PubCon video content producer Vanessa Zamora sat down with Scott Hendison, president at Search Commander Inc., to discuss content management systems, specifically WordPress, the blogging platform that is one of his specialties. Hendison shared a number of his top plugin picks for WordPress development in this PubCon Las Vegas 2010 interview, including SEO Automatic’s own Core Tweaks WordPress Setup plugin that minimizes the initial content management system set up time, All in One SEO Pack and HeadSpace2 SEO for search engine optimization needs, as well as Yoast, which includes a plugin for SEO, an XML Sitemaps plugin, and an RSS footer plugin. Hendison also shared his preferred WordPress themes, pointing out that although the most popular theme to his knowledge is Thesis, a premium theme, he prefers a free theme called Atahualpa, and recommends others browse through free themes before spending money on a premium theme that ultimately might not have all of the desired capabilities. Hendison continued by sharing his recommendations with regards to selecting a Web hosting server, suggesting against shared servers that stifle page load time, now a factor in Google’s ranking system. In addition, shared servers do not provide as much security as dedicated environments, Hendison added. If looking for shared hosting, Hendison suggested Search Commanders PDXTC shared hosting service, as well as Bluehost. For dedicated options Hendison suggested Rackspace or Dreamhost.
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Can’t-Live-Without WordPress Plugins
The debate rages among bloggers surrounding what are must-have plugins for WordPress. Naturally, everyone has their personal preferences that depend on what they are trying to accomplish by blogging. But I was rather horrified to read a forum post discussing WordPress plugins stating that all you need in the way of plugins, “if you have good content”, were All in One SEO Pack Google XML Sitemaps and StatPress. Now, these are great plugins and I use them all on everyone of my sites. But to say that these three are all you need, regardless of not whether your content is good, bad or mediocre, is, well, just wrong. If you want to increase your on page SEO; decrease your page load time (a key factor for ranking in Google with their latest algorithm change); hide your affiliate links and find and remove lines of code or text quickly and easily and more you need a few more plugins in your arsenal. Here is my top-ten list of great WordPress Plugins. These are all free plugins. 1) All-in-One SEO Pack–This plugin helps your SEO right out of the box, without any configuration. To increase your on-page SEO, it allows you to add title, description and keywords to make your posts more search engine friendly, but it’s not a requirement. 2) WP-Super Cache–A caching plugin is a must with Google’s new emphasis on page load speed. WP-Super Cache allows logged in users to disable caching, which is important if you are trying to do some editing on your site without the pages constantly …