Willing to pay for professional advice. I am just entering the world of blogs. I actually manage about 50 other sites and am getting overwhelmed. I thought I would experiment with blogging to see where it takes me. I have two new sites, new domains set up with Wordpress. I would love expert opinions of what needs to be repaired, adjusted, tweaked etc. Please remember, I know little, if anything about how this all works. Would love to hear advice on plug-ins, and features I should utilize. When all is said and done, I willbe looking for someone to hire to make the changes. I am also going to be looking for some content writers familiar with Wordpress. Blogs: http://www.handyhouseholdhints.com http://www.freestuffhunter.com Thanks!
Some of the best plugins are also some of the easiest. Here's a list of my 'must-haves', some of which were found by browsing around here: - Akismet comes bundled, but you definitely want to make sure it's turned on. - Adsense Deluxe allows easy embedding of adsense links in your content posts. http://www.acmetech.com/blog/adsense-deluxe/ - Crawl Page Generator builds a crawl page for your blog, helping search engines find your content. http://www.zerotorich.com/ - Comment subscription -- helps engage your readers by notifying them of responses to their comments, bringing them back in for more ad impressions. ;-) http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/subscribe-to-comments/ - Ultimate Tag Warrior -- is a suite of tagging applications that make tagging ridiculously easy. Tagging helps get you into all those great tag-based sites like Technorati. http://www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/ - WP-Cache -- not much for SEO or traffic or whatnot, but if your blog is wildly popular, it definitely helps handle the load. http://mnm.uib.es/gallir/wp-cache-2/ Also, a couple other tweaks to be performed are to ensure that you've got relevant pingback URLs in place, so that sites like technorati, bloglines, etc are notified of your new posts, making them available to viewers on their site to find. My list currently looks like this: http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping http://ping.feedburner.com/ http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/ http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2 The top two are pingback aggregators, and will ping a variety of other services... the rest added because either they weren't included by the aggregators, or I just wanted to make sure they were pinged specifically. Don't make the list much longer than that or posting will start to take forever (as it has to ping each of those for the post to complete) Also, tweaking your permalinks to offer the most relevant options whatsoever. I've got mine set with date specificity, because I like to post title-recurring articles (e.g., "Friday Fashion"), and don't want there to be naming conflicts, but my recommendation is to set it to just "/%postname%/" if you can, or perhaps "/%year%/%postname%/".
Oh, i totally forgot the awesome Google Sitemaps Generator plugin, which creates the google sitemap XML format to assist Google in finding your content. http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final
my advice for this blog: http://www.handyhouseholdhints.com - change the ui/template so it doesn't feel like its from 1996.
Sociable's actually a plugin to add all the social bookmarking links, e.g., digg, del.icio.us, furl, etc., at the bottoms of each of your posts. I don't know exactly how similar it is to ultimate tag warrior, but I will agree that it's invaluable.
Glen, have we answered the bulk of your questions? If there's anything you'd like more specifics on, just post here or PM me and I'll get back to you. Tyler, thanks for the green kind sir. Back at ya.
It's only been a month since I jumped into Wordpress, so I can say from experience that it's easy to think that you don't need all these plugins, and really, you don't... Wordpress is a fantastic piece of software on its own. However, these plugins dramatically increase its usability to search engines, users and yourself alike (depending on the plugin). What I did, basically, was set up Wordpress, start using it, and wait for the needs to arise. You may want to install the search engine-specific plugins as soon as possible, just to give you that extra jump on indexing, but the bulk of them aren't necessary unless you want them. So start bare, and add as you go. It'll be a lot easier to tackle each plugin one at a time than having to get your mind around all of it. But, as I said, if you need anything, just let us know.