Vote It Up is a cool WordPress plugin that adds a 2 way voting system to WordPress. Your visitors can vote stories up and down. It provides you with the opportunity to modify its skins to change the look and feel of the buttons on your website.

This plugin is flexible enough to allow you to switch from text votes to image votes if you prefer. You can also define what text shows up after a vote is cast. ‘Permissions” is the most important part of this plugin. If you don’t want everyone to vote on a post, you can make the option exclusive to your members. Also, if you are using this plugin to gauge the performance of an author on your blog, you can turn off their ability to vote on their stories.

It is possible to use this plugin to find out which posts are popular among your visitors. Instead of using a regular “popular post plugin” that counts the hits on your posts, you can use Vote It Up to show those posts with the most scores in your sidebar.

This plugin is not for everyone. Some people can’t handle getting negative feedback from their visitors. Those people are better off installing a plugin that only allows positive votes. Others can use this plugin to ask their visitors to vote on goods and services (as well as on their posts). Pretty useful tool all around.

If you are looking to integrate Foursquare into your website one way or another, these Foursquare plugins can make your life a whole lot easier:

FourSquare Integration: enables you to integrate Foursquare into your WordPress blog (inside your posts or in your side-bar). It’s customizable too.

My Foursquare: display your Foursquare badges and mayorships on your WordPress with this awesome plugin. You probably need to be a bit active in Foursquare to take full advantage of this.

gPress: a powerful WordPress plugin that lets you add geo-layers to your website. Can be integrated with Foursquare and BuddyPress.

Foursquare Map: makes it easy to share your last check-in location without needing to give away any personal info nor do you need to be an expert in mapping APIs.

PlaceWidget for WordPress: makes it easy to add a widget from PlaceWidget.com to your WordPress website. A decent choice for businesses.

Lifestream: it does not need any introduction. It’s one of the best plugins to share your activities in Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare and other sites with the world.

BP Foursquare API: a library for your BuddyPress powered website that enables you to connect it to Foursquare.

Foursquare and other geo-location services are here to stay. The above plugins make it a tad bit easier to integrate Foursquare into your WordPress website and share your experiences with the world.

Photoland has a very simple, yet attractive design. Let’s not forget that this is a theme for photoblogs. So your photos are going to be key here. Photoland’s back-end gives you the chance to customize your theme without touching your code. Photoland is designed in a way that puts the main focus on your photos instead of other less significant things on your site.

Photoland comes with Cufon headers and fonts, giving you the chance to change things around on your blog easily. It also have a super attractive jQuery slider on its front-page, which can be used to promote top photos on your blog.

Photoland is social friendly too. Your visitors can use the social media buttons integrated into this theme to distribute your work to their friends and communities.

To sum things up, Photoland is an attractive and super clean theme for photo-bloggers that is easy to deploy and customize. You won’t have to be a WordPress or PHP genius to bring your art online with Photoland.

Instant Q&A is a turnkey questions and answers solution that offers 3 color schemes and gives your visitors the chance to post their questions and search through existing ones on your website. This theme is ad ready too, giving you the opportunity to start monetizing your website from the get go. It’s not one of those cheap clone themes and does have a lot of power under its hood.

Instant Q&A has a point system that rewards your members for answering questions on your website. A more sophisticated Karma system would be nice, but that wouldn’t be hard to implement if you know your way around PHP. Changing your logo and adding Google Analytics can be done in the back-end.

Your visitors get their own member pages, which makes tracking their questions and answers more convenient. What’s nice about this theme is that it makes your visitors feel like they are part of a real community.

To sum things up, Instant Q&A is a brilliant theme that turns your WordPress website into a question/answer portal quickly. It’s pretty clean and ready to go out of the box. The karma system could be improved a bit though. Considering that this is almost a one-of-a-kind theme, we can forgive its small short-comings.

There aren’t many job WordPress themes around, but the few that are around are easy to use and customizable. You can always install them on your root domain or in a sub-directory on your blog. Here are 5 powerful job board WordPress themes that can help you save time and get your job board online fast:

Job Roller: a powerful job listing theme for WordPress that takes full advantage of custom types, jQuery, and AJAX to bring your visitors the most dynamic experience possible.

Job Board Theme: a flexible job board theme for WordPress that comes with 7 color schemes and tons of customization features in the back-end. Paypal is integrated into the theme as well, making it easier to start a paid job board with WordPress.

Tapp Jobs: a super job board theme for WordPress by Press 75 that is clean, SEO-friendly, and social-media ready. You can easily customize it and put your brand and stamp on it.

Jobpress: a very flexible and attractive job board theme for WordPress that lets you set up your job board fast. You can also charge people for listing their jobs on your blog. Even if you don’t know any coding, you can still set up your job board fast with Jobpress.

Classipress: a cool WordPress listing theme for advanced users who want to customize it and make a job board out of it. The functionality is already there, but you just have to make minor changes. If you know coding, it’s very much worth it.

There you have it. Adding a job board to your WordPress blog is an easy way to take your blog to the next level. Thanks to the above job listing themes, you won’t have to spend too much time doing it.

Tribune has an easy-to-customize slider that you can use to display your top stories. You can define which category you want to use for your slider. Custom menus are nice to have too. The video widget comes handy if you want to add more videos to your news site. Multiple layouts offered with this theme are a plus.

Tribune is SEO and social media friendly. As demonstrated in the above screen-shot, you can add your social media profiles to your website easily. You can customize your title tags and other on-page SEO factors in the back-end.

What I like the most about Tribune is its design. It’s very clean and great for all types of websites (especially the ones covering the news). Its powerful back-end makes life easy too. Certainly worth checking out.

Compete: Compete is for power players. It gives you all kinds of information on your competitors and helps you optimize your own strategies. Whether you are looking for more keywords, want to increase your traffic, or find out what your competitors are doing right, Compete has you covered.

SEOmoz: not only has some of the best search engine optimization tips around, it has a set of tools that can help you find out more about your website (and more importantly your competitors’ websites).

SpyFu: the ultimate keyword spy tool for search engine and advertising professionals. Can dig up your competitors’ keywords and campaigns. Its Kombat tool lets you compare your website against those of your competitors’.

Keyword Spy: one of the most powerful keyword spy tools around. If you intend to promote affiliate products on your site or just want to find out what keywords people are bidding on, this is the tool you need for your research.

Market Samurai: unlike the above tools, Market Samurai is a desktop application. It has plenty of modules to help you do your keyword research, find out about your competitors, and find new ways to promote your websites.

There is nothing wrong with spying on your competitors and learning from their strategies. If you have a popular website, you can be absolutely sure that others use these types of tools to spy on you. While you do not want to clone everything others have done, the above keyword spy tools can help you learn some new things.

Once you install the plugin, EzineArticles’ box will be added to each of your posts. If you are a premium member, you can schedule your articles too. For free members, you can change the category, define tags, and tell EzineArticles where to grab your tags and article title from.

You don’t want to submit all your posts to EzineArticles, but it does not hurt to submit a couple and test this directory out for your content. Since you will have to enter your user-name/password to get this plugin to work, you can also count on this plugin to keep track of your submitted articles.

To sum things up, this is a simple plug-in that semi-automates the process of adding your blog posts to EzineArticles’ article bank. I don’t recommend doing it for all your blog posts. But it can work if you do not go overboard with it. If you intend to heavily invest in article marketing, you may want to sign up for a premium account with EzineArticles. That’s not cheap though.