WordPress is not only the most popular blogging platform, but is increasingly becoming a leading website content management system (CMS) as well.

Cost and ease of use are certainly factors, but one of the important reasons is its extensibility through plugins. These add-ons make it easy to add an incredible variety of functionality to the platform, from contact forms and photo galleries to social sharing and ecommerce capabilities.

How did WordPress emerge as the leading blog platform? What are some techniques, beyond the obvious, for search-optimizing WordPress content? Which plugins are the most popular / useful / vital? Get the answers to those questions and more here in a dozen of the best posts and articles about WordPress from the past year.

WordPress Guides and Commentary

How did WordPress win? by majordojo
***** 5 STARS

Byrne Reese—former Product Manager of Movable Type and TypePad and employee at Six Apart, now a Partner at Endevver, a Movable Type and Melody consulting company—dissects the strategy used by WordPress to become the dominant blogging platform, in order to “see what lessons can be learned from WordPress so that others seeking to build a successful product can learn from it.” This brilliant article delves into the technological, economic, cultural and environmental factors behind the success of WordPress, and inspired more than 70 comments.

Web Traffic Tracking Alternatives to Google Analytics by uber.la

John McElhenney provides helpful reviews of three simple and free alternatives to Google Analytics for tracking WordPress site metrics: JetPack Site Stats, Wassup Plug-in and Widget (which provides real-time stats including how many visitors are on your site or blog at any given moment) and Gaug.es (another real-time tool, which works on any website).

WordPress SEO – 10 Essential Actions by WP Blog Talk

Rob Cubbon details 10 best practices for optimizing WordPress content, from ideal use of keywords and plugins to sitemaps, redirects and image optimization.

WordPress Plugin Compilations and Reviews

90+ WordPress CMS Themes and Plugins by Tripwire Magazine

Contending that “It’s actually pretty easy to turn WordPress into a CMS if you are using the right WordPress CMS Themes,” Dustin Betonio showcases a huge collection of “the best plugins and (premium WordPress) themes to turn WordPress into a CMS and build a professional website fast.”

Top 50 WordPress Plugins for 2011 to Zoom SEO, SMO & Audience Engagement by Zoom Factor

Pam Moore reviews 50 of her favorite WordPress plugins, divided into categories for social sharing & engagement, design and image enhancements, search engine optimization, and development (e.g., the Flexi-Pages widget for adding sub-menu navigation and Mass Edit Pages for WordPress for making small changes to a large number of pages at once).

14 WordPress Plugins Worth Considering by JT Pedersen

JT Pedersen provides a short list of his favorite plugins for personal and corporate (non-ecommerce) blogs, including both popular favorites (the AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget, BackUpWordPress) and some interesting but lesser-known add-ons (Twitter Mentions as Comments, and WP Smush.it to improve load times).

11 WordPress Plugins You’ve Gotta Have by Social Media Today

Writing that he gets the opportunity to work with a lot of different plugins, and that “Every once in a while I’ll come across a new one that is just amazing and I wonder how I ever blogged without it,” Zubin Kutar shares his favorites including Google XML Sitemaps (also on my list of must-haves) and Contact Form 7 (“Probably the easiest to use contact form available” according to Zubin).

8 Excellent WordPress SEO Plugins by Six Revisions

Matt Krautstrunk offers list of “top-notch WordPress plugins for SEO to improve your WordPress site’s search engine rankings,” among them SEO Rank Reporter, All in One SEO Pack (another of my personal favorites), SEO Friendly Image (automatically updates images with alt and title attributes) and SEO Smart Links.

33 WordPress Plugins To Power Up Your Comment Section by 1stwebdesigner

Dainis Graveris presents 33 plugins to “power up and evolve comment form possibilities and security,” including Disqus, WP Ajax Edit Comments, Comment Rating and Twitter Avatars in Comments. The English is a little rough but the list is fantastic.

20 Great WordPress Plugins by Online Income Teacher
***** 5 STARS

Once you get past the spammy blog title and the annoying pop-up, Matt Smith has put together an outstanding list of plugins to perform a wide variety of tasks, from the Ackuna Language Translation Plugin (which, as the name implies, allows readers to translate your posts into many different languages) to Google Analytics Dashboard (which lets you quickly check on your GA stats without logging into GA) to Sharebar, a plugin that keeps social sharing buttons visible while visitors scroll down through your content.

15 Essential WordPress Plugins (Presentation) by Mykl Roventine

In the presentation from the Minnesota Blogger Conference, Mykl Roventine (one of the smartest WordPress gurus I know personally) presents 15 of the best WordPress plugins that meet his strict criteria: he’s used it (or someone he trusts has0: it solves a specific problem; it doesn’t hog resources and degrade performance; it’s supported; easy to use and configure; and free (in most cases).

Blog Technology: Most Downloaded WordPress Plugins by Marketing Technology with @iamreff

John Refford lists the top 15 WordPress plugins in order of popularity. Not too surprisingly, All in One SEO Pack, Akismet and Google XML Sitemaps top the list.

Despite any recent recent rants you may have seen about how blogging is dead or blogs are passé, the fact of the matter is that business blogging is now more important than ever. With Google’s most recent Panda algorithm updates, attributes like content freshness and social signals (strengths of blogs, not corporate websites) will gain increased importance in search ranking.

