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Adsense for WordPress – 5 Plugins reviewed

finalwebsites.com — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 05:41:41 +0000

If you try to monetize your blog with Google Adsense you might have noticed that this is not an easy job. Blog reader are very focused on reading the content and writing comments. Many readers will not visit your site since they read your blogs in a RSS reader. That will say that we need a very flexible Adsense plugin to place our ads on the right place in our blogs articles. Some of you will say “I place them always on place A, B and C”, but I’m sure that this will not work all the time.

We need a plugin that has the following features:

Single blog post placements
Unlimited number of ad layouts
Easy to integrate with each blog post using tags
NO revenue share with the plugin author!

Additionally we like to see features like:

IP-based filter functions
Alternative ads for the IP filter
Using ad code from other networks than Google Adsense

For this review we selected the 5 WordPress plugins because they have recent updates (active projects) and many features:

Adsense Daemon

This plugin supports three different Adsense layouts. All configured ads are placed on all your blog pages (single view). For each layout you have the control (7 options) where each ad will show up. The plugin has basic features and acts very static. A good plugin if you don’t need so much functions.

AdSense Integrator

If you need a more flexible plugin, you should check this Adsense plugin for WordPress. It has all the features we mentioned above and more: Default settings for automatic placement, full control about which pages have to show the automatic placed ads and a CSS margin for some better ad placement. Revenue share is enabled by default, but you can change this setting (if you don’t like to support the developer with 4% of all your ad impressions).

Everything seems working, except the single ad placement
With every placement the “initial” ad is placed too, maybe a recent bug? I posted this to the WordPress forum and will post the result here. Anyway a good plugin if this bug is fixed.

All in One Adsense and YPN!

Great plugin idea on how to configure your blog using Google Adsense or YPN (Yahoo Network). While the configuration options are very comfortable is this plugin less flexible. All settings are site-wide and valid for all ad formats.

The plugin offers an option to use multiple ad formats, a random function will show them all. I don’t think that this really works (maybe for different colors?). There is an option to disable ads for single pages, but this will disable all ads on that single page. While this plugin looks really good, I will not use it.

Easy AdSense

If you check the WordPress plugin page you should think that this is a great plugin, but I deactivated the plugin very quickly. At the moment that the plugin was activated, it shows already the Adsense ads from the plugin author and also at least one link to his website on each of your blog pages. I need to mention that I choose the plugin because according the author, is this version more advanced and doesn’t include a revenue share. The plugin has a lot of functions to configure the different products like Adsense for search and feeds and of course the content and link units. I’m sure you can treat the setting that way to get a static ad setup for your site, but I don’t like a plugin that includes code in my site without permission and that’s the reason why my advice is to NOT using this plugin. You never know what a future version will do with your website!

Quick Adsense

Finally a plugin that has all important features and works for 100%! Using this plugin you have all the options you need for your blog site: Static placements for your whole website, custom placements for your posts using simple snippets or just disable ads for a single post. This plugin has more features:

Add your Adsense code to your blog posts and your sidebar widgets, all settings are controlled through a single settings page.
You don’t need to remember the tag names, just place them using quick tags in the HTML mode of your editor.
There is space for 10 different ad layouts for the blog pages and 3 in your sidebar.
There are no strings attached will say no revenue share or unwanted links, the only thing the author asks is to place a link or button.

There is one feature missing; the IP filter with the option to show alternative ads. Since this feature is very special and should work together with a GEO location script, I think I can miss this feature for now.

At the end I must say I go for the Quick Adsense plugin, because I need a plugin that makes it possible to place the ads on locations I choose while writing a blog post. The Adsense Integrator is also a good plugin, but because of the bug in the current version it’s not useful for my website.Similar Posts:

Useful Plugins for your bbpress Forum

Olaf — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 14:01:17 +0000

To support our php script users at finalwebsites.com, we’re using bbpress for more than a year now. bbpress is a great peace of software and is based on WordPress, that will say if you’re able to write code for WordPress you can code the same way for bbpress. There are several WordPress plugins which work with bbpress out of the box! Since the release of version 1.0 we have integrated bbpress into our own layout to make it a 100% part of our PHP resource site.

Why a forum and not just email support and why bbpress?

As a software developer you get most common support questions more than once. Sharing information is useful for others and a forum is a great platform for user support. bbpress is a very basic forum without heavy stuff like personal messaging and is very fast even with lots of users / posts. We like the WordPress/bbpress API very much and it’s quite easy to add extra functionality. Sure there are still lot of features missing like merging topics or other important moderator stuff, but I’m sure the developers of bbress are on the right way. There is one more thing with bbpress, the system is able to work with the same user base as WordPress. That will say you can connect your blog with your forum site, a great feature for communities.

