Over the years, Alex King has written and released a large number of incredibly useful plugins for WordPress. There’s one in particular I wanted to highlight for you all very quickly today called Delink Comment Author. I’ll let Alex describe it himself:

This plugin gives you the ability to remove the link a commenter left as their URL without removing the entire comment. A link to do this is added to your new comment e-mail notifications and to the comments list in your admin area.

What a great idea. I run multiple blogs and each one has the same problem of people leaving comments with their name being a keyword phrase. It drives me crazy but this is a great way to stop those people dead in their tracks.

You can download Delink Comment Author or check out its README first if you want to learn a little bit more.

For each blog that we run, we try and get as much quality content as we can get. The more content we have, the more pages that will be indexed by search engines, which means more traffic will be driven towards our WordPress blog. What do you do if you do not have enough time to write up a thousand entries? Well that is where you can show other entries from other sites.

When you are editing your “widgets”, you may have noticed that there was a “widget” that is called RSS. Well you already have an RSS button, so what could this possibly be? Well this is what can give you more content on your WordPress blog. All you have to do is activate the RSS widget to your sidebar, add an RSS feed link to it, and there you have it. You will now get more links to more content on your sidebar.

This is a great widget because it will allow visitors that come to your site to receive the information that they are looking for, which means they are more likely to come back to your website again.

The only problem however is that the content will not be on your own WordPress blog. Instead it will be a link to the original content. Now you may be thinking why would you want people to leave? The thing is you can fix it so the content opens up in another window, so when they are all done reading it, they will close that window and be right back at your website, where they are more likely to stay.

The search engines use to pick websites that had content relative to the users search terms. That is still the case today, only there are a lot more factors that affect which results will show up. One of the main factors in search results is SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

One of the best ways to show up higher in search engines is by fixing your Title Tags. The Title Tags are the titles that show up on the very top of your browser. These titles help search engines determine what the name of you link is. So if you have a title tag that is completely opposite of your content, chances are you will not get any traffic from search engines.

So how can we change the title tags on our blogs? Well there is a great plug-in that does the job, its called SEO Title Tag. This plug-in allows you to change the title of your posts, your front page, your tags, and also your categories.

SEO Title Tag is really easy to install as well; it is just like the traditional plug-in with a little step on the side. There are two steps to installation, all you need to do is upload the folder into the plug-ins folder. After that, you just need to edit your header.php file with a little bit of text then you are done. It is simple as that.

So if you are really serious about getting better traffic from search engines, you definitely need to install this plug-in, and start naming your articles.

There are a huge amount of WordPress plugins out there that offer statistics. Some of them are as simple as easily inserting Google Analytics code into your theme while others are full-blown tie-ins with WordPress.com. If you’d rather not have your stats stored on someone else’s server you might want to look at StatPress.

Once you activate StatPress the plugin begins to store visitor data for your blog in real-time. Then you can check out information on your traffic in stats using a nice dashboard style interface (seen above).

I run and manage a handful of WordPress blogs that use a ton of different plugins. Of all those plugins, the one that is consistently used on all of the blogs is the Google XML Sitemaps plugin by Arne Brachhold.

This plugin automatically generates a valid XML sitemap of your blog every time you add or edit a post or page. The advantage to having a current sitemap is that search engines like Google and Yahoo have a much easier time crawling and then indexing your site. The faster and easier it is for search engine to do their jobs the faster and easier it will be for your blog to start appearing on search engine results.

This plugin is a no-brainer for me and is usually the first one I install and configure when I’m starting a new blog. There are other Sitemap plugins available out there but in my experience this one is the best.