My Favorite SEO Plugin

I do most of my own SEO but when I have an affiliate site on WordPress (as most of mine are), I like to use the great SEO Ultimate Plugin. There are a few others out there (probably equally as good) but this plugin is my go-to when it comes to quick link masking, 404 detection, deep linking prefs etc.

There’s a new update out that expands on some of the functionality…

SEO Ultimate WordPress SEO Plugin Version 7.2.1 Released: “Link masking has two benefits: First, it lets you replace lengthy affiliate URLs with short, clean, internal URL masks (using 301 redirects, which have no search engine penalty). Second, Link Mask Generator automatically generates robots.txt rules that disallow your masked URLs, effectively neutering the juice-flow of the link, without resorting to the rel nofollow attribute. This combination makes Link Mask Generator a perfect tool for affiliate marketers.”

If you use WordPress, it’s worth a look as a plugin.

Here’s a PDF with all of the new features.

Great Review of @Posterous

Years of building and maintaining my WordPress blog have resulted in my learning a lot about WordPress and getting a lot of grease under my fingernails. Weeks of using Posterous has resulted in a media-rich blog with several posts per week. Tell me which service is more powerful.

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I started using Posterous primarily as a photo-blog back in September of ’08.

However, it’s transitioned into my full time personal blog as I’ve changed up the samharrelson.com domain into a static landing (pointer) page.

Posterous solves so many problems for me.

Thanks to Andy Ihnatko for the great review affirming my love and thanks to the Posterous team for a fantastic product that has renewed my love of posting.

Magnify Publisher Simplifies Blogging

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Magnify.net is releasing a very exciting new WordPress and MovableType plugin aimed at making it easier for bloggers to find and include images and videos into posts.

Basically, the plugin integrates easily and nicely into either a WordPress or MoveableType install and allows for a blogger to include a keyword relevant image or video to be embedded in a post within a few seconds.

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As most bloggers know, finding relevant images or video content for a post can consume a great deal of time and often lead to frustration. So, the Magnify Publisher program definitely solves a much maligned problem.

Magnify Publisher searches through popular video sources such as YouTube, Metacafe, Veoh, Blip.tv, Google Video, AOL Video, RedLasso and a number of others. At the moment, Flickr is the only available image search source but Magnify CEO Steve Rosenbaum tells me that this will soon be expanded.

Here’s an example of the video search and embedding feature:

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And here’s an example of the image search and embedding feature:

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Perhaps most compelling is the ability to also directly and easily incorporate webcasts into a blog post. So, instead o recording a video on a webcam then uploading that video to YouTube then grabbing the embed code then embedding that code into a WordPress blog, a blogger can simply press a couple of buttons and instantly get their webcam video embedded into a post.

Here’s an example:

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These are very innovative features from the Magnify team and definitely needed improvements to the current paradigm of blogging. When I spoke with Steve Rosenbuam today, he mentioned his ardent belief that popular blogs of the immediate future would be those that best blend the visual, video and text components of content creation rather than those that just focus on one specific medium.

Magnify’s Publisher plugin goes a long way in supporting his idea.