Functions Every Tax Blog Should Have

 Print This Post

Our tax blog is built upon the powerful Wordpress blogging platform. One of the beauties of Wordpress blogs is that there are a great number of “plugins” (devices and functions that drive a Wordpress blog). In fact, there are currently over 2,500 at this time, creating a huge haystack to look through:

Spam Filtering

When a new comment, trackback, or pingback comes to your blog it is submitted to the Akismet web service which runs hundreds of tests on the comment and returns a thumbs up or thumbs down.  You’re always protected up-to-the-second from the latest dirty tricks of spammers. There’s no need to create and maintain a blacklist of email addresses.

Search Engine Optimization

There are quite a few of these types of plugins, but two plugins are especially easy to use to create and improve your blog’s ability to rank well on search engines.

All In One SEO PackGoogle XML Sitemaps
This plugin will create a Google sitemaps compliant XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Everytime you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

• Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
• Generates META tags automatically
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs
• For Wordpress 2.3 you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
• You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
• You can fine-tune everything
• Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

Social Networking

This is a crucial function that allows readers who find your Posts useful and informative to pass it on, as well as submit it to various RSS feeds or communities such as Digg, StumbleUpon, etc.

Share This
An example of this is at the end of this post.

Site Statistics

Even though something like Google Analytics provides an incredible depth of information, it can be overwhelming and doesn’t really highlight what’s most interesting to me as a writer.   That’s why Automattic created its own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.

This program will begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page. Less is more.

Finally, because all of the processing and collection runs on our servers and not yours, it doesn’t cause any additional load on your hosting account. In fact, it’s one of the fastest stats system, hosted or not hosted, that you can use.

Comments

A great blogging feature is the ability for your readers to interact with your site.  Providing your visitors with the ability to comment on your posts will give thme a sense of ownership and a more personalized touch.

Subscribe to Comments is a robust function that enables commenters to sign up for e-mail notification of subsequent entries.  The function includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address

Podcasting

• Full featured and automatic feed generation (RSS2, iTunes and ATOM and BitTorrent RSS)
• Preview of what your Podcast will look like on iTunes
• Podcast Download stats, with cool graphs. See below.
• Support for Premium Content (Pay Only)
• Makes adding a Podcast to a Post very simple
• View MP3 Files ID3 tags when your Posting
• Control over where the player will display within your post and what it will look like.
• Support for various formats, including Video Podcasting
• Supports unlimited number of media files.
• Automatic Media player for MP3, RM, OGG, MP4, MOV, QT, FLV, ASF, WMV, AVI, and more, with inline and Popup Window support.
• Preview image for videos
• Support for seperate Category podcasts