Optimizing bbpress using plugins

bbpress SEO Tools
One of the most important requirements for our forum was search engine optimization (SEO). Great search engine positions in Google are great for all websites and for a support forum it’s more than important. Using this plugin it’s possible to index only the topic (sub)pages and the main page of course. All other views are for Google (and others) just content duplication and get marked by the plugin as “NoIndex”.

Moderator Notification
bbpress is using Akismet to protect your forum against spam, but for new forums it’s very important to know all new activities. This plugin sends an email message about new posts to all forum moderators.

Auto Add Favorites
bbpress has a different “Post subscribe” function, a user has to add a topic to his favorites for further watching. This plugin is the missing function to add favorites automatically. Check also this article on how-to subscribe to a bbpress forum.

Google Sitemap Generator
A Sitemap for Google is an important feature for SEO, you need to tell search engines about your sites content. This plugin is a great addition if you use the bbpress SEO tools, the plugin creates the same URLs as the pages marked for “Index” by the SEO plugin. If you need a more “general” sitemap plugin, check this one.

If you have questions about the plugins above, please post to our bbpress forum.

More bbpress plugins (3rd party)

Comment Quicktags for bbPress
The core version of bbpress has no extra options in their reply/post box, it’s just a textarea. A lot of html markup is allowed and this plugin will add some buttons to the form which helps users writing “nice” postings. This plugin is very old, but it works for the current version (1.02).

Human Test for bbPress
There are several plugins to limit registrations by bots and spammer. I like this one because it’s better integrated than others and it’s easier to handle by new members than ReCaptcha validation for example.

Related Topics
We know the related blog post plugins from wordpress, this one works the same way and for a forum it’s very useful. It is great for inter-linking (SEO) and it helps members to find related topics very fast. This plugin works much better if your forum has enough tags set for each topic.

EDIT: I disabled the related topics plugin yesterday for my forum because it stopped working. I will post an update if found a solution.

SMTP mailer for bbPress
The email function used by the core version is already based on phpmailer, but is still using PHP’s mail() function. It seems that many passwords send after registration, never reached the inbox from the new member. Many bbpress users solved this while using this plugin to send mail messages via SMTP.

Social It
These days social sites are a great way to share content with others. This plugin is also based on a WordPress plugin and is a great addition for your forum.

We use these plugins at finalwebsites.com together with the recent version of bbpress. They are compatible even with our custom template for bbpress. Some of them need tiny modifications in the template files. If you like to see more custom bbpress modifications check our bbpress forum section and find much more bbpress plugins on the bbpress site.
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Optimizing your WordPress Blog for Google: Part 2

Olaf — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 05:39:28 +0000

This is part 2 in our series on how to optimize your WordPress blog for Google. In our earlier post we discussed how to avoid the duplicate content penalty when blogging with the WordPress blogging software; today, we are going to share how to optimize your WordPress blog for search engine friendliness especially for the Google search engine.

Interlinking your blog posts

Since your blog should be topically related anyway, you should have no problem referencing previous post from time to time in new blog postings. Also, it wouldn’t hurt to edit your older blog postings to include topically related links for new posts. Not only does this help to improve your internal linking structure, it can also help improve keyword relevancy for certain pages if you’re using keyword focused, or descriptive, anchor text for your internal URL’s.

Another approach to boost the link popularity and improve the visibility of your blogs internal pages is to offer a sitemap, one which will benefit users and work to help with search engine spidering.

XML sitemaps, such as the type used within your Google Webmaster account area, are only read by search engine robots. By offering a “static” sitemap, (though really it’s generally dynamically generated), you are giving your website visitors a location where they can easily browse your blog posting titles and find topics that interest them. You can manually update a sitemap page (not recommended for large websites or blogs), or you can hire a programmer to build a page that queries the WordPress database and lists all the postings. There is also a WordPress plugin that will build a sitemap for your blog, the Sitemap Generator Plugin; it’s one of the more feature-rich sitemap generators available for WordPress.

For those of you who are only interested in using an XML sitemap for your WordPress blog, the Google Sitemaps Generator will build one for you, and this XML sitemap generator will create a sitemap that can read by Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN as well.

Post high quality and useful content

Natural link building comes about by offering useful content; if you give your website visitors what they are looking for, a percentage of your blog readership will link to what they find useful or helpful. Continually posting informative and helpful content on your blog almost guarantees a steady flow of new incoming links without any additional work on your part all while increasing your blogs’ link popularity and overall visibility.

Optimizing your WordPress blog for Google

Now that you’ve taken steps to alleviate duplicate content from your blog and are working on building the link popularity of your blogs’ inner pages, it’s time to optimize your WordPress blog for ultimate search engine friendliness.

