Why I Selected The W3 Total Cache Plugin

I host many websites on a Hostgator dedicated server platform, which I fully recommend to improve website performance so that you are not at the mercy of unknown websites in a shared hosting environment. One of these websites is an article directory which has over 100,000 articles. With so many articles, I was looking for a good caching solution that I could setup and forget. After reading many reviews and on the recommendation of Hostgator, I selected the W3 Total Cache WordPress plugin.

I installed the plugin, implemented the suggested settings, and forgot about it.

The W3 Total Cache Plugin: What Happened?

Now, fast forward 6 months…which brings us to yesterday.

While working on one of my websites, I was using WS FTP Pro to upload files to the site and received an error message 552, which prevented me from uploading files to the server. I did a little research on this error message and here is what the message means: “Requested file action aborted. Exceeded storage allocation (for current directory or dataset).”

This was one of those messages that make you go…hmmm. I have 500GB of storage available to me and I know that I am not using even 20% of that. This message must be wrong. It must an FTP program error. So, I decided to use Fielzilla even though WS FTP Pro has always been my FTP client of choice. The result? Same message.

Out of space? There is no way that I have used 500GB of space. WordPress sites and databases simply do not take up that much space! I did some research in my WHM panel and put in a call to Hostgator. Sure enough…I was out of space.

What could be the culprit? Well, WHM and cPanel both have tools that can display disk usage. However, these tools were having “timeout” problems because they were attempting to access 500GB of data…somewhere. Where is this 500GB? It’s like trying to find an elephant in your house but being unable to do so.

After much clicking around in the article directory’s cPanel, I clicked the w3tc directory. I now know that this is the directory that was hosting the caching files of the W3 Total Cache plugin. When I clicked on a subdirectory of w3tc, I experienced that long delay that screamed to me: YOU HAVE JUST FOUND YOUR ELEPHANT!

In the end, W3 Total Cache had created caching files that exceeded 350GB. Yes, 350 Gigabytes!

We all know how easy it is to delete a file on website. You just simply choose the file and delete it. Well, it’s not so easy when that file and/or directory is 350GB! Routine deletion procedures did not work. In the end, I had to access the server through the root and it took the better part of 24 hours to delete all of the cached files from the server. During much of this time, my this website was inaccessible and I had to manually delete the W3 Total Cache plugin which caused some problems as well.

W3 Total Cache Review: Conclusion

In conclusion, you should not implement the W3 Total Cache plugin as I did. I simply set it up according to how Hostgator said to do it and forgot about it. I find it a bit ironic that Hostgator told me to use this plugin and then did not have any idea that this plugin could be the culprit of my “out of space” messages. Clearly though, the set it up and forget about it approach did not work for me.

To be fair to the author of this plugin, I did not look at any of the settings of the plugin other than what I was instructed. In addition, I was using this plugin on a site with over 100,000 articles which is very different than most usage scenarios.

If you find yourself in a similar situation and need to manually uninstall the W3 Total Cache Plugin, check out this article entitled: How to Uninstall with no Admin Panel.

The W3 Total Cache Plugin seems to have both supporters and detractors. Some have said it destroys their website, gives them a blank screen, destroys permalinks, and much more. Others, though, say that this plugin increases blog performance and is a necessity.

When you have conflicting recommendations like this, there is only one way to proceed with this plugin and it reminds me of an old joke:

How do you make love to a porcupine?

Very carefully!

If you host your website on Hostgator or another leading provider that uses cPanel, you see a choice in your cPanel that allows you to password protect a subdirectory. This works great…unless you have WordPress installed in the root of your domain with Permalinks enabled (which you should always have for SEO benefits.)

I write this solution today as much for me as for you. I had implemented this solution a year ago but was having trouble remembering the little steps to take to make it happen.

You will find information on this topic on Hostgator here and another article here, but I prefer the approach I outline below because it works and does not require modifying the .htaccess file in your root WordPress directory.

