A checklist of the most important steps would be a helpful asset, and guess what – I found a great one for you! MaxBlogPress has a featured article Laying the foundations for a successful WordPress website that not only has a comprehensive list but also explains why these steps are important.

One of the items on the list is to set up 7 auto responder emails to go out to new newsletter optins. I have to admit, I’ve been very bad about following up with regular newsletters on SEO Diva. I’d like to write a complete newsletter, with lots of information, photos, etc. but can never find the time.

Well, perhaps I should just keep it simple and send you great SEO tips that you can use to increase site rankings. Sound like a good idea?

Here are 10 unique WordPress plugins to help your blog become more search engine friendly.

1. All in one SEO Pack This handy plugin will help you take care of all your meta and title tags. It allows you to easily customize these important attributes without the need to dig into your html code.

2. Google XML Sitemaps This is a great tool that lets all the major search engines know where your pages exist. Sometimes the spiders won’t be able to find every page on your site, so it’s important to have this file so that they know they are there.

3. SEO Friendly Images Perhaps you didn’t know that the "Title" and "Alt" attributes on your images are important to search engines. Not only do these tags let the search engine know what your page is about, but they also increase the likelihood that your page will be found through alternative means, like Google Image Search.

4. WP-Super-Cache This plugin will create static html versions of each of your pages so that they will load faster in your users’ browsers. It also means that the Google spider will be able to access your site faster. Since the spider only spends a certain amount of time on each site, faster page loads mean more of your pages will be indexed. Google has also indicated that all things equal, faster pages will appear ahead of slower pages in the search engine results.

5. Robot Meta This plugin helps you to customize your robots.txt file. This is basically a file that allows you to give specific instructions to the search engine spiders when they visit your site. For example, you can prevent the spiders from indexing your category pages so that you aren’t penalized for duplicate content.

6. SEO Smart Link This is a plugin that will search through your content and automatically create links to other pages within your site. For example, if you have a post about poodle training tips, and you mention poodle training in another post, a link will automatically be created. This helps the search engines understand better what your site and each page is all about.

7. I Love Social Bookmarking This plugin will automatically insert an attractive drop-down menu so that your readers can automatically bookmark your website on any of the most popular social bookmarking sites. This helps the search engines find your content easier, and it can help boost your ranking if more people discover your site and link to it.

8. Nofollow Case by Case The "nofollow" attribute was created by Google in order to fight the growing problem of comment spam. By default, WordPress will automatically nofollow people who leave comments on your blog. Unfortunately, this has the undesirable side effect of discouraging people from commenting because they know they won’t get "credit" for their backlink. This plugin allows you to give credit to people for their comments, while at the same time discouraging spammers by allowing you to nofollow their backlinks on a case-by-case basis.

9. SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin If you happen to have duplicate content on your blog for some reason, this plugin allows you to specify which page you’d like Google to index. This allows you to put as much duplicate content on your blog as you wish while at the same time avoiding the dreaded duplicate content penalty.

10. Redirection This plugin lets you easily manage 301 redirects and 404 errors. Mismanaging these can have an adverse effect on your search engine rankings, and Google can even de-index you if you have too many 404 errors. Rather than fiddling with the access files of your website, you can manage these easily with this plugin.

Implement a few of these SEO plugins today, and you should see vastly improved search engine rankings in a short period of time. A few of them require absolutely no maintenance, so there is really no reason not to utilize them.

This post was brought to you by Tom Walker, a writer and designer from the UK who works with a leading online store specialising in HP supplies. For more of his writing, visit their blog where he posts about advertising in print media.

That’s when I discovered that the default for WP is

I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors

Yikes! That means unless you know to go under “Settings”  and then “Privacy” and change it to the following:

I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers

…the search engines will skip over your WordPress blog or site. It really sucks that this is the default.

It’s okay, in fact a good idea, to block search engines like Google while you’re building the site, but make sure you change the privacy option when you’re ready to invite them in!

You can block the parts of your site that you don’t want seen by using the following code in your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: /sitemap.xml

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-content/cache/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-login.php

I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors

This prevents the site from being crawled while it’s still sitting there with the default HELLO WORLD! post, which I’ve had happen within a few minutes of activating a WordPress blog or site. It seems to take the search engine a long time to come back and crawl the site again once that’s happened.

If you do this, don’t do what I did on a new site after it was ready, and forget to change the option to:

I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers

That web site sat there in all its shining glory for two weeks, totally ignored by the Google bot, until a light bulb finally went off in my head.

That’s better than what happened to a client a couple of years ago…his web developer had forgotten to remove the site-wide “no index” robots tag after the site was finished. The poor guy had spent a lot of money on this ecommerce site, and after over six months of no activity, he contacted the SEO company I was working for at the time, and we discovered the problem.

It pays to check everything, then check everything several more times!

UPDATE: Not sure which update made this change, but now the privacy option is the default in WordPress.