But as the blogosphere continues to expand (as noted by Diana Adams below), it becomes more difficult to stand out and be heard above the noise.  How can a company launch (or relaunch) a new blog properly? Write great blog post headlines? Promote new content most effectively? Optimize blog content for search? Emulate the best corporate blogs? Take advantage of free or low-cost blog tools and resources?

Get the answers to those questions and more here in two dozen of the best blogging guides of the past year.

Guidance for New Bloggers

20 Common Mistakes Made By New Bloggers by Ink Rebels

Noting that will well over 100 million blogs on the web now it can be challenging to stand out, the effervescent Diana Adams shares a list of common mistakes to avoid such as making your RSS button hard to find, posting inconsistently, and failing to respond to reader comments.

12 things every business blogger should know how to do by Ragan’s PR Daily

Contending that “blogging isn’t that difficult until educated, professional, bright grownups begin to overanalyze things,” Susan Young provides a dozen pieces of commonsense advice for business blogging success, such as sticking to what you know and enjoy, and writing “to express, not to impress.”

The Entrepreneur’s Advisor | Why and How to do a Blog Right by The Entrepreneur’s Advisor

Stuart W. Smith provides some blogging basics and helpful tips for those relatively new to blogging. After making the basic case for a blog, he delves into keywords, developing quality content, links, calls to action and more.

6 Tips for Blogging for SEO in WordPress by Business Insider

Sue Reynolds offers a half-dozen tips for SEO on WordPress blogs, helpful particularly for those just getting started.

Business Blogging Tips, Tactics and Best Practices

8 Ways to Get Your Blog Ready for the Big Time by Blog Engage

Frequent best-of honoree Kristi Hines offers eight tips to get your blog ready for a surge of traffic if you happen to get mentioned or retweeted by a highly influential source. Among the tips: optimize your site for speed, delay your opt-in popup form (or better yet – lose it, they’re obnoxious) and make sure your key pages (About, Contact, Guest Post Guidelines, etc.) are easy to find.

How to Be an Awesome Blog Commenter by HubSpot Blog

Kipp Bodnar offers half-dozen tips for “how to be a thoughtful and engaged commenter” that apply to social networking sites as well as to blogs. Much of it comes down to appropriate social etiquette, and always striving to add value to the conversation.

How to Turn a Lousy Blog Headline into a Great One by The Backlight

Tristan Higbee steps through the creative process of turning a boring blog headline into a better one and then, eventually, into one that is both search-friendly and compelling to potential readers.

26 Ways to Enhance Your Blog Content by Social Media Examiner

Another delightful A to Z post from Debbie Hemley, this one alphabetizing the business blogging process from attributing source material through links and blogging as a hub of social media efforts through YouTube and “Zigzags and Leaps” (“mental moves that might open up things a bit, allow a little more in, including, we hope…discovery”).

7 Key Elements to a Successful Business Blog by TopRank Online Marketing

Lee Odden defines the key characteristics to consider in terms of “branding, community, SEO, PR, recruiting and taking midshare away from your competition” with your blog including the URL, name, design and navigation. (For more on this topic, see also Eight Factors to Consider When Launching a Business Blog previously published here.)

12 Things to Do After You’ve Written a New Blog Post by Content Marketing Institute

Noting that “even great content can go unnoticed,” Brody Dorland recommends 12 steps for promoting your blog content, from the obvious (utilize keywords for SEO, use syndication) to the creative (using a post to answer a question on Twitter, promoting posts via your email signature).

21 Ways Bloggers Engage by Heidi Cohen

Heidi Cohen details 21 ways bloggers can engage with readers beyond just responding to comments, among them: inviting others to contribute guest posts, providing social sharing buttons, enabling readers to subscribe by email, and participating in Twitter chats.

The Blueprint for the Perfect Blog Post (Infographic) by Business 2 Community

Brian Rice graphically illustrates nine components of the “perfect” blog post, beginning with a compelling post title. in this nicely-done infgraphic. He also shares six blogging lessons learned, including the importance of user experience and letting your audience drive your the conversation.

Displaying Social Proof – What the Marketing Experts Use by KISSmetrics

Kristi Hines studies the AdAge Power 150 blogs to see how leading bloggers are displaying their social clout. Tools and methods used include displaying FeedBurner reader count, a Facebook Like box, LinkeddIn share button, or multi-purpose tools from AddtoAny, Share This, or AddThis.

Blog SEO

SEO success for your blog in 10 easy steps by {grow}

Guest blogger Eric Pratum outlines a “10-step prioritized plan to improve the SEO for your blog without spending a lot of time or money,” from keyword strategy to sitemaps.

How to Optimize Your Blog for Google by Social Media Examiner

In this extensive and detailed post, Dino Dogan walks through the process of search optimizing a blog, from audience targeting considerations and keyword research to SEO plugin settings (presuming you are using WordPress).

Where to Use Keywords in Corporate Blog Posts by TopRank Online Marketing Blog

Lee Odden lays out a non-technical five-step process for getting a corporate blog to rank well in search. His item #4 (“Use Descriptive References vs. Pronouns”) in particular should be required reading for ANYONE writing online content.

Top 10 Blog Directories 2011 by SEO Wizardry

Writing that “Blog Directories add an important element to your web site traffic generation and search engine optimization programs,” Peter Hollier lists and links the top 10 blog directories along with their Alexa ranks.

8 Steps to Optimize Your Blog Post by Search Engine Watch

Erez Barak recommends a heavy focus on keyword research, selection and tracking among his eight steps for getting a blog post to rank well in search.

