1. WP Security Scan
This plugin will scan your entire WordPress installation and will suggest you regarding security vulnerabilities like  passwords, database security, file permissions, admin security. It will also hide the version of your WordPress and remove the META tag from the core such that hacking to your WordPress installation would be hard.

2. Secure WordPress
It will help secure WordPress installation by removing miscellaneous items after the installation process which may aid hackers. It will remove error information from the login-page and also remove or change the WP-version data but leave it unchanged in the admin area. It is suggested to remove any unwanted information to the non-admin for security reasons so it will remove update information about plugins, themes and core update information. Secure WordPress will add a blank index.html to the plug-in directory such that if anyone is trying to view the contents of the directory they will be viewing a blank page instead of the contents.

3. WordPress Database Backup
This is the first plug-in to be installed soon after you complete WordPress installation. It will help you backup all your core data and other content of your choice to the destination your choose: hard disk, email or remote server. In the event of crash either by your fault or from hackers, you can restore your WordPress blog from the backup file easily. It is recommended that you use this plug-in for WordPress version 2.0.3 or later.

4. Force SSL
Having a secure SSL connection to communicate with your users is beneficial. To enable this, your site must be SSL enabled first. To implement this, you need to buy the SSL certificate. By installing this plug-in it will force your user browser to connect to your site via a SSL connection. This eliminates any third party attacks between the connection and all the data that is transmitted to and from the site will be encrypted for better security.

5. Chap Secure Login
If you are not having a secure connection like SSL to protect your password , then you can use this plug-in for encrypting passwords. It will use the Chap protocol to hide the passwords and transmit it encrypted. The only information that is transmitted unencrypted is your username. Protecting password will give full security because password leaks will enable the hacker the gain full control of your WordPress blog.

6. Anonymous WordPress Plugin
All the WordPress versions 2.3 and above have the feature to get automatic updates for plugins. During this process it will send some of your information like your blog’s URL, version number, list of installed plugins and activated plugins to Wordpress.org. This information could be of potential use for hackers. So to avoid this, installing Anonymous WordPress plug-in is a feasible option. It will strip off your blog’s URL and version number and empty the activated plugins list. This plug-in is compatible with WordPress 2.3 and above.

7. Login Encrypt
This will help encrypt the login information using the complex DES and RSA combination. It uses the JavaScript appended and encrypted the password of the user and generates a unique DES key. And by using this key, user can have secure login each time they login to your blog.

8. Admin SSL
This plug-in will work with both the private and shared SSL connections and it will force a SSL connection in every page where password can or has to be entered. It is very helpful to protect the admin area, posts and all the pages of your WordPress installation and secure the login page. This plug-in works on WordPress 2.2 to 2.7.

9. AskApache Password Protect
It will block the bots and creates a safe wall for any vulnerability your WordPress blog may have. It will protect your password as well as your WordPress directories like the wp-includes, wp-content, etc. It is like placing your WordPress blog behind a security wall.

Password Protect Directory with htaccess
Step 1 – Create .htpasswd file with your desired username and password in any text editor (like Notepad) and save without the .txt extension. It is a good idea to encrypt the password  for extra security. Here is a good htpasswd encryption tool to do just that – simply enter the username and password and it will generate the code for you, which you can copy and paste. For a user ‘abc’ and password ‘abc’, I got this (but it generates a new one everytime) -

abc:9476nIHW7Esgw

Step 2 – Create .htaccess file with the code below. It can be created using any text editor (like Notepad) and saved without the .txt extension. Remember to double check the location of the htpasswd file, or it will not work. You can change ‘Login Details’ to whatever you want displayed on the pop up alert.

AuthUserFile /home/user/domain/secretfolder/.htpasswd
AuthType Basic
AuthName “Login Details”
Require valid-user

Step 3 – Upload both these files in the same folder which you want to protect  (in this case ’secretfolder’). Now whenever anyone accesses that directory or any files in it, they will be asked for login details. You web directory is now secure.

NOTE – You might not be able to see these files on your server since they are hidden files. I use Filezilla FTP client and often use the “force showing hidden files” option to view these files. Also remember that these files can be created easily in Notepad but save without .txt extension (Save a type -  choose “All Files”, then you can save without any extension). If the Login window keeps popping up,  most probably your login details are wrong.

OPTION – Here are some simple scripts to protect webpages, but they are only the first line of security. However, they are easier to implement as they can be simply inserted in the webpage  HTML code.

