While allowing comments on your blog is a valuable way to keep content fresh (and keep search engines busy re-indexing your blog) the issue of comment spam is one of the most frustrating aspects of blog ownership.

If you’re a blog owner then I’m sure you’re well acquainted with comment spammers… all those annoying commenters who dump comments filled with links that have absolutely NOTHING to do with the content of your blog, viagra links, online pharmacies, pornography etc. Life as a blog owner would be much nicer without these scumbags (Oops, did I say that? Schlap my wrist! LOL)

But did you know that many of those comments have not even been left by real, physical, human visitors? That’s right, a high proportion of those comments are actually automated by insidious computer programs that range around dumping spam comments on every blog it can find. Now THAT is truly annoying!

Thankfully there are methods to help stop comment spam. One of the best wordpress plugins to help stop comment spam is ‘Botproof Captcha’. For those who don’t know a CAPTCHA is defined as a ‘Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart’. It’s one of those boxes where you have to type in the displayed characters/numbers before your information is submitted. If you’re on the individual post page right now just look below the post to the comment section to see Botproof Captcha in action.

Most CAPTCHA’s these days are completely useless as bots (computer programs) find them easy to crack. Botproof Captcha is different. Botproof captcha uses dynamic images that shift and change to make it impossible for bots using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology to recognize letter and number patterns.

In the words of botproof.com;

Our captchas are made up entirely of “noise”. And it is constantly moving, so no one frame has the complete symbol displaying. Because the human mind is so much more complex than a computer, humans are able to make out the numbers and letters, even though they are moving and changing. This is impossible for any current bot program to do.

I should define the term ‘noise’ here also. Noise refers to the grids, squiggly lines, dots etc that are part of a captcha image. These parts are designed to confuse bots. Unfortunately, they no longer work.

It should be noted that while Botproof Captcha can be installed from within your wordpress dashboard you will need to go to botproof.com to sign up for a free account. It’s like adding a google analytics plugin, you need to have a google analytics account before the plugin works. To add the plugin via your wordpress dashboard simply go to ‘plugins>add new’ in the left hand navigation menu and search for botproof captcha

To provide you with an idea of how effective this plugin is, when I installed it I went from receiving 10-20 spam comments per day to 1-2. Pretty impressive huh? For this reason it is on my list of best wordpress plugins.

Check out my post about another excellent plugin that lets you ban repeated human comment spammers at Best WordPress Plugins – WP Ban. These two plugins combined will dramatically reduce the amount of comment spam your blog receives making your task as a blogger much more enjoyable.

Good luck in your efforts to stop comment spam using the best wordpress plugins around!

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Apart from finding content to update your blog, the next most frustrating aspect of blog ownership is all those spammy comments that you inevitably receive. You know the crap I’m talking about, the pharmacy sites, viagra, pornography etc. It wouldn’t be so bad if that were what your site were about. But these annoying individuals like to inundate blogs with massive long comments with 50-100 links each etc. It’s so disheartening to log in to your dashboard and discover 50, 70 or even 100 of these crappy comments that have absolutely nothing to do with your content.

This kind of behavior has made it necessary for blog owners to either turn off comments altogether or to moderate every single comment that is received (which is what I do with my blogs). Another annoying aspect of this blog spam is that perpetrators frequently leave one or more comments on every single post that is available for commenting.

To combat this type of abuse I recommend what I believe to be one of the best wordpress plugins around called ‘WP-Ban’. This plugin allows you to ban visitors according to

• IP Address
• IP Range
• Host name
• Referrer (website)
• User Agent

You can even exclude individual users from being banned despite banning every other user from their host or country.

But how do you know who to ban. Well, when you go to your comment page within your dashboard you will see that below each comment author is listed their IP address. If there are multiple spam comments coming from the same IP address you simply add that IP address to the banned IP’s in the WP-Ban settings (found under ‘Settings’>'Ban’.

If you find you have several IPs that are similar, for example 92.241.169.135 and 92.241.169.142 then you can either ban those individually or you can ban the everyone from that host by using the wildcard symbol like this 92.241.169.* or you can do it with a range like this ’92.241.169.135-92.241.169.142′

A word of caution here… do NOT ban your own IP in order to test or you will not be able to get back into your dashboard and you will have to ask your host to log in to your blog and remove the ban from your IP.

Once you have added an IP to the ban list, whenever someone using that IP tries to access your page they will be redirected to another page that you can edit from within the plugin settings. I had a little fun with mine and embedded a wav file saying ‘I’m afraid I can’t do that!’ with big red text saying ‘ALL COMMENT SPAMMERS BANNED’. You can find the wav file here

The plugin even supplies statistics of how many times a banned IP has attempted to access the blog. If you find that certain IPs don’t attempt to re-offend then you may remove the ban from that IP simply by removing it from the list. You can always re ban them if they start spamming again.