Examples of Exceptional Corporate Blogs

The 10 Best Corporate Blogs in the World by {grow}

Mark Schaefer shares a few observations on the state of corporate blogging (e.g. the tech sector produces most of the best corporate blogs, the Fortune 500 lags the rest of the world in this area) as well as his picks for the top ten corporate blogs based on quality. Most of the companies are large, but the variety of industries represented is intriguing.

Outstanding brand blogs you should check out by iMedia Connection

Sarah Kotlova showcases four well-done corporate blogs (or in the case of Cisco, a collection of company-related blogs written by internal subject-matter experts) from both the B2B and B2C worlds.

Blogging Tools and Resources

Huge List of Useful Tools for Bloggers by ShoutMeLoud

Exactly what it says–a big list of tools to make your blogging more productive. This post lists and links to tools for SEO, writing, blog marketing and more.

Stock.XCHNG

Need an interesting photo for your latest blog post but don’t want to shell out big bucks, go through some convoluted licensing process, or risk violating a photographer’s copyright? This may be the site for you. Owned by Getty Images, Stock.XCHNG bills itself as “the world’s best free (image) stock site.”

veezzle

A free stock photo exchange where you can search, use, share and create collections of images for online use.

fotoglif

If the free sources above don’t have quite what you need, fotoglif offers reasonably-priced photographic images, in a range of categories including news, politics, business, technology and lifestyle.

Many of the same principles apply to optimizing a blog for search as for optimizing a business website: use keywords in the body copy, post titles, subheadings, permalink URL, image alt tags and meta tags. But a blog also presents additional opportunities for search optimization beyond those that apply to standard websites (which is why Google loves blogs). Take advantage of these six techniques to help get your blog ranked highly in relevant searches, and increase your overall web presence.

1. Categories: For the sake of user-friendly site navigation, standard websites usually have a fairly small number (generally no more than six or seven) top-level sections. Furthermore, some of these are virtually worthless for search (e.g.  investor pages, and “Contact Us” is almost always a top-level link even though this page has no search value).

But with a blog, you can create any (reasonable) number of top-level categories, and give these keyword-rich labels. For that reason, think about your blog categories carefully: create category tags that will be meaningful and useful to both human readers and search engine spiders.

2. Fresh content. Most B2B website content (other than items like news releases and upcoming events) and much B2C content as well is fairly static; once it’s written, it tends to stay pretty much intact for the life of the website. But Google’s recent algorithm changes (which Bing and other search engines will most likely try to mimic) favor fresh content, as least for certain types of searches. Authority still matters, but freshness is now a much more important ranking factor than it was in the past.

Blogs are one of the best mechanisms for publishing a steady stream of new content. They are also a great platform for responding to breaking news or the latest developments in your industry. So while an editorial calendar can help your blog posts on track and on schedule, it’s crucial to also build in the flexibility to write posts responding to current events in your industry. This both increases the relevance of your blog and takes advantage of new-to-the-world search phrases that won’t show up in keyword tools.

3. Syndication and blog directories. Content syndication and blog directory sites provide valuable backlinks as well as driving traffic directly to your blog. Technorati and AllTop are two of the general-topic blog directories. Nearly every industry has its own specific directories and syndication sites as well; for example, B2B Marketing Zone for B2B vendor and influencer blogs, and Social Media Informer for social media-related blogs. In addition, there are hundreds of smaller blog directories and RSS submission sites that can further increase the reach and visibility of your blog.

4. Social media. Sharing your content on social networking sites like Twitter and (most importantly) Google+ as well as social bookmarking sites creates links to your blog. More important, however, is that Google tracks social signals (the overall level of content sharing for your blog as well as the authority of those sharing it) as measures of the quality and authority of a blog. So while sharing your own content provides some SEO benefit, building and nurturing a network of authoritative people in your industry and producing content they want to share is even more valuable.

Add social media buttons to your blog to encourage readers to share your content. Tools like ShareThis, AddThis and Wibiya, or WordPress plugins like SexyBookmarks, make it easy to add buttons for any of the most popular social networks and bookmarking sites. Of course you can add these sharing buttons to a standard company website as well, but readers are far more likely to share useful blog content than ordinary vendor web pages; while 60% of all social postings link to published content (news sites or blogs), just 4% link to corporate website content.

You can also build high-authority backlinks through commenting on other blogs as well as writing guest posts (with embedded text links) for other industry blogs. Again, you could use these techniques without having your own blog, but many bloggers are more likely to consider publishing a guest post from a fellow blogger (whose writing they can easily evaluate) than from an unknown corporate or agency contact.

5. Clean code. Google and many other search engines reward sites that have fast loading time, use the latest best practices in web coding and are W3C-compliant with higher rankings. If all of that sounds a bit technical, don’t worry; most of the leading blog platforms automatically create fairly clean, compliant code. Free blog platforms like TypePad and WordPress produce clean code out of the box. Fee-based platforms like Compendium and HubSpot are also search-friendly.

