SEO is one of those we’ve come to love and hate at the same time. Many agencies boast about their SEO services and they don’t even swap columns to put the main content at the top, one of the most easiest and simplest SEO techniques. However, the SEO war gets tougher every time with more attention paid to things like canonical URLs, microformats, geolocation, sitemaps, domain age, and a long etcetera. In this post we will check 10 tools that will help you to analyze your blog and get some feedback about how you can optimize it. We will also explore 5 WordPress plugins that will improve the SEO friendliness of your site.
TDO Mini Forms is one of the best plugins for WordPress to allow visitors or users to publish posts and upload files without having to access the admin area. You can select categories for the post, add tags, title, content, etc. However, even after WordPress introduced UIs for custom taxonomies in version 2.8, TDO Mini Forms (or tdomf for short) won’t allow you to select custom taxonomies. In this post you will find how to modify the categories widget for TDOMF to enable custom taxonomies.
Interesting Firefox addon that provides the capability to search WordPress Codex from Firefox search bar.
Although the upcoming WordPress 3.0 will support different post types to discriminate content in a proper way, creating new custom post types will require some coding on the theme. However, things will get easier with the Custom Post Type UI plugin for WordPress, that provides us with a graphic user interface to create not only custom post types but custom taxonomies as well.
WordPress 3.0 will separately identify the Drop-ins that you add to your installation. WordPress Drop-ins are custom PHP files related to several WordPress core files such as advanced-cache.php or object-cache.php that you can load on WP-Content to override the core file with new functionality.
The ILC-PDFBox plugin for WordPress will allow you to display a PDF document that you embed in the post writing area using Thickbox, the jQuery modal window. In this way you don’t have to open a separate page to display it, you can speed up loading times by loading it only if it’s going to be read and you don’t waste excessive bandwidth.

Extensions for Google Chrome were released last December 8, and there is already quite a bunch of interesting stuff, like Zemanta, Quick Scroll, Aviary Screen Capture.