In this subscribers-only “Expert Tips” post, I will give an overview of the plugins I am currently using in my own blogs, explain how they work, and tell you how to install them on your own blog to give it power and flexibility you won’t believe. Keep in mind that although this post is specific to wordpress, most blogging software offers the use of some plugins, and while you may be using another blogging tool, you can take the suggestions in this post, and use them as a jumping-off point to search for similar plugins for your blog. Also, don’t feel constrained to using the plugins I have suggested. There are usually some great competing plugins for each of the ones I am using. For example, visit the plugin page at wordpress.org, wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ and search for plugins to allow you to add a Digg link to your posts. Just enter “Digg” in the search box. You will be amazed at how many plugins allow you to do this one thing. The same is true for almost all of my plugins.

While all of these plugins are available for free download at wordpress.org/extend/plugins/, wherever possible, in this post, I will link to the homepage for the plugin or designer. To install them, download them from either the Wordpress.org plugins page, or the designer’s page, then unzip them and copy them into your wp-content/plugins file using an FTP program, or your webhost’s control panel, file management software. Once you have placed the plugin in your wp-content/plugins folder, log in to your Wordpress dashboard, and click the plugins button at the top right of the page. From there, follow the instructions on the page to activate and set up the plugin.

Akismet

Akismet is, without a doubt, my favorite Wordpress plugin. like most great tools, It does one thing and does it very well. Akismet is a comment spam filter.

If you have ever had to deal with comment spam, you know that it can quickly eat up your time, frustrate you, and cause you to lose faith in humanity. Before I found Akismet, I used to have to moderate approximately 200 spam comments a week. After a few times, spending 10 minutes deleting spam comments, and finding that I couldn’t even weed the spam comments out of my blog, without losing the good ones as well, I turned off the comments on my blog. I hated to lose the power of allowing comments on my blog, but I couldn’t stand the trouble that they brought.

Akismet has fixed this problem, for good. Now, I allow comments on all of my blogs, and never have to deal with comment spam. Akismet is such a great plugin, it is now included with every installation of Wordpress. I encourage you to activate it immediately when you install wordress.

Google XML Sitemaps

One of the most powerful SEO tools I have found, is Google Sitemaps. Sitemaps are XML or HTML documents that tell search engines what, and how many pages are on a website. They also tell search engines when these pages were created, and how often they are edited, and how to find them. The idea behind Sitemaps is, “why wait for search engine spiders to find pages on your site, when you can just tell them where they are”. I have found Sitemaps to be a very quick way to get ranked on Google, and like I have said before, If you can get found on Google, you can get found anywhere.

You can visit Google’s Sitemaps page here. While you are there, take a look at the rest of Google’s Webmaster tools. They are very powerful.

With small sites, it is possible to build XML and HTML sitemaps by hand. But if you have more than a few pages, or if you update your site often, it gets VERY time consuming to keep your sitemap up to date. If you regularly post to your blog, say weekly, it is nearly impossible!

This is where Google XML Sitemaps comes in. This plugin will automatically update your XML sitemap every time you update your site, then it will automatically notify Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com about the changes. Very Handy!

I Love Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking sites allow users to submit links to sites, pages, videos, blog posts, or other content that they like, and then, allow other users to vote on the the submitted links. Links with more votes move further up the list. While this is a somewhat obscure concept, it is simple to understand the effect of these sites. Digg is the most popular social bookmarking site, right now. If you have a blog post that gets voted to the top of Digg, you will get literally thousands, and maybe tens of thousands of hits to your site. It is not uncommon for sites to be knocked offline, due to high traffic, when they hit the front page of Digg.

In order to benefit from the HUGE amount of traffic that these sites provide, you have to actually get people to link to you (Digg you). If you have a really great site or post, they might do this manually, but it is much easier to get people to Digg you, if give them an easy way to do it, then encourage them. This is what the
“I Love Social Bookmarking” plugin does. It places a link at the bottom of every blog post that allows people to Digg that post, or submit it to any of several other social bookmarking sites, in a few easy steps. To see it in action, Purple heart and “Social Bookmarking (Digg This)” link at the bottom of this post, then DIGG THIS POST. I’d do it for you!

SEO Friendly Images

SEO Friendly Images automatically sets the proper ALT and TITLE attributes for images you put on your blog, and if you haven’t added these tags, it adds them according to criteria you set. SEO Friendly Images also validates the xHTML in the post, to W3C standards. That’s a lot of technical gibberish to say that this plugin cleans up your posts and tags images, so they are easily indexed by search engines.

Tell-a-Friend

Tell-a-Friend adds a button to the end of every blog post, that allows readers to email the post to a friend, or group of friends. To see this plugin in action, click the “SHARE THIS POST” button at the bottom of this post. In marketing, “calls to action” are very important. While you might expect that your readers, clients, or customers should know exactly what you want them to do, you can be reasonably assured that you will have a much better response, if you just ask them to do something specific. That’s what this plugin does. It asks your readers to spread the word about your great content.