Step 1: Password Protect Your Subdirectories Through cPanel

Here are the instructions from Hostgator. Perform these steps first but don’t test them yet as you need to perform steps 2 and 3 next.

Step 2: Create a 401.HTML File

Create a file named 401.html in your favorite text editor that says only: “PASSWORD PROTECTED FOLDER – Please enter the correct username/password.” Upload this file to the root of your domain (under public_html).

Step 3: .HTACCESS File for SubDirectory

Create a file name .htaccess with the content below and place it in your subdirectory:

.htaccess File for SubDirectory

ErrorDocument 401 /401.html
AuthName "directoryname"
AuthUserFile "pathtoppassworddirectory"
(with HostGator the path is as follows:  "/home/username/.htpasswds/public_html/directoryname/passwd"
AuthType Basic
require valid-user

Password Protect SubDirectory When WordPress Is Installed: Conclusion

You will find several solutions to password protecting a subdirectory when WordPress is installed. I prefer the three-step method that I demonstrated above because it does not require you to modify other existing, active files.

I hope this information has helped those out there who are researching this issue. I know that it took me time to figure it out (twice) and it probably has taken you some time to research this as well.

Hopefully, I have saved you some time.

Cheers,
Richard

Why would you want to do this? Well, you might be losing a lot of money and lot of web traffic and not even know it.

A client of mine recently came to me and remarked:

“I recently realized in looking at my web stats that I am getting a lot of people who are looking at my web images from the Google search results. However, I don’t benefit from that at all. They see my image in the Google search results but never get one look at the content of my site. Is there anything that I can do about this?”

In fact, there is something that you can do about this.

Many people out there are losing significant potential income because people are viewing their website images from the Google images results but not actually viewing their website.

There is something that you can do about this and it is very easy to implement. It is a WordPress plugin called Break Out of Frames. This is perhaps one of the easiest plug-ins that you will ever implement that yields the biggest reward.

After implementing the plugin, when people view your image from the Google Image search results, the image page will be redirected to the page containing the image, rather than just the image itself.

After implementing this simple little plugin, the client referenced above had 1000′s of more visits to his website monthly and drastically increased his income.

Occasionally, there are those little things that you can do which yield large results. This is one of them–take advantage of it!

Each of these four have one thing in common: They all run successful websites. Enjoy:

My Review of This SEO Smackdown

A quick review:

This is a well-educated panel and I think what we learn is that there is no “either/or”.

A great website needs both engaging content and solid SEO. Only previously established brands can succeed with little to no SEO.

There was one comment that I disagreed with entirely and it came at the beginning.

In response to the question, “Do you ignore SEO completely or are there some basic SEO techniques that you incorporate in your blogging?”, Dawn somewhat facetiously remarks, “Ignore SEO completely” and goes on to say, “until you have really great content on your blog, all the SEO in the world does not matter.”

I disagree with this statement entirely. It is precisely in the beginning, before you have established your brand, that you want to have outstanding SEO.

All in all though, a highly educated panel with good information for all!

–Richard

When you do web page promotion for yourself or your clients, you are often called upon to put in the source code of a link (the A HREF syntax) rather than the WYSIWIG version of the link.

For example, in the article I just wrote called Replace Comma with Line Break (this is a WYSIWIG link), I may need to refer to the HTML source code for that link if I wanted to promote that article (which I won’t promote, but if you want to link to it, I accept).  The HTML source code for that link looks like this:  <a href=”http://richardcummings.info/replace-comma-with-line-break/”>

The problem with showing the HTML source code is that it will get executed if you place it within the HTML code of your document.  For example, since I do a lot of site promotion for clients, I store all of my links in a database and then output them with a php file.   However, the A HREF output will always appear in WYSIWIG form if I do not make alterations.  Or, if I want to illustrate php syntax, it will get executed since I use a WordPress Plugin called Exec-PHP, which I recommend to everyone for implementing PHP within WordPress.

Fortunately, the solution is a simple one.