WARNING: .htaccess is a very powerful file to mess with and if wrongly configured can make your site inaccessible. If you are not sure of what you are playing with, seek professional tech support from your hosting provider. Edit your .htaccess at your OWN RISK, we bear no responsibility for the same and cannot provide support.

1. Add to Facebook
Once you install this plugin on your WordPress blog, you can see a footer link at the bottom of each blog post. By clicking on this link, user can add the current post to their Facebook mini-Feed. You can choose either a text link “Share on Facebook” or a Facebook button or both can be displayed at the bottom of the post. By clicking on the link, the user can sign in to the Facebook account it he is not already logged in and the post will be automatically added to his Mini-Feed.

2. Facebook Comments
This plug-in will import all the comments that are written on Facebook to your blog to the exact post such that you can see all the comments that are been made for a particular post directly in your WordPress blog. By this way you will not miss a single comment made on your post and it automatically updates the comments.

3. Facebook Dashboard Widget
This WordPress plug-in for Facebook allows you to see all the updates from your friends and allows you to know what your friends are doing. This is a  dashboard widget that allows you to go side by side with your friends on Facebook and your WordPress blog. Using this widget you can know the updates from your Facebook friends even if the Facebook site is blocked.

4. WP-FBConnect
This plug-in will add Facebook functionality to your WordPress blog using the Facebook Connect APIs. You have to link WordPress and your Facebook account, and once they are linked you need not have to sign in again. You can publish the comments on your blog through the newsfeed and Facebook avatars will be displayed in the comments field.

5. Gigya
All the features in this plugins are fully configurable by the WordPress administration panel. By installing this plug-in to your WordPress blog, you can have a secure signup and login for users in your site. You can update your states on various social networking sites at once and also invite all your friends on various networks to visit and join in your blog site.

6. Facebook Photos plug-in
This plug-in allows you to add photos to the posts directly from the Facebook. All that you have to do is install and activate the plug-in and link your Facebook account with the WordPress blog. After that when you edit a new post in WordPress, a new Facebook icon in the add media section will be present – by clicking on the icon you can see the photos that you have uploaded to your Facebook account. You can then insert the photos to the post as small, medium and large size and can also align the image position.

The Blackberry app will work with all new BlackBerry devices such as the 8700, Pearl, Curve, Bold, and Storm, with BlackBerry OS 4.2.1 or newer. The Wordpress app will work on WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress version 2.5.1 or newer. For self-hosted WordPress sites, ensure you have XML-RPC enabled on dashboard under Settings -> Writing.

Point your BlackBerry browser to http://blackberry.wordpress.org/install to install the Blackberry app for WordPress. Remember its a beta software, so is bound to have bugs, which means dont use it to manage your primary blog to avoid surprises. The app will frequently prompt when new versions are available, which you can easily upgrade. Support is available at the WordPress for Blackberry Forums.

bbPress is a simple forum software, easy to use, easy to administrate, and is very fast and clean. It has some powerful features and is highly customizable and WordPress bloggers will find the same WP goodiness and feel when they use bbPress.

We used bbPress for our forums earlier and here are the top 10 reasons to install bbPress. Some key highlights are pretty SEO optimized permalinks, lots of plugins and themes, open source, lots of feeds, Akismet spam control, integrated Gravatars, and lots more.

Download bbPress now and start a new forum for your site in minutes. Remember bbPress requires PHP 4.3 or greater and MySQL 4.0 or greater.

BuddyPress is a package built on top of WordPress which transforms it into a social network with profiles, friends, messaging, groups, and activity streams. The  BuddyPress plugins can be themed to match your own style.  All of the plugins can help you create a complete social network or you can use specific plugins to add special features to your blog network. It’s 100% GPL and Open Source.

You can test drive the BuddyPress demo site, which is powered by the latest version of the BuddyPress software. You can sign up and see how BuddyPress works. I signed up too and the demo application is amazing.

Download BuddyPress. BuddyPress 1.0 requires you have a functional running WordPress MU version 2.7.1 or greater. Read this setup guide to get started.

Before you choose a web host, it is advisable to review if the web hosting company meets your requirements. If it doesn’t, you remove the company from your list and look for one that meets your requirements.

What to look for in a web host?

1. Cost of Hosting – Consider your budget before choosing a host. Some web hosts would give you discount if you pay for 1 year. Some might give you more discount if you can pay for 2 years or even more. I prefer  going for hosting that cost less than $5 a month, but I will compromise if I cannot get a host that meets the other requirements of a web hosting company.