6. WordPress plugins. WordPress blogs can easily be made even more search engine-friendly through the use of a few key plugins. You can find lots of posts about the best SEO plugins for WordPress, but a few of the absolutely key plugins are:

• • All in One SEO Pack. Among it’s other features, this plugin makes it easy to add meta title tags and automatically create search-friendly URLs for each post.
• • W3 Total Cache. This plugin uses caching and other techniques to dramatically increase the load speed of your blog and improve the user experience.
• • Google XML Sitemaps with qTranslate Support. Sitemaps help the search engines more fully and accurately index a website or blog. For a relatively static business website, it’s easy to create an XML sitemap using an online tool then submit it to the major search engines. For a blog, which is constantly changing, using a manual process would be virtually impossible. Fortunately, this plugin creates an XML sitemap of your WordPress blog in a format supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search (Bing) and Yahoo,  and automatically keeps it up to date as you write new posts, add categories, and make other changes to your blog.
• • WP Google Analytics. Google Analytics provides a wealth of information to help with SEO efforts, such as which keywords and referral sites are driving the most traffic and which landing pages draw the most search traffic. This plugin makes it a snap to add the Google Analytics tracking code to all of your blog pages and posts, and automatically include the code on new posts.
• • Sexy Bookmarks. The Sexy Bookmarks plugin adds a configurable set of social networking and social bookmarking buttons to each of your blog posts, making it easy for your readers to share your content on their site(s) of choice. Sharing provides useful social signals to the search engines about the authority of your content and creates valuable backlinks.
• • Do Follow. By default, WordPress applies the insidious nofollow tag to outbound links from your blog. This is done ostensibly to prevent your blog from passing authority to sketchy sites through comment and backlink spam. However, if you are moderating comments to your blog, those kinds of links shouldn’t be an issue. Do-follow outbound links to high-quality, relevant websites actually help with SEO as well as increasing reader satisfaction, generating more comments, and helping with relationship building.

Once you’ve developed and optimized an effective business website and launched a properly optimized business blog, the core of your web presence optimization framework is in place. Now you’re ready to take the next steps to expand that presence and work toward dominating in the search engines for your core terms.

Over the last decade, business blogs have gone from being a novelty to a leading-edge practice to an essential element for any company seeking to optimize its presence on the web. According to Small Business Trends and HubSpot, the percentage of businesses with blogs has increased from less than half in 2009 to nearly two out of three in 2011.

Why are so many companies now embracing blogging? In addition to the traditional benefits of business blogging, recent changes in the way search engines rank content have made blogging crucial for obtaining and maintaining high search engine visibility.

Three ranking factors that have recently taken on increased importance from Google (and will therefore likely soon become important to other search engines as well) are content quality and authority, social media links and content freshness. A blog helps on all three fronts much more than a standard corporate website. Google is also placing increased weight on link quality and diversity; thoughtful, helpful blog posts are more likely to attract such links than typical vendor product and service content.

What’s more, blogs are a central component of web presence optimization, and the core of a productive social media strategy.

Once your organization makes the decision to start a blog—or to re-launch one that’s been neglected or has underperformed—here are eight key factors to consider.

1. Location. Will the blog be part of your corporate site or have its own unique URL? The more common practice today is to treat the blog as a section of the website, often with a URL like company.com/blog. The primary advantage of this approach is that all of the SEO value of external links accrues to the corporate site, giving it more authority in the eyes of the search engines.

An alternative approach is to treat the blog as a separate entity with a meaningful URL. For example, if Acme Widgets wants to rank for the very competitive phrase “widget management software,” and their corporate site is at acmewidgets.com, they may want to use the URL widgetmanagementsoftware.com for the blog. This option is worth considering in product categories that are highly competitive in search. It also provides the opportunity to give the blog a distinct and less “corporate” personality of its own, as well as potentially providing the company with an extra spot on the first page of search results.

2. Author(s). The internet is littered with a hundred million abandoned blogs, for two primary reasons: first, it’s a fair amount of work to research and write quality content on a regular basis. And second, there is no instant gratification—it takes time to build an audience and authority with the search engines. Assigning multiple writers (i.e., creating a group blog) can help spread the load and allow for more frequent posting, a variety of styles, and broader topic coverage. Just make sure all of the authors have what it takes to be successful business bloggers: writing skills (of course), but also originality, subject matter expertise, a point of view, and most importantly—persistence.

3. Tone. Sassy? Intellectual? Helpful? Informative? Sophisticated? Technical? While a blog is likely to contain a mix of attributes (particularly a multi-author blog), think about the overall tone and personality your blog should have. Unlike website copy (which tends to be feature/benefit, marketing oriented), a blog can project a distinct and less directly sales-y side of your organization.

4. Design. Some corporate blogs (particularly those integrated into the company website) simply match the look and feel of the corporate website as closely as possible. But while a company blog should carry over certain key branding elements (e.g., colors, logo), it can also have some distinctiveness to its look, reflecting the tone (above) and setting it apart from the “commercial” content of the corporate site.

5. Platform. Just kidding, this really isn’t a tough decision: use WordPress. Sure, there are alternatives, ranging from other free or low-cost platforms (e.g., Blogger, TypePad) to fee-based systems (e.g., Compendium, HubSpot) to tools built into web content management system (CMS) platforms, but it’s tough to find an alternative that can compete with the flexibility, affordability, capability and search engine-friendliness of WordPress.

6. Structure (topics). Though these will likely evolve over time, it’s best to think about at least the obvious subjects for your company and industry up front. First, doing so will help keep subsequent posts organized into logical groups, without “category proliferation” (an excessive number of categories) or multiple overlapping topic areas.

Second, properly naming the categories is critical both for human navigation and for search engine optimization; a mis-named category (e.g., one that uses internal company jargon rather than the language of your prospects and customers) won’t attract as many readers as a better-named category would, and won’t help your blog rank as well for popular industry search terms.