You need only refer to the page entitled Special ASCII HTML Character Codes.  When you want to Show HTML Code On Web Page, just replace the HTML code (for example the leading “<” in all A HREF syntax) with the ASCII character.  This is an easy process, especially with the ultimate Text Editor UltraEdit, a program that should be in everyone’s SEO ToolBox.  AND, you do not to replace every symbol within the line.  More often than not, you can get away with simply replacing the first line of the code.  In the case of A HREF, that would be the first bracket, or less than symbol, which i ASCII code looks like this:  &#60;

I especially like the list of Special ASCII HTML Character Codes listed above because the page offers both a Friendly Code and a Numerical Code, both of which you can use in your HTML code.

One other option to Show HTML Code On Web Page is with the HTML textarea element.  With this HTML code, you can create those little text boxes that you often see on web pages that look like this:

Place Your Code Here

This is useful in some instances.  More information can also be found at W3Schools on their page called HTML TextArea Tag.

Show HTML Code On Web Page: Summary

The first time that you try to show HTML Code on a Web Page, you may be startled to find out that the code does not show, it gets executed! And, then you think, but of course it gets executed!

For me, the list Special ASCII HTML Character Codes saves the day everytime…especially since I often write php programs that output A HREF links. Most of the time, I can simply replace the bracket or minus sign (<) with &#60; and I am all set.

In other situations, you may find that the HTML textarea element serves you well when you need to display HTML code on a web page.

For instance, you may want to say, “if you liked this article, link to it by copying and pasting the following into your HTML code:

<a href="http://richardcummings.info/show-html-code-on-web-page/">Show HTML Code On Web Page</a>

Hope this article helped you all out. Cheers, Richard

Thus, I am writing about it in the hopes that whoever has to replace a comma with a line break will not have to scurry around looking for a solution.

If you want to know how to replace a comma with a line break, you clearly have a rather large comma delimited list with which you are dealing.  (If you just have a few words, you would do it manually, right?).  I had a list of keywords numbering more than 10,000 and so I could not do it manually.

But, for the sake of this article, let’s assume I simply had the following list of 10 golfers:   (This is the list of best finishers at this year’s British Open which,  if you did not see, you missed something special!)

Stewart Cink,Tom Watson,Chris Wood,Lee Westwood,Luke Donald,Retief Goosen,Mathew Goggin,Soren Hansen,Ernie Els,Justin Leonard

Ok, our goal is to turn this list of comma separated items into line separated items.

To manipulate text in many ways, I always use UltraEdit.  This is the best text editor and a requirement for anyone involved in SEO or text manipulation.  With UltraEdit, the solution is very simple.

With your document open, choose Search | Replace.  In the “Replace” Dialog Box, enter a comma in the “Find What” field.  In the “Replace With” field, put “^p ” without the quotes.  ^p will add a line break.

And…that’s it.  You are done.  Your list should now look like this:

Stewart Cink
Tom Watson
Chris Wood
Lee Westwood
Luke Donald
Retief Goosen
Mathew Goggin
Soren Hansen
Ernie Els
Justin Leonard

When you have thousands of entries to modify, I hope this little tip on how to replace a comma with a line break helps you.

Good luck!

I recommend the Thesis theme to all of those who want a great theme that is extensible and extremely readable.  The Thesis Theme truly presents content beautifully.

So, when this customer asked me to add Adsense to the Thesis Theme, I said, “Sure, no problem, it will just take a sec.”

If you are WordPress aware, you then know how this process usually goes.  You simply find the single.php file and add the Adsense code where you would like Adsense to appear, which in this case was directly under the title.

However, with Thesis, it’s a little different.  When you search for the single.php file, it’s not there!

Thesis is structured differently from all other WordPress Themes and it uses hooks.   All of the action takes place in a file called custom_functions.php.