I’ve discovered that when I update plugins, I’ve got to go back and check all my settings, which obviously I forgot to do this time around. Arrrgh!

One of the most problematic plugins for me in this regard is All in One SEO. It’s a great plugin, but whenever I upgrade it I have to go the settings and enable it yet again. I don’t know why the developer makes that the default; perhaps because he wants me see his donation request. All it really does is irritate me.

On this blog I use Platinum SEO. I noticed that it did not change the permalink structure in the “Permalinks” settings when I updated the settings. So, apparently it doesn’t work as well as I thought, and I may have to change over to All in One SEO. Since the developer sees fit to tweak it weekly (at least it seems like it) I’ll have to stay on top of it, or once again, my “pretty permalinks” won’t be so pretty.

The plugin is called Free Traffic Getting SEO Plugin for WP. Once you’ve installed it on your site, it recommends the best plugins to download for SEO purposes. (It’s so easy to add plugins with the latest versions of WordPress – you just click on “add new” under Plugins in the Admin panel, type in the name of the plugin you want, and install it.)

The cool thing for a lot of non-SEO people, besides the guidance on plugins, is that it will then configure all the plugins’ settings for best SEO results. This is great if you’re not sure which ones to use and then how to set them up properly.

I already have everything it recommended on all my sites, with the correct settings, with one notable exception. It was a plugin I didn’t know about and it’s a good one. (Nope, not gonna tell you! You’ll have to download Jeff Johnson’s plugin and see for yourself.)

This plugin certainly does no harm to a blog or site, and can be quite helpful, so I definitely recommend it. There’s no malware, or secret settings that send your Adsense money to him, nothing like that. If for some reason you don’t like the settings you can change one or set everything back the way it was.

To get the plugin you have to join Jeff’s newsletter. I’m happy to report I haven’t been inundated with emails, which happens sometimes when I sign up for something. Instead, he promises emails over the next few weeks with tutorials and more free tools. I’m looking forward to seeing what he has to offer. Sometimes just one tip can make all the difference in how well a web site ranks and draws traffic.

I don’t recommend things lightly, and I’m pretty cynical about the myriad offers online. But this is one that could be helpful to you, it’s free, and it does no harm.

Speaking of newsletters, if you haven’t subscribed yet, be sure to subscribe to mine right away. I’m preparing my first newsletter, and I’m including a really good SEO tip that helped one person get to the #1 position on Google for a very nice keyword phrase.

Since I use HostGator, I’m going to show you screen shots from there. (By the way, I highly recommend them for hosting your blog or site – customer support is the absolute BEST.)

1.  Login to your Cpanel, then click on your host’s MySQL administration tool (I.E. phpmyadmin):

2.  Locate and select your WordPress database

3.  From your WordPress database, locate and select the wp_users table (Note: the wp prefix may differ) and then click the browse icon

4.  Locate admin and click the edit icon

5.  Under the user_login column, change admin to your preferred WordPress administrative login name and then click go

Do you go directly into WordPress or Blogger, and write them there? Or do you write them in Word, then copy and paste?

My absolutely favorite tool in blogging is Windows LiveWriter. It’s a free desktop application – I write my entries offline, and can preview them in the blog’s template to see what they look like before either uploading them as drafts or publishing them.

With plug-ins, you can insert:

* graphics
* hyperlinks
* tables
* maps
* video
* Adsense
* book details
* Silverlight
* Flickr images
* smilies
* Amazon links

This program is sweet when it comes to graphics. You can copy a graphic, paste it in the program, then add a drop shadow, margins, alt tag, link it to a URL, play with the size, adjust the contrast, and add effects.

When the content is uploaded, the code is totally clean – none of the junky Microsoft coding that you get with Word. Formatting is much easier – there are certain things I have problems with in the WP editor that not only work like a charm in LiveWriter but also upload perfectly.

When you’re ready to publish your blog, I suggest that instead you click on “post draft and edit online” so you can add the title and meta description before you publish it. You always do that, right?

Tip: I don’t know if you find it as much of a PITA to upload graphics for a sidebar as I do, but now I’m going to reveal my awesome shortcut! Just paste your graphic into a blank LiveWriter post, fix it up to look just right (add that nice dropshadow, an affiliate link, margins, etc.) and click on “post draft and edit online.” Your WP blog will open up in the post editing screen. Click on “html,” copy the URL of your graphic, and place it wherever you want on the blog site. Delete the faux blog post and you are DONE.

Many bloggers are also concerned that it will affect their rankings in the search engines. However, according to Google, they are quite good at identifying original content, and the result is no negative effects for the originating site.

