Today I have the pleasure to share with you a free wordpress plugin to automatically populate your blog with content from Yahoo! Answers.

For those of you that might not be familiar with Yahoo! Answers, it’s been described as

“The largest knowledge-sharing community on the Web. It’s an online community where anyone can ask and answer questions on any topic. Yahoo! Answers connects people to the information they’re seeking with those who know it. Everyone has life experience and knowledge about something, and Yahoo! Answers provides a way for people to share their experience and insight.”

So ya its a cool site, buts its also a great source of content, and this plugin will allow you to use all that content on your own website with ease.

WP-YA Grabber will create a post from questions asked on Yahoo! Answers and then insert all the answers to that question as comments on that post.

I often use this plugin on affiliate product sites I create with EZ Empire Builder.  I’ve found that this plugin tends to add that “human element” to these affiliate sites that users can connect with, and it increases the visitors duration and trust factor a bit.  People somehow feel more inclined to stay on a site and trust its links a bit more if they can see that others have found that site useful as well.  I think the proper term for it is “social proof”.

So what I do is create a few FAQ/Support/Forum type categories on my EZ Empire Builder built websites, and load them up with questions and answers using this plugin.  I then activate  the recent comments sidebar widget and set it to show the last 5-10 “comments” left … aka the answers from yahoo answers.  Visitors to the site then see all kinds of “activity” on the site, and consider it to be a trustworthy source.  At least it seems to work that way, so i consider it a nice little companion for these kinds of sites.

WP-YA Grabber works for all languages supported by Yahoo! Answers.  Allows you to define the exact topic categories, and sub categories you would like your content pulled from.  And allows you to enter in specific keywords to further refine the content.

So if you only want to post content in “German” from the “pets” category, and the “fish” subcategory which is about “discus” you can set all that up in about 45 seconds per category =)

If your unsure if this kind of content would be a good fit for your blog, I would suggest just downloading it and giving it a try.  Create a test category in your blog, and post everything into that test category, if you don’t like it just delete everything and try again.  This plugin is pretty simple to use.

You can install this plugin on as many blogs as you would like for free & each domain will be given a unique unlock code when its activated.

I’ve personally used this Yahoo Answers plugin on wp2.5-wp3.0.1, on godaddy, hostgator, vps.net, and seohosting servers without any troubles (knock on wood).   If you have any troubles with it let us know and we will do what we can to help get you going.

If you enjoy this plugin let us know.  We’ve been meaning to release a series of little free wordpress plug-ins like this for months now but keep getting side tracked.  So if you like free wordpress plugins like this leave a comment below and I will keep passing them along your way.

Just wanted to share a tip with you.

Here’s a plugin I use with EZEmpireBuilder sites to have scheduled posts ping once they change to published status.

Smart Update Pinger

Normally WordPress pings a post immediately as the post is created, which doesn’t help us much when we are scheduling posts out months in advance.

So give this plugin a try with a nice ping list and see how it works for you, as well.

Cheers,

Ryan

Find the plugin in question.

Lets imagine you just bought EZ Empire Builder and are ready to install it on your WordPress site. Lets also assume you just updated to WordPress version 2.9.1 from 2.8.

The first thing to do is to go to your wp-admin panel and click,

‘Plugins > Editor’

Next, see the drop down menu near the top right side of your ‘Edit Plugins’ console. Open the drop down menu and find ‘EZ Empire Builder’ and select it by hitting the ‘Select’ button.

On the right side of the text box you will see several files that make up the EZ Empire Builder plugin. One of those files will be,

‘ezempirebuilder/readme.txt’

Click that link and you will see the contents of that readme.txt file appear on the main text editor.

Inside this file you will see where it says,

‘Tested up to: 2.8.4′ or something similar. This number may vary but the important thing is that it shows at least as high as the current version of WordPress that you are currently using.

To fix your “Plugin does not have a valid header” problem, simply edit this number to your current version number or higher and save your changes.

Now your headers problem should be resolved until such a date that you update your WordPress Version to a date beyond your current new setting. Updating to WordPress 3.0 for example would require this setting to be updated again.

