Category — Plugin

You will never have to search for a wordpress plugin again. All that you need to do is bookmark this page. That is a promise.In this post I shall be listing most useful plugins that will help you in

1. Search Engine Optimization (8)
2. Effective Internal Linking (3)
3. Commenting (Including spam protection) (8)
4. Social Media Marketing (Digg, stumbleupon, plain email) (6)
5. Caching (1)
6. Navigation (3)
7. Advertisement and Monetization (6)

Wordpress plugins for Search Engine Optimization

• Google XML Sitemaps: Slap yourself and slap hard if you do not have it already. The plugin creates a sitemap for your blog and keeps updating it automatically everytime you make a new post. Super useful plugin that needs to be installed immediately.
• Sitemap Generator: Highly useful for effectively passing link-juice to the important blog-posts. It produces an html sitemap for your blog that your human visitors can see. You can see it in action here. It provides you with the ability to group your posts into categories, choose which posts to show in the sitemap and which ones to hide. Use the plugin to list your most important posts and then build significant links (internal and external) to this page.
• Canonical URL Plugin: Makes use of the canonical tag feature supported by Google, yahoo and msn and thereby avoids the dreaded duplicate content issue. A must have plugin right in the category of Sitemap generator and All in one SEO Pack.
• All in One SEO Pack: A super useful and most popular wordpress plugin. Automatically optimizes the title,meta description and meta keywords for your post. Allows you to customize them if you want.
• Platinum SEO Pack Similar to the All in One SEO Pack. However some bloggers seem to prefer this one
• Ultimate Tag Warrior : Tags are extremely helpful for targetting long-tail keywords. I know keywords in the title are important. However I can not write a title as “wordpress plugins for seo | wordpress plugins for comment management | …………..” even though I want this post to rank for all those keywords. The best solution is then to add those keywords as separate tags and then I shall have one url pointing to this page with title wordpress plugins for seo and another url with title wordpress plugins for comment management.
• Plugin to solve canonical url issue : Google treats http://binaryday.com, http://www.binaryday.com, http://binaryday.com/index.php and http://www.binaryday.com/index.php as 4 different urls !!!!!!! This splits the external link juice amongst the urls and creates problem of duplicate content. The www-preference (linked above) solves the issue by doing a 301 redirect of all 4 urls to a single url.
• Permalink Migration plugin : Permalink structure determines the format of url for individual posts. The structure of your permalink has significant impact on seo. The problem is if you change your permalink structure then old bookmarks and external links will stop working. This plugin solves the problem and allows you to optimize your permalink structure for best seo result.
• Search Meter : Your blog is the best place to conduct keyword research. It tells you what are the keywords yours users are searching for so that you can create content that satisfies their need.
• SEO Friendly Images: More people search for images than you think. Image search has become even important after Google’s universal search roll out put image into standard Google SERP. It is common knowledge that having good alt and title tag helps a lot in image search. The seo friendly images plugin will autmatically assign an alt and title tag in situations where you have forgotten to put one.

Wordpress plugins for Effective Internal Linking

Internal linking is very often the most neglected SEO aspect. Considering that this is the single most important reason for wikipedia pages ranking so high, I am surprised that not many bloggers use it. Effective internal linking keeps your olders posts fresh on google index and builds new links to them, thereby protecting flow of traffic to them.

• Yet another related posts plugin Shows related posts at the bottom of each post. Increases number of pageviews per user.
• Show your best work to visitor: It calculates popularity based on pageviews, comments and trackbacks. Helps you display the most popular posts to visitors thereby increasing the probability of them getting impressed and subscribing/ linking to you.
• Internal Linking: The plugin lists the most widely used words and against them you can specify a url to link to. Then whenever you use any of those words, it automatically inserts a link to the relevant post. Great for keeping content fresh in Google-cache.

Wordpress plugins for better Commenting and spam protection

• Akismet: You can not allow commenting on your blog without installing this plugin.
• CommentLuv This plugin shows a link to the latest blog post of the commentator. Definite encouragement for other bloggers to leave a comment on your blog especially if your blog gets decent traffic.
• Top Commentators widget Shows the top commentators of your blog. You can select the duration over which the top commentator is calculated. Avoid the temptation to set it to 1 day as then only spammers will show up. If you set the time period to 7 days or a month, regular commentators on your blog get a free link from you.
• Show an email to first time commentator : It does exactly what it says i.e sends an email to the first time commentator on your blog.
• Most recent comments Displays the recent comments on your sidebar. Keeps the discussion alive by getting attention to posts where discussion is going on.
• subscribe to comments plugin lets a user know when someone has replied to a comment that she has posted. Works like a charm in getting some passionate discussion going.
• Nested comments is a great way to keep different threads of discussion among the users separate. Not necessary for smaller blogs with less than 10 comments per post though.
• comment highlighter allows you to make the comments by the author stand out by highlighting the same in a different color.