Determining a set of baseline categories up front also helps in developing an editorial calendar. While this may be too formal for a single-contributor or small company blog, it can be very helpful for assuring topic diversity and a steady stream of content.

7. Post frequency. As Heidi Cohen points out, there is no hard and fast rule as to how often a blog needs fresh content, but the best strategy is to “blog as often as you can create quality content.” In terms of a blog’s impact on customer acquisition, posting once per week is nearly 50% more effective than posting only once per month, and more than twice as effective as posting even less frequently. But posting 2-3 times per week yields only a small incremental gain, and posting daily provides an even smaller incremental improvement.

Again, having multiple authors (see factor #2 above) can help increase post frequency without placing an excessive burden on any one contributor. Five authors, each writing two posts per month, would result in 2-3 posts per week—a highly effective frequency for customer acquisition. Spreading the burden should also (at least theoretically) improve the depth and quality of each post as well.

8. Features. Any blogging platform should provide the capability to add common features to your blog like a subscribe-by-email option, buttons/links to your social media accounts, and social sharing buttons to make it easy for your readers to share your posts on social networks and social bookmarking sites (though few platforms offer as many options for “pimping out” a blog as WordPress—see factor #5 above).

WordPress plugins let you add a wide variety of more advanced functions to your blog such as incorporating feeds from social media sites, enable your readers to rate posts, build customized contact forms, automatically display contextually related posts, add an online directory to your blog, display your most popular posts, insert a customized greeting based on the site that referred the reader to your blog (e.g., Digg, Facebook, LinkedIn), even create an e-commerce store.

By addressing each of these factors in your blog planning and setup, you’ll be ready to launch (or re-launch) a business blog built for success.

The best B2B marketing blogs are once again creatively presented by marketing automation provider Eloqua and JESS3 in this year’s Blog Tree. It’s gratifying to see that Webbiquity sprouted a leaf this time out. As Joe Chernov explains in his blog tree post,  “All gene pools benefit from healthy DNA, and if the blogosphere is going to continue to evolve, it’s important that new voices are heard. The Blog Tree: New Growth cheers about 60 active, insightful blogs launched (or significantly re-engineered) after January 1, 2009.  It’s truly a collection of the freshest voices on the Web.”

You can find the interactive PDF version of this very cool infographic here or in Joe’s post.It’s great to see some familiar names like Pam Moore The Marketing Nut, Mack Collier, Savvy B2B Marketing and B2B Bloggers on this year’s tree, as well as a lot of new blogs to check out.

Every blogger wants more traffic. How to get it? The key is a balanced strategy of search engine optimization (SEO), social media, syndication and guest posting.

So where does blog traffic come from, and how does this change over time? Looking at data from the Webbiquity blog, several trends are apparent. This B2B blog isn’t necessarily representative of all blogs of course, but the trends likely aren’t much different for many business blogs. What’s important here isn’t the specific results from this blog, but what those results say about how to get more traffic to your blog.

Six conclusions that can be drawn from this graph:

It takes time to build a blog audience. Don’t expect miracles right out of the gate, or get discouraged by low blog traffic at first. Patience is a virtue, and persistence is rewarded. Even those early posts may draw significant traffic over time as your blog gains traction.

Direct and referral traffic are highly correlated. It’s striking in the graph above how the lines for direct and referral traffic remain nearly parallel over time. But it makes sense: the more often your blog is “seen” on other sites, the more people will bookmark it, subscribe to your RSS feed, and type in the URL directly.

SEO doesn’t produce immediate results, but is crucial over the long term. Just as it takes time to build a following, it also takes a while to build credibility and authority with the search engines. Note from the graph that search was the lowest source of traffic to this blog for its first three months, and for six of the first nine months. But it’s been the top source of visits for nine of the past 10 months (the only exception resulting from the spike in direct and referral traffic to the Nifty 50 Top Women of Twitter post). And even with the falloff in direct and referral traffic over the last two months (more about that in a moment), search traffic has held up fairly well.

A closer look at Google stats (see below) reveals an even more remarkable point about search: while direct and referral traffic tend to be “spiky” based on the popularity of individual posts, search traffic is more consistent over time.

Social media is important. Of the top dozen sources of traffic, four were social networking or related sites: Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and HootSuite. Twitter is the most productive, driving more than half of all non-blog social media visits. Including blogs, more than one of every seven visits came through social media (blogs, social networking, social bookmarking, or tools like HootSuite and bit.ly) sites.

Syndication is also helpful. Three of the top 12 traffic sources for this blog were syndication or content aggregation sites: B2B Marketing Zone, Social Media Informer and Social Media Today. The best syndication sites will vary by industry, so choose sites appropriate for your blog subject manner. Don’t overlook smaller blog directories and RSS syndication sites that can collectively drive notable traffic (as well as providing valuable links for SEO purposes).

Digging deeper into the Google Analytics results and correcting errors (such as GA sometimes mislabeling search visits as referral traffic) yields a more detailed picture. Search is the top source of traffic for most blogs over time. But search is affected by every link, so a multi-faceted approach is critical. For example, links from other blogs may provide only modest direct traffic, but they influence search engines and other social media sources, as well as increasing direct traffic.

Post frequency matters. Back to that dropoff over the past two months—in a way, this blog is a victim of its own success. Because I’ve obtained several wonderful and active clients through my blogging, I’ve had less time to write posts over the past 60-90 days, and the resulting dip in direct and referral traffic is readily apparent in the first graph above. But for corporate blogs, the lesson is clear: maintaining consistent post frequency is crucial to maintaining high blog traffic and continuous growth.

