The Redirection plugin, written by John Godley, allows you to easily monitor any “file not found” 404 errors and create search friendly 301 redirects for them easily. The main difference between 301 redirects and other types is that a 301 redirect will transfer around 90% of the original link juice to the new destination. This is very important for maintaining your current rankings in search engines.

I have used this plugin for several years, it now has over 1 million installs and is frequently updated.

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1. Free Plugin: Exclude Pages from WordPress Navigation Menus Creating pages easily is one of the best features of...

Earlier this year I had been using a wicked combination of WordPress Anti-spam plugin, SI-Captch and a few others to control spammers on my WordPress sites. Over the past month I noticed my inbox filling with more and more spam comments so I decided to go searching for what “today’s” best spam killing plugins were. I got to work installing different highly rated anti-spam plugins on various sites (because I run multiple sites it’s fairly easy for me to A/B test plugins for performance).

And the winner is… Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin

Although it doesn’t appear this plugin has been updated in months, it’s performance is so simple it probably just doesn’t need maintenance. The plugin adds a simple checkbox to the comment form asking people to confirm they are not spammers. This little checkbox throws off all the automated comment spam software.

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I use a great free WordPress plugin to easily exclude pages from navigation. Exclude Pages creates a checkbox on the side of page creation and editing areas that allows you to exclude the page you are editing or creating from the navigation menus.

I’ve been using the plugin for over a year and it’s been kept up to date. I feel confident you will love this plugin.

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You can configure this plugin to show the recently popular pages, posts, or both. The plugin allows you to easily configure how far back it should check activity to generate your list – this allows you to set the widget to display the most popular posts over the past day, week, month, year, etc.

Recently Popular is super easy to setup and display in the sidebar. The author keeps it up to date. In 3 months since my first installation it hasn’t broken down on me yet (/me knocks on wood).

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Showing Related Blog posts helps your blog in several ways. First, it allows users to find other content relevant to what they were searching for when they first arrived at your site, and your overall bounce rate will lower. Second, it helps search engine have more visibility into your site and pages. By having related posts listed for each single post search engines begin to group the posts together under associated topic weight.

Customizable templates allow you to change every aspect of the plugin’s display. You can easily disallow certain posts or categories from showing up as related posts. It’s one of my favorites and you should give it a try.

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Out of the box cleanRoar resembles a newspaper or blank WordPress theme. There are a few options to select pre-made stylesheets that will alter the style significantly (I like the red one, but Dave said it made him puke). The default colorless theme version is fine and it’s what I usually end up going with each time I’ve installed this theme over the past week.

Another option area in the cleanRoar theme configuration area allows you to choose the layout. 3 column, 2 column, and a few multiple configurations are possible. You may also add 125×125 sidebar ads through the theme manager if you choose.

It looks like they are keeping it up to date. After being launched 4 months ago wordpress.org is showing the last update was just a few weeks ago. It works fine everywhere I’ve installed it, so no special skills needed here.

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If you decide to pay a certain amount for people who send you contacts through your website you will need to be able to fire a pixel as soon as the contact form has been successfully submitted. This is easy to do with Contact Form 7 if you’re using an image pixel.

Log into your wordpress admin area. Navigate to the Contact Form administration area in the bottom left. Click the name of the form you want to place a pixel in (if you have multiple forms setup). At the bottom of the form admin screen click the “Messages” tab.

Under the first message “# Sender’s message was sent successfully”, paste your IMG SRC image call html. Scroll to the bottom and hit save. Now submit your form and it should fire the pixel.

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Make sure you have the most recent version of WordPress. Download Area on WordPress.org

Once the zip file is downloaded to your local computer, then unzip the files

Upload the folders inside the /wordpress folder on your computer (from the inflated zip file) to your public html web directory on your web host.

Inside your hosting control panel, create a new MySQL database for the WordPress Installation

When the files have finished the FTP process and your database exists, navigate to yourdomain.com/wp-admin/ to generate your initial configuration file. Make sure to save the admin password that is auto generated by wordpress.

You should now be ready to start posting on your blog. If you have problems or need some to install wordpress for you, do not hesitate to contact me.

A few tips:
You may wish to create a blank file named .htaccess and also upload this to your public html directory, then CHMOD it 777. This will allow you to easily turn on permalinks.

I recommend using the custom permalink structure of: /%postname%/ . This will help keep your urls short, position keywords closer to your root domain level, and make navigation more user friendly.

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You can allow registered users your blog to upload photos. You can decide if you require a review process before they are posted.

You can manage your own personal photo galleries easily with this script. You can create custom albums that contain galleries of photos you’ve already grouped together. The feature list is huge on this one.

There are other NextGen Gallery companion plugins (also free) that you can download to display the latest (or random) photos in the side bar, and many other cool features. Of course NextGen has a spectacular slide show and all the normal bells and whistled you’d expect with an over the top plugin like this.

I basically install this with my core group of plugins on any new domain. If you’ve found a better free plugin, or have ran into any problems getting NextGen Gallery to work, drop me a comment in the comment box below and I’ll get back to you.

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I’m using the theme on 2 sites currently. I’m having one heck of a time getting the featured content gallery plugin to work properly, so I just completely stripped it out for now (as you can see here on this blog currently).

Check out this link to see what eDegree looks like with the slider. Read more about this theme and download it yourself at the official WordPress Themes Directory listing.

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