2. Addon Domains - If you have multiple websites, get a webhost that allows addon domains. I prefer hosts that allows  unlimited addon domains i.e. I can add as many as 20 sites to my account without being charged.

3. Down time – Look for hosts that have low down time. It is annoying if you try to access your site, and you cannot. If you have a business, this means losses because there were no sales. (If you have a wordpress blog, you can cache you site. You can read more about how QOT got more than 20K pageviews traffic despite Internal Server Errors!).

4. Web Space – You need a lot of webspace if your site is growing especially if you have addon domains. Every post you post on your site uses some of your web space. So this means that the more you post, the more space is being used monthly. If you have a WordPress blog, you would like to install plugins to improve your blogging. These plugins also use some portion of your web space. All this is for just 1 blog. If you have about 4 blogs, you post daily on your site, and you have been blogging for more than 2 years, how much web space would you have left if your web space is small.

5. Customer Support – A good web host should have online customer support. This is because you would like to receive an answer immediately and not after 6 hours. The customer support should be able to handle all your technical needs. A tech support representative from my host helped me transfer my database. If I go to look for help in places like forums, I would have to pay money to get that done for me.

6. Cpanel - Having a Cpanel feature would save you a lot of trouble. If you want to install a blog platform such as WordPress, you can do it with a single click from the Cpanel. If you don’t have a Cpanel, installing wordpress can take you more than 30 minutes if you have no clue.

7. Money Back Guarantee – You might change your mind later and decide to cancel a hosting service. Most good web hosts have 30 days or more money back guarantee. So if you change you mind within 30 days, you are sure of receiving your full refund back.

8. Reviews – Look for reviews about the web hosting company. People would always write if a web host is good or not. Read the negative reviews and see if it is a recurring problem or if it is an isolated problem. You can get web host reviews on forums or you can do a search on any search engine.

Wordpress is already SEO optimized but there are few settings needed to be done before launching your first post. If your useful post cannot be discovered by search engines, you are actually losing lots of potential readers.

Permalinks Migration

Wordpress Permalinks are permanent links of your posts. By default wordpress permalinks are in the following format
http://www.yourdomainname.com/?p=123

This is not a search engine friendly permalink. First thing after installing wordpress, you should consider changing your permalink structure. If you use permalinks which has keywords in it and are relevant to your post, chances of ranking in search engines are high.

The ideal permalinks are
/%category%/%postname%/
/%postname%.html

You can use either of them, but if you use more than one categories for a single post, I would suggest you to go for later one. You can change your permalink structure, under your wordpress admin dashboard > Settings > Permalinks

But what if you are changing your permalinks after publishing many posts? Use the Permalinks migration-plugin, and it will help your old permalinks to redirect to new ones instantly.  The redirection will be 301  permanent  redirects, so you do not loose any Google link juice.

 SEO Friendly Images

Optimize your images for Search Engines. Many bloggers avoid the importance of traffic from image search engines, like Google image search and Yahoo image search. By adding an alt tag to your images you can make it search engine friendly.

The basic rule is if you upload any image by the name 12387.jpeg with the same alt tag, it doesn’t make any sense to search engines. But if you upload an image with the title iphone-screenshot.jpg and using the same alt tag, you can rank high in the image search engine results as well.

Though manually adding alt tag is not easy for every image you upload, this can be easily accomplished by using wordpress SEO-friendly image plugin.

It automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. Download SEO Friendly Images Plugin .

ALL in one SEO plugin

Recently I attended Wordcamp and got the opportunity to meet Matt Mullenweg.  In the discussion round, one of the topics was  integration of “ALL in one SEO plugin” with wordpress. Matt answered they would like it to be users choice rather then implementing it by default. The point here is “All in one SEO plugin” is one of the basic essential SEO plugin for any wordpress blogger.

All in one SEO plugin helps you to stuff appropriate keywords and optimizes your blog for the keywords you are targeting.  You can read more about the plugin or download All-in-one SEO plugin .

Broken Link Checker

Broken links become dead ends for search engine bots. Suppose you have written a post which is pointing to a website www.domain.com, and after some time website goes down; you will never realize it and such posts become dead ends  for your blog.

Broken link checker wordpress plugin comes very handy in such situations. It will show the broken link on your dashboard which you can unlink from there. Download Broken link checker for WordPress .

NoFollow Plugin

Nofollow plugin helps you to add a nofollow attribute to your external links. You can simply select to which external links you want to share your link juice. It’s always a good advice to add a nofollow attribute to bad neighborhoods, like warez websites or adult/p0rn websites. Download Nofollow WordPress Plugin .

