Social Networking

Users of social networks like Facebook and Twitter are very curious and love to click links making them sources for driving huge amounts of traffic. There are several plugins available for adding Facebook links to your blog posts automatically. One of the most downloaded and, in our opinion, better plugins is Add To Facebook. Twitter traffic is even more powerful. Two plugins that we recommend are TwitThis and TweetMeme.

Social Bookmarking

Allowing your users to easily add bookmarks to sites like StumbleUpon and del.icio.us can also be helpful in building traffic to your site. The well recognized king in this area is the Sociable plugin.

What We Use

Instead of cluttering the page with several plugins linking to all of these services we use ShareThis. You can customize the feel a little bit and it allows both Facebook and Twitter posting as well as social bookmarking.

HeadSpace2

The most important on page factor in SEO today appears to be your title tag. HeadSpace2 allows you to easily control the layout of all title tags on your WordPress blog. Along with title tag management you can control all of your description tags which, while not very important in SEO, can be very important in attracting people to click your site in the SERPs.

Redirection

What happens when you change a post’s URL? Do you know when your visitors are getting 404 errors? With Redirection you get everything you need to easily redirect posts and log any 404 errors.

Meta Robots

Until Meta Robots there hasn’t been an easy way to keep WordPress from allowing the indexing of certain pages on your blog. Now you can easily prevent the indexing of any pages/posts on your blog.

SEO Slugs

Including works like “in” and “the” in your post slugs doesn’t really do your SEO any good. SEO Slugs automatically removes all of these types of words from your slugs.

To install WP Google Analytics you just need to download the .zip file from the plugins directory, go to your WordPress admin dashboard and navigate to Plugins > New > Upload. Upload the .zip file and activate the plugin. You can then change the settings and insert your tracking code.

Caching

There are two fairly prominent caching systems for WordPress: WP-Cache2 and WP Super Cache.

WP-Cache2 is often the first caching system you should try. It doesn’t require that you use the permalinks system, although you can if you want to and you don’t need to edit any files.

WP Super Cache does require the use of permalinks and you may need to make some manual file edits, but since it’s caching is more advanced it completely relieves the use of PHP to generate your page so it will get the site running faster than WP-Cache2 can.

WP-Cache2

WP Super Cache

File Requests

Perhaps even more than PHP processing, additional page requests can really slow your site down. PHP Speedy WordPress addresses this problem by turning all of your separate .js file downloads into one file. The developer has a screenshot showing the before speed at 8.41 seconds and the after at 687ms. That’s a pretty impressive improvement.

PHP Speedy WordPress

Get the newest version here.

With the installation of just a couple extensions you can vastly speed up your WordPress site.

From the WordPress notification:

Longer explanation: This morning we received a note to our security mailing address about unusual and highly exploitable code in WordPress. The issue was investigated, and it appeared that the 2.1.1 download had been modified from its original code. We took the website down immediately to investigate what happened.

It was determined that a cracker had gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers wordpress.org, and had used that access to modify the download file. We have locked down that server for further forensics, but at this time it appears that the 2.1.1 download was the only thing touched by the attack. They modified two files in WP to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution.

You can download WordPress here.

WordPress has also released version 2.1. There are over 500 bugfixes available, so it is highly recommended to upgrade. You can download the release here.