Tadd Mencer

Posts Tagged ‘Platinum’

Here are some great finds for this week! Thanks to Weblog Tools Collection for the descriptions and keeping us in the loop!

Theme Tester

The Theme Tester plugin allows you to change themes and view the results without the visitors to your blog seeing any changes. The visitors may notice some changes if your current theme uses blog options that a new theme overwrites.

Donations Cloud

The Donations Cloud plugin allows visitors to donate and leave a link with a link text. As soon as a donation is done, the blog is notified by PayPal, and the links will automatically appear on the receiver’s website (at a designated position)

Branded Admin

The Branded Admin Plugin plugin allows for the application of custom header and footer graphics to the WordPress Admin Section. It also removes WordPress links to better distinguish the site as a custom work and reinforce the sites branding.

Mortgage Loan Calculator

Mortgage Loan Calculator is a plugin for any loan officer or real estate agent looking to provide good-looking, functional, valuable content to readers.

Platinum SEO

Platinum SEO offers all the features of All in One SEO plugin plus more. You can import your settings from All in One SEO to Platinum SEO.

Ok, everyone wants to know effective ways to get more traffic for your web site, right? Heck, I do! If you have a site – you want people to come to it, right?

Let me start by saying that if you really want to push the envelope, you need a system that’s SEP (search engine optimized) friendly. Let’s say you’re using WordPress, because that’s the best way to go. Really.

Let me also say, I’m not an expert. This isn’t an end all and a guarantee to get you the most hits for your site. This is my suggestions and recommendations.

First, in the ‘Settings‘ page, make sure you have ‘Permalinks‘ set up. This is the first, and extremely important, thing you need to do. Otherwise the rest is kind of useless.

This is what I roll with. Simple, easy and clear.

Now, on to the plugs – this is where we need to start installing some simple plug ins that will help you really roll out your SEO.

These are some plugs for WordPress that I’d roll with:

Configurable Tag Cloud
A tag cloud plugin for WordPress 2.3 to give you more flexibility with the styling of your tag cloud. By Keith Solomon.

Google XML Sitemaps
This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Configuration Page By Arne Brachhold.

NoFollow Free
Remove the nofollow tag from your blog’s comments with a lot of options customizable, per user type removal, per comments count removal etc… Supports multilingual and a Top Commenters sidebar Widget. By Michele Marcucci.

Platinum SEO Pack
Complete SEO solution for your WordPress blog. By Techblissonline Dot Com.

SEO Smart Links
SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags. By Vladimir Prelovac.

Slashdigglicious (More on social book marking later)
Add user-submission icons and links at the bottom of each post: Digg, del.icio.us, etc. By Robert Tsai.

WordPress Mobile Edition
Show a mobile view of the post/page if the visitor is on a known mobile device. Questions on configuration, etc.? Make sure to read the README. By Alex King.

WP Auto Tagger
Automatically finds tags based on your post content. By iDope.

These are all pretty self explanatory. If I had to pick two or three I’d definitely go with Platinum SEO Pack, Google XML Sitemaps and WP Auto Tagger. These are all pretty important, especially for later in this ‘tutorial’.

Tomorrow – RSS Feeds.

Many people know me. Some, know me really well. Only my wife knows me through-and-through.

What some of you may not realize is I’m a person who likes to create. Whether it’s a graphic, photo, story, music … I like things created. I’m one who thrives on imagination.

However, I’ve come to realize something. In the past few years I’ve had an increasingly hard time really … CREATING … anything. A graphic, a story, a song .. nothing.

It started when my band, GreyHalo, disbanded. I
think I had the innate fear of failing, yet again. I know the reasons my band broke up. Some where my fault, some where not. So I’ve had a mental block – fear of failure.

The other thing I realized is that a question on my mind whenever I start working on something is “will this sell?” This is the biggest stumbling block I think.

WHO CARES!?

That’s what I need to start telling myself. Who cares if my music goes platinum, my book is on a New York Times Best Seller list or my artwork gets shown in galleries.
What I think I need to remember, and so many others do to, is that you need to do art that pleases you and tickles your fancy. If you’re sitting back trying to figure out what everyone else is going to catch on to – then you’re pretty much screwed from that point. You’ll hate everything, nothing will get done and you – will – fail.

So, my mind is being reset. I will design for the sake of designing and try REALLY REALLY hard to not think what anyone other than myself is going to like seeing.

This is not going to be easy.