Three WordPress Plugins For SEO Pings And Link Love

I’ve reviewed three great plugins today, and although they may not be new to you, they are very important.

They are the Google XML Sitemaps, MaxBlogpress Ping Optimizer and Commentluv.

I have mentioned Comment Luv before, but I thought that it was worth including it again.

It works by displaying the url of the last post on your visitors’ blogs, and helps to create a community aspect to your blog.

The Sitemaps plugin makes it easier for the search engines to map your site when they visit, while MaxBlogPress prevents unnecessary pings, which can inadvertently identify you as a spammer of the ping services.

I hope that you find these as handy as I have.

I have tested all three plugins, and provided you follow the instructions they are simple to install.

I have included the homepages of all the plugins for your convenience.

Google XML Sitemaps

The Google XML Sitemaps plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog.

Google Sitemaps were first introduced by Google in 2005, and were also adopted by Yahoo, MSN and Ask.com in 2006.

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling, and this plugin makes WordPress blogs compliant with the protocol.

Put simply, a Sitemap informs the search engines each time your site is updated.

For further information on how Sitemaps work, simply go to Sitemaps.Org.

Plugin Features:

• Available for all WordPress versions since 1.5
• No PHP skills or file changes needed
• User interface to customize all parameters like priorities etc.
• Generates automatically a sitemap for all types of WordPress pages
• Calculates a priority for each post, based on the number of comments
• Notifies Ask.com, Google, MSN Live Search and YAHOO about changes via ping
• Includes a WordPress filter for other plugins which can add their pages to the sitemap
• Generates a static XML file as well as a zipped version

Go to WordPress to download the plugin.

The plugin is free to use, but the author accepts donations via Paypal for support. The link for donations is available on his homepage.

Answers to most questions about the plugin can be found by going to the author’s FAQ Page.

Note: You don’t need to be a PHP expert with this plugin, but if you get it wrong the first time it can be very confusing!

Make sure that you follow the directions closely. It pays to read the instructions carefully first… 🙂

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

This plugin is a MUST Have if you update your blog regularly!

Did you realize that WordPress pings every time you hit the ‘Save And Continue Editing’ button?

I didn’t, and to my horror found that doing this can have you tagged as a spammer!

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer prevents this from happening, and is easy to install.

Once installed, MaxBlogPress Ping will:

• Ping and notify all the ping services when you create a new post. This enables search engines and blog directories/services to index your updated blog properly.
• Avoid unnecessary pings to ping services, thus saving you from being banned by them.
• Avoid unnecessary pings when you post a future post by editing the time stamp. This means that it will ping only when your post appears in future.

Download the plugin by going to WordPress.Org

Go to the MaxBlogPress Homepage for more information.

CommentLuv Plugin

This is one of my favorite plugins, as it encourages comments on my posts, and helps build a community aspect to my blog, because commenters return more often.

When someone comments on your blog, and enters their url, CommentLuv searches for and displays their last post.

This is a very handy tool, and very simple to install.

Feel free to test it out by leaving your comment below.

Download the plugin from WordPress

For more information, go to the homepage

I will be reviewing a number of other great plugins for WordPress over the next few months.

Please note that I have no connection with the developers of these plugins other than as a user of them!