One easy way to avoid this problem in the future is to set it quite a bit ahead. The “Plugin does not have a valid header” error serves no real value and can be easily suppressed so, might as well do it and save yourself the troubles.

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CopyFeed – It puts a link back to your site and a digital fingerprint you can search for that will show you if anyone is scraping your content. The nerve!

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/copyfeed/

Action PopUp – It’s actually a nice pop-up controller.

Sales Page: http://www.actionpopup.com/

AntiVirus – It scans your template files for malicious code and will email you if it finds something!

Link: http://wpantivirus.com/

Contact Form 7 – The only contact form you will probably ever need.

Link: http://contactform7.com/

Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – Install it, put a short code on a page named “Sitemap” and bam you have a sitemap (not to be confused with an xml sitemap, this is a page intended to assist site visitors in navigating your site).

Link: http://www.dagondesign.com/articles/sitemap-generator-plugin-for-wordpress/

EasyPayPal – EasyPayPal is a WordPress plugin that allows you to make money from your WordPress site by collecting a payment from your users.

When a new user creates a login on your site, they will be taken to PayPal to process their payment. When they return to your site, the next payment date will be updated based on a period that you define.

After the next payment date, the user will attempt to login and they will be taken to PayPal to process their next payment.

Link: http://www.voiceoftech.com/swhitley/index.php/?page_id=129

Exec-PHP – Executes PHP code in your posts, pages and text widgets.

Link: http://bluesome.net/post/2005/08/18/50/

Exit Rescue – Create a very simple and easy exit popup on your blogs and web sites.

It pops up a dialog box when someone clicks the X on the browser.

Note: You have to sign up to a mailing list to get this one, but you can use a trash account and it is free.

Link: http://www.actionpopup.com/rescue/index2.php

FAQTastic – FAQ-Tastic Lite is a FREE multiple FAQ plugin for WordPress that makes light work of answering questions from your site visitors. Unlike other WordPress FAQ plugins, FAQ-Tastic can help you build different FAQs for different areas on your WordPress site.

Link: http://faq-tastic.com/faqtastic-lite-free/

Google XML Sitemaps – This generates a sitemap everytime your blog is changed and submits it to search engines. The number one most downloaded plugin from the WordPress repository.

Link: http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/

Headspace2 – Meta-data manager on steroids, allowing complete control over all SEO needs such as keywords/tags, titles, description, stylesheets, and many many other goodies.

Link: http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/headspace2/

Heatmap – This plugin monitors user mouse movement and clicks. When logged into wordpress and viewing your site it actually overlays a png that shows you where people have been clicking on your page!

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/heatmap/

ICRA Label Generator – This plugin generates the appropriate ICRA ratings for your WordPress site and integrates the information into your site. Google is all about the “semantic web” and this is supposed to make your site more semantically friendly.

Link: http://smheart.org/icra-label-generator/

Mailpress – The WordPress mailing platform. This is a fully featured mailing list / newsletter / subscription / blah blah platform for wordpress. It tracks emails, handles bounces, everything you’d ever want!

Link: http://www.mailpress.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

Page Cornr – Adds a page peel in the corner of the site… with jQuery! no Flash. This one is not as pretty as the flash ones but it gets the job done.

Link: http://www.luxiano.com.ar/page-cornr/

PS Disable Auto Formatting – PS Disable Auto Formatting disables auto formatting when you are editing your content.

Link: http://www.web-strategy.jp/wp_plugin/ps_disable_auto_formatting/

Redirection – Manage all your 301 redirects and monitor 404 errors

Link: http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/

Reveal IDs for WP Admin – WordPress 2.5+ only. Reveals hidden IDs in Admin interface that have been removed with WordPress 2.5.

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/reveal-ids-for-wp-admin-25/

Robots Meta – This plugin allows you to add all the appropriate robots meta tags to your pages and feeds, disable unused archives and nofollow unnecessary links.

Link: http://yoast.com/wordpress/meta-robots-wordpress-plugin/

SEO Images – Makes the images on your site SEO friendly.

