Finalizing my wordpress installation, the essential plugins.
After you have done your wordpress installation and set up the basic configuration I always install some plugins. These plugins can really make the difference for your blog and I find them essential for all my blogs. First of all I activate the akismet plugin which is installed by default, you just need to fill in the
Wordpress API key and your done. This protects your blog against spam comments. Another plugin I always install is
Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam that also helps against spam. With these 2 plugins you should be protected against all automated spam. This is of course wishfull thinking, spammers get smarter by the day. If you look around on the internet you will have no trouble finding scripts that can bypass them. The next two plugins are very important seo wise. They will help to get your blog indexed and let search engines know what your blog is about. The
“Google-xml-sitemaps-generator” doesn’t need much explanation. After activating and configuring (which is very simple), the plugin generates a sitemap every time you update your blog. This sitemap is compatible with Google, Yahoo, MSN Live and Ask.com. I have had no trouble getting a blog indexed by Google just by adding a sitemap to Google webmaster tools, even for a blog which had zero backlinks.
By default a wordpress blog doesn’t have any metadata. The value of metadata isn’t that important anymore to search engines. Many years ago it was possible to get listed high in Yahoo by using metadata and spamming your keywords all over your frontpage. Unfortunately those days are long over. I still think a correct set of metadata tags helps seo wise. The
All-in-one-seo-pack adds metadata tags to all your posts. When writing a post you will have the option to fill in title, description and keywords. It’s not much work and helps search engines indexing your posts, certainly on short posts with little or no text, for example when you post a funny Youtube video.
Now that I am talking about Youtube, when embedding a Youtube video on your blog and you just copy paste the embed code from the Youtube sit. The code you are generating is not XHTML valid. It’s not that much of a problem, but if you want to keep your blod strictly XHTML valid it’s not a bad idea to install the
“Embed-video-with-link” plugin. It ads a button to the “write post” section, when clicking it you get a pop up box asking you the video ID and video site. The plugin supports a lot of video sites and gives you clean XHTML valid code. To check if your website is XHTML valid just surf to
World Wide Web Consortium, these are the guys that make up all the web standards. You can easily check your code and it will give you some tips and guides on how to improve your code.