Ultimate Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a very powerful website statistics service provided by Google. The Ultimate Google Analytics plugin adds JavaScript to each post, page, and link on your blog, that allows Google Analytics to generate statistics on what your visitors are doing while they are on your site. Additionally, Google Analytics can tell you how visitors arrived at your site (did they enter a search term in a search engine, or click on an inbound link on another site), and how they left your site (did they click on an outbound link, or did they close the window or browser).

I have found Google Analytics to be an irreplaceable tool, in that it allows me to very effectively, guage the effectiveness of certain aspects of my sites. It allows me to work to increase the “stickiness” of my site, by adding more of the features that my readers like, and it allows me to track the effectiveness of different advertising campaigns, because I can see which landing pages people are entering through, then what they are doing once they are on my site.

For anyone who is serious about conducting business on the web, I highly recommend a good statistics program, and Google Analytics is by far the best that I have used.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade does just what it’s name implies. It automatically upgrades your wordpress installation to the newest version. This is a great time saver for me, because I have multiple Wordpress blogs that I manage, and manually upgrading all of them would be a real hassle.

yaCAPTCHA

yaCAPTCHA adds a CAPTCHA field to the end of forms. CAPTCHA is the technology that creates distorted text images, to ensure that the person filling out a form is an actual person. In concert with Akismet, yaCAPTCHA insures that the only comments I get on my blog, are from real people. I also use CAPTCHA technology on my subscription form. To see this plugin in action, comment on any post on this blog.

While this is not a topic that I suspect I will be expanding on in the future, I wanted to include it here mainly to encourage creativity in web design, and to show some of the techniques I have used in the past (not saying anything about how effective they were). I originally had three posts on this topic, but the first was so site-specific, I decided not to include it here.

One Last Babelfish Post
May 12, 2006
O.k. this is my last Babelfish post, but this is a good one. Most of us have heard about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), yet it is a mystery to all but the most seasoned web pro. Companies charge thousands of dollars per year to keep other companies’ web pages at the top of the search lists. Web designers and marketing people pull their hair out trying to get their websites found on Google. We hear stories of Google removing whole sites from their database. What are we supposed to do?

There is an easy way to vastly improve your search engine standings and help your site to be found. Build a great website. I know it sounds silly, but it works. If you have a great website, it will translate to better search engine ratings.

So what makes a great website? First, you have to have a lot of relevant content. If you are building a dog grooming website, have pages for contact information, techniques for handling different breeds, tools of the trade, shampoo and flea dip recomendations, a secure online store, staff bios, pictures of past clients, tips for grooming at home and anything else that is pertinent. The more relevant content you have the better. Just make sure the content is relevant. Having a page dedicated to safecracking on your dog grooming site really won’t help anything.

This is where Babelfish comes in. Once you have your site set up and looking good, start translating it. Babelfish allows you to translate whole pages of your site into 12 different languages. That means that your relevant English content becomes relevant Spanish, Greek, Korean, Japanese, Portugese, Dutch, Russian, German, Chinese and Italian content. Take the time to capture the code and post the translated pages to your web server. This will multiply your content many times, and you don’t have to spend hours and dollars creating new content.

Enjoy, Garritt

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Babelfish
May 11, 2006

I recently began the monumental project of translating the Realty Response and Realty Response Connections websites into spanish. This task is complicated to begin with, but the fact that I do not speak Spanish only makes things worse. Luckily, we have a wonderfully dedicated agent on staff who speaks Spanish. Consuelo set out on the tedious process of translating the website, page by page. She was doing a great job, but it was very slow going. Then we discovered Babelfish.

Babelfish is an excellent web translation tool provided by the good people at Altavista. You can check out the very basic front end to Babelfish at http://babelfish.altavista.com. At first glance it is not very impressive, but as you use the tool, you find that it makes very tedious translations possible, whole pages at a time.

The basic user interface allows you to translate blocks of text from English into 12 other languages including Dutch, Greek, Portugese, Japanese, Italian, Russian, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Korean, French and Spanish, . It also allows you to translate text in most of those languages back into english and to enter specialized characters for multiple languages via an onscreen keyboard. Just these capabilities make this free tool an incredible value, but there is more. By linking your website to Babelfish through a relatively simple html tag, you can allow visitors to view your site in any of those languages.

There are a few limitations to this amazing tool, but they can be pretty easily overcome. The first is that Babelfish can not translate button images. So if you use buttons on your site, they will remain unchanged. This is remedied by creating an all-text, or mostly-text page for translation. The second limitation lies with dynamic pages. Babelfish doesn’t like PHP or non UTF-8 encoding. That severly limits it’s usefulness for blogs. I have found that WordPress pages do not translate to languages that do not use the basic western character set. It will do Spanish and French on a WordPress blog, but if you want to translate your blog to Russian or Greek, good luck. Even with these limitations, Babelfish is a tool that every webdesigner should keep in his belt.

For businesses, Babelfish offers a relatively simple and inexpensive way to reach a wider audience, and even conduct web business overseas.