What is premise? Premise is the ultimate landing page optimization WordPress plugin, brought to us by Copyblogger Media Inc.

After spending some time using the plugin, I absolutely love it. There are a few things that could change to make it better, but let me dive into the review.

Premise General Settings

First, the general settings. You have the ability to set landing pages inside a sub-folder, in case you want to disallow all the landing pages in your robots.txt, or you can have them sit in the root, such as wpvibe.com/landing-page/. This is some serious forethought by Copyblogger Media on what people will want to do with their permalinks. Sure there will always be one person that wants to do something different, but this should cover the majority of people.

Premise also has newsletter settings. The plugin comes with support for Aweber, Constant Contact, and MailChimp, three widely used e-mail services for newsletters. It offers the ability to hook in directly and use your landing pages as sign-up lead-gen tools.

Next are the style settings. There are a lot of style settings. Global styles, Global Links, Wrap (content area), Header, Main Headline Area, Blockquotes, Notice Box, and a lot more. Endless style settings, to give you ample control over the style of your landing pages.

Premise Landing Pages

Next, the landing pages. Here is the sweet sauce.

When you go to “Landing Pages” in the left side navigation, you have the ability to view existing landing pages or add a new one.

Upon clicking Add New for Landing Pages, you’ll be given six (6) options. Sales Page, Content Landing Page, Pricing, Opt In, Video, and Tab Scroller. Each will provide you with different write page options, and they’re pretty straight forward given their descriptions.

The ample options that this plugin provides both in the settings and in the write screen for your actual landing pages is quite impressive. It does an amazing job and does exactly what you need it to do.

For a limited time, you can download this plugin for just $85, so hurry up and go download it! Click here for more examples of Premise in action.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE26h2LMdEI[/youtube]

I’m going to walk you through two different plugins.

Subscribe to Comments Reloaded

This plugin provides a single-opt-in feature that allows comments to easily subscribe to comments. All they need to do is check the box and they will be subscribed. One thing this plugin does really well, is that when you want to manage your subscription, it’s cleanly integrated into your design.

It will even let visitors subscribe to the post even if they haven’t commented, in case they’re just really interested in the feedback on the post.

Here’s a screenshot of the options provided in the admin interface.

plugin download

Subscribe To “Double-Opt-In” Comments

The reason for double-opt-in is because there are some laws internationally, specifically in Germany, that require website publishers to have a double-opt-in for it not to be flagged as spam.

This plugin is a lot more like Mark Jaquith’s original “Subscribe to Comments” plugin which DOI was adopted from. I really like what STC Reloaded did though, it’s a much better interface.

But this plugin is good if you feel you need to comply with the international spam laws.

plugin download

We currently use Gravity Forms here at WPVibe, but this plugin could give Gravity Forms a run for its money.

Grunion, the WordPress Contact Form, does one thing really well – exactly what it’s meant to do: be a contact form.

This is a big space in the WordPress community that was greatly lacking, so I’m really happy to see what Automattic stepped up and made their own contact form that will make it easier for WordPress site owners to offer customizable contact forms.

click here

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The WordPress SEO Plugin

So what features does this plugin offer?

• Snippet Preview – allows you to see what your post will look like as a Google result
• SEO Title – provides guidance in helping you create a proper title for your post
• Meta Description – helps you create what your snippet will say below the title and above the link. By having two lines worth of description text, it makes your result one line larger, giving is just a little more visibility in the results.
• Focus Keyword – let’s you pick a keyword that you think the post is about, then analyzes your post to see if you’re really targeting the correct keyword.

WordPress SEO Plugin – Advanced

Want to dive deep and get into the advanced section? We do too, so here it is.

• Meta Robots Index – Index/Noindex; Google has an explanation of how this meta tag works, but in the form of rel=”noindex”
• Meta Robots Follow – Follow/Nofollow; Google has an explanation of how this meta tag works, but in the form of rel=”nofollow”
• Meta Robots Advanced – No ODP, No YDIR, No Archive; If your site is listed in one of the trusted directories, DMOZ or Yahoo! Directory, some search engines may use the description you have in either of those directories, instead of what you have on that page. Matt Cutts explains how it works with Google.
• Canonical URL – it is typically a good idea to leave this blank so it defaults to the permalink of the post, unless you really need to change it.
• 301 Redirect – If you need this post to redirect to another page or post, you can setup the redirect directly on the post, rather than setting up a 301 in .htaccess and/or having to delete the post.

