Ok, just a quick hit today. I’m going to try to start showcasing some of the free stuff I use. A lot of it will be free WordPress plugins, free WordPress themes, and other tools and sites that I really use myself.

Today, I’m going to talk a little bit about a plugin I’ve been using for about 6 months or so now called Link Juice Keeper. Basically this plugin will automatically 301 redirect any non-existant pages on your site to your home page. It’s super simple to set up, and literally starts working once you activate it.

So why is this useful? Well there are actually a couple reasons. Probably the main thing I like it for is using it with expired domains. I generally only try to pick expired domains that have a diverse link profile – at least a handful of real contextual links. Most of the time, in this case, the links pointing back to the expired domain point to a variety of different pages within the site. That means, if you do noting, and put up a brand new site, you will have a ton of nice links pointing to a 404 page… What a waste. Now, many people will use the wayback machine or cached pages in google and recreate the old pages on the site. In some cases this is worth the time, and in other cases, it isn’t. Personally, I’ve found that this works great, and is the fastest way possible to avoid having a ton of links pointing to 404 pages.

Also, another good use for this tool, would be if you were converting an existing site to WordPress. Generally, if you’ve got any kind of non-Wordpress site, it’s going to be hard to keep the exact same URL structure for every page in the site. This is a quick way to avoid a ton of 404′s from search results and keep your traffic level stable as you transition to a new site. Now this probably isn’t as useful for this application, but it would be a lot better than manually setting up 301 redirects for a large amount of pages.

So overall, this is a plugin I use quite a bit. You can add it to your WordPress via the admin if you search for Link Juice Keeper, or click on the link above to visit the plugin page and download it.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Creating intra-site links is a great way of optimizing your blog for search engines and controlling page rank. Then there are all your affiliate links. You’ve probably got your banners in the sidebar, but you also want to pepper your affiliate links throughout your copy as well.

Both of these things can take a lot of time away from working on more productive things. I know that there have been times when I’ve referenced other posts on this blog and haven’t even bothered to link to them just because I don’t want to have to go through the process of opening up the site in a new window, navigating to the page I want to link to, copying the URL and adding it as a hyperlink in my new post. It’s just a pain, plain and simple. Same thing with affiliate links – in fact that can be even worse.

Anyway – the good news is, there is an amazing solution - SEO Smart Links, by Vladimir Prelovac.

I’ve been using this plugin for quite a while, and I have to say it’s probably one of the most useful plugins I’ve ever seen, particularly if you’re dealing with a Blog that has a ton of content. The best part of all, it’s totally free.

Here’s a basic overview – you define keywords combined with a URL and this plugin will parse your blog’s content and automatically add the hyperlinks for you. So for example, on this blog I would set up one link like this:

WP Commerce Steel, http://www.wpcontempo.com/wp-contempo-steel-free-wordpress-theme-for-ebay-affiliate-sites/

By doing this, the plugin will automatically add that link to any instance of the keyword WP Commerce Steel in my blog.  This saves me a tremendous amount of time.

It also works the same way if I want to hyperlink words like PHPBay or Bluehost using my affiliate link.

There are also a ton of other configuration options that come with this plugin as well. Many are pretty self explanitory so I won’t go into detail, but if you’ve got questions don’t hesitate to ask.

Popularity: 44% [?]