Wordpress Plugins

I don’t see this posted about often enough. There are probably thousands of plugins for wordpress that do all sorts of things for you and that help you customize your blog.

However, seo is important to you as well and plugins can affect seo in a big way. Too many plugins can hurt your search engine rankings. It adds a ton of code to your already code-bloated wordpress blog.

Code-to-text ratio is an seo term that means the percentage of actual text in a web page. From SEOChat.com, “The code to text ratio of a page is used by search engines and spiders to calculate the relevancy of a web page. A higher code to text ratio gives you a better chance of getting a good page ranking for your page.”

Wordpress already has a lot of php code in it. Your blog posts are the text. Each plugin adds more code. So for each plugin you add, your percentage of each page that is actual text drops.

The advice I give you is that simple is always better when trying to optimize for the search engines. A static html page has advantages over html pages that use a lot of javascript. Same concept.

Use wordpress plugins that actually help you achieve what you are trying to do on your blog. Don’t just get all the latest and coolest plugins just because you think you need them to be up-to-date or cool.

Akismet is a good example of a plugin that you might need. It helps you filter out spam comments. Adsense Deluxe is a good plugin if you make money with adsense or yahoo publisher. AddThis is a decent plugin for making it easy for readers to bookmark your posts. Those all have a purpose that helps you manage your blog.

Before you add the latest greatest plugin, ask yourself if it is something you really need and something you would be willing to sacrifice some of your code to text ratio for.

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