To add adsense to the Thesis Theme under the article title and just above the post content, you need to add the following code to your custom_functions.php file.  The first two lines should be placed within the php codes symbols which begin with <?p…

function add_adsense() {
if (is_single()) {

After these lines, allow the php to close, which would look like ?>.

Now, you can paste the adsense script that you have been given from Google.

After you add the adsense code, you will then reopen the php code, add a couple of closing brackets (necessary from the two lines above) and then add this line:

add_action(‘thesis_hook_before_content’, ‘add_adsense’);

As you can probably see, this adds your adsense syntax before the post content, which is a great place to put it if you want the maximum amount of clicks.

Why is the Thesis Theme Designed This Way

DIY designed the Thesis Theme to be easier to use with this notion of “hooks”. The thinking was that people would no longer have to mess with the single.php, index.php, and .css files with the theme.

For people like me, who are accustomed to messing with these files, the Thesis Theme is a big departure. Even people like Rae Hoffman, who knows WordPress inside and out, were initially thwarted by the paradigm shift. Initially, she said of the Thesis Theme:

It looked completely awesome until I downloaded it and saw that Thesis was now run completely on “hooks”. Not only did I not know what a hook was, the tutorials and discussions I saw about it scared the hell out of me.

Great Thesis Theme Tutorial

What did Rae do after her initial fear of hooks? She did what enterprising people do…set about learning Thesis and presenting her knowledge in a Thesis Tutorial – Hooks for Dummies series which will find quite useful.

I used these tutorials as the basis for this article on How to Add Adsense to the Thesis WordPress Theme.  Now, after writing the article WordPress Category Pages: The Most Overlooked SEO Gem this morning, I realize that I need to figure out how to customize WordPress Categories with the Thesis Theme. And, fortunately, in her dummies Tutorial, Rae has just written the Thesis Tutorial – Creating Custom Categories.

For more Thesis learning information, you may also want to check out this page from bloghighlight.com.

Add Adsense to Thesis Theme: Summary

Thesis is a great theme that takes some getting used to. Even with the great tutorials available, it took me a little time to add Adsense to the Thesis Theme because I did not find an article on doing exactly that.

I hope this article has taught you how to add Adsense and led you to other sites that will allow you to learn the Thesis Theme inside and out.

Other Thesis Theme Resources

From the source, DIY Themes, check out the Thesis Theme User’s Guide.
Check out the Thesis Theme Headquarters website, a site dedicated to Thesis.

If you answered nothing, you are correct.  In fact, it might be fair to say that they do less than nothing with their WordPress Category Pages since the All In One SEO Plugin, which most tend to use,  will by default  add the “no-index”, “no-follow” to your category pages.  This means that you are telling the search engines:  Don’t look at this page!  Don’t index this page!  This page is not important!

Nothing could be further from the truth.  Your WordPress Category pages may be the among the most interesting pages on your site.

In this article, I’ll explore the duplicate content penalty with WordPress Category pages, why we should take our WordPress category pages off auto-pilot and customize them, and how to make WordPress Category pages one of the first stops for our visitors instead of a “no-indexed” afterthought.

WordPress Category Pages:  “NOINDEX” and the Duplicate Content Penalty

One of the principal reasons that the All In One SEO Plugin sets the “NOINDEX” and “NOFOLLOW” tag on your WordPress category pages is to address the duplicate content issue.

WordPress Category pages are often set to show the entire content of articles within that category.  Thus, a WordPress category page will have the exact same content as a post that you have written.  This may incur a duplicate content penalty within google on either the category page or the post page.

By customizing the category page, we can remove the potential duplicate content penalty, set our category pages to be followed, and create a host of rich content pages that our visitors will love.

How do you know if the All In One SEO Plugin has set your category pages to not be indexed or followed?  Simply view the source of the web page and you will find this line:

<!-- all in one seo pack 1.4.6.15 [430,472] -->

<meta name="description" content="" />

<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />

<!-- /all in one seo pack -->

But wait!  Before you go remove the check mark in the All In One SEO Plugin to have your category pages indexed, you need to customize your WordPress Category pages to remove any hint of duplicate content and make keyword rich WordPress category pages so that when the page does get followed, it will be brilliantly indexed in the search engines.