This excellent plugin is available from http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/

Another one of the best wordpress plugins that help stop comment spam is a plugin called ‘Botproof Captcha’. Botproof captcha is a unique captcha plugin that uses dynamic animated images containing a turing number (If you’re on the individual post page right now you will see this plugin in action below). This image is designed to confuse software programs that post automated comments and it works admirably. When I installed this plugin I went from receiving 10-20 spam comments daily to around 2 spam comments per day. I believe this testifies to the effectiveness of the plugin making it one of the best plugins available. This free plugin is available from http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/botproof-captcha-20/

It should be noted that to use Botproof Captcha you will need to sign up for a free account at botproof.com

Good luck in your efforts to stop comment spam using the best wordpress plugins!

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There are a huge number of excellent plugins available to make blogging simpler and more profitable. When it comes to SEO plugins I recommend the ‘All in One SEO pack’ as one of the best wordpress plugins available.

The All in One SEO pack allows you to add several crucial features to each post;

• Title
• Description
• Keywords

In effect, this plugin allows you to add meta tags to individual posts compared to adding them to the blog overall (which is achieved by adding them to the index.php template).

Oh I know, there is a lot of debate as to whether meta tags are effective but the ones that are being used here are generally effective. Here is a breakdown of the individual sections.

TITLE: The title is used as the clickable text in search engines. It is also the text that appears in the colored bar at the top of each browser window. Utilizing keywords in your title increases the chances of your site coming up in search results for those keywords and if you use visitor friendly titles (rather than just keyword stuffing your title) then they also increase the chance of searchers clicking your link.

DESCRIPTION:Some search engines use this text as the summary beneath the clickable link. So once again, if you develop a well formed description for the post you will increase the chances of a searcher clicking your link rather than someone elses.

KEYWORDS: This is the tag that is most debated by SEO experts as to it’s effectiveness. The problem is that when they first developed this tag search engines relied heavily upon it and this led to people abusing the tag by using highly popular keywords in the tag even when they had nothing to do with the actual content. This is like using a keyword of ‘online dating’ on a legal firms website… it’s totally inappropriate! As a result of this abuse, search engines reduced the emphasis on the keyword tag and started focusing more on page content.

However, my experience in using this tag indicates that when appropriate keywords that match page content are used then there is a resulting increase in the amount of organic traffic coming from search engines.

Please note that it is crucial that keywords used be appropriate to page content or your site could even be penalized by search engines. SEO centro provide a free meta tag analyzer for you to compare your content to your meta tags.

The reason I believe the all in one SEO pack to be one of the best wordpress plugins (and certainly the best blog SEO plugin) is because it simplifies the addition of these elements by including fields for you to add them at the bottom of the post creation/editing page. Doing this means that you are not required to go fiddling around with blog templates and also allows you to specify tags for individual posts giving you the ability to use multiple tags for the blog based on the content of each post and page.

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One of the easiest ways to get additional backlinks for any website or blog is to include social bookmarking icons on the page. Doing this allows your visitors to directly bookmark your site if they are interested. Each time your site is bookmarked you are effectively given a free backlink to improve your position in search engines.

If you saw my Best wordpress plugins post, you will see that I recommend the use of the ‘Sociable’ social bookmarking plugin available from Yoast.com

The reason I particularly love this plugin is because it currently offers a staggering 95 social bookmarking sites to choose from. As you can see at the bottom of this post, I only use a small selection of these. It’s also extremely easy to use and allows you to use your own icons if you wish.

But there were a couple of things that I wanted to change after I first installed it. To see the plugin in it’s original form take a look at http://seo.sophisticated-woman.com. As you can see, the graphics are much smaller than the ones I have used here AND they are opaque until you hover over them. I wanted to make them stand out more so I made a couple of changes to templates.

The first template change removed the opacity of the icons. First of all I went to “Appearance>Editor” in the left hand panel of the wordpress dashboard and selected “Style.css” from the right hand panel. I then added the following code to the bottom of the style.css template before clicking the update file button underneath the editor field.

.sociable-hovers {
opacity: 1.0 !important;
-moz-opacity: 1.0 !important;
filter: alpha(opacity=100) !important;
}

Then, to increase the size of the graphics I went to the plugins page. In the list of installed plugins I located the sociable plugin and clicked the edit link beneath it. This takes you to the template pages for the plugin. In the right hand panel click ‘sociable.css’ and search for the code below. The easiest way to find this code is to click your mouse inside the editor window then click ‘ctrl f’. This will cause a dialogue box to appear (in IE) or a search bar at the bottom (in Firefox). Simply type img in the search field and click find next to find instances of the text within the editor window.

