Hi, I’m Jeremy Turner and tonight I’m all about the plugins. So evidently there are all kinds of ways to “optimize” your Wordpress blog. A Google search for “Wordpress Google Analytics” yielded links to four very worthy plugins on the first SERP alone, that I’ve since downloaded. See why I need to get to the first page? Who goes past the first SERP anymore except somebody (like myself) who is searching for something that they kind of already know should be there, but isn’t? Since the whole point of this blog is to game The Google—and hopefully learn something along the way—it’s nice to have all of these options available.  So here’s what I’ve done so far:

Google/Yahoo/MSN Webmaster tools

Signed up for accounts with Google Webmaster Tools, Windows Live “Live Search Webmaster Tools”, and Yahoo Site Explorer and then added my site to each. I would recommend using these services to track how your site shows up in the search results of the three major search engines. Ask.com does not offer this service. As an aside, every time the BART train passes the Ask.com building in downtown Oakland, I have this image in my head of 10 floors filled with cubicles, each containing an Ask.com employee hunched over their keyboard doing a Google search on the query that you just typed into Ask.com. But I digress.  At the day job I’ve found it handy to use The Google Webmaster Tools to delete entires in The Google Cache for pages that no longer exist, create and update the robot.txt and sitemap.xml files for the websites we administer. You can find out lots of other interesting facts about your sites such as what other sites are linking to yours, the top search queries that returned your site as a result, page rank for each page of your site, set the geographical target for your site, and whole bunch more. Really, you should check it out.

Wordpress plugins I’ve installed:

All in One SEO Pack So far, so good. Rewrites the meta tags in the headers of your pages, plus a whole lot more. Only downside is that you have to enter information for every post, adding another step to the writing/publishing process. Totally worth it though.

FeedBurner FeedSmith Very handy, Google/Feedburner recommended plugin to help track your RSS feed analytics with Feedburner. A bit easier than hand coding the feed into your template.

Google XML Sitemaps Again, so far so good. And it’s prettier than a hand coded sitemap.xml. Let’s see how it scales. This plugin will also notify Google, MSN, and Yahoo when The sitemap is updated.

obsocialbookmarker Wishful thinking, but hey it looks cool. Let’s readers bookmark your page in a ton of social type sites like del.icio.us, digg, etc. by adding little chicklet links at the bottom of your post.

Already switched to a ShareThis account.

Ultimate Google Analytics My second crack at a GA plugin. The first one didn’t make it past this post. If I change any of these plugins I’ll blog about it. The Google Analytics combined with The Google Webmaster Tools is a pretty powerful combination of tools for analyzing just what the heck is going on with your website anyway.

I’m still trying to find a good Google Adsense plugin but the three I’ve tried are a bit confusing. I may be trying to do too much too quick. Having said all of this, I’m pretty new to Wordpress so I have no idea how well any of these plugins will work. Time will tell.