Why You Should Customize Your WordPress Category Pages

WordPress category pages have the potential to be of high-interest to your visitors because they are filled with articles similar in nature.

For example, suppose someone is going through a divorce due to infidelity.  They may want to know about divorce, infidelity, and any applicable divorce laws that may apply to infidelity.  One article will usually not suffice in this case.

However, a category page with all articles on all of these topics is just what this person wants.  Here is an example of a good page about divorce and infidelity.

Now, let’s look at what can happen when a page has been limited by the All In One SEO Pack.  Let’s say that you live in Ohio, are going through a divorce, and there may be custody issues with the children.  Thus, you may type into google:  Ohio, Divorce, Children…or something along those lines.

One of the first pages that should come up is this page entitled Children’s Issues | Ohio Family Law Blog.  This is a category page on a very professional, high page rank blog focused on Family and Divorce Law in Ohio.  Why will this page not appear?  It is being blocked by the All In One SEO Pack which is commanding the search engines to “NOINDEX”.

How To Customize Your WordPress Pages

Now that we know the Why to Customize WordPress pages, let’s look at the how.

WordPress provides a great explanation on their Category Templates article. Essentially, you will find out the hierarchy of your WordPress files and then rename the appropriate file to Category-X.php.

What Should You Customize On Your WordPress Category Pages

The first thing that is often missing in a category page is the proper keywords. When you customize a category page, you are then permitted to add text above and below the list of posts which will give more definition, and keywords, to the page.

In the example above, The Ohio Family Blog would add keywords to their category page such as Ohio, Divorce, Kids, and Children.

You will also want to make sure that the customized category page shows post excerpts rather than the full article to eliminate duplicate content.

To do this, find where it says:

php the_content();

….and replace this line with…

php the_excerpt();

(NOTE: These commands are within the php code.)

I also like to add pictures to category pages as this adds to the look and feel of the page and allows you to add “alt” content if you would like to augment your keywords.

Customizing WordPress Categories: Summary

WordPress Category pages can be heavily trafficked, valuable pages or NOINDEXED, duplicate content throw-a-ways.

Which would you prefer?

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to turn your WordPress Category pages into an SEO gem.

To make your WordPress Category pages extremely valuable, keyword-rich pages, you need to customize them using the steps outlined above and summarized below:

1. Customize the page using the strategies outlined on the Category Templates page on WordPress.
2. Add quality, keyword rich content and photos.
3. If you show full articles on your category page, make the changes outlined above to only show excerpts. This, combined with your added keyword content, removes the trail of duplicate content.
4. Finally, remove the All in One SEO Plugin’s command to NOINDEX category pages.

Now, build an inbound link campaign to your category pages and watch them become some of the most valuable pages on your blog.

PS:  As with most of my articles, I give live web-site examples in this post.  Bear in mind, it’s always possible that the authors have read this and updated their content.

In the past (and still today), many SEO professionals find a popular keyword, fill the page with that keyword, and create a massive amount of inbound links using exactly that keyword.

This technique still works today.  In fact, I recently had a frustrating experience with it.  I was searching for Airfrance Flight 447, the plane that crashed over the Atlantic, because I wanted to find out more information as I had a friend who may have been on this flight (luckily he wasn’t).  The fifth entry down in google looked promising so I clicked it and it took me to a page that wanted to analyze my system because it “appeared” to be infected.  You know that game…they then tell you that you need their program to get rid of the malware on your system.  This is bad for the web and even worse for google.

Enter Latent Semantic Indexing.

Latent Semantic Indexing

Latent Semantic Indexing is a technology employed by Google in an attempt to give you better, more natural, search results.

Google is in the business of providing the best search results.  In spite of the fact that they make extremely cool products and give them to us for free (think Google Earth), 80% of their revenue still comes from their search engine.

