Have you ever found that you are looking for a WordPress plugin that does something specific, but you’ve tried the WordPress Codex or using Google search and nothing has come up?

There are a few choices you have, including our quickly growing WordPress plugins page, but one cool thing I ran across is I want a WordPress Plugin to… , which serves almost as sort of a WordPress plugin directory.   Here you’ll find plugins broken down into categories, allowing you to click on the type of plugin you are searching for, then see what options you have.

[via WordPress Garage]

If you haven’t heard of a sitemap before, now is probably a good time to start learning about them if you run a blog. A sitemap is a XML file originally created by Google for webmasters to use to create a “map” of their website.

A good sitemap is dynamic, keeping the freshest content at the top. This way Google knows to index any new posts or updated posts. Google’s spiders then use your Sitemap.xml file when they index your website to ensure they get everything new or that has changed. A sitemap also helps ensure pages get indexed that use JavaScript or Flash, but do not contain HTML links (without a sitemap, these normally would not be discovered by a search engine).

Eventually the Sitemap.xml file was adopted by Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com, making it as important for webmasters to use as a Robots.txt file to get their website maximum exposure and control what is indexed.

If you’re reading this blog, I’m going to assume you are a WordPress user. If you’d like to create a sitemap for your WordPress blog, look no further than the Google Sitemap WordPress plugin. This is the WordPress plugin I use for this website. When activated, it will create a sitemap on http://yourdomainname.com/sitemap.xml and do all the maintenance work for you. You’ll want to then log in to your Google Webmaster Tools account and add your sitemap, or make sure your homepage links to your sitemap somewhere (usually the footer) so the search engines can find it.

For those that are curious what they look like, you can see what our sitemap looks like here. Are you using a sitemap for your blog(s)?

For most of us, traffic is the driving force behind our blogs and motivation to blog. Therefore, it may seem silly to think that you would want to prevent a lot of potential traffic from Google’s image search.

However, some bloggers like to post personal pictures, or custom make their pictures and don’t want others to take them when possible. If you fit into this category, you can easily prevent Google from indexing your pictures by placing the following code into your blog’s header file above the < /head > tag:

<meta name="robots" content="noimageindex">

If your site has a problem with people taking your content (including the pictures), then there is a chance Google will still index them when they index that person’s website. Another route you can take is to place images into a folder then add a disallow to your Robots.txt file. For WordPress users, this is fairly easy as by default, we already have pictures in either our Images folder of our theme, or the uploads folder (unless you’ve assigned a custom path for your images). You can add something like the following to your Robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/

or

User-agent: *
Disallow: /uploads/

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