Plugins 028 – PodCamp Pittsburgh WordPress Coverage

In this episode, Angelo goes into detail of the WordPress coverage at this year’s PodCamp Pittsburgh.

Quick Announcement: I will be speaking on Friday, October 16th at the 2009 Blog World and New Media Expo within the WordCamp Las Vegas sessions track. I’ll be speaking on how to setup WordPress for Podcasting at 12:45pm. Friday and Saturday I will be present at the Blubrry/RawVoice booth, so if you’re at Blog World, please stop by and say hello!

PodCamp Pittsburgh 2009

The first session I attended was WordPress Knowledge Exchange hosted by Mike Woycheck (Woy) & John Carman. The session covered an array of recommended plugins and had a lot of insight on WordPress. Here are links to John’s and Woy’s recommended WordPress plugins. Plugins that stood out to me were Bookmarkify, Useful 404s, Time Zone, and Maintenance Mode.

The second session I attended was SEO Plug-ins for Your WordPress Website: Using SEO Tools for your WordPress Website hosted by Jami Broom of Clicks to My Site. Her session slides are available as a downloadable PDF. Jami covered a number of resources for SEO including Google’s Starter Guide, SEOBook.com and SEOMoz.com. Plugins that stood out during this session were Google Analyticator, Robots Meta, Redirection, SEO Friendly Images, Nofollow Case by Case, Platinum SEO Pack, and SEO Smart Links.

PodCamp Pittsburgh was a great unconference! The organizers and volunteers did a great job with the event. I can’t wait for next year!

Next episode I’ll be speaking with Max Sweet (TimeStampStudios.com), a WordPress plugin developer and web designer for WebmasterRadio.FM. Max discusses why his employer moved to WordPress and how the custom plugins he’s developed meet specific needs for the online radio station. We also discuss WordPress MU.

Plugins 006 – All In One SEO Pack Plugin

Today we’re covering Search Engine Optimization and the All In One SEO Pack plugin. Remember, a well optimized web site for SEO will help your ranking in search engine results.

Key features in the All In One SEO Pack include:

  • Reorders page titles to optimize search engine coverage
  • Detailed HTML Meta descriptions and keywords
  • No follow options to prevent search engines from indexing pages that contain redundant content such as category and tag result pages

The plugin is developed by Semper Fi Web Design. To learn more about the All In One SEO Pack plugin as well as other plugins developed by Semper Fi Web Design, please visit www.semperfiwebdesign.com.

Instructions how to setup Permalinks are included in this episode. Permalinks, or permanent links, give your blog site friendly URLs for your pages and blog posts that search engines love to see.

Plugins 005 – Google XML Sitemaps

Today we’re covering the Google XML Sitemaps plugin to generate valid site maps for popular search engines such as Google, MSN Search, Yahoo and Ask.com to process.

Key features include:

  • Automated regeneration (New and edited posts and pages automatically regenerate sitemaps)
  • Auto Notify Google, MSN Search, Yahoo and Ask.com when sitemaps are updated
  • Optional compressed version of sitemap file
  • Detailed selection of content to be included in Sitemaps (e.g. only posts and static pages)
  • Customize priority weights based on page type (homepage, archives, static pages, etc..)
  • Works with WordPress 2.7 (latest version as of this writing)

The plugin is developed by Arne Brachhold. To learn more about the Google XML Sitemaps plugin as well as other plugins developed by Arne, please visit www.arnebrachhold.de.