Best WordPress Plugins: sig2feed

The sig2feed plugin is a very useful yet not that popular WordPress plugin. It basically allows you to add a custom message to your feed, possibly including a copyright message and a link back to your homepage, to your archives or to any other specific page of your blog.

This feature is very useful because it will discourage sploggers from stealing your feed and it will also increase your page views if people click on the link you will place on the footer of your feed. There are other plugins out there providing the customization of the feed (check Better Feed for instance) but sig2feed was the most user-friendly I could find, check it out.

Optimal Title Tag for WordPress

Some time ago I wrote a post titled “Keep your Title Tags short and pertinent“ outlining the best practices for Title tags. Most blogging platforms come with a standard Title tag structure that places the blog name and post title on single post pages. Suppose you have the “ABC Blog” and you just published a post called “Top 10 Firefox extensions”. In that case your Title tag for that single page would be “ABC Blog – Top 10 Firefox extensions”.

This Title structure is good but not optimal. The best possible Title tag for a single blog post is the title of the post alone. The name of the blog will increase the number of keywords (reducing the value of each one) and it might not be related to the post content at all.

Below you will find the code that I use for my Title tag. This code will display the blog name on the home page, the post title on single post pages and the blog name plus category name for category pages.

<title><?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo(‘name’); }
elseif ( is_category() ) { single_cat_title(); echo ' - ' ; bloginfo(‘name’); }
elseif (is_single() ) { single_post_title();}
elseif (is_page() ) { single_post_title();}
else { wp_title(‘’,true); } ?></title>

RSS Footer WordPress Plugin

I confess that I am a bit cranky when it comes to WordPress plugins. I use as few as possible (to not compromise my WP install), and I also tend to like some old school plugins that were released years ago. My plugin of choice for adding a link to my RSS feed, for instance, was the sig2feed one. I started using it early in 2006!

Recently, however, more people started scraping Daily Blog Tips, so I felt that it was necessary to add not only a link back to the blog, but also a link back to the original post. This should help Google to identify my original articles more easily and quickly.

When I tried to use sig2feed for this purpose, however, I found that it was not capable of (not without a good deal of PHP tweaking at least), so I decided to find a new RSS feed footer.

RSS Footer is the name of the plugin created by Joost de Valk, and it gets the job done perfectly. Basically it allows you to insert any message or link on the footer of your feeds, and it also comes with a check box that you simply need to tick if you want a link back to the original article.

If you have people scraping your RSS feed, give this plugin a try.

Jerome’s Keywords

WordPress is one of the best blogging platforms around. It is reliable, customizable and it gives you full control over your blog. One of the useful features of WordPress is the existence of plugins, which can be used to solve particular problems or to add functionalities to your blog.
Jerome’s Keywords is a very good WordPress plugin to manage keywords, here is a list of what you will be able to do with the plugin:

• add tags to each post (compatible with Technorati)
• implement a local tag system
• create a local tag cosmos
• add keywords to meta tags on the header

If you still do not have a keyword manager on your WordPress blog you can check Jerome’s Keywords
here.