Zen Zoomie’s Place: Chronicles of a (Wannabe) Pro Blogger

It’s been a busy 2 weeks here at Zen Zoomie’s Place as I continue my quest to improve the site.  The objective is to get the Blog to the point where it requires very little tweaking or management, so I can spend more time concentrating on writing and creating compelling content.  After many hours of research, I’ve identified and integrated a number of WordPress plugins to simplify my site management tasks and improve the overall user experience. 

Adsense-Deluxe

This plugin allows placement of Google Adsense content-targeted ads within the text of your Blog posts.  The general consensus among most Blog monetization experts out there is that this is the most effective way to present ads to your target audience so that you can maximize their effectiveness and click-through rates. 

All in One SEO Pack

"Automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of the box for your wordpress blog" according to the author.  Search engines rely on certain types of metadata (URLs, titles, excerpts, and keywords or tags) extensively when indexing and ranking your website.  This plugin doesn’t quite do everything for you automatically, but it greatly simplifies the task of adding the information Google and other search engines will be looking for.

Dean’s FCKEditor for Wordpress

This is by far my favorite plugin of all the ones I’ve integrated so far.  I love Wordpress as a blogging platform, but the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that comes standard is completely unsat for any serious editing.  Until I found this plugin I was writing my blog posts in Microsoft Word, pasting them into WordPress, and then tweaking them extensively to get them to look right.  There are several other FCKEditor plugins for WordPress out there, but this one seemed to use the most up-to-date version.  Highly recommended.

FeedBurner FeedSmith

I mentioned this one in my last post about integrating a FeedBurner RSS feed with this site.  Very easy to implement, and simplifies the management and subscription process for RSS feed users. 

Filosofo Google Ad Sectioning

After experimenting with Google AdSense adds for a few days, it appeared that the ads Google was providing were targeting the overall content of my blog instead of the content of the specific post they were appearing in.  Google has something called "Ad Sectioning" that allows you to define which sections of your website should be targeted for the ads that are displayed.  Filosofo automates that process for each post.  I haven’t had enough posts yet to determine how effective this plugin is, but it appears promising.

Google Analyticator

"Adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging."  Very easy to integrate and get up and running.  If you run a WordPress blog and want a good analytics package to keep track of how much traffic you are getting and from where, Google Analytics is a great free tool to get started.  You can see things such as where traffic is coming from, which pages are being visited most often, how much time visitors arespending on each page, etc.  Good stuff.

Google Sitemaps

Creates an XML-sitemap compliant sitemap of your Wordpress blog.  The sitemap helps Google, MSN Search and Yahoo crawl your sites more efficiently, helping to ensure that your site is accurately indexed by the most popular web search engines.

KB Robots.txt

Makes editing the robots.txt file on your WordPress blog a snap.  Robots.txt is used by Google and other search engine "spiders" to determine where they should and should not look.  There are good reasons not to allow Google to look everywhere on your website.  I recommend looking at my robots.txt example file, as well as doing some research on your own to determine which portions of your file system you should make off-limits to automated webcrawlers. 

Permalink Redirect

I discovered shortly after establishing my blog that the default URLs used by WordPress for blog posts are not SEO friendly in the least.  It’s much better to have a descriptive URL that is based on the title of your blog post (ideally containing some good keywords).  Luckily, this plugin exists to help you if you decide to change permalink structures for an existing website.  It will automatically redirect web queries based on the old naming convention to the new SEO friendly URL. 

Sphere Related Content Widget

This one’s just plain cool.  Click on Sphere Related Content at the bottom of this post to try it out.  It will allow your users to quickly find information related to each post–I’ve found it to be a very helpful resource

Ultimate Tag Warrior

Another great SEO plugin to help make your blog posts more search engine friendly.  Allows custom tagging of each post with applicable keywords.  One helpful feature is a button that allows you to automatically query Yahoo for terms related to your post that may be considered relevant.  A good sidekick to the All in One SEO Pack plugin. 

I think you’ll find each of these plugins to be well worth the time required to download, install, and configure.  Most of them will pay you back many times over in increased efficiency and overall results.  Until next time,

Zen Zoomie OUT!