One of the great things about having a WordPress blog is that there are tons of cool plugins available on the net to make blog management a breeze. Here’s 3 plugins that I can’t live without.

Google XML Sitemaps Generator - This plugin is incredible. Every time you publish a new post it automatically generates a new sitemap of your blog AND submits it to Google. This saves you the hassle of doing this by hand - which can take a while - and it means that your site is always up to date in Google’s database. I’ve seen brand new posts of mine turn up in Google searches within just a couple of hours of posting.

Optimal Title - This little plugin reverses how WordPress displays your post title so that the post title comes before your blog name.

Instead of: MyBlog >> 10 Reasons Why Your Breath Stinks

You get: 10 Reasons Why Your Breath Stinks << MyBlog

This makes posting to social bookmarking sites MUCH quicker, and it looks better in search engine results.

NOTE: You must set your permalinks (post links) so that they display the post’s title and not the default dynamic link name. You know, that link that looks something like: ?=23…that doesn’t tell people or search engines anything!

Here’s how:

• Go to OPTIONS in your WP Admin.
• Select PERMALINKS.
• Under COMMON OPTIONS select CUSTOM, SPECIFY BELOW, and
• In the CUSTOM STRUCTURE text box put: /%postname%/

There you go!

Kimli Flash Embed - If you use the visual editor to write your posts you may have noticed that some things don’t end up displaying exactly how you’d hoped, especially if you wrote your post with direct code. The WP visual editor will often strip out HTML tags that your post needs. WP seems to have a particular disdain for the <object></object> and <embed></embed> tags, which are a little important for embedding media.  This plugin can make embedding flash players turn out the way you want.

I don’t know about you, but even if I have several thousand hits to a blog post, if there are no comments on it, I get a little depressed. Sure, I can tell myself that no one commented on the post because I was so absolutely right-on with my analysis, opinion, and prose that my readers were simply rendered speechless, but I only believe that when I’m fall-over drunk.

The truth is, people don’t comment on blog posts for two reasons:

1) No one else has already commented on the post. Well, if no one else has posted on this post it must not be worth it…I’m sure as hell not going to waste my precious time if others haven’t!

2) There’s really nothing worth commenting about. That sounds horrible, but it’s not really an insult. If you post a list of…oh, let’s say…10 Free Internet Tools You’ll Love! people will generally like it, get something out if, and move on. Very seldom will someone post on something that they agree with or that helps them out. Not because they’re rude, just because you have put it up there for the taking…so they’re taking. No worries.

But you can urge people to post if you stir up a little controversy!

Now, I’m not talking about destructive controversy. Not racism, or hate speech. Not something that will turn people off of you completely. I’m just talking about a little, subtle jab. I’m talking about, well, dork controversy.

Let’s say that you write your 10 Free Internet Tools You’ll Love! and you forget to mention (dramatic music) the Firefox browser. You have just created controversy. People who use the Firefox browser are like junkies addicted to open source crack. You haven’t dissed Firefox, so they can’t hate you, but they can sure as hell bang out an “I can’t believe you left out Firefox! Sheesh!” comment to get the ball rolling. And you better believe all the pro and con Firefox geeks will fall right in line, posting like feverish little howler monkeys with ADHD.

Recently, this happened to me…sort of accidentally.

I decided to write a post on MovieBlast! about actors who are also musicians and who are actually sort of good at it. I knew right off the bat that it might stir up something simply because I didn’t have time to list every single actor in a band. But what really put it over the top is that I didn’t mention Jared Leto’s band 30 Seconds to Mars.

Apparently 30 Seconds to Mars fans are just as psychotic as Firefox users! I’m still getting steady comments on this post and it’s almost been up a full week!

In conclusion I would like to say that if you’re not using Firefox to download your 30 Seconds to Mars mp3s then you should burn in hell. Thank you.

I’m posting today about a tool that I find invaluable for a few reasons. It is called Keywords Analyzer SEO Pro by Blue Infinity.

As anyone who’s ever done any amount of serious SEO knows, keyword research is a pain in the butt. Even with all of the free tools offered by the likes of Google and Overture, it’s still pretty hard sometimes to get at the information you really want. Information like how many times a keyword or phrase was searched in the last month, other related keywords, Google bids, etc. Keywords Analyzer SEO Pro makes all this a breeze.

Let’s say you have a site selling widgets so you want to optimize for that. Instead of just trying to dream up all the keyphrases involving widgets in your head and then researching each one for its possible value, all you have to do is enter “widgets” into Keywords Analyzer and it will generate tons of other keyphrases about widgets. And these aren’t just suggested ideas for keyphrases, these are actual keyphrases that are actually being searched and the number of times they’re being searched per month!

Another great use for Keywords Analyze is doing niche research. Just as in the widgets example above, the additional widget based keywords Keywords Analyzer churns up will uncover several possible widget niche markets.

Let’s say you enter “widgets” - a very broad term into Keywords Analyzer and it returns 100 other keyphrases involving widgets. You might see that one of these keyphrases is “handmade blue leather widgets” and it’s being searched for about 500 times per month…what a tight little niche you’ve just found!   Run on over to Blogger, set up your free blog about handmade blue leather widgets and slap in some AdSense and you’ve got a great start to successful little niche site!

Well, I’ve decided to try a little experiment. I’ve started a free Blogger blog about a VERY tight niche market. I’m not going to do anything with this blog except post a single picture of the blog’s topic every day with a little niche related note and just see how long it takes for traffic to start coming in. No SEO, no AdWords, no mention of it anywhere…not even here. I just want to see how fast it will rise in its very narrow little niche - if it rises at all. The blog focuses on a specific breed of dog, just so you have some idea of the niche. I’ll post updates on traffic and stuff periodically. Traffic as of right now: zero. Haha.