Most of the blogs nowdays built on wordpress and for better great search engine optimization (SEO), it is always advisable to use plugins for wordpress which are quite easy to install. These are some of the plugins to use, but there are lotsn lots more which can be used too!!

All in One SEO Pack – One of the most popular SEO plugins ever for WordPress, this plugin does a bit of everything for you from helping choose the best post title,meta tags, keywords, & to helping you avoid duplicate content and more.

Google XML Sitemaps – An essential tool in for any kind of SEO .  Though the name only mentions “Google,” this plugin creates an XML-sitemap that can be read by Ask, MSN and Yahoo also.

Nofollow Case by Case – This plugin allows you to strip off the “nofollow” command from the comments, and then you can also apply it to only the comments you don’t wish to support.

SEO Friendly Images –This plugin is very useful for blogs with lots of pictures n graphics , it helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.

Simple Tags – This plugin helps you choose the best tags for your posts by offering suggestions, auto-completion of tags as you type, an AJAX admin interface, mass tag editing and a whole lot of things.

SEO Title Tag – Tags ina blog are an important part of the site for making sure that search engines know where to place posts, and SEO Title Tag plugin focuses exactly on this.

Redirection – For any reason if you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, then you are at the risk of losing that page’s status in search results.  Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more.

HeadSpace2 – This plugin helps you to install all sorts of meta-data, add specific JavaScript and CSS to pages, suggests tags for your posts and a whole lot more.

Meta Robots WordPress plugin – An easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page you choose on your blog.  You can use it to make your front page links into “nofollows,” prevent indexing of search pages, disable author and date-based archives, prevent indexing of your login page and numerous other features.

SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin – If you  have duplicate content on your site for whatever reason, SEO No Duplicate will allow you to state which version of the post search engines should index while ignoring the others.

We all use some kind of analytics tools like Google Analytics, StatCounter or any kind of similar tools to measure page views, traffic sources, visitor locations & a whole bunch of information. But sometimes we need some more info than what these analytics provide. In these cases we can use visualization tools since they apply variety of methods to show you where users are clicking on the individual pages of your Web site to help you make design adjustments that emphasize the right links and content.

These are best Web Traffic Visualization Tools to redesign site layout for more traffic & better conversions.

clickdensity – Heat maps with real-time visitor data to help you optimize your link and ad placement and enhance your site’s stickiness.

nextSTAT – Complete analytics package that includes graphical visitor detail path reports.

ClickTale – Watch movies of what your visitors do while on your site, view heatmaps and every interaction that a visitor has on your site including hovers, hesitations, and even which form fields are causing visitors to leave.

ClickHeat – A free click heatmap generator.

ClickTracks – Enterprise analytics software, shows visitor navigation directly on your site’s pages.

Crazy Egg – Provides visual “Heat Maps” to show where your visitors are clicking.

Intellitracker – Enterprise web analytics software including recently released IntelliMaps feature for visualizing user activity.

It’s quite some time I am using Google Adwords for my own sites & client sites. Goofing up with billing is a common issue with Google but I have got into a habit of ignoring it.

But from yesterday what I am experiencing is quite a horror story with Google Adwords. My client’s ads have not been running on Google Adwords for more than a day now. This is because the Adwords system says that we have not made our payment. But the actual story is: In India, the Reserve Bank of India had introduced a rule that all credit card transactions made online need a PIN. We got that done, and Google sent us a form which was supposed to take care of all this from their end. We signed the form and sent it to Google Hyderabad, India. I checked out with some friends & they are also experiencing same kind of issues with Google.

On August 7, we got a message from Google that our Adwords payment could not be processed, and that our ads will be stopped if we do not make the payment quickly. We contacted our account representative regarding this, and he told us that it is a technical error and to be ignored. Yesterday, we got a message that our ads are not running. Adwords being a pretty sizable mode of traffic for us, we immediately mailed our account representative. But we got no reply from him for almost 6 hours. We decided to call up Google’s India offices so that we could have our ads running as soon as possible.

