WordPress tweaks and addons

WordPress already is a world class product. In fact free and the best personal CMS solution to date, but like any other software a few tweaks and add-ons go a long way in making your page/site effective.
I’ll be listing a set of links on this page for your consideration soon. Here are a few to start with…

  1. Optimise Page Titles, URL Structure, Meta descriptions and more. Very effective writeup.
  2. List of Ping Services — let others know you’re posting.
  3. Verify your site with Google, and notify Google. You need a google account(free) to use their services.
  4. Feedburner Feed Replacement — is another must have plugin for WordPress. while WP’s own RSS out of the box kinda works, FeedBurner makes sure you deliver content to your RSSed subscribers and even get statistics to that end. Some features require $$ but a free account with Feed Burner will give you a lot. Another reason why!
  5. Create a Sitemap (there are numerous ways of doing this, here is my write-up). You can use Wordpress Sitemap generator plugin.
  6. If you’re not happy with the theme you currently have you can always build your own or chose from a wide range of readily available ones. Or more at OS Skins, simple minimalist themes, Planet WordPress… and very recently added WP Theme generator if you like sinking your teeth into a bit of web design.
  7. Add meta description to your post automatically through Head META Descriptor plugin from guff. Increases Search engine visibility if your first few lines have good keywords.
  8. Search_Hilite plugin search results can be highlighted for easy readability.
  9. Priceless WordPress Guides by Pods
  10. A lot of words, a lot of text, not very well presented but has links to some good SEO related tools for WordPress
  11. Role Manager is particularly useful whenthere is more than one author and different levels of permissions needs to be implemented.
  12. Crawl Test at SEOMoz — this is currently available to premium members only but due to launch in April 2007. This tool helps quickly diagnose search engine crawling issues like areas that have potential issues such as if there are a numerous pages with the same title tag (keyword cannibalization?), bad HTTP response codes such as 404 or 500, or a high number of pages that aren’t being spidered by the search engines. If you’re curious to find out how the results look, here is a sample that was run for http://web2.0awards.org.