Charm FX

If you’ve followed this blog long you know my preference for Wordpress as the platform of choice for blogging and site building especially for creative people showcasing their work.  It’s not terribly difficult to use and its functionality can be expanded using plugins that are typically, similarly easy to use.

Not long after anyone puts their first site on their server they realize the real issue they must confront is getting anyone to take a look at what they’ve put up.  The technical side of how search engines find and rate how relevant your content is is often more arcane than many people can deal with.

To address this the following is a short list of some plugins I’ve found particularly effective in improving your site’s visibility to search engines.

The following ARE NOT specifically relevant to web sites of artists, performers, film producers or other creative people.  They’re just the basics of what’s necessary to begin to technically make any web site friendly to the search engines.

• All in One SEO Pack
• All in One Webmaster
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Karailiev’s sitemap
• WP tags to Technorati

The above automatically add code to your pages to help the various engines find and index your site as well as making ‘tags’ available on the post pages.  Some require you to get some account IDs from the various search engine services to add to their config screens, but they include the links for where to get those.

A few more useful plugins that aren’t specifically relevant to SEO or search engines are:

• Smart 404 – When content cannot be found, Smart 404 will use the current URL to attempt to find matching content, and redirect to it automatically.
• Sociable – Automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites.
• Ultimate Google Analytics – Enable Google Analytics on your blog. Has options to also track external links, mailto links and links to downloads on your own site.

Most of the above can be added from within your Wordpress admin area or found on Wordpress.org.  If you can’t find some try a Google search.

I hope you find this useful.  This list is only a short list of some of my preferences.  Please feel free to add any you’ve found effective in the comments.