Daily Dose of social media: SEO FTW!

20 of the Best SEO Plugins for WordPress — SEO is massively important on the Web. Many of you run sites and blogs with WordPress. Therefor, you need to read this post. The first plugin on the list, All in One SEO Pack, is a must for any WordPress user. This one blog post could help change the fate of your blog. Read it:

With more than 120 million blogs in existence, how do people find YOUR content on the Internet? 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 WordPressWordPress reviews 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.

99 Essential Twitter Tools And Applications — Okay, so not every one of these “essential” tools and applications is really relevant to journalists and content producers, but there are some real gems here:

• Tweetlater is a nice little app to schedule tweets in the future. This is great for group Twitter accounts where multiple employees are responsible for providing content. It’s also a nice way to ensure you spread out your tweets. It also allows you to keep your account active while you are away.
• Tweetbeep allows you to keep track of when people mention you, your company or other keywords that you want to track. This is great for journalists who want to be alerted every time certain words are mentioned on Twitter. This is also great for news orgs that want to track what people are saying about them. Yes, Tweetdeck can do the same things, albeit, without the alerts.
• StrawPoll asks different questions for polls each day, which is an interesting way to see what people think on Twitter. For journalists,  however, it’s much more helpful to be able to create their own polls. That’s where StrawPoll really shines.

Hands-on with IE 8: A giant step for Microsoft — Internet Explorer has finally become a decent browser. I know most people still use it, but IE7 and IE6 are categorically inferior browsers to Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc, etc, etc.

For journalists, the most welcome new feature in IE8 sandboxing. This feature means that individual tabs crash, not the browser itself. This is an extremely useful feature for those of us who have a lot of tabs open at once.

Chrome also features sandboxing, and I expect most browsers will get this feature in the coming years. Essentially, sandboxing makes Web browsers much more similar to modern operating systems, in that they will crash a lot less. Yes, individual applications/tabs will still crash, but that’s a lot better than having your whole computer/Web browser crash.

Sandboxing will make IE users more productive because less time and knowledge will be lost to crashes. IE8 still has some major issues:

IE 8 does have more problems than mere JavaScript engine speeds. It scores a 20/100 on the Acid3 test, the lowest of the major browsers, and the installation process still requires a reboot. There’s no default “smart” location bar that many other browsers have, although you can search your history and most visited pages from it.

Check out this CNET video to learn more about it: