Some of you may have noticed that I've jazzed up my blog a bit. I've installed ratings icons, tag lists, related posts, social network links, the list goes on. Installing some of these plugins put my thinking in a new direction so I thought I would share my experience through a series of posts (unimaginatively) entitled: "My Favorite Wordpress Plugins". The series will describe practical plugins you can add to your blog to improve the quality of the blog, and in return, enjoy more traffic. If you are serious about your blog and you don't have these plugins, then you are
really missing out.
Note that I'm only going to describe the plugins and why they are of interest to you. I'm not going to describe how to install them as each plugin comes with comprehensive documentation.
I'll start the series off with arguably the most important plugin...
The SEO Title Tag Wordpress Plugin
Update: I confused myself while writing this and said that my blog used to be titled "Alex Pooley's Blog", but the default Wordpres blog title is your blog name followed by the post title. SEO Title Tag will switch the order, and/or remove the name of your blog from the title.
There are some plugins that sit pretty in the limelight while other plugins do the dirty work without recognition. The SEO Title Tag plugin is a dirty worker. All it does is set the HTML title element value to the title of the post currently being viewed. So instead of each page being titled "Alex Pooley's Blog", each page is titled with something more fitting. Check out random pages in my blog and you will see the title of each post in your browser window bar.
Accurate titles are really important from a search engines perspective. A search engine only has a limited amount of information to determine what a page is about, and the title element is often considered one of the most important bits of information. Say I had a post about "Wordpress Plugins" and the page was titled, "Alex Pooley's Blog", that's obviously one less hint to the search engines as to the content of my post.
I should also note that the front page of the blog is still the title of your blog, unless you configure otherwise in the plugin options page. A couple of other things in the plugin configuration you may like to look at, like appending your blog name to the end of each title.
If you only install one plugin this Christmas, make sure you install this one. You can grab the plugin from
netconcepts.
Update: I just wrote a post about how to make money online from your blog.
Check it out!