Thus, if I search for a term, and receive only useless pages filled with ads, I will be a frustrated user and might look elsewhere for a search engine that provides better results.

Google needed a better way to provide search results that could not be so easily manipulated as in the example above.

Latent Semantic Indexing:  A Quick History

In 2003, Google purchased Applied Semantics, a company dedicated to delivering more effective advertising for web sites.  Initially, this purchase was a move to thwart one of Google’s largest advertising competitors, Overture, who has since been purchased by Yahoo and has become known as Yahoo Search Marketing.

Over time, Google has taken the engineering concepts from Applied Semantics and implemented them into their core search functionality.

This fundamental shift marks a move away from keyword-focused searched results to theme-focused searched results.

Latent Semantic Indexing:  How It Works

LSI does not look exclusively at the keywords a webpage uses but at the theme of a page.

For example, let’s assume that you are creating a webpage with the keywords being download top music.  In the past, you would create the page using this term frequently and perhaps some variations on the term like download music, music downloads, top music downloads.

This strategy will no longer be as effective with the new LSI implementation.  LSI uses an algorithm to look for related keywords to determine the value of your page.  This approach provides better results.

In looking at this music example, can you identify other words that you should use given this new LSI paradigm?

We can begin this process by asking some questions.  Where do people download music from?  In what format do people download music?  How much do people want to pay for their music?  What are other names for music?

Can you see where this is going?  In asking these questions, we come up with related terms like online, Internet, mp3, mp4, free, inexpensive, songs, tunes, etc.

Thus, LSI increases the value of a webpage with these related keywords and devalues a page that simply has variations of the keyword such as download music.

This has great SEO implications.

LSI and SEO:  Brothers in Arms

You need to be aware of how LSI works in order to do effective Search Engine Optimization.

As we see in the example above, you must expand your keyword research efforts beyond what you would have in the past.  No longer can you simply use 4 variations of the same term.  You need to know all the related terms on the subject.

How can you discover related terms?  Well, in the music example, we simply asked basic questions to come up with some common sense answers.  There is a much quicker way though.  Wordtracker provides a related keywords feature that expedites this process.  (I actually used it to formulate the questions above.)

The term Latent Semantic Indexing has gained a lot of momentum in recent months as google continues implementing features.  But the real question is:  How will LSI affect my page placements within google?

Well, we have seen how you should create your future pages–simply make sure that your pages reach beyond just the keyword that you are targeting by using many similar related keywords.  This will result in a page that is more theme-focused and less keyword-focused.

But what about the pages that you have already created?

We know that re-doing web pages is an arduous task and you don’t want to have to do this.  There is good news and bad news.

The good news is that you should have been doing your pages this way for the last several years.  In the SEO community, we have known for some time that a page with just one keyword or phrase, and inbound links focused solely on that keyword, will eventually get your page penalized.

Google always attempts to weed out unnatural sites over time.  A webpage with the same anchor text on every inbound link is unnatural.  What are the chances that everyone links into a page with the same anchor text?  If you have been using one or two keywords or phrases, and inbound linking solely on those terms, you are in for a world of hurt.  You either need to revise your pages and create new related keyword inbound links OR watch your pages slowing disappear from their current google standing.

However, if you have been practicing solid SEO by creating informative pages with naturally relevant related keywords, your pages will be fine and you do not need to do any revisions.

Latent Semantic Indexing and SEO:  Summary

We often like to assign big, fancy terms to relatively simple concepts.  Latent Semantic Indexing, or LSI, falls into this category.

Essentially, it means that your pages need many thematically related keywords, not just your targeted keyword.

Frankly, SEO experts have known this for a long time.  A long detailed page about any topic, combined with good inbound links, will always yield the best google results.  On top of that, a long detailed page will always, naturally, have an abundance of related keywords.

Thus, Latent Semantic Indexing is nothing new and you should not need to considerably alter your SEO approach.