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-image/

StatPress – Real time stats for your WordPress blog. I like this better than Google Analytics, and sometimes you, ahem, don’t want to use G Analytics

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/statpress/

Subscribe To Comments – Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.

Link: http://txfx.net/wordpress-plugins/subscribe-to-comments/

Thank Me Later – Automatically send a ‘thank you’ e-mail to those who comment on your blog. This plugin engages the visitor by reminding them to check back for responses or new blog posts. The plugin is highly configurable with multiple messages, variable delay and restrictions.

Link: http://infinity-infinity.com/2009/10/thank-me-later/

WassUp – WordPress plugin to analyze your visitors traffic with real time stats, chart and a lot of chronological information. It has sidebar Widget support to show current online visitors and other statistics. I still find myself going to statpress. An alternative solution though if you’re not so hot for Statpress.

Link: http://www.wpwp.org/download/

Web Invoicing and Billing – Send itemized web-invoices directly to your clients. Credit card payments may be accepted via Authorize.net, MerchantPlus NaviGate, or PayPal. Recurring billing is also available via Authorize.net’s ARB. Invoices are hosted on your site. If you are billing people for anything, this one will make you look more professional (even though you work in your underwear)!

Link: http://twincitiestech.com/services/wp-invoice/

Widget Logic – This plugin gives every widget an extra control field called “Widget logic” that lets you control the pages that the widget will appear on.

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/widget-logic/

WordPress Database Backup – Backup your site people. It doesn’t even cost you anything! Setup a special gmail account for backups and this plugin will send them to it!

Link: http://ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup/

WordPress Popup Scheduler – Wp Popup Scheduler allows you to add a popup box to your blog. You can customize the popup to suit your blog theme and schedule it to popup as and when you like it.

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-popup-scheduler/

WP No External Links – This plugin will allow you to mask all external links to internal, or to hide them. Your own posts, comments pages, authors pages, etc.

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-noexternallinks/

WP Super Cache – Very fast caching plugin for WordPress. This could keep your cheap host from banning you if you get a traffic burst from a digg or reddit hit. I know it works because I have had tons of #1 posts on both. 50,000 visitors in a very short span will get your hosts attention if you’re not using this plugin, let me tell ya.

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-super-cache/

YOURLS WordPress to Twitter – Create short URLs for posts with YOURLS (or other services such as tr.im) and tweet them. This plugin will tweet your scraped posts and make short urls (like bit.ly) except it uses YOURLS installed on your own server. You will have to install YOURLS but it is worth it in my mind since you get the links pointing to you instead of bit.ly.

Link: http://planetozh.com/blog/yourls-wordpress-to-twitter-a-short-url-plugin/

YOURLS – An open source URL shortener that you install on your own server. This is NOT a WordPress plugin. Install this in a subfolder of your domain like “go” or something short.

Link: http://yourls.org/

Zingiri Tickets – This plugin integrates the osTicket ticketing solution with WordPress.

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/zingiri-tickets/

When you run a blog its imortant to have an eagle’s eye view on your visitors. This is without a doubt the easiest way to discover new trends within your niche and even to uncover newly developing spin-off niches or sub-niches that you can focus on.

It also helps you see possible pitfalls and issues with your blogs.

Whatever your reason for needing stats, we ALL need them.

Here are just under 20 Great Stats Plugins for WordPress!

The key starts with great search engine optimization (SEO), which is an art and a science that helps search engines discover your content and understand how relevant it is to specific search queries.

You can blog your heart out, but if you don’t have good SEO, then odds are you won’t have many readers.  Luckily, the WordPress plugin community values SEO and has developed a number of plugins to help.

Here are 20 of the best SEO plugins to help you choose the right tags, tell search robots what to work on, optimize your post titles and more.

Have another SEO plugin to recommend? Tell me more about it in the comments.

All in One SEO Pack – One of the most popular plugins ever for WordPress, this plugin does a bit of everything for you from helping choose the best post title and keywords, to helping you avoid duplicate content and more.

