PHP Image Sitemap and Wordpress RSS Feed Advance

I discovered two very nice additions to any Wordpress site this week, a PHP Image Sitemap and a plugin called Advance Excerpt. The PHP Image Sitemap was developed by Eric Nagel who hosts the Pod Cast ‘Two Sides of the Track’ on GeekCast.fm. The code is presented on this page, and following the instructions is easy and quickly accomplished. By creating a file in the root of any Wordpress website, pasting the code into the file, and submitting the file location to Google, you can have your images indexed by Google.

Google will more easily present your images to image searches and thus you will receive additional traffic from Google. Submitting the sitemap can be accomplished with Google’s Webmaster Tools. Within your Google Account, add the Webmater Tools and then add your site to the tool. Click on the sitemaps link, add your main sitemap, and then add your new image sitemap. Google will quickly tell you how many items are present in the sitemap and how many they have indexed.

Advance Excerpt is a plugin currently available within the Wordpress.org Extends directory. This allows easy installation from within the Plugins area of any Wordpress site. Once activated, the plugin modifies the excerpts present in your RSS feed when you select to show Summaries instead of Full Text in the RSS feed.  You can set the amount of text to deliver through the RSS feed and which HTML tags to allow.

What I really like about this is that other sites cannot take your complete text and easily repost it to their sites. Plus you can include an ad and a couple of links within the first 100 characters of a post that will be picked up and reposted by all the aggregate blogs. Therefore there’s no duplicate content issues, while free links and affiliate links are reposted without any additional effort on your part.