These search engine optimization tips will help you to get more visitors from search engines, but in the end it’s “Quality of the post” which matters the most. Don’t forget to share your search engine optimization technique.

Fifty Most Influential ‘Female’ Bloggers – “As it is often the case with technology, blogging can seem like a boys’ club to many, but the average blogger is no longer (if they ever were) a geeky, twenty-something man from the US. Strong, interesting women are taking over the blogging world.”

101 Women Bloggers to Watch for 2009! – scours the internet to find these amazing women bloggers and present them to the readers of WE Magazine for Women. There are business blogs, personal blogs, relationship blogs, hobby blogs, travel blogs, blogs about kids, pets, travel, food, health, women, men, shopping, fashion and more.

100 Must Read Blogs…By Women! - The list is compiled ‘In honor of these hardworking and insightful ladies’ and are all written with an engaging, unique voice that they bring to their subject matter.

Women in Tech: The Bloggers – FastCompany shares 11 of the Web’s most talented writers.

Top 100 Australian Women Bloggers – ranked by the average of Technorati ranking and Alexa ranking, this regularly updated list tracks the helps you find new and interesting blogs from great Aussie blogging women.

20 Women Bloggers to Watch in 2009 – “You may not have heard of some of these ladies, but you will. This list isn’t about stats, Technorati links, or Twitter followers because who cares? Show us the content! Whether they blog about everyday life, work and family, or women’s empowerment and accomplishments these ladies are positive, uplifting, and most of all they provide a unique view.”

500+ Women Political Bloggers – another regularly updated collection with links to 500 women blogging about politics…

The W-List – Gathering a List of Outstanding Women Bloggers. “Are there truly 5+ to 1 men bloggers to women bloggers? Why should we care? We should care because women are great at conversation, strategy, and writing.”

BlogHer: Who Are Your Favorite Women Bloggers? RWW share some links to their favorite women bloggers and some favorites web celebs you may or may not know.

Top 100 Female Bloggers – Claims to be one of the first lists dedicated only to female bloggers showcasing their contribution to the blogging world.

100 Awesome Webmaster Blogs by and for Women – A discovery of over one hundred women in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEM (Search Engine Marketing), public relations and marketing, design, business, social media and in IT.

The Magical List of Outstanding Women Bloggers – The author finds it hard to choose just a few. “But there are a few who are not only wonderful women bloggers but  also hang out online with many other wonderful women bloggers, so these people will pass the honor along.”

Top 10 Women Real Estate Bloggers – “Having personally met each of the women within this elite group, we can honestly say that they all possess the very best qualities that we’d expect in a real estate professional.”

Top 45 Female African Bloggers - “It’s clear that South African female bloggers dominate the list but I am very pleased to see Nigeria, Kenya, Eqypt, Uganda and Ethiopia make it on the list.”

Rocking Indian Female Bloggers – a list of some rocking female bloggers from India, whom the author recommends you subscribe in your feed reader.

Who is Web’s Hottest Female Blogger? Playboy picks. “It didn’t take us long to find an abundance of lovely bloggers and video bloggers (or “vloggers”) from the worlds of finance, entertainment, tech and sex. Meet some of the internet’s most click-worthy women.”

The Best Female Bloggers Of 2008 -”From futurists to postfeminists, octogenarians to mommies, nonbloggers to celebrities, we’ve rounded up the best bloggers who happen to be women.”

27 Inspiring Women Edubloggers – a slideshow showcasing some of the best female edubloggers out there

Best women fitness bloggers! – “written by women who we can all learn from. They all write from an unique perspective that is both realistic (at least for some of us) and not based on fear, fads or fantasy”.

15 Amazing Women in Blogging – “Some of the following ladies blog for themselves, others blog for a network, and a few even run their own blog network. All in all, there are some amazingly talented women making their mark on the blogosphere.”

The World’s Most Beautiful Bloggers – “Excluded from this list are professional models, celebrities and famous people who have a blog. I’m talking about real bloggers, who write their own content and share their own ideas.”

Since preview urls look like this -
http://www.domainame.com/blog/?p=12345&preview=true

I guess it was not too difficult to block ads on preview pages.

Why is it good that they blocked Adsense ads on WordPress Preview pages – No false impressions inflating cost for CPM advertisers. No accidental clicks on your own Adsense ads. Google Adsense bot visits your final published page only for better targeting. No falsely raised ad page impressions, modifying your Adsense ad statistics reports.