i7o Media

This is a guest post from Joel Carl. If you’re interested in writing an article for this blog, feel free to use the contact form. You will be linked to appropriately.

1. All in One SEO Pack
In my opinion, this is the most useful plugin of all time. Helps you pick the post titles, keywords, tags and more. It also allows you to noindex the category, tag and archive pages which helps you avoid duplicate content issues.

2. Google Sitemap Generator
This great little plugin creates a sitemap file each time your blog is updated. Search engines love sitemaps. The name is misleading as yahoo, msn, ask and many others will read the sitemap. Very easy to install.

3. Google Analytics
Google analytics allows you to get detailed stats on your blog. How many visitors, where they came from, which pages they visited, where they exited. Possibilities are endless with google analytics, a great free tool

4. MBP Ping Optimizer
This little plugin will control your pinging. You don’t want to be pinging the search engines every 10 secs, this allows you to control the minimum time between pings as well as a ping log.

5. Automatic SEO Links
Allows you to choose a keyword/keyphrase and turn that into a link each time it is mentioned in the blog. You also have the ability to choose nofollow. This will only work for the keyphrase once per post, so you don’t have to worry about having spammy looking links in your posts.

6. Nofollow Case by Case
Gives you the ability to choose which comments don’t deserve follow tags and which do. This helps with comment spammers and allows you to look after the genuine commenters.

7. SEO Friendly Images
It’s important to SEO your images with alt tags – you can actually get lots of traffic from images. This plugin will ensure that your images are SEO optimized. If you forget to add alt tags, this plugin will add them for you.

8. SEO Post Link
When you set a post slug, sometimes they are too long and search engines don’t like that. This plugin will shorten the post slugs i.e http://www.bizboink.com/short-post-slug. The plugin will cut out unnecessary words, you can set it to a maximum number of words or characters

9. SEO Smart Links
Use this plugin for internal linking. By linking from one post to another, you can keep readers on your blog for longer. It can take a while to manually add those links, so use this plugin which will create a link to a certain page when you use a certain word/phrase.

10. SEO Title Tag
This allows you to make your post titles different to your title tags. By default wordpress will use your post titles as the title tag. The post title should be something catchy, but the title tag should be full of related phrases and synonyms which can help capture more visitors in a wider net.

11. Redirection
Whenever you need to move a page to another address(which happens somtimes), you can use this plugin to ensure a smooth redirection without losing your position in the search results.

12. Google Positioner
This plugins allows you to follow which keywords are bringing you visitors from the search engines. This helps monitor your search engine rankings.

13. Related Entries
This plugin allows you to output a series of related posts based on the keywords used in the post. This helps your readers move onto the next most relevant post.

14. WP Backlinks
This plugin allows you to manage reciprocal links with other websites. Whilst reciprocal links are not the best quality links you can get, they are still an important part of the overall SEO in Google’s eyes. They make your links look natural. Be sure to only trade links with related sites with good page rank.

15. Wordpress Global Translator Plugin
Make your blog available in over 41 different languages. Gives you a much bigger audience.

Next time we will be revealing 15 Wordpress plugins to pimp your blog

This is a guest post from Joel Carl. If you’re interested in writing an article for this blog, feel free to use the contact form. You will be linked to appropriately.

Many bloggers, especially beginners are faced with the dilemma of whether to get a free hosted blog or to fork out the money and get your own hosting and domain.

Free blogs such as wordpress.com, blogspot and typepad offer free hosted blogs which can be suitable as they reduce the technical overheads. This is especially appealing to those with little to invest and even less in tecnhical knowledge.

Whilst it may be free now, if you put considerable work into your blog and build up a following, you will soon realise that getting a free hosted blog was the worst decision you ever made.

Here’s why:

• You have serious lack of control over hosted blogs.

• What happens when you want to get a custom design and actually control what your visitors see? Having the ability to customize your blog is especially important when it comes to monetizing your blogs. Customization allows you to smoothly integrate your products, affiliate pages and other money making pages into your blog design. You can make your blog aesthetically pleasing aswell as highly functional.

• What happens if the hosting provider gets shut down? What happens to your blog posts from the last 2 years? What happens to all that page rank, authority and organic traffic you built up? It could all be gone in a heart beat. Go back to square 1 and start again?

• If your blog becomes popular, suddenly you are getting an influx of visitors and the number of simultaneous connections allowed may be limited by your host. Now your visitors get annoyed because they can’t view your blog, this will certainly test their love for your blog.

• With a self hosted domain, the possibilites of customisation are endless with thousands of themes, designs and plugins. If you plan to build a name/brand, then this will provide a much greater level of trust and credibility.