A substantial share of “Other Referring Sites” traffic to this blog comes from WebMarketCentral, the website marketing resources portal. The lesson for companies is to feature your blog prominently on your corporate website, as that can be a rich source of visits.

All in all, your specific results will vary, but again the key to getting more traffic to your blog is a balanced approach of activities including search engine optimization (SEO), social networking, social bookmarking, syndication, blog commenting and guest posting. And of course writing compelling content for your audience.

Several great new features were recently added to the B2B Marketing Zone and Social Media Informer by co-founder Tony Karrer. One of the most obvious is that posts now include images, making the sites more visually appealing than the former text-only design.

Both of these sites bring together content from leading experts and companies like Brian Carroll, Paul Dunay, Ambal Balakrishnan, Harry Hoover, Gini Dietrich–really too many to list. You can find a long list of the Featured sources on the right side.  There is a lot more content that comes in as well beyond the Featured sources.

The home page itself will show you the latest and best content at any time.  For example as I’m writing this, I see a few great posts right up top:

• • 3 Questions To Ask About The Qualified Lead You Just Received…
• • Do B2B Editors Get Twitter?
• • The evolution of social media power and influence

Best is decided by the system based on social signals – that’s clicks, views, twitter, delicious, and other kinds of inputs that tell us what people are doing with the content.  And the goal of both sites is to make sure that great content from lesser known sources still makes it to the top.

Each day, week, month and year, each site generates a “Best Of” Edition.  You can change the Edition at any time.  That allows you to see some really great stuff beyond what you typically see on the home page.  For example, included in the July 25^th edition on Social Media Informer are these posts (among others):

• • How Small Businesses Can Use LinkedIn to Grow
• • Fifteen Incredible Mobile Statistics
• • Web Presence Optimization, Reloaded

Posts on both sites are categorized by subject. Topics on B2B Marketing Zone include social media, inbound marketing and business blogging. Social Media Informer covers topics such as social networking, small business and brand monitoring.

The intent of the sites is to aggregate and make it easy to find great content.  You’ll see only see a snippet of each post.  When you click the link, you will be directed back to the source.  In other words, we curate the content, but don’t own it.  You can still comment and interact with the content on the original site.

Visiting these sites is a great way to find fresh content, but you can also subscribe to newsletter digests on both sites.

This is a quick overview of the new features on these sites.  Tony and I look forward to continuing to improve them.  If you have thoughts, or comments, please feel free to contact Tony Karrer via email at: akarrer@techempower.com.

The “ROI of social media” (or lack thereof) is a hot, and still hotly contested, topic. I summarized arguments from both sides a few months ago in The Social Media ROI Debate. More recently, numerous writers including Olivier Blanchard, Neil Glassman and Mark Schaefer have tried to make the case that social media ROI is real, can be measured, and must be measured.

Yet a Bazaarvoice/CMO Club study showed that only 15% of CMOs could point to a “significant return” from Facebook marketing efforts, while 9% report no ROI and 35% basically had no idea. Jacquie McCarman argued in It’s Not Your CEO’s Fault He’s a Social Media Moron that “Most C-levels will scroll down to the bottom line to determine effectiveness of any campaign but what many don’t realize is that the bottom line definitions have changed with this new-fangled internet technology. All of the old measurements are moot.”

Austen Mayor writes that although “executives like numbers,” social media efforts should proceed even without hard ROI attached because “The sooner a company starts climbing the deep functionalities learning curve, the sooner their Klout score will be at a respectable level,” and “social media might be bigger than the industrial revolution in terms of societal effects.” On ClickZ, Heidi Cohen reports that even at this stage, only one in three companies are even trying to measure social media ROI, because doing that is hard, though she also outlines five other social media metrics that matter. And another  recent study from McKinsey concluded that, whether you can directly measure ROI or not, companies that embrace social media are more profitable than those who don’t, and “those that fail to implement social media could be making a “critical mistake”.”

It’s challenging to get the metrics really needed to measure social media ROI primarily because social media is much more like public relations than it is like direct marketing or search engine advertising. It can influence your prospects to buy from you, but doesn’t normally lead straight to a purchase. Nevertheless, social media activity consumes resources and therefore must produce business results–or those resources will be spent somewhere else. Marketers need to do the best they can with measurement, but also think about how to move their social media followers, who are often near the top of the purchase funnel, into and along the sales process.

The core of social media marketing efforts should be the corporate blog. Through a blog, marketers become publishers, providing their audience with relevant and valuable content. Publishing has historically relied on advertising, or sponsorships, to pay for content production. Corporate blogs can operate in a similar fashion, except that the sole sponsor or advertiser is the company itself. Essentially, marketers need to (carefully and tactfully) advertise on their own blogs. What should they promote? Here are 20 ideas.

Promote white papers / eBooks / reports for lead generation. According to MarketingSherpa (and many other sources), generating qualified leads remains the top priority for B2B marketers. Use “ads” in your blog sidebar, and in-post text links where appropriate, to drive visitors to your white paper or other gated content download pages. When you come out with a new white paper, summarize one of the main findings in a blog post with a link to the page to download the full document.

Generate webinar registrations. Again, you can “advertise” upcoming webinars in your sidebar. Also, as with white papers, write up a short summary of the webinar in a preview post linked to the signup form. After the webinar (if it’s been recorded), write a follow-up post answering questions from the event and directing visitors to the recorded version online.