According to Google:

Generally, we can differentiate between two major scenarios for issues related to duplicate content:

-  Within-your-domain-duplicate-content, i.e. identical content which (often unintentionally) appears in more than one place on your site

-  Cross-domain-duplicate-content, i.e. identical content of your site which appears (again, often unintentionally) on different external sites

Search engines identify duplicate results and will then filter out all but one. They try to figure out which is the original by checking which version was published first and which has the most links pointing to it. They also look at which site is the more authoritative one.

Usually, duplicate content will not affect your site negatively, but instead will get filtered out.

All that said, it’s still infuriating to find your own content on a scraped blog. There’s at least one blog that has been scraping the Diva for some time now. Contacting site owners that scrape usually does no good. One plugin that’s helpful is WP-Ban. You can block the IP address of the scraping site.

One thing I’ve been considering is putting an absolute link within or at the end of my posts, so I at least have a link to the originating site (mine), like this:

SEO Diva

As soon as I deactivated it the weird code disappeared and my blog is pretty once again.

Thanks to all of you who made suggestions on how to fix this. Since Glossy Business Cards was the first to suggest that it was a plugin, as promised I have awarded the text link prize under "Recommended."

The first commenter on this post whose suggestion works will get a free month-long text link in my sidebar right under "Recommended" as a thank you!

For established sites, it has brought a lot more traffic, more comments, and more subscribers.

A couple of new sites have gotten a nice kick in the pants with traffic, which can be hard to get when a site first starts out. However, Entrecard decided to ban them because I was selling things on them, which I find interesting since I don’t think one blog on there isn’t selling something, and some look like mini-malls.

Since I had several sites to promote, and not enough time to spend visiting other sites and dropping my card, I spent $50 for 5,000 credits, enabling me to advertise on high traffic blogs right away. This has paid off since you get more credits for clicks received on an ad, and I’ve received quite a few credits from those high volume sites. However, Entrecard stole took over 5,500 credits away from me. I’ve requested a refund.

I’ve encountered a few glitches, but a very nice (and patient) tech support guy named Ben has been helpful in ironing out the problems. Ben decided to ban me, so I’m not a fan of his anymore.

If you haven’t tried Entrecard, you may want to watch the video below and read my previous post Choose Entrecard for Great Traffic. Put the widget on your blog, work the program, and watch your stats for a week. By the end of that week, I think you’ll be surprised at the traffic you’ve received, along with some nice comments on your blog, too. That is, if Ben doesn’t ban your site.

After you’ve given Entrecard your week-long trial, I’d love it if you came back to let me know how it worked for you.

I’ve borrowed a couple of screenshots from their site to show you how it changes your admin when you write a post.

As you can see below, it gives you links to 3 popular and free keyword tools right there…with one click you can open up a new window or tab to your favorite tool and check on the keywords you should use in your post content (don’t forget to optimize your title too).

Links are also located in the sidebar of your admin’s post page, saving you the effort of having to scroll back up to the top of the screen while in the middle of writing your blog post.

All you have to do is download the plugin, ftp it to your blog, and activate it. Easy peasy!

No more excuses when you’re writing an article and aren’t sure what keyword phrase is actually searched for, and which one is something you just made up (a fatal error).

Some are better than others – a lot are rehashes of common themes, but then there are some beautiful and unusual themes that are freely available.

One thing to keep in mind is that if you find a theme you really like, make sure you read the comments about it and look at the star rating if available. Some themes, although fantastic looking, don’t work well or have bugs you need to be aware of. Also, make sure it will work with WordPress version 2.5+.

Below is my personal list of the sites I peruse when looking for a WP theme. Almost all of them have several up to 100 themes onsite.

If you know of other web sites that offer fresh or unusual themes, please include the link in your comment.

8 Remarkable WordPress Themes » Inspiration Bit

Free WordPress Themes » WPDesigner

Best WordPress Theme Collections | Rich Sage™

We Love WP | WordPress Website Design Gallery

WordPress Themes — TopTut.com – Top Tutorials

Free Blogger Templates for the Third World Geek

ThemeVibes – Free Web Themes and Templates

WP Themes | milo

View Designs · OpenDesigns.org

43 Phenomenal and Advanced Groundbreaking WordPress Themes

Sandbox Designs Competition » The Designs

My Top 15 WordPress Themes | Susan Suarez

Sadish.NET » WordPress Themes

WordPress Plugin Database

83 Beautiful WordPress Themes

Free WordPress Themes Download

Theme Finder. The complete collection

100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes

11 Free Magazine Style WordPress Themes | Epic Ready WordPress Themes

Free WordPress Layouts

Themes Gallery

August Themes – WordPress Themes by WP Diva

Free WordPress Themes | Quality free WordPress Themes

21 Fresh, Usable and Elegant WordPress Themes

18 Adsense Optimized WordPress Themes to Maximize your Contextual Ad Earnings

If you have the CommentLuv plugin enabled on your WordPress blog, leave a comment below or fill out my contact form, and I’ll add you to the list I’m compiling and will publish very soon.

Free links, free advertising – don’t you luv it?