Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
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Google XML Sitemaps
—Search engines all love highly organized sites. This plug-in generates a
new sitemap every time you update your blog, keeping the engines notified that there's some-
thing new to index. Generate the sitemap and define the search engines you want to notify in
Settings, XML-Sitemap.
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All in One SEO Pak
—This is the most popular WordPress plug-in ever. This set-and-forget tool
aims to raise your blog's profile to get you more visitors and, in turn, a bigger audience. Look for
All in One SEO in the Settings area of the navigation bar to set things up.
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SEO No Duplicate
—Some folks try to game the search engine system by making sure certain
phrases appear early and often within their sites. If your blog happens to focus on medical
advertising, and every post mentions one drug after another, you could find yourself bounced
from search engines entirely. To avoid this, you want to use the Canonical property in your head
tag to define your topics. This simple plug-in helps you easily tell the search engine bots the
preferred version of a page
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Easy AdSense
—Once you have that big audience, Google AdSense could just make your blog
economically self-sustaining. This plug-in wants to simplify adding Google ads to your site.
Links
All three of these plug-ins allow your visitors to flag posts on social bookmarking and networking
sites:
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AddToAny
—This plug-in is not kidding when it calls itself AddToAny. Visitors can share your
post via email, social bookmarking sites, and more social sites than you're likely to have ever
heard of. They also have a Share button for WordPress.com users that functions like a book-
marklet.
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Sociable
—Thousands of folks download this plug-in every day to put a colorful little ribbon to
“share or bookmark this post.” It is configurable for dozens of sites.
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ShareThis
—The familiar green button doesn't paste a million little logos on your page like the
others, but instead takes people to the ShareThis site, where they can select the service(s) they
want to post to.
Multimedia
These plug-ins simplify and enhance audio/visual aspects of your blog.
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Page Flip Image Gallery
—Create an Image Gallery that looks more like a presentation, with
Page Flip effects. This plug-in is great for photoblogs that document events.
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Viper's Video Quicktags
—This plug-in is so good and so useful it was incorporated into
WordPress v2.9. Consider Video Quicktags as one of the links plug-ins in reverse. Want to
include video from YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv, or some other popular site in your post? This plug-in
relieves you of the obligation to copy an entire block of HTML to embed the player on your site.
Just click a site button and paste the URL in the edit box to display the clip.
