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Today I’ve got a great list of some WordPress plugins that will help with your SEO efforts. If you aren’t sure how to install plugins within WordPress, each site below has instructions in order to help you out.

Adsense-Deluxe
www.acmetech.com/blog/adsense-deluxe/
I love this one! It’s a great way to earn some extra income on your blog. All you need to do is cut and paste your AdSense code and then place it in each post you make. Very slick.

Optimal Title
elasticdog.com/2004/09/optimal-title/
By default, WordPress does not show ideal titles. As a matter of fact, if you don’t have this plugin installed, the search engines won’t have the faintest idea as to what your post is about. Get it installed ASAP.

Ultimate Tag Warrior
www.neato.co.nz/ultimate-tag-warrior/
If you’ve ever visited a social bookmarking site like Digg.com or even del.icio.us (and who hasn’t?), you know that you keep your bookmarks organized by using tags. But…they’re not only used for social bookmarking, they can also be used for your blog posts and are in fact, highly recommended. This plugin allows you to place tags with your blog posts to help others understand what that post is about.

Akismet
akismet.com/
Askimet is a must have for your blog. It will keep those unsightly spam comments from showing up on your blog and nothing is worse than keeping a professional blog like having a comment containing extremely questionable content within it. Askimet will help you get rid of this junk.

Google Sitemaps
www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/
A mantra in the SEO world is that you must have a sitemap on your website or blog. It makes it easier for search engines to find all of your pages quickly and easily. Highly, highly recommended.

Ok, here’s the deal…

Google recently announced on their blog that they’ll be doing yet another “slap” only this time to AdSense publishers. The bottom line is that publishers who “blend” their Google ads into their own content will be the ones who suffer.

Now, personally, I was very confused about this because Google specifically TELLS you when you create your AdSense ads, that it’s best to blend the ads - so what the heck is going on?

First off, I went to go check out their “guidelines for choosing colors” in their AdSense support section here:
www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=21592&topic=1165
I scrolled down to step 4 about “choosing colors” and clicked on the link provided which took me here:
www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=17957
hmmm…the “topic can not be found” coincidence? (I’m such a conspiracy theorist).
But…here’s yet another page which talks about blending…
www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=17957
And here’s a snippet from that page…

Well, here’s how Google puts it:

1. Ads shouldn’t be placed under a title or a section heading in a way that implies they aren’t ads. Here’s an example:

2. Ads should be easily distinguishable from surrounding content. (I know, I know, again, confusing as hell but here’s how they phrase it)…
“…you should not place an ad unit by a group of links that has identical colors and line spacing. Doing so may cause users to think the ad unit is content created by you. In this situation (again see the image below), we recommend using a different color for the ad titles or indenting the ad unit to help distinguish the ads from your own content.”

It’s probably best you just read the whole thing for yourself and then get to work if you’re in potential danger…