Wordpress plugins for Social Media and plugins to help your blog go viral

If you have a relatively new blog, then you will do well to focus more on social media sites like Digg and Stumbleupon, rather than waiting for google to start showing you some love. Social media tends to treat each individual post on its merit. Hence if you can write good and interesting topic then you can attract traffic.

• Addthis : This is one of the few plugins that I use on Binaryday. Adds a button to the post. As the users clicks on the button, it opens a page with large number of social media sites links. Keeps your site clutter free while providing the user an option to add your site to any social media he likes.
• diggZ-Et : It puts the familiar digg button on your posts. Works like a good reminder to your visitors to digg up your post. Hope you will remember to digg this post by seeing that big digg button at the bottom of this post.
• Stumble-It : Puts a stumble button at the bottom of your post. Great for reminding users to stumble you.
• Stumbleupon for wordpress : It allows users to read more similar posts from your blog. Really helpful at increasing pageviews/user.
• WordTwit: Highly useful plugin for publicising your blog on twitter. It automatically pushes your published post to your twitter account.
• email this: Allows users to email your post to their friends. You will be surprised by how useful it can be.

Wordpress plugin for efficient caching

If you have done the above steps (SEO, internal linking and social media marketing) correctly then there is a good chance that your server will be having tough time serving up your blog to the massive traffic that is flowing in. Wp-Super-Cache reduces the load on your server by caching your blog pages and then serving static html pages to subsequent users.

Wordpress plugins for Better Navigation

• Pagination Plugin : Display clear and beautiful links to the inner pages of your blog. Offers the ability to style the page bar according to your choice with little bit of coding.
• Horizontal Dropdown Menu : This is not a plugin. Rather this is a code sample explaining how to create a magazine style horizontal menu. I could not find a good plugin for this functionality. If you hate coding, here is a plugin. But then the fact is the demo looks little messy.
• Sticky Post : Adds a sticky post feature to your blog.

Wordpress plugins for Advertisement and Monetization

• All in One Adsense and YPN and adsense deluxe allow you to insert adsense ads into your blog post. Can help in increasing CTR significantly.
• AdSense Sharing Revenue and Earnings System enables you to share revenue with blog authors
• Now Reading Display books from amazon and earn commisson
• Paypal Donate Add a link to your paypal account so users can tip you
• chitika plugin helps you integrate chitika ads to your blog.

Wordpress plugins for Everything else

• Contact Commentators : It allows you to contact the previous commentators on your blog. You can now thank your new commenters for their comment, appreciate long term active commenters for their continued support, inform all commenters about new services, send greetings on special occasions or events, analyze the commenters’ contribution etc
• Wp-Security-Scan It scans your wordpress installation for security vulnerabilities like 777 file permission and offers corrective measures
• Wp-DB-Manager: Automates the backup, repair and all other admin functionalities related to wp database.

Categories is one of the few parts of a wordpress blog. The Category Order plugin allows you to easily reorder your categories the way you want via drag and drop.

This plugin displays a “digg” button for each post. If you run a tech oriented blog, then you shall be surprised by the traffic potential of digg even when you do not hit the first page.

This plugin is for those who want greater control over their blog. Selectively add social network buttons such as digg, sphinn, etc to your posts or theme design. Use this if you want finer control over where and which buttons were placed on your site. Sometimes you may have marketing posts so you want to link to Sphinn, but sometimes you have technical posts so Reddit would be a better choice.

The text widget that comes with the wordpress does not allow you to include PHP code. This plugin adds a new widget called Samsarin PHP Widget, which will allow you to include PHP code, as well as plain text and HTML.

Coders like to use spaces, carriage returns, new lines, tabs and indentation to make their HTML documents human-readable. This helps collaboration and debugging of the HTML document. However, all these features add to the filesize of the resultant HTML document. This structural information is totally ignored by browsers. This plugin removes spaces, carriage returns, new lines and tabs from your HTML document. You can therefore freely use these features while writing HTML, safe in the knowledge that it will not bloat the final HTML document.
With this plugin you can also mark areas of your HTML template where you want to preserve white space – for example – in areas containing Javascript which needs carriage returns and new lines to function correctly.

