The longer I use Wordpress for our blog and other sites I build the more and more I love it’s flexibility and ease of use. From complicated ecommerce sites to simple 10 pages sites for non-techie clients Wordpress’s simplicity makes it easy to teach people how to use and even modify their site without being dependent on anyone.

Here are my favorite plugins that make Wordpress great!

All in One SEO Pack

Provides all your SEO abilities in one easy to use plug-in.

AJAX Comments

Lets users add comments without having to refresh the page using Web 2.0 AJAX goodness.

Askimet

This comes packaged by default with Wordpress but it’s vital you get an API key and activate this plug in, that is unless you want to help spammers sell viagra.

Dofollow

Why let Google outsource it’s quality control to you?? Add the dofollow plugin to remove the “rel=”nofollow” attribute from comments on your site.

Google XML Sitemaps

This tool is great for easily adding an XML Sitemap to your site so Google can better index you, especially if your entire site is built in Wordpress.

Sociable

Automatically adds links to the bottom of every post/page (at your discretion) that allows your users to easily submit and up-vote (hopefully) your content.

Wordpress Back Up Tool

Great tool for people who can’t handle phpMyAdmin for pulling a database backup. (back up early and often!!)

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade

This tool makes it easy to upgrade your site to the latest version of Wordpress without having to play with FTP. Just make sure you back up your site first and navigate to http://www.yoursite.com/wp-admin/update.php after running this to make sure you update your database.

Know any other cool plugins?? Please leave links in the comments.

Back on June 24th Ryan Naraine did a post on the ZDNet blog likening Apple’s bundling of additional software with their security updates as Badware Behavior. I had seen these updates and while I agreed at the time this was pretty questionable Apple at least had the courtesy to separate new software from the actual security update.

It appears that today Apple has reached a new low by actually bundling iTunes with their Quicktime update, forcing you to add iTunes to keep Quicktime up to date and secure.

This set off alarms as I don’t have nor do I want iTunes installed on my computer yet Apple seems to think I should.

Come on Apple, I’m just not cool enough to use an ‘i’ anything so please stop rubbing it in.

Google has reached another milestone in integrating all the business units from its DoubleClick Acquisition with the launch of the Google Affiliate Network, a re-branded version of the Performics Ad Network.

From Google’s site:

As an advertiser using Google Affiliate Network, you’ll discover pre-screened publishers who can refer consumer traffic to you. As a publisher, you can market your site to advertisers in the network; if selected to participate in an advertiser’s program, you’ll earn a percent of sales or a referral bounty.

Sounds like any other affiliate network to me. I have yet to log in and check it out but we’ll be doing a thorough review this week to let everyone know how it ranks against the other big players in affiliate networking in the coming days.

We’ve just added our page for DONE! SEO on Facebook.

Please feel free to check us out or become a fan.

According to Yahoo News Presidential Candidate John McCain is using Google to check potential running mates for any potential skeletons in their closets. Well, at least someone on his campaign staff is doing the checks as John McCain has stated that he doesn’t know how to use a computer, even ‘the Google’, instead relying on his wife for help.

At DONE! SEO our team has compiled a list of specialized strategies to assist with Political Online Reputation Management.

My hat is off to Quadzilla at SEOBlackHat.com for really putting it to all these ‘SEO Speakers’ that harp how great advanced ‘White Hat’ SEO techniques are:

I think this is by far my favorite part:

“But at the same time, I couldn’t help but notice that this year’s Advanced show seemed to lean a whole lot more to the grey/black hat side of things. I couldn’t help but wonder: When did advanced search engine optimization get confused with being a black hat?“

Right around the time that Google took this stance solidified it:

“Web spam is when somebody tries to cheat or take shortcuts so that their Web site shows up higher [in search results rankings] than it deserves to show up,” - Matt Cutts

If you are not trying to get your client’s websites to rank hire than they “deserve”, why should they hire you?

That really does sum it up. If you’re not going to help someone get better rankings them Google thinks they arbitrarily deserve then why should they pay you?

Maybe you can get Google to pay you a dividend for being so ‘ethical’?? Just don’t hold your breath

For those of you unfamiliar with this tool (http://www.mcdar.net/dance/index.php) it let you search each of Google’s data centers by IP address, letting you see how your rankings are across all the data centers. This can be very interesting to use when you’re working on an important ranking for an SEO or Reputation Management campaign.

Right now it shows that the account is suspended and we’re hoping they get their account reinstated as we really like this tool.

If anyone knows the owner of this site please have him get in touch with us, we’d be happy to host this tool for free for everyone to use. We’ve go plenty of servers so it won’t be a problem for us.

Recently the term zxbfwwr was the top search term on Google Trends. The guys who started this actually put a small site up at www.zxbfwwr.net but left the .com unregistered. I registered the domain right away and now that there are a lot of results for the term I’m going to see if the .com will have the strength to outrank the other 39,000 results in Google today.

We’ll have an update on Friday the 13th (oooohhh scary) and see how successful this test was.

In our effort to expand our offering in the field of Online Reputation Management we have decided to launch a site very specific to reputation and public relations related services that we offer.

Please visit our new site, www.donereputationmanagement.com and feel free to contact us through that site if you are interested in managing or improving your online reputation.

Thanks a lot to PushON for making our Friday here. We’ve decided to cancel all work today (sorry clients) and play SEO Bullshit Bingo using a quick search for “search engine optimization” on YouTube as the bingo caller.