.sociable img {
float: none;
width: 16px;
height: 16px;
border: 0;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
}

When you find this code replace the ’16px’ in the width and height lines with whatever icon size you want to use. This blog uses 48px. Please note that if you increase the size without replacing the icons you will lose image quality on the icons and end up with grainy looking graphics.

The sociable plugin uses png files for icons. To change the icons used find the icons you want to use, make sure the icons are the same file type (png) and are named exactly the same as the existing ones in the wp-content/plugins/sociable/images/ folder. Upload those images to your hosting package then access the plugin settings in your wordpresdashboard. To do this click the settings link in the left hand panel then the sociable link from the submenu. On the settings page scroll down until you find the section on ‘image directory’ then enter the full URL to the directory where you placed the replacement images. Eg. http://www.mysite.com/images. Then save the settings. In future the plugin will use that directory for it’s icons.

Please note that the replacement icons shouldn’t be uploaded into the same directory that the plugin uses by default. If you do this then your changes will be erased the next time you update the plugin. This can be a real nuisance so it’s easier to keep the images in a separate folder.

Also, in the settings for the plugin I always check the ‘use target=blank’ box to make sure that the bookmark site is opened on a separate page so that visitors do not get taken away from my site.

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Many people ask the question; “What are the best wordpress plugins to use in my blog?”

Of course, there’s a HUGE choice of plugins out there designed to perform just about any conceivable task on your blog. Which ones you install is entirely up to you. However, there is a small group of plugins that I recommend as the best wordpress plugins necessary for every blog.

Best wordpress plugins

1. All in one SEO pack
2. Google Analytics for WordPress
3. Analytics 360
4. Sociable social bookmarking plugin
5. Botproof captcha
6. WP-Ban

Okay, dealing with these one at a time.

All in one SEO pack

The all-in-one-SEO plugin allows you to add meta titles, tags/keywords and descriptions to individual posts which helps search engines to understand what your website is about. This plugin is available through the wordpress plugin section of your dashboard in wordpress versions 2.7+ or from All-in-one-SEO-pack

Google analytics for WordPress

The Google analytics for WordPress plugin would have to supply the absolute simplest way to install google analytics into your blog. If you have an analytics account simply add a profile for your blog, copy the UA string from the overview page of your analytics account and enter that string into the settings page of the plugin. Done. All you have to do then is update the status in the profile so google knows that the code is installed. Once again, this plugin can be installed directly through your dashboard if you have wordpress version 2.7 up. Alternatively, you can download the plugin from Yoast.com

Analytics 360

Analytics 360 supplies a snapshot of your google analytics stats directly in your blog dashboard. The full range of stats isnt’ available, just visit numbers, referring sites and popular pages. But it does include a link that will take you to your analytics account if you want to see the full range of statistics. Additionally, if you have a mailchimp autoresponder account you will be able to see the effect of your email campaigns on blog traffic. The Analytics 360 plugin is available from Mailchimp or directly through the ‘add plugin feature available in your wordpress dashboard.

Sociable Social bookmarking plugin

See the social bookmarking icons at the bottom of this post? These are part of the sociable social bookmarking plugin which boasts a staggering 95 available bookmarking services to choose from. The plugin is available from Yoast.com. Please note that I have edited the plugin to make the icons larger and added different icons. To see how that was acheived visit Best WordPress Plugins: Sociable Social Bookmarking Plugin.

Botproof Captcha

These days, a majority of blog comments are posted automatically by computer programs known as ‘Bots’. The botproof capcha plugin foils automated commenting by displaying a dynamic, constantly changing image that bots are unable to decipher. This free plugin effectively stymies those programs and protects your blog from the majority of spammy comments. When I first created this blog I was receiving about 10 spam comments per day. After installation of the Botproof Captcha plugin that figure dropped to about one comment every two days. The Botproof Captcha plugin is available from http://www.botproof.com/wordpress.html

WP-Ban

This last wordpress plugin once again has to do with blog security and killing comment spam. If you install the botproof captcha plugin it will stop automated comments. Unfortunately you will still receive human visitors who leave off-topic comments and comments filled with spam links. They will sometimes leave exactly the same comment on several posts and will return on a daily basis to leave more comments. These are what I refer to as ‘nuisance commenters’. To help combat against these types of comments I installed the WP-Ban plugin. This plugin allows you to block access to your blog from IP addresses and hosts that have a history of comment spam on your blog. You can edit the page that spammers are forwarded to. Visit ban-preview.php to see the ban page I created for this blog. This plugin is available from LesterChan or directly through through the ‘add plugin’ utility available in your wordpress dashboard in versions 2.7+.

So there you have it… My list of the best wordpress plugins available for your blog.

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