How a few great WordPress plugins have saved my bacon



Contributing Writer
Photo: Piggy Upclose Credit: Gareth Weeks


Developing my site so that it supports multiple authors has been a challenge.  The logistics of taking on so many authors and the responsibility of making the site a vehicle to promote their writing has been daunting.  Fortunately WordPress and my contributors have been very forgiving.  For the last couple of months I’ve experimented with quite a few things and wanted to share three WordPress plugins that I found super helpful (and hope you will too).

WordPress SEO by Yoast

Most people know about Joost de Valk’s comprehensive WordPress plugin “WordPress SEO by Yoast,” but I think it bears repeating how good it is.  I credit Cammi Pham for introducing me to it, and it has made a lot of difference.  It does some pretty cool things, including handling the Google “rel=author” attribution for each author on site and offering a comprehensive list of ways your post is strong and ways it could improve.  But maybe the most valuable thing that it does for me is to keep my keywords consistent in the headline, meta description and throughout the text of each post.  Taking SEO out of the equation altogether, the keyword analysis makes sure that readers know what a post is about from the headline and the description, and that in the body of the post I’ve actually written about what they say I have.  I can go back through old posts and show you where I integrated this – the consistency in the content has been that noticable.

One Click Close Comments

I made the mistake of playing with my comment settings and ended up closing many of my posts.  I’ve never had to reopen a closed post before and had a lot of trouble trying to execute SQL queries to accomplish this (with a limited technical background).  I was just on the brink of probable disaster (and by that I mean I was about to do something rash that I’m convinced could have compromised the whole site) when I found the WordPress plugin “One Click Close Comments” by Scott Reilly.  With this plug-in, a simple red light / green light system appears on my list of posts.  If it’s green then comments are open and if it’s red comments aren’t.  I simply have to click the button once to toggle comments on and off.  Crisis averted!

Fanciest Author Box

I played with all kinds of author boxes, reverse engineering ones that I liked, scouring blog after blog but I never quite produced the product that I wanted.  I wanted the author box to look nice and to allow readers to be able to connect with contributors through many social platforms and that’s when I came upon “Fanciest Author Box.” Programmer Slobodan Manic put together a fantastic WordPress plugin that links an author to their website, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and last few blog articles.  I am notoriously miserly, but for $10 it’s hard to beat .  And I can see the value of having a box like this even for a single author blog, it’s THAT nice and useful.

If you made it this far and rock a WordPress blog, I’d be interested to hear what WordPress plugin you rely on to keep your site running smoothly and looking sharp….

Photo Credit

Jim Dougherty

Jim Dougherty

Writer and chief of miscellany at leaderswest.com

I aspire to give people something to think about rather than tell them what to do. My favorite Google Alert is “social media research,” I am increasingly compelled by Gen Z, and I appreciate good writers agnostic of where they write. At one time I was Kred’s 12th most influential social media blogger and Klout’s most influential person on the topic of David Hasselhoff. Transplant from Seattle living in Cincinnati. Haven’t entirely adopted the local sports teams yet.

Jim Dougherty

@jimdougherty

Writer about social media and tech at Leaders West, I also tweet as @leaderswest.

[The Glad Scientist] A fun idea… http://t.co/I4ZggKOt4v via @notsalmon – 10 hours ago

Jim Dougherty

Jim Dougherty

Related posts

  • http://just-ask-kim.com/ Kimberly Castleberry

    Congratulations on your influencial status on all Hasselhoff topics ;)

  • http://leaderswest.com Jim Dougherty

    It’s good to have a friend like Pete Bosak who will vouch for such things!

  • http://www.rocktheworldbook.com/ LoriRuff

    What an honorable man! You guys rock :) Love the plug in as well.

    And Jim… on the one click comment close. Why close comments on an entry? I’m having trouble thinking of a reason. Your insight would be much appreciated!

  • http://twitter.com/slobodanmanic Slobodan Manic

    Lori,

    When building a product, no matter what it is, few things are as rewarding as getting great feedback, thanks!

  • jimdougherty

    Thanks Lori, I was trying to integrate Facebook comments into the site when their plug-in came out and it did something to my comments that closed all of them. To re-open comments I would have had to do some SQL changes that made me uncomfortable. The value of that plug-in for me was to re-open comments where they had been closed, not to close them.. though if I needed to I suppose I could.

    The only good reason that I’ve seen to close comments (that I’ve read) is to maintain some SEO optimization benefit, but I don’t generate enough traffic from search engines for that to be a huge consideration (and I don’t really like the thought of closing comments to game the system). Thanks for reading and commenting!

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