Overall, we are really impressed with Joost’s plugin and his commitment to the SEO and WordPress communities. So what are you waiting for? Download it now! (click below)

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If you have any thoughts or suggestions about other or different SEO plugins, we’d love to hear about them in the comments below.

Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like:

But I see two issues with it. When I tested it out, it first didn’t show up at all and when I went to the post, it showed I was in South Africa. Well, that’s not right. So I asked Alex from the WP.com team, and he said it has to do with my geolocation database, which didn’t even cross my mind. I assumed that it would just work after I installed it.

The next issue I saw is that it doesn’t have the option to auto-display the map, but rather you only see it when you hover over the description. That seems a little silly to me, but maybe that’s just me.

It’s a good first attempt for v0.1, but there’s much to be desired still for it to be a production plugin.

Introducing the ‘Tweeted‘ plugin. Simple put… you wrap the Twitter status of any user in the shortcode ‘tweeted’ and the plugin will get the status directly from Twitter and output it in a stylized format that looks like a Twitter post!

The data will then be saved in the ‘post meta’ table to allow easy retrieval to not burden the Twitter API code. The plugin allows a theme to override the default ‘output’ design or you can use one of the many designs options provided by the plugin.

Here is out example:

[tweeted]http://twitter.com/wpvibe/statuses/7816184618[/tweeted]

In future version all you will have to do is place the Twitter URL. Just like oEmbed, but for Twitter!

download

We enjoy great plugins as much as the rest of the WP community. This guide by Mark will help ease a lot of pain for a lot of people. Here’s the list.

WP Plugins, The Do's & Dont's

1. Give it a license that is incompatible with WordPress’ license.
2. Host your plugin elsewhere, and only use the WordPress.org plugin listing as a pointer to that.
3. Use base64 encoding to hide your plugin code or obfuscate HTML that you’re injecting into people’s blogs.
4. Insert SEO spam links into people’s blogs (like <a href=”http://example.com/”>video poker</a>).
5. Insert external links (like a credit link, <a href=”http://example.com/”>My Awesome Plugin by Awesome Sauce</a>) into their blog without explicitly asking their permission, or make the default option be to insert the link.
6. Load portions of the code from an external site for no valid reason, or use any other trick to work around #3, #4 and #5.
7. Harvest people’s e-mail addresses or require registration to activate the plugin.
8. Explicitly state or imply that users of the plugin must pay you money in order to use the plugin.
9. Make the plugin a “requirements check” or bootstrapper for some other plugin or service. See #2.
10. Make it do something illegal.
11. Make it do something sneaky, underhanded, or otherwise dishonest or immoral. Maybe a plugin that disables all plugins by a plugin author you don’t particularly like. Harvest the user’s password. Use your imagination!

This is a great post because I have and still do, often see plugins that are not fitted to being in the plugin repository; which I will report and often get removed.

This goes for everyone, including myself and the plugin authors I work with (hint hint, we’re going to release a plugin next week), to be careful, be honest, and be straight forward with all your plugin development if you want them to be hosted on the WordPress Plugin Repository.

Here are just some of my favorite WordPress SEO plugins that I use on a regular basis.

SEO Smart Links

This plugin absolutely rocks. It’s first on the list because I feel it’s one of the more valuable SEO plugins for WordPress. This plugin has the ability to easily set and forget keywords and links, and the ability to even auto-link tags and categories, if you choose to do that.

Here are some of the features of this plugin:

• Find keywords in your posts, pages and comments and link them to your other posts, pages, categories and tags
• Full control with customizable options
• Ignore list for keywords you do not want to link
• Improves your site’s interlinking
• Control external links with custom keywords
• Add nofollw attribute or open links in new window
• Caching for speed – make sure you have define(‘ENABLE_CACHE’, true); set in your wp-config.php

SEO Smart Links plugin link

SEO Titletag

This plugin is a huge help with optimizing your <title> tags within the HTML of your post.

There are a few options with it as well, to customize the title tag experience.

Here are a few of the features of this plugin:

• Allows you to override a page’s or a post’s title tag with a custom one.
• A Title Tag input box in the Edit Post and Write Post forms. (Previously in version 1.0 you had to use the Custom Field box.)
• Mass editing of title tags for all posts, static pages, category pages, tag pages, tag conjunction pages, archive by month pages, – indeed, any URL – all in one go.
• Mass editing of slugs for all posts and static pages.
• Define a custom title tag for your home page (or, more accurately, your Posts page, if you have chosen a static Front Page set under Options -> Reading), through the Options -> SEO Title Tag page in the WordPress admin.
• Define the title tag of 404 error pages, also through Options -> SEO Title Tag.
• Handles internal search result pages too.
• If you choose to keep the blog name in your title tags (not recommended!), the order of the blog name and the title are automatically reversed, giving more keyword prominence to the title instead of the blog name. Note there is also an option to replace your blog name with a shorter blog nickname.