However, if you are narrowly targeting one or two keywords or phrases, with skimpy, shallow content, you need to know this.

You must change your SEO strategy…or change your career!

When you are writing an article, you no doubt refer or hyperlink to other authority sources on that same topic. Often, those authority sources are other articles that you have written.  This presents a great opportunity to build inbound links to your content using keywords that you choose.

However, this process can be very time consuming.  Manually adding links to articles with the appropriate keyword anchor text not only takes a lot of time but disrupts the flow of your writing.

Enter WordPress Link Plugins.

WordPress Link Plugins automatically hyperlink your chosen keywords AND allow you to declare important link attributes such as nofollow.  The bottom line is that WordPress Link Plugins save you massive amounts of time and drastically increase your ability to effectively create inbound links using the anchor text that you want.

SEO Smart Links Plugin:  The Best Link Building Plugin

I have recently researched three WordPress Links Plugins and recommend just one:   SEO Smart Links.

The other two that I researched were SEO ROI’s Internal Link Building and Blog Mechanics Keyword Link Plugin.

I chose SEO Smart Links because the author,  Valdimir Prelovac, seems intent on creating, and maintaining, this plugin.   SEO Smart Links also has some great features that the others do not…like fast, effective import of the your link list (great if you have multiple sites),  linking several terms to one page, and auto linking pages.

(For older pre-Wordpress 7.0 blogs, you will want to choose Blog Mechanics Keyword Link Plugin as it supports older WordPress versions.  I have several of these so I also use this plugin.)

SEO Smart Links Plugin: How I Use It

I will not go into detail about the setup and activation of SEO Smart Links as this is covered on their web page.  Instead, I will tell you how I use it and how it can drastically save you massive amounts of time.

Let’s take this particular article as an example.  As you read it, you probably see that there are hyperlinks on this page to the various WordPress Links Plugins.  Do you know how many hyperlinks I created as I wrote this article?  Exactly ZERO.

Here is how I use the SEO Smart Links Plugin.  After I write a post, I review the article for clarity, grammar, and spelling.  Remember, during the writing process, I have included no hyperlinks.  When I do this review, I have this “post” page open and right next to it I have the SEO Smart Links page open.  For each keyword used, I will then simply add the hyperlink on the keywords page.

The beauty of this approach extends far beyond this immediate article.  Whenever I use any of these terms again, in any article past, present, or future, they will automatically be hyperlinked.

For example, last week I wrote about Wordtracker and Keyword Research.  At the time, I did not include any hyperlinks in that article because I knew that I would be adding, and writing about, SEO Smart Links this week.  Since I have just added the plugin to this blog, I will now add the keywords for last week’s article and the hyperlinks will be automatically included.

This plugin is also ideal for affiliate products and interlinking within and between sites.

If you promote affiliate products, you need only add the link one time in the plugin and it will be automatically linked each time you use it.  Additionally, you can add the nofollow attribute to each of these affiliate links.

Many of these types of plugins focus solely on intra-linking, or linking within one site.  However, this plugin is terrific if you run multiple sites.  You can maintain one master list of anchor text and links and simply import and export that list at will to all of your websites.

WordPress Links Plugins: Conclusion

As everyone involved in SEO knows, inbound links are what turns an isolated, lonely website into a well-trafficked attraction.

We often cannot control the inbound links from outside sources. They may not use the keyword anchor text that we desire or they may link to the wrong page.

We can only absolutely control what belongs to us.

It is essential that you build and manage your internal linking structures. And the best tool for this is the SEO Smart Links plugin.

Footnotes:

Suggestions for using SEO Smart Links Plugin

• SEO Smart Links  (as do the other link plug-ins mentioned above) creates links on the fly and thus can be taxing on a webserver. If you have a busy website, be sure to stress-test the application before a mass deployment. Because of this, when you deactivate the plug-in, the links go away.
• You probably want to set the # of times that a keyword is linked. If you do not, your pages may become filled with links.