• You will be taken more seriously. I know some people will say “Hey I’ll follow a blog regardless of whether it is self hosted or not”. I understand that, but the harsh reality is – many people hate hosted blogs. If you choose a hosted blog – you better be packing some damn high quality in those posts, because content is going to be extremely crucial for you.

If you are still floundering around on a hosted blog, it is time to learn the ropes of hosting and domain registration, trust me, it really isn’t as daunting as you think and the rewards are endless.

This is a guest post from Joel Carl. If you’re interested in writing an article for this blog, feel free to use the contact form. You will be linked to appropriately.

Before you even write your first word on a blog, it is important to carefully choose a blogging platform. I’m talking about platforms such as wordpress, blogger, typepad, blogsmith etc.

You may choose a free option now, but what happens in the future when your blog grows? What happens when it turns into a recognisable brand and you now need to migrate to a new platform and perhaps your own hosting?

There are tools available which can make this transition more manageable, but this is something that you should look to avoid. If you have grand plans for your blog and you can see yourself blogging long term, then it is smart to carve out the details now, get yourself set up with your own hosting and a suitable platform. You may have initial costs of domain registration and hosting, but the costs will be much higher if you choose to migrate at a later date, not to mention the frustration if you aren’t tech savvy.

Platform Features
The best thing about blogs is that most blogging software makes it ridiculously easy to create and publish content. If you have limited knowledge of HTML, look for a platform with a WYSIWYG editor – this will make it even easier!

Blogging Platforms
Wordpress(.org) – is the most popular blogging platform to date. Because of the immense popularity, wordpress has thousands and thousands of developers creating useful plugins and themes – many of which are free. Wordpress is free to download and once installed on your hosting, it is 100% modifiable. Infact, you can turn a wordpress blog into anything.

I have even created squeeze pages and sales letters from the wordpress platform, you wouldnt even recognise it – sure they aren’t blogs in the traditional sense, but whenever I make a small update – out go the pings, twitter updates, RSS etc. My competitors with boring old html pages, have no idea how I smash them in the google rankings. Wordpress truly is a great piece of software and it’s here to stay.

Wordpress(.com) – dont confuse this with wordpress.org! This is a blog hosted on the wordpress site. Suitable for those who dont have hosting. The domain will be h.ttp://yoursite.wordpress.com

This is fine if you are not 100% committed to your blog and you just want to have some fun. Since it is hosted on wordpress servers, you have less control over things such as plugins, customization and themes.

On top of that, if you eventually decide you want your own domain and hosting, you can not 301 redirect your pages to your new address because wordpress has control over the servers. This is the biggest problem I can see with free solutions. However, at the end of the day, free is free and it’s always hard to beat.  It all depends on your situation.

Blogger – a free blogging platform from Google. Bloggers are given a subdomain – h.ttp://yoursite.blogspot.com. Blogger is really not that great. You have even less control than wordpress.com, for example you don’t have full control over the meta tags unless you can modify the code. A good indicator is that only 3 out of the official top 100 bloggers use blogger.

Blogger has also become popular for spammy purposes so it’s reputation and ranking is dropping. Look elsewhere.

MovableType – a highly professional platform featuring numerous weblogs, making it especially user-friendly for those who have several blogs to manage. All the templates, tagging, user interface and file management are customizable.

The biggest advantage of movabletype is the Perl-Based functionality offering the same, if not more features than wordpress. MySQL, Postgres, SQLite and Berkeley DB and supported. Pages can be created to be static or dynamic – a great feature which I will explain more later.

MovableType is Popular amongst professional bloggers

Typepad – this is the hosted version of MovableType, no hosting required here. You have to pay for this though – around $5 a month for basic version which allows 1 blog. Packages go all the way up to $90 a month.

Here is the biggest problem – it once again involves 301 directs. If you start with a h.ttp://yoursite.typepad.com instead of your own domain, you wont be able to map your URL to your domain IF you eventually choose to get your own domain name. This functionality is possible but it is included in a more expensive package. If you start with your own domain name, you WILL be able to implement 301 permanant redirects to a new host and platform if you choose to relocate.

Also important to note – link value is forfeited if you ever make the switch.

Other popular platforms include Blogsmith, Gawker, Expression Engine and Drupal.

Most Important: Before you rush out and choose a blogging platform, ask yourself the following questions:

- What are your goals? Can you see yourself committing to this blog? Is it personal or for your company?

- What’s your budget? Can you afford to pay for domain names and hosting? Do you have funds to have a custom design made?

- How tech savvy are you? If something goes wrong with the tech-side of things, can you fix it? Or will you need to pay someone to fix that buggy blog software you chose?

Answer these questions and you should get some sort of idea on what blogging platform you should employ.