SEO Title Tag plugin link

SEO Slugs

I’ve been using this plugin off and on, and I’m probably going to turn it back on for this site. This plugin helps ease the process of writing slugs for your posts. The WordPress default is set to use the slug of the entire post name, which is not always ideal. The SearchEngineJournal wrote a great article about URL Best Practices for SEO, which outline a lot of great things to do for your permalinks. The first item on this list is short URLs.

This plugin will help automatically create shorter URLs and more effective URLs.

One of the key features of this plugin is that it will instantly strip common [and ignored] words like “what”, “you”, and “a” out of the permalink.

SEO Slugs plugin link

SEO All in One Pack

In terms of number of downloads, this by far one of the more popular SEO plugins available for WordPress. This does a lot of things, in a single plugin. Here are a few things this plugin features.

• Advanced Canonical URLs
• Fine tune Page Navigational Links
• Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality
• ONLY plugin to provide SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites
• Nonce Security
• Support for CMS-style WordPress installations
• Generates META tags automatically
• Avoids the typical duplicate content found on WordPress blogs
• For beginners, you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
• For advanced users, you can fine-tune everything

…and that’s not even the entire list! This is a great, “one stop, get it all done in a single plugin,” plugin. The other plugins I mention in this post are still great, if you want slightly more granular control over things.

Here’s a screenshot of what the options look like.

All in One SEO Pack plugin link

Headspace2

Another SEO pack of sorts, but this one is written by John Godley, now an Automattic employee. He has been a long-time WordPress developer, and I still use many of his historical plugins.

This plugin features an array of customizations for configurable meta tags, page titles, custom “more text”, site name and site description, custom themes per page, and custom plugins per page.

Here are a few other great features of Headspace2:

• Allows you to add Google Analytics
• Allows you to authenticate to Google Webmaster Tools
• Ability to easily integrate into CrazyEgg (heat map click-tracking)
• Allows you to authenticate to Yahoo! Site Explorer
• Easy integration into Feedburner Stats Pro

Something else I noticed about this plugin that is different than just about any other SEO plugin, is the ability to import settings from other plugins. You can import settings from legacy plugins like Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, and Simple Tagging; which I think it pretty awesome.

Headspace2 plugin link

BONUS: Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

This bonus plugin, termed YARPP, is not exactly an SEO plugin, but I feel it helps a great deal with SEO. Related content is great for internal link juice; which is one reason why Wikipedia is effective and has such great rankings. Internal, relevant links, are quite important to the search engines and while this does play a role in SEO, it’s equally as beneficial for the visitors [to see what related content you have on the site.]

For an example of this plugin, just look right below the end of this post and look for “related posts” and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about.

YARPP plugin link

So those are some of my favorites. Do you have any WordPress SEO favorites or tips?

It’s easy to integrate Google Analytics code into your site, but using a plugin offer some extended functionality that doesn’t come with just adding the code to your footer.

Today we’re going to look at the WordPress Google Analytics plugin by Joost, which in my opinion, does the best job — and he keeps it up to date.

First step, install the plugin. Either use the web installer or manually download it and install it. But note, there are a number of Google Analytics plugins available, make sure you find the one by Joost De Valk. Then activate it.

Here come the options.

First, make sure you insert your Google Analytics Account ID, it will look like this: UA-######-#, make sure you put the UA in the field, you need the entire string.

You can leave it like that, but if you want to, you can enable advanced options too.

Here’s a small list of things that I like doing.

• I like to un-check the “Track the administrator too” box, so it doesn’t track me while I’m viewing the site. This gives me a better perspective of the site’s actual traffic.
• I leave the prefixes are they are, they are pretty good as is.
• The only thing I really go set is Track extra Search Engines and “Track Google Image Search as a Search Engine”, even though this is only in beta, it’ll eventually work, I hope.
• I don’t tag links in RSS feeds with campaign variables because often people will want to scrap content and repost it to another site, and then they are linking to your campaign links instead of your actual URL. Yes, this does get resolved by using canonical links, but I really don’t feel it adds enough to warrant changing my RSS links.

Any questions or suggestions, please leave them in the comments!