6 Blog Pluging You Must Have Effective Social Media - Managing Social Media WhatDidEricSay.com

Is your blog firing on all cylinders?

Here’s 6 WordPress plugins you should have in your toolbox to ensure maximum performance.

Getting your blog retweeted is great. So why not make it even easier for your readers to do so. Don’t rely on just the tweet stream; let your blog visitors become a distribution channel as well.

High Anxiety

You’ll quickly see how may times your story has been retweeted with the built in counter. Quickly adjust its placement, icon size and the name of the twitter profile being retweeted. That’s my TweetMeme button at the beginning of this post. Go ahead. Click it.

Google XML Sitemaps Control ipod

Within a couple of clicks your Google compliant XML-Sitemap is complete. Notify ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO once you create or edit a page. The search engines like it when you notify them of current content changes; keeping them happy with your new XML sitemap coundn’t be easier.

SEO Friendly Images Dead Silence divx

Give your images the correct ALT and TITLE attributes per your custom settings. Your posts will also be W3C/xHTML valid; doing so helps with a key element of the search engine optimization process. This plugin provides a description of your images and also helps when users search for specific images.

SEO Slugs

This plugin helps your SEO efforts by eliminating unnecessary words such as ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’ from within your post slugs. Simply install and let it do the rest.

Sociable

Another great tool to get your posts linked to social bookmarking sites and in your RSS feed. One of the better tools with 99 different social sites to choose from.

All In One SEO Pack

The best one stop shop in the blogosphere for effecting your blog’s titles, descriptions and keywords.

Affect your blog post titles by including your most specific key word phrases. Create specific, descriptive descriptions to help provide even more information to search engine users when you’re found in the results. Accurate descriptions help drive qualified visitors interested in your content by providing them with a quick detailed overview of the post they’re about to click on. Control specific keywords, within the keyword text box and select auto-detected keywords and/or add your own custom KW’s.

Which other plugins are you using to improve your blog’s performance?

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Every so often you happen upon a website that stops you in your tracks.

Not only cool. Not just functional. A site that totally changes what you have been doing – and makes it faster and easier.

MotorMouths.com is a nice example of that kind of site. And no, I’m not just saying that because its a car site.

I’m saying it because the site has simplified the automobile research process – a process which drives people crazy due to the amount of information available. I’m familiar with nearly every major automobile research/review portal site out there – and my sentiments mirror those of typical consumers. Where does one start? Who’s info is better? How do I find exactly what I’m looking for?

The tastefully designed site does one thing. It finds car reviews from the major review sites. That’s it.

Simply enter a vehicle make and model into the search box, hit enter…and you’re done.

I searched Dodge Viper and 11 organized results appeared. Search summary box is on the left; the center column shows each site who reviewed the vehicle, its individual rating and its summary. Quick links take you directly to the review page on the respective site.

Finding those same pages in Road & Track would take several minutes at best. Instead of repeating that process throughout multiple sites, I entered two words and clicked one link. Thank you MotorMouths. Very nicely done.

Here’s what’s even cooler. Twitter users just need to send a reply message to MotorMouths with find + make and model.

IE: @MotorMouths find Dodge Viper. An instant reply provides a link to the results page. Turn on your mobile settings and the link is also sent to your phone.