Automatic SEO Links – Automatic SEO Links allows you to choose a word or phrase for automatic linking, both internal and external, set anchor text, choose if it should be “nofollow” or not, and more.  One of the best features of this plugin is that it will only do this for the first occurrence of a word in a post so you don’t have to worry about spamming your post with numerous links to the same thing.

Google XML Sitemaps – An essential tool in any blogger’s armory of SEO tools.  While the name only mentions Google this plugin creates an XML-sitemap that can be read by Ask, MSN and Yahoo also.

HeadSpace2 – This plugin allows you to install all sorts of meta-data, add specific JavaScript and CSS to pages, suggests tags for your posts and a whole lot more.

Meta Robots WordPress plugin – An easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page you choose on your blog.  You can use it to make your front page links into “nofollows,” prevent indexing of search pages, disable author and date-based archives, prevent indexing of your login page and numerous other features.

Nofollow Case by Case – This plugin allows you to strip the “nofollow” command from your comments, and then you can apply it to only the comments you don’t wish to support.

Platinum SEO Plugin – The Platinum SEO Plugin offers you such features as automatic 301 redirects for permalink changes, auto-generation of META tags, post slug optimization, help in avoiding duplicate content and a host of other features.

Redirection – For any number of reasons you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, but then you risk losing that page’s status in search results.  Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more.

SEO Blogroll – Do you worry that the people you link to in your blogroll are feeding off of your PageRank?  With SEO Blogroll you can make separate sections for various groupings of links, with an unlimited number in each, and all of them will receive the “nofollow” attribute.

SEO for Paged Comments – With the introduction of paged comments in WordPress 2.7, there was a potential problem with search engines thinking you had duplicate content as the post would appear on each page.  This plugin aims to take care of this issue for you until the folks at WordPress change things up.

SEO friendly and HTML valid subheadings – Some themes for WordPress will confuse your sub-header tags based on the page they are to be displayed on, but this plugin will automatically reset them to make them more SEO friendly by moving them down one spot in the hierarchical tree.  In other words, h2 becomes h3, h3 becomes h4 and so on.

SEO Friendly Images – Images can be a great source of traffic as people search for images of various subjects, and this plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.

SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin – If you must have duplicate content on your site for whatever reason, SEO No Duplicate will allow you to state which version of the post search engines should index while ignoring the others.

SEO Post Link – The post slug is the blog title you see in a browser’s URL bar, and if it’s too long, search engines won’t take a liking to it.  SEO Post Link comes with an already populated list of words to cut from a title when it turns into a URL to make your post addresses that much friendlier.  You can set it so that it’s limited to a certain number of characters, cut short words, cut unnecessary words and more.

SEO Smart Links – Interlinking your blog can be the key to getting more people to read more of your posts, but it is time consuming and tedious to do it by hand.  SEO Smart Links does this for you automatically when you tell it what words to link to what URLs, and it also allows you to set “nofollow” and “open in window” comands for the links.

SEO Tag Cloud Widget – Love ‘em or hate ‘em, a lot of people use tag clouds on their blogs.  Since their inception they have been fairly unreadable by search engines, but with this plugin they will be converted to an SEO-friendly HTML markup that can be indexed.

SEO Title Tag – Your tags are an important part of your site for making sure that search engines know where to place your posts, and SEO Title Tag focuses exclusively on this.  Unlike some other plugins, and WordPress itself, this extension will allow you to add tags to your pages, your main page and even any URL anywhere on your site.

Simple Tags – An extremely popular plugin that focuses on helping you choose the best tags for your posts by offering suggestions, auto-completion of tags as you type, an AJAX admin interface, mass tag editing and a whole lot more.

Sitemap Generator – This is a more customizable sitemap generator than most with options to support multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, permalink support, choices on what to display, options to show number of comments and more.

TGFI.net SEO WordPress Plugin – This particular plugin will do most of the usual SEO work of optimizing titles and keywords, but it adds a unique twist as it is mainly directed at people who use WordPress as a CMS.

[Courtesy of Mashable.com]