Build your email subscriber list. Feature a newsletter signup box prominently near the upper-right corner of your blog. From time to time, write “teaser” posts informing readers of what content they are missing, but could be getting, as a newsletter subscriber.

Invite visitors to hear your experts speak or meet you live. Exhibiting at an upcoming trade show? Speaking at an event? Attending a local tweetup? Let your readers know! Social media is a great way to make more in-real-life contacts.

Get more from your presentations. For those readers who aren’t able to make it to that industry event to hear your product expert speak live, extend the life of that carefully crafted presentation by posting it on a social content sharing site like Slideshare.  Include a call to action at the end of the presentation or a link to learn more.

Display testimonials linked to case studies in your sidebar. Your customers’ words are more powerful than your own.

Offer a free trial of your product (if practical).

Link to product information from within your blog posts. While it’s inappropriate to simply write a blog post extolling the wonderfulness of your product or service (that’s a marketing slick, not a helpful blog post), there will be times when, in presenting a solution to a problem, a mention of your product naturally fits in. Or better yet, a text description of your product (e.g. “help desk software” instead of the product name). Link it to the page on your website about that product. Most readers won’t bother clicking on the link, but those who do likely have an interest in the product. And as a side benefit, this is helpful for SEO.

Make your content easy to share by including social sharing buttons on your blog posts. This doesn’t directly lead to ROI, but when readers share your content, they are enhancing your reputation by implicitly giving your their endorsements.

Grow your social network by including links to your Twitter account, Facebook page, YouTube channel and other social media points of presence. Again, this doesn’t produce leads directly, but it gives you more “at bats” with your audience.

Integrate social media activities with your CRM system. If there is an individual in your CRM system who is also following you on Twitter, or who likes you on Facebook, or who has left a comment on your blog, that should be noted. If there are several individuals from the same prospect company doing these things, that should really be noted. Don’t pass up the chance to get closer to these people.

Respond to comments (helpfully and appropriately). It’s not always proper to “sell” when responding to a comment, but when pointing someone to information about your products or services that can solve their problems is pertinent, don’t be afraid to do so!

Amplify new product or service announcements (carefully). A blog post isn’t the place to publish a press release, but when apropos, it is a perfectly reasonable place to link to one. Promote the announcement in your sidebar or link to naturally from within a related post.

Answer questions in your blog posts. Some of the most popular posts I’ve written on this blog were essentially extended responses to client questions. Common customer questions will very often pertain to your products or services. Again, while blog posts shouldn’t be too salesy, it’s perfectly acceptable to mention products or services (with links to more information, case studies or white papers) when required to answer an inquiry.

Gather market intelligence. Response rates for email surveys continue to decline; who has the time to answer a survey? (At least without a very attractive incentive to do so.) A corporate blog is a great vehicle, however, for gathering intelligence from your customers and prospects in small chunks. Include a quick poll widget in your sidebar to gather answers to yes/no or multiple choice questions. Ask essay-type questions in your blog posts and encourage readers to answer with a comment.

Showcase your customer support. Got some great support resources online? An active and helpful support forum? A responsive customer support Twitter account? Write about and link to these resources in your blog; customers may need to be reminded, and prospects may (hopefully) be impressed by the breadth and sophistication of your support offerings.

Promote your “evergreen” content and assets. These can be things like lists (e.g., Aira Bongko’s extensive list of Twitter apps or Ken Burbary’s wiki on social media monitoring tools), industry-specific glossaries (like this one on IT service delivery terms), free online tools (HubSpot’s Website Grader has been a phenomenally successful lead generator), collections of resources, free software utilities–the possibilities are limited only by your creativity.

Highlight your partners. If you sell through any kind of channel, find creative ways to link to your partners, either within blog posts (for example, when discussing a specific topic where one of your partners has expertise or writing about a specific geographic region) or even by “advertising” for them in your sidebar. Helping your partners ultimately helps you. Recognition on your blog can even be an incentive for greater performance.

Make it easy for the press to contact you. A well-written blog can be a PR magnet. A journalist is conducting research for a story…finds your blog…is impressed by the facts and knowledge conveyed and wants to learn more. Where do you send them–to a standard blog “contact us” form? A better approach is to make it prominent and easy for members of the media to click directly to your website’s online newsroom or media page. Link to this in your sidebar and on the “About” and “Contact” pages on your blog.

Highlight your company’s community involvement. Okay, this won’t directly produce leads or sales, but it helps spread the kind of publicity that can definitely cast your company in a favorable light, help generate media coverage, and make people more likely to want to do business with you. Be strategic about this; look for opportunities to showcase your company’s expertise while also doing good for society. Two quick examples:

• • A manufacturer of industrial control devices donated some of its products and engineering expertise to students at a local college to help build a solar-powered vehicle for a green energy competition. The car won, but more importantly so did the students, the college, the company (which got some great press and was able to show off it’s engineering capabilities) and, ultimately, perhaps the environment.
• • An IT services firm donated the time of several of its developers to local non-profit groups for a weekend. Again, the non-profits benefited (by getting applications built at no cost, including an improved online donation system for on group), the firm was able to demonstrate the prowess of its developers, and the event was well-covered by local media.

Social media ROI may indeed be challenging to measure, but ultimately, it’s a business activity requiring resources and so it must produce a return. The ideas above are a place to start. Got more? Please share them in the comments.

WordPress is no longer just the leading blog platform, but is now the most popular open-source CMS (content management system) as well. Among the many reasons for the popularity of WordPress: it’s affordable, search engine-friendly, reasonably easy to use, and extensible through an incredible array of plugins.

