Create Ultimate Contact Forms With Cforms II 8.7

September 23rd in Free Plug-ins by .

I got to admit that I had heard of cforms II when it came out a while back, but I never bothered to try it out as I never saw the need to create contact forms for my blog. After all, I could just put my e-mail and other information on “about me” page and forget it. But since I have used it on my business blog, I have been hooked. And I can’t believe it’s for free. But if you are looking ot create professional contact forms such as the one below, then you should definitely check out cforms WordPress form plugin.

The guys at deliciousday have done a magnificant job of designing this form plugin. When you install the plugin, it shows up next to your comments tab on your WordPress dashboard. So it’s very convenient to find unlike a few other plug-ins that are tough to figure out.

Once you click on that link, you are going to get a host of features that allow you to design your desired form. For instance, you can define read only fields, checkboxes, radioboxes, file-upload boxes, radio groups, select boxes, and password fields for your form. In addition, you can disable fields, make them read only, or even clear them on focus. The possibilities are limitless in that regard.

But that’s not all. You can customize your messages (success or failure) or change the text and button labels easily with cforms. Not only that, you can define the email address that your readers will see when they fill a form on your blog. You can also redirect them to a whole different page once they have completed your form, which is great as you can walk your readers through your sales funnel.

But what I liked the most about this plug-in was the tell-a-friend feature for some of my WordPress blog. That’s one way to go viral, and a lot of people do take time to e-mail about your service to their friends if you over deliver.

The plug-in is very easy to use, and essentially does what it’s supposed to do, create brilliant contact forms. I can’t believe that the programmers have released this for free, but then again, I am glad they did. Version 9.0 is going to be even better, so watch this space for that. You can get more technical details about cforms II form WordPress pluging on the author’s page.

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How To Add Breadcrumbs To Your WordPress Theme with NavXT Plugin

September 12th in Free Plug-ins, Plugins For SEO by .

I am sure you are familiar with the concept of breadcrumbs. These are those little handy links that show up at the top or bottom of pages and help you navigate through websites. Breadcrumbs are highly recommended for SEO, but they are not necessarily easy to generate for WordPress blogs. Now I say that as it is possible to implement a customized Breadcrumb system for your WordPress plug if you know PHP inside and out. But if you are just a blogger who want to take advantage of breadcrumbs to make your site easier to use, then you should check out Breadcrumb NavXT.

NavXT allows you to create highly customizable crumbs for your WordPress blog without too much fuss. Now some WordPress themes may not quite work easily with this plug-in but most of them do. Basically, all you need to do is to add the following code to your header.php file:

if(function_exists(‘bcn_display’))
{
bcn_display();
}
?>

The administration panel for this plugin is very easy to use and allows you to customize all pages such as archives, author pages, and even static front pages. You get to define what you want to see on your breadcrumb here.

Now if you are an advanced user, I highly recommend activating the Core version of this plugin instead of the administration version. The reason is that you can make this plugin perform faster without the administration panel. But you will need the following code to make it work:


if(class_exists(‘bcn_breadcrumb_trail’))
{
//Make new breadcrumb object
$breadcrumb_trail = new bcn_breadcrumb_trail;
//Setup options here if needed
//Fill the breadcrumb trail
$breadcrumb_trail->fill();
//Display the trail
$breadcrumb_trail->display();
}
?>

The breadcrumbs are often used to boost search engine rankings. The search engine robots love these, and you should definitely consider having them if your theme fits one of these. This plug-in is for free and you can download it right here.

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Get The Most Out Of Twitter With Twitter Tools

September 8th in Free Plug-ins by .

I am sure by now you have had a chance to check Twitter out for yourself. If you haven’t, you really should. Microblogging is the future of blogging and Twitter doesn’t show any sign of stopping. So go check Twitter out if you haven’t already.

Many bloggers that I know are way afraid of the commitment that they need to put forward towards Twitter. It’s true that you have to take care of your twitter account, but at the same time, you can use the free plugin Twitter Tools to simply your tasks such as posting blog notifications to your Twitter page. In essence, you can keep your Twitter followers up-to-date all the time by automating the process.

This plugin is very easy to use. All you have to do is activate it, and you can access your plugin settings under setting tab of your WordPress dashboard. It is also a widgetified plugin which means you can just drag and drop your twitter posts to your WordPress blog. My favorite feature though is the daily digest feature. Basically, if you use tools such as Thwirl to “tweet” heavily daily, then you can use this tool to create digests from your Twitter posts and put them on your blog. Think about it. You can put your focus on your twitter account and your major updates will be automatically inserted to your blog. Overall, this is an extremely useful plugin, and it is for free, so definitely check it out.

Here is how to install Twitter tools:
Download the plugin archive and expand it.
Put the ‘twitter-tools.php’ file into your wp-content/plugins/ directory.
Go to the Plugins page in your WordPress Administration area and click ‘Activate’ for Twitter Tools.
Go to the Twitter Tools Options page (Options > Twitter Tools) to set your Twitter account information and preferences.

