Cool WordPress How to Videos & Plugins

I stumbled onto a cool website for folks trying to figure out WordPress. Basically what you get is a WordPress tip every day, and it is free. You get a email that tells you what the days tip is about and if it is something that interests you, you click the link and watch the WordPress How to video. So far I have saved a few that really stuck out for me;

• create a page in your WordPress menu bar that links to an external URL,
• control the order of pages in your menu bar, and also to hide certain pages from being visible on your site,
• How to add a favicon (also known as a website icon or bookmark icon) to your WordPress blog,
• Adding a Contact form to your Site, and,
• How to add social bookmarking Icons. I am sure there will be some more useful tips to come,
• How to add random testimonials to your sidebar,
• Stop WordPress from removing p and br tags,
• Setting up Google webmaster tools,
• How to create a mobile friendly site,
• How to change the default “admin” user name,
• How to change default image size,
• How to use lightbox plugin to create a image gallery,
• How to add social bookmarking icons,
• Adding a contact form.

The site is called WordPress Tip of the Day. It is free, nothing to buy that I can see, I am not affiliated with the site or owners, I just think its a really good set of WordPress How to tips:)

Here is an example video from the site;

Some Must have WordPress Plugins

There are a handful of Plugins that are really useful for Optimizing your WordPress blog. These are some of my favorites and each one is free;

1. All in One SEO – This plugin helps to optimize your WordPress blog for the search engines. There is both Global settings, affecting your entire blog and post level settings that are specific to each post. It is pretty user friendly. It is important to do some research to identify what keyword phrases to optimize.
2. CommentLuv – This plugin checks commenters website. If it is a blog, it will pull the title of the most recent post and link to it. It helps to encourage commenting and helps out your fellow blogger.
3. FixBack -  404 redirect is an error that occurs when an inbound link is broken/missing. Generally this will direct a visitor to your web hosts 404 page. What this plugin does is redirect to an internal page on your blog, instead of your web hosts 404 page. This way, visitors can easily go to your homepage when they would have otherwise been lost all together.
4. Tweetables – This is a Twitter integration plugin. It automatically Tweets your new blog posts (you can turn this feature off). It also puts a retweet image at the start of each blog post and keeps track of the number of times that post has been re tweeted.
5. WordPress Automatic Upgrade – This plugin makes it really easy to upgrade your plugins and your version of WordPress. I don’t know that I would want to do it manually.
6. Google XML Sitemap Generator – As the name implies, this plugin builds and keeps your site map up to date and search engine friendly. It automatically builds and and submits an updated site map each time you make a new post, which helps to ensure your site gets indexed.

Do you have any Plugins to add to this list? Do you know of any other free WordPress How to sites?