Create search engine friendly URL’s

WordPress blogs, by default, display the posting pages using a query string to represent the individual pages, such as:

http://exampleblog.com/?p=16

Now, search engines have come a long way since their conception and most major search engines can crawl and will index what appear to be dynamically generated pages using query strings, but setting up search engine friendly URL’s will not only help to improve relevancy for the pages for certain keywords, using descriptive URL’s can increase the clickthrough rates from the SERPS (search engine results pages) as well.

To set up search engine friendly URL’s, simply login to your WordPress administration area, then click on Options>>Permalinks. On the permalinks page, you will see a selection of choices and radio buttons. Most users opt for the Date and Name Based option, though if you know what you’re doing, you can choose the custom option and input your desired posting link structure.

Once you’ve setup your search engine friendly URL’s, you’ll likely need to modify your website’s .htaccess file unless yours happens to be writable by default.

Example .htaccess code for WordPress Blogs

The code below is an example of what you would add to your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

This code is posted for example purposes only, and it is not guaranteed to work on your server.

A word of caution: modify your .htaccess file with extreme caution! Before you update this file, you should create a backup; this way, if for some reason your website messes up because of the code you have added, you have a working backup of the file.

For additional information about WordPress Permalinks, you can checkout more information on using permalinks on the WordPress website.

Add unique page titles to your WordPress blog

A web pages title is the most important “on site” element in regards to optimization for search engines. By default, WordPress forces the posting title as the page title itself, and is considered by top seo professionals as an optimization faux-pas. You should absolutely have unique page titles for every page of your blog, and you should avoid replicating the page title in your heading tags when at all possible.

Probably the most effective WordPress title optimization plugin is the SEO title tag plugin. This plugin allows you to create a unique title for your blogs’ home page, any supplemental pages, your category and archive pages as well as for each and every post on your blog. As an added bonus, you can “bulk modify” up to 20 pages at a time, so if you happen to have hundreds of posts on your blog already, it’s not too much of a chore to make each of them unique.

For best results when creating titles for your blog posts, the titles should be keyword targeted, concise with the pages contents and descriptive enough to encourage clickthroughs from the SERPS. Your most important keyword or keyword phrase should be placed at the beginning of the title, and you should keep the titles short, at least this is generally the recommended method amongst optimization professionals.

Adding meta keywords and descriptions to your WordPress blog

The age-old discussion about whether the meta description tag and the meta keywords tag is beneficial for search engine optimization today will undoubtedly continue, but there’s one thing for certain; if you add these meta tags to your blog respectfully, without trying to keyword stuff unrelated phrases or insistently repeating words over and over, these tags certainly haven’t been proven to hurt your rankings.

In fact, if you haven’t yet noticed, a while back Google started using the Meta description tag in their search results. Whether or not this translates into improving rankings has yet to be officially determined, but Google is certainly putting the Meta description tag to use, that is undeniable.

Probably the easiest to use Meta tag plugin for WordPress is the Add Meta Tags plugin. With this plugin you can specify the meta keywords and meta description for your home page, category pages and each unique posting page. Using this WordPress plugin with the SEO title tag plugin offers a powerful plugin combination that is certain to improve the overall search engine friendliness of your WordPress blog.

While the tips outlined in this 2 part series on how to optimize your WordPress blog for Google will undoubtedly help to improve the overall search engine friendliness of your blog, it cannot be understated that if you want your blog to be successful, you need to offer something to your readership that will keep them coming back for more. In the end, people don’t care that you’ve spent days, months, or even years promoting and optimizing your blog for search engines; if you aren’t giving people something that is beneficial to them, your blog will end up in the “blog graveyard” amongst the MFA splogs and the outdated blogs of yesteryear. No form of optimization can make up for a blogs failure to share informative and useful information with its readers.

Now, if you already have the “unique and useful” content squared away, by using the tips outlined within this 2 part series, you will be doing what 80% of your competition isn’t doing, thus exponentially increasing your chances of higher rankings in the SERPS, more natural visitors and ultimately more money to your financial bottom line.Similar Posts:

Optimizing your WordPress Blog for Google: Part 1

Olaf — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 09:34:33 +0000

How to avoid the duplicate content penalty when using a WordPress blog

There’s no denying it, Google is the powerhouse of the internet; more than capable of showering targeted visitors on your website like a torrential downpour backed by gale-force winds. That is, if you happen to be in Google’s good graces and rank highly for popular keywords.

Bloggers often times find themselves in the position to receive great traffic from Google simply because of the way that blogs work; namely, they allow for quick inclusion into major search engines even when using the default setup. Being the most popular blogging software on the planet, WordPress blogs are the content management system (CMS) of choice for bloggers due to ease of use and the large community of supporters that help to develop plugins for this open source blogging software.