Your blog can look really cool with some interactive google maps. Embedding google maps into wordpress blog has become really easy with Google Maps Wordpress Plugin. However you need wordpress version 2.5.1 and php5 for this plugin to work properly.

Every blog has two types of visitors : returning readers and first time visitors. Returning readers already know what to expect on your blog and come to your site for its content and for what you write. First time visitors, (mostly search engine visitors), come because they are looking for something particular, look at the page, and leave.

The returning visitors should be treated as premium members because they spread word about your blog and link to you. Anyways they are least likely to click on your advertisements. So no point in showing a lot of adsense advertisements to them and put them off. I shall rather show them CPA advertisements to them as they trust my blog.

Whereas one time visitors are most likely to click on the adsense advertisement as they are looking for something. If I have to monetize my blog with adsense then I shall show the adsense advertisements to these one time visitors. However the compexity of the code required to determine if the visitor is a regular user or onetime user deterred me from using this strategy.

However now you can control the display of the advertisements using who sees ad plugin for wordpress

While inserting the adsense code you just mention what type of user can see the ad. The plugin takes care of everything else.

A really successful wordpress blog can consume a lot of server power as each page needs to be dynamically created for each user. Now you can remove the need for doing so by using WP Super Cache plugin.

This plugin generates static html files from the dynamic WordPress blog. Once the file is generated your webserver will serve the static html file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

Advantages of WP Super Cache

1. It saves server power. If your blog has become popular and you are yet to move to a dedicated server, then you should use this plugin.
2. It will speed up your wordpress blog. That in turn makes the user experience of the blog readers much better. Also a faster blog/website is liked by most search engines, including Google.
3. Static html pages are better than dynamic ones from SEO point of view

I have been working on this idea of “There’s more to selected text than cut/copy & paste” for past few weekends.
What do we do when you come across a word whose meaning you don’t know or a term you want to know more about while reading a Charles Dicken’s or Shakespeare’s work or may be just a newspaper?
Most of us simply ignore it or think “I’ll lookup in a dictionary when I get up” and we never do that. There are a very chosen few of us who purposely keep a dictionary with us while reading.
Consider this scenario while reading on the web. It’s lot easier, right? just select the term, right click, copy, open a new window, open google, paste and then wait for result. Fast enough but also irritating enough to break your concentration.
I came up with a widget to try to solve this problem. As of now I call it “DotGyan”. It allows you to search a word/term there and then with least interference in your reading pleasure.

It works like this…
1. You see a word like lagniappe whose meaning you don’t know. The word can be there any where on the blog or webpage.
2. Select the word as you would do for cut/copy & paste.
3. You see a dot at the end of your selection.
4. Click this dot.
5. You get the options (on what I call a “GyanBox”) to search the term in Google, Wikipedia or Wiktionary.
6. Click on one of the three options.
7. Rest you will get it yourself.

TRY THIS OUT, RIGHT HERE ON BINARYDAY !

What if I don’t want to search the selected term? Simple, just ignore the dot. It will go away in 3 seconds.
What if I want to edit the selected text before searching? Well, just edit it in the text box you see on the GyanBox.

Some may argue that we already have such softwares. True but almost all of them are available as browser plugins and how many of us actually know about such plugins and even if we know how many of us install them? Also plugins are browser dependent. DotGyan is browser independent and it shifts the installation trouble from user to web-master.

I have installed DotGyan on BinaryDay. Go ahead, Try it out Please! (Just select any word or phrase and click the dot)
DotGyan is right now in a very initial phase. Please give your valuable comments and suggestions as comments to this post or mail me at vineet7kumar@gmail.com.
Your comments and suggestions can pertain to anything from looks & colors to any new feature you would like to have. Also suggest some good names for the widget.

Team BinaryDay will be more than happy to hear from you

PS: If you are a blogger or a webmaster and would like to install DotGyan on your blog or page please drop me a mail at vineet7kumar@gmail.com … I will love to have DotGyan on your Blog or page.

PS: Currently safari browser and Internet explorer less that IE7 are not supported.

If you happen to use firefox and if you dont want other people to see some of the tab labels or what you are upto here we have a plugin available which allows to hide title and icon of the selected tab/page.

Thus it provides more privacy at workplace or some time even at home when mom or someone else go for sudden check on your screen..
The Page Title Eraser:

The Page Title Eraser extension can be used in different ways, by right clicking on a page or from

It also has a hot key Ctrl + Shift + H which will hide or unhide the title bar.

So If you want to hide the titles, then this is a decent extension you can use

Plugin can be downloaded from http://www.download.com/Page-Title-Eraser/3000-11745_4-10746639.html