Google has 4 offices in India – Gurgaon, Bangalore, Mumbai and Hyderabad. We called up each of them, only to be told that everyone had gone home (at 11 in the night, which is not so late if you are working in a company which intends to change the world). I then realized I was talking to the security guards at the offices who obviously had no idea of what their bosses had done wrong. They gave me an email address and asked me to direct my problems there. And an auto-responder got back to me: This email address is no longer in use. And it gave me no other way to get in touch with an executive.

So I decided to call up Google’s US offices. After 2 minutes of pressing numbers to get through to a support executive and then waiting for another 2 minutes for someone to pick up, I was finally asked to leave my message in the voice mailbox. Obviously, I was in no mood to leave a message and then wait for someone to call me back. So I mailed my account representative again. Five hours into the working hours of the next day (which happens to be today) and I got no reply from them. I again called up their India offices, this time during working hours only to be told that the only support that they offer is through email. So 24 hours have gone since our ads stopped running and there is no information that I have got from Google.

Things I got to know from the entire episode:

1. How can a company like Google not offer phone support for something that generates over 95% of all its revenues?

2. Google manages search for the entire world, but they can’t manage their internal communications itself.

3. Google knows that the world cannot do without it, or will take a very long time to get ungoogled. So…

I think Google takes customers for granted becoz  it has a monopoly in online advertising & turning out to be a bigger evil than Microsoft.

I am writing this post since I read a gr8post at Smashing Magazine explaning most corprorate blogs fail. Being into web marketing I have always seen most companies nowdays crave for a corporate blog or official blog, whatever you want to name it. The most funny thing is there are so many articles over the web about  how to ” Have a Successful Corporate Blog ”  & if you ask most web marketing people like me, everyone will tell you almost the same do’s or don’t , but still only 5% succeed & the rest fails. Why?? It is becoz I truel believe in one thing that gettting ideas is not the toug thing, it’s the application which is the hardest part. Back to corporate blogs most CEO’s/Management Guys tend presume getting a blog up will drive traffic. NOWAY! you need to give lot of time & effort in making the blog itself  popular in the social community[unless your Microsoft or Google].

There are some of the best things rounded up in the post at “10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Blogging” which every CEO or management guys should read[ not Web Marketing Guys], did I say we already know this .

I had long got the news of the Kolkata Bloggers Meet via 2 of my ex-collegues Saptarshi & Arnab at 123greetings.com & wanted to attend it to meet with old friends at the meet. But incidently we at FusionCharts also decided to give a product demo for  FusionCharts Google Gadgets for blogs at the meet.  Thanks to Sanket & Saptarshi(he blogs at handfullofrain..opps  hatfullofrain we came up with a great presentation at the last moment. It was really nice to to see such a great turnup at the venue.  There were some gr8 presentations from Abhishek Rungta, Aji Issac Mathew (worked few months with him), Saptarshi (old collegue), Arun Agrawal, Vikas Kedia.

Also it was nice to see some new bloggers in the meet. Did I forgot to tell about the t-shirts and an ELearning CD (from Indus Net Academy) as a gift?

Thanks to ppl like Kamanashish & all others for organising such a event in kolkata.

The craze of url shortners have hyped up a lot becoz of Twitter, infact I was wondering to make one maybe just for fun.  But honestly it has always bothered me how much importance we should give a site like http://bit.ly/ for shorting urls for Twitter, is it really worth of such attention? I just read a excellent post on this by joshua.schachter [ founder of http://delicious.com ] why he feels url shortners are bad for the ecosystem & could not agree more on this. A shortened URL is not easier to remember. Even a longer URL like http://www.techfeedr.com/blog/2009/07/155/ is easier to remember than bit.ly/4RT7K. After some time if Twitter excludes URL’s from the 140 character limit and ¾ of the tinyurl services will shut up shop in a few months. Normal people won’t go out of their way to try and create tiny URL’s, they’ll just copy and paste the full URL.

Thousands of development hours and X million dollars in VC cash later and they’ll all have created a massive collection of 404′s. Great job, yet another sensible year in Silicon Valley… Read full post by joshu HERE