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Get Your Message Across With WWSGD WordPress Plugin

September 4th in Free Plug-ins, Plugin Tips by .

Have you ever wanted to show a note at the top of each of your posts (RSS subscription would be one) to your new visitors but keep them hidden to your regulars? If so, then you should definitely check out the free WordPress plugin WWSGD. It’s an excellent plugin that allows you

What Would Seth Godin Do is a plugin that allows you reach out to your new readers and provide them with a call to action.

As you can see in the image above, you can use the box provided to you by WWSGD to communicate all kinds of information to your visitors. I use it to talk about the latest GPS or PC Deals on my tech blog. The good thing abut it is that you can specifically target the new users and make them feel welcome. At the same time, you can give them the opportunity to sign up for your newsletter or feed, or join your YouTube subscribers.

WWSGD is a free WordPress plugin and is compatible with the latest version of WordPress. Check it out here.

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Add META Robots To Your WordPress Blog with META Robots!

August 24th in Free Plug-ins, Plugins For SEO by .

Getting your WordPress SEO right is probably the most important part of running your SEO blog. It’s true you can drive to your website with PPC, Article marketing, or various other ways, but it is essential to use SEO to your advantage to keep your costs down. After all, who doesn’t like getting free traffic.

One of the issues that many wordpress bloggers have to deal with is the issue of content duplication. The template that you use, and they way WordPress is designed in general can get you in trouble with search engines. For instance, in most blogs, domain.com/cat1/cat2 story and domain.com/cat1/story return the same page which could be counted as duplicate content on major search engines. So you want to make sure you address potential duplicate content issues with your WordPress blog as soon as possible.

The issue of link weight is also important towards for your SEO efforts, so you want to make sure you are not leaking pagerank by linking out to unrelated sites (either through comments or links on your pages). Well you can address this issue by adding the META Robots tag as below:
<meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow”>

If you are familiar with HTML, you know that the above meta robots tags, when added to your pages, instructs search engines to follow the links on the page and index them as well. Now if you have 200 pages, you simply cannot customize your robots tag per page easily. That’s just not how WordPress is designed right now. But that’s where META Robots plugin comes in.

META Robots WordPress plugin allows you to apply the above tag to all your pages. In addition, the box below shows up under each and every post, allowing you to override the settings for each post. This plugin allows to avoid indexing your META pages and other useless pages as well, which can only help your SEO efforts.

Now here is what you should know before using this plugin:

  • You want to make sure your WordPress template comes with a call to wp_head().
  • You want to make sure your theme is using wp_list_categories for listing categories. META Robots is not compatible with older function calls such as list_cats.
  • You want to make sure you don’t add no index or no follow if you don’t know what you are doing. If you add no index to your homepage, your homepage will not be indexed by Google, and your site could drop from the face of the earth.

But give this a try. It’s simply an amazing simple but powerful WordPress plugin and it’s free too!

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Optimize Your WordPress Titles For SEO

August 22nd in Free Plug-ins, Plugins For SEO by .

One of the shortcomings of WordPress is the fact that it comes SEO-unfriendly in the box. When you install a WordPress system, you are basically left with default options that are not very SE-friendly. As you know, the title of each and every post is your greatest opportunity to rank on Google and receive free traffic. SEO Title Tag SEO WordPress Plugin is one of the best in allowing you to manage your title tags.

SEO Title tags wordpress plugin allows you to modify your title tags for each and every page on your blog. You can also modify the title for your category pages, your tag pages, and your 404 and archives pages. You can also put in customized title tags for each post when you are writing them. I personally prefer this approach to the automated one as you get to customize for the keywords that you really want. The plugin is free of course, and you can download it here. Don’t forget to make sure that you have only one title plugin active. There are people who have multiple active plugins that do the same thing. You don’t want to do that when you are doing SEO for your WordPress blog. That’s if you want to show up high up on Google.

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Yahoo Buzz WordPress Plugin: Buzz on!

August 20th in Free Plug-ins by .

In case you haven’t noticed, Yahoo! Buzz is now open to public. If you own a blog or planning to start one, you NEED to jump on the bandwagon. Thankfully, there were a few smart folks who were anticipating the release and had plug-ins lined up for yesterday: WPBuzz. Is that smart or what? Having a plug-in handy to push it on the very same Yahoo! Buzz. Has gotten quite number of buzzes as well. In any case, you can download the file from the link above. It’s very straight forward. Put the Yahoo! Buzz WordPress plugin in your plugins folder and activate it. Yahoo! Buzz will automatically be added to your blog posts. Of course, you will need to have Buzz worthy content handy as well, but that’s really outside of what the plug-in can do for your blog. Enjoy!

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