Archive for the ‘WordPress Tips’ Category
12 (of the) Best WordPress Guides and Plugin Reviews of 2011
Monday, January 30th, 2012WordPress 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.
Six Ways to Search-Optimize a Blog
Monday, December 5th, 2011Many 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.
12 of the Best WordPress Guides, Hacks and Plugins of 2010
Thursday, February 10th, 2011WordPress 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.
Best WordPress Tips and Tools of 2009
Thursday, April 29th, 2010Which tactics and plugins provide the most powerful SEO boost for a WordPress blog? Which tools are best for Twitter integration? How can you make WordPress easier to use for non-technical content contributors? What plugins and techniques should you use to truly personalize your blog?
Find the answers to these questions and more here in the best posts and articles about WordPress from last year.
Must See SEO Guide for All WordPress Bloggers by wpbeginner
Noting that “SEO for a WordPress blog is different than SEO for static websites, mainly because of the social nature of blogging technology,” this post provides 16 excellent tips for optimizing a blog for search.
20 of the Best SEO Plugins for WordPress by Mashable
Who knew there were so many SEO-specific plugins for WordPress? A great list, though some promote use of the insidious nofollow tag. In contrast, the Dofollow Plugin won’t hurt your SEO (as long as you’re filtering out spam comments) and it’s much friendlier to your valued commenters than nofollowing their links.
3 Plug-ins That Every Blog Needs for SEO by Clicktelligence
A quick review of three complementary plugins for improving blog SEO.
Platinum SEO plugin – The ultimate wordpress SEO solution by Techblissonline Dot Com
Though I personally use and like the All in One SEO plugin, this is an alternative worth checking out if you want more granular control.
One of the fastest, easiest tools for adding photos to blog posts.
How to build a successful blog from conception to delivery by Steve Newman Digital Marketing Blog
A bit rambling, but includes some valuable insights and a nice list of key plugins.
7 Tools To Integrate Twitter With Your WordPress Blog by makeuseof.com
Milind Alvares reviews seven helpful Twitter tools for WordPress, including TweetSuite by Dan Zarrella, which he rates as the most complete Twitter plugin he’s come across.
Using Forms in WordPress by siam communications
A helpful and positive review of the cforms II plug-in for WordPress by Delicious Days.
8 ways to make WordPress easier to use for your clients by Designer Daily
***** 5 stars
An outstanding list of tips and plugins to make the use of WordPress as a CMS easier for non-technical clients or content contributors.
Custom WordPress blog design checklist and walkthrough by The Design Cubicle
Brian Hoff provides a helpful checklist for custom blog designs listing all of the various elements to design and consider when working with a standard WordPress template.
10 Ways to Customize and Personalize your WordPress Blog by Pro Blog Design
Angie Bowen supplies a detailed tutorial, complete with examples, on customizing various elements of a blog’s design including creating a personalized About page, customizing the 404 error page and incorporating social media.
Lazy Blogger’s guide to Super Charge WordPress with 100+ Plugins by Ruhani Rabin
If Angie’s instructions (above) seem like too much work, try jazzing up your blog with a selection of these plugins. But as Ruhani notes, “Do not install all of the
plugins, it (sic) will simply overload your WordPress configuration.”
Top 105 Tips, Hacks, Templates, and Plugins for WordPress by WordPress
As the title promises, links to more than 100 WordPress resources for tasks like SEO, creating a unique design, adding dynamic Javascript search bars and much more.
300+ Resources to Help You Become a WordPress Expert by Web Designer Depot
A treasure trove of theme sources, tutorials, plugins and other valuable resources.
The Wonders of WordPress (from a Blogger Bigot)
Friday, November 13th, 2009When I first started work on the WebMarketCentral blog back in early 2005, I evaluated both Blogger and WordPress. At the time, it seemed that:
- There were a similar number of popular blogs on both platforms.
- The features and capabilities of the two platforms were roughly equivalent.
- Blogger was easier to use.
Today, while I’d argue that the last point above still holds true, on the first two items – it’s not even close. It’s hard to even think of any “A list” blogs on Blogger (okay, Paul Dunay’s excellent Buzz Marketing for Technology, but I mean other than that). And in terms of capabilities, WordPress has advanced with each new release, while Blogger seems stuck in the past. And then there are plugins, of course. As the iPhone commercial says “there’s an app for that,” for almost any cool thing you want your blog to do, on WordPress “there’s a plugin for that.”
To consider just a few differences in capabilities between the two platforms:
- Subscribe by email. This can be accomplished relatively easily with a plugin in WordPress. In Blogger, it can be done, but requires a painful and convoluted workaround using Google Groups.
- RSS feeds. Both platforms make it easy to set up a single RSS feed for all blog content. But WordPress provides far more flexible options as well, allowing users to subscribe only to specific categories, only to comments, whatever.
- Use as a CMS. WordPress can fairly easily be adapted for use as a CMS for a general purpose website, with or without a blog. I’m not sure this is even possible with Blogger, much less simple.
- Add a quick poll. Easy in WordPress. Tried for two years to figure out a way to do this in Blogger, gave up.
- Set up “who links here.” Automatic function in WordPress, painful manual process in Blogger.
- Trackbacks. Again, automatic in WordPress. Blogger requires use of a third-party app and another painful workaround.
- SEO. Don’t even get me started. While WordPress is naturally optimized for search, Blogger seems at best indifferent, at worst hostile to making a blog search engine-friendly.
Perhaps this is unfair to Blogger (feel free to leave comments/corrections below if you think so). I will concede that blogging on Blogger, like most habits, is a hard habit to break. The platform’s quirks and inconveniences can become almost charming. I’ve tried before and failed, but this time I’ve got to quit and take up a healthier alternative. It’s not for me; I’m doing this for the children.