Discover some great sources for free and reasonably-priced themes, essential plugins you may not be aware of, SEO tips, and other interesting techniques and hacks here in a dozen of the best WordPress guides of last year.

WordPress Themes and Plugins

31 Websites Where To Find Free HQ WordPress Themes by W3Mag

The English is broken but the list of free template sources, like Wp Mojo, eBlog Templates and ThemeLab is excellent.

20 Excellent Free WordPress 3.0 Themes by Blogfreakz

Another excellent selection of free themes, including Heliumified which has a nice Apple-like look and feel.

10 Free WordPress Themes for Small Businesses by American Express OPEN Forum

Zachary Sniderman highlights 10 interesting free themes, along with recommendations on how each could be used and optimized.

32 Essential WordPress Plugins I Use…And You Don’t! by Andy Beal

An outstanding list of useful WordPress plugins from Andy Beal, author of Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online and the brain behind the Trackur social media monitoring tool.

25 Top WordPress Plugins You Should Know About by Ask WordPress Girl

Angela Bowman shares her “clean and simple list of the plugins I use most often on my WordPress sites” for SEO, feeds, forms, security, Twitter and more.

WordPress SEO

10 SEO Tips To Get Your WordPress Blog Ranking Highly In The Search Engines by SEOheap

Helpful guidelines on plugins, post titles, pages, permalinks and pinging improve the search engine rank of and increase search traffic to your WordPress blog.

8 Effective SEO Techniques Every WordPress Blogger Should Use by BloggingPro

Robyn-Dale Samuda offers guidance on navigation setup, image tagging, sitemaps, permalinks, plugins and more for search-optimizing a WordPress site or blog.

WordPress Tips, Techniques and Hacks

How I Create and Manage A WordPress Website by Graywolf’s SEO Blog

Michael Wolf likes to use WordPress to create “magazine or newspaper style site(s)…(because) it’s easier to administer, easier to get writers to upload and format their own content, and it has RSS and other social tools built in or that can be integrated very easily with plugins,” and in this post explains his process for setting up a WordPress site from keyword research and “evergreen” content to design and backups.

The Comprehensive Guide for a Powerful CMS using WordPress – Part one: 101 Techniques for a Powerful CMS using WordPress by Noupe Design Blog
***** 5 Stars
A nicely crafted and illustrated reference to how to do a variety of things with WordPress from setting up a static home page and custom navigation bar to adding breadcrumbs and widgetizing a theme, footer and page menu.

5 Things You Didn’t Know You Could Do with WordPress by Let’s Do It!

Zeke Camusio shows that WordPress isn’t just for blogging; it can also be used to build an e-commerce site, social network site, image gallery, email auto-responder system or message board.

Code to Create Custom Share Buttons for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & Delicious by B2B Online Marketing

If you want to make it easy for readers to share your blog posts socially—but find social media sharing tools such as ShareThis overkill because of the overwhelming number of options they present—here are simple code snippets to create custom sharing buttons for the most popular social networking sites.

35+ Most Essential WordPress Tricks and Hacks by Artatm

Ever wondered how to insert some standard text after each post? Automatically display each post’s word count? Number your comments, or make author comments stand out? Learn how to do all of that and more in this outstanding list of WordPress tricks, categorized into Post Hacks, Comment Hacks, Tags,categories and Archives hacks, Search hacks and Other General Hacks.

Blogging is often viewed as the core component of a B2B social media marketing strategy, and other than discussion forums, it’s the most mature component of social media. Facebook, Twitter and even newer tools like Quora may be sexier and get more attention, but blogs are the workhorses essential to making social media marketing work. Research from HubSpot shows that small businesses with blogs have twice as many Twitter followers as those who don’t. Increased search engine visibility, targeted traffic and enhanced brand image are just a few of the benefits of business blogging.

So what’s next for B2B blogging? What trends are likely to emerge in the coming year? To answer those questions, the founders of the B2B Marketing Zone asked 22 of the most influential b2b marketing and PR bloggers—including Roxanne Darling, Jay Baer, Ardath Albee, Erik Qualman and Chris Abraham—for their prognostications. You can get the whole story in B2B Blogging Trends in 2011, a free (and no registration required) white paper from Aggregage (the software that powers the BMZ site). Among the findings:

• • If you don’t have a blog yet, 2011 is the year to start one. As less than half of all B2B companies currently have blogs, there’s still an opportunity to stand out and establish thought leadership in your niche. If your company doesn’t have a blog, you’re not a laggard…quite yet. But time is running out to grab the best intellectual spots of turf on the B2B blogging landscape.
• • Blogging helps a company demonstrate expertise, it’s ideal for search, and as Blake Landau points out, “As push marketing becomes less effective, blogs become more important.”
• • Blogs are not islands; as pointed out above, they are the central point to social marketing efforts. Blogging is most effective when integrated with other communications efforts including PR and email marketing.
• • Although there is still opportunity to get started with a business blog, it’s crucial to do it right. Jay Baer predicts an “explosion of bad B2B blogs” in the coming year as companies scramble to embrace the medium, but many fail to do it well. To stand out and achieve business success with a blog, it’s critical to focus narrowly on the information needs of your customers and prospects, as Kristin Zhivago and Harry Hoover both note.

There’s much more. Again, you can download the complete Aggregage white paper on B2B Blogging Trends in 2011 here.