However, just because WordPress blogs can help websites to get noticed by the major search engines easily, this doesn’t mean that they are inherently search engine friendly; in fact, the default settings for WordPress blogs almost guarantee that, if left untouched, your blog will end up suffering from the duplicate content penalty.

The duplicate content penalty and WordPress blogs

The duplicate content penalty is a term that is used to describe what happens when a web page is removed from the primary search results for a certain keyword phrase due to identical content elsewhere on the internet. In Google, the lower-ranking websites and individual pages that contain the duplicate content are hidden, and this phrase is displayed instead:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the X (number) already displayed.

This happens primarily in two situations; with article marketing, A.K.A. article directory submissions, and when you post content to an unmodified blog. Since this article is focused on WordPress blog optimization, we’ll focus on how you can avoid the duplicate content penalty for the latter.

Unmodified WordPress blogs are search engine “unfriendly”

By using a WordPress blog with its default setup, you are creating an atmosphere where your blogs’ content is almost guaranteed to suffer from the duplicate content penalty. The reason for this is simple: By default, your WordPress blog will have the exact same content, word for word:

On the blogs main page
Within the blogs RSS feed
On the category page
On the monthly archive page
On the posts unique page

Clearly, having 5 different instances of the exact same content within a single website will undoubtedly lead to your content being seen as “duplicate” content by Google, and other major search engines for that matter.

Avoiding the duplicate content penalty with a WordPress blog

There are a couple of things that can be done with your WordPress blog that will help you to keep your blog in the primary search results:

Limit the text shown on your blogs pages

The duplicate content penalty comes about due to large amounts of significantly identical text being shown on numerous pages throughout the internet, not a few characters or even a couple of sentences. WordPress blogs allow bloggers the option to use what is called the “more” tag, where they can limit the amount of text that is displayed on the blogs main page, the category pages and the archive pages. By utilizing this tag, WordPress users are limiting the content for a post to be displayed, in full, only on the posting page itself; thus removing four of the five aforementioned instances of locations of duplicate content when adding a post to their blog, which can help to decrease the chances of being affected by the duplicate content penalty.

However, if you have an established blog – it would be a cumbersome chore to edit every existing post, not to mention it’s another step you would have to endure to use this option for all future posts. Fortunately, there is a WordPress plugin that will replicate the effects of the “more” tag, yet not requiring you to manually add it to your blog posts.

Evermore WordPress Plugin

The evermore WordPress Plugin will replicate the effects of the “more” tag, effectively limiting the amount of text shown on your blogs main page, category page and archive pages. You have the ability to specify the character limit, so you can have more or less text displayed in these other areas depending on your needs. Installing this plugin is as easy as uploading a file via FTP to your WordPress plugin directory, and the effects can be reversed completely by deactivating it.

Choose “Summary” for your blog’s RSS feed file

Another way to help stop the chances of becoming the next victim of the duplicate content penalty is to simply change the settings from within your WordPress blogs administration area.

Once you’re logged into your blogs administration area, go to Options>>Reading. Under the sub-heading “Syndication Feeds”, select the “summary” option. This will effectively cut down your chances of suffering from the duplicate content penalty.

Using the robots.txt file to keep Google (and other search engines) away

Now, of course you want search engines to crawl your blog, but in some cases it’s not in your best interest to have all of your pages crawled and indexed by all search engine robots. Another trick to helping you avoid the duplicate content penalty is to tell the Googlebot to stay away from your RSS feed. Some bloggers even go so far as to disallow the Googlebot from crawling their blog archives and category pages, but that is a personal preference; in all honesty we have yet to see conclusive evidence as to which approach is best. Here is an example of a set of commands that will help you to keep the Googlebot from accessing your blogs feeds.

Sample robots.txt file to disallow the Googlebot from your RSS feed

(if your WordPress blog is at the root of your domain)

User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /feed/$ Disallow: /feed/rss/$ Disallow: /trackback/$

You can check out some advanced commands for your WordPress blogs robots.txt file on the Ask Apache website. As with any modifications of this type, you should implement changes with extreme caution as improperly forming commands to your robots.txt file may cause it to be excluded from search engines all together!

Using the tips and tricks outlined here, you can help keep your blog in Google’s primary index and avoid the duplicate content penalty that many other bloggers suffer from. It goes without saying that one of the major contributing factors to the duplicate content penalty is syndicating articles from article directories; and for best results it’s always suggested that your blog is comprised of unique content rather than syndicated content.

This article is a 2 part series on how to optimize your WordPress blog for Google. In our next article, we will show you how to optimize your WordPress blog for ultimate search engine friendliness and also how you can pull your blog out of Google’s supplemental index as well as covering ways to stay out of it.Similar Posts: