us. Until then - happy searching faces !