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Posts Tagged ‘WordPress’

The Twelve Days of Christmas SEO Style

On the first day of ChristmasSocial Media Christmas Tree
my true love sent to me:

  • A Google Page One Ranking

On the second day of Christmas
my true love sent to me:

  • Two Webinars
  • and a Google Page One Ranking

On the third day of Christmas
my true love sent to me:

  • Three Squidoo Lenses
  • Two Webinars
  • and a Google Page One Ranking

On the fourth day of Christmas
my true love sent to me:

  • Four RSS Feeds
  • Three Squidoo Lenses
  • Two Webinars
  • and a Google Page One Ranking

On the fifth day of Christmas
my true love sent to me:

  • Five Facebook Fans
  • Four RSS Feeds
  • Three Squidoo Lenses
  • Two Webinars
  • and a Google Page One Ranking

On the sixth day of Christmas
my true love sent to me:

  • Six WordPress Plugins
  • Five Facebook Fans
  • Four RSS Feeds
  • Three Squidoo Lenses
  • Two Webinars
  • and a Google Page One Ranking

On the seventh day of Christmas
my true love sent to me:

  • Seven Spider Crawls
  • Six WordPress Plugins
  • Five Facebook Fans
  • Four RSS Feeds
  • Three Squidoo Lenses
  • Two Webinars
  • and a Google Page One Ranking

On the eighth day of Christmas
my true love sent to me:

  • Eight DMOZ Listings
  • Seven Spider Crawls
  • Six WordPress Plugins
  • Five Facebook Fans
  • Four RSS Feeds
  • Three Squidoo Lenses
  • Two Webinars
  • and a Google Page One Ranking

On the ninth day of Christmas
my true love sent to me:

  • Nine Long Tail Keywords
  • Eight DMOZ Listings
  • Seven Spider Crawls
  • Six WordPress Plugins
  • Five Facebook Fans
  • Four RSS Feeds
  • Three Squidoo Lenses
  • Two Webinars
  • and a Google Page One Ranking

On the tenth day of Christmas
my true love sent to me:

  • Ten Linkedin Connections
  • Nine Long Tail Keywords
  • Eight DMOZ Listings
  • Seven Spider Crawls
  • Six WordPress Plugins
  • Five Facebook Fans
  • Four RSS Feeds
  • Three Squidoo Lenses
  • Two Webinars
  • and a Google Page One Ranking

On the eleventh day of Christmas
my true love sent to me:

  • Eleven Tweeples Tweeting
  • Ten Linkedin Connections
  • Nine Long Tail Keywords
  • Eight DMOZ Listings
  • Seven Spider Crawls
  • Six WordPress Plugins
  • Five Facebook Fans
  • Four RSS Feeds
  • Three Squidoo Lenses
  • Two Webinars
  • and a Google Page One Ranking

On the twelfth day of Christmas
my true love sent to me:

  • Twelve Bloggers Blogging
  • Eleven Tweeples Tweeting
  • Ten Linkedin Connections
  • Nine Long Tail Keywords
  • Eight DMOZ Listings
  • Seven Spider Crawls
  • Six WordPress Plugins
  • Five Facebook Fans
  • Four RSS Feeds
  • Three Squidoo Lenses
  • Two Webinars
  • and a Google Page One Ranking

WordPress is the Liberator of Growing Businesses Everywhere

I have always been a fan of WordPress.  Okay, let me rephrase that.  Since I discovered WordPress, I have always been a great fan.  Similar to other people, I was hesitant at first.  I thought it was simply a blogging application with limited capabilities.  I equated it to Google’s Blogger and thought it was solely used for bloggers and it was much to limited for a real corporate website.

Thankfully, I was wrong.  WordPress liberated me and it has liberated many website designers and business owners around the world.  It is liberating because it is free and it is easy enough for normal – non website designers – people to use.  WordPress is robust enough to create elaborate websites, while simple enough an in-house marketing person or business owner to add content and update.

A case in point is a client that just launched a WordPress website.  The client is an ERP consulting company based out of Denver, Colorado.  More importantly, the client had a limited website needed to upgrade because the company is rapidly growing.  I proposed WordPress and the client agreed, then they jumped fully into design mode with me as we added plug-in upon plug-in to do such things as automated imports of news feeds, polls, quizzes, videos, events, live chat, and on and on.  As a web designer I love this enthusiasm.  It is great to offer a suggestion that your client not only likes, but that they build upon with their own ideas.

At the end of this project my client has a website that is robust, functional, and has solid growth potential.  They can maintain it internally or hire a million different WordPress experts around the world to jump in at anytime.  They are liberated and a little open source package called WordPress made this liberation possible.

The client and their transformation reminds me of a saying my Grandmother always said.

Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today.  Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime.

A normal website is a fish, but WordPress is the lesson of fishing.


Thirty Top WordPress Plugins

If you’ve ever used WordPress, you know the mass of WordPress’ functionality resides in the plugins.  Any high quality theme, blog, or website is loaded up with plugins.  The problem is not the ability to locate plugins, but the plugin’s actual ability to work without the need for special coding.

Below is a list of my favorite plugins.  These plugins are both functional and easy to use.  The augment WordPress’ core functionality and require little or no coding.

  1. Add to Any: Share/Save/Bookmark Button – Help readers share, bookmark, and email your posts and pages using any service.
  2. All in One SEO Pack – Supports easy definition of page specific meta tags for search engine optimization.
  3. AWS Easy Page Link – Easy interlinking between pages when writing content.
  4. Breacrumb NavXT – Generates breadcrumb trails for your WordPress blog or website.
  5. Contact Form 7 – Simple and fully customizable contact form.
  6. Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – Generates a fully customizable sitemap.
  7. Datafeedr Random Ads V2 – Aallows you to simply and easily show random ads anywhere in your template files or using widgets.
  8. Events – Enables a list of events with a static countdown to date in both pages and sidebar.
  9. Featured Content Gallery – Rotating images on home page.
  10. Fun with Sidebar Tabs – Adds a tabbed sidebar to existing themes.
  11. Google Maps Anywhere – Interactive map to locations utilizing Google maps.
  12. KB Robots.txt – Creates a standard robot.txt file for regular WordPress and WordPress MU.
  13. Link to Post – Supports easy internal linking to post entries.
  14. List Pages Shortcode – Introduces the [list-pages] and [child-pages] shortcodes for easily displaying a list of pages within a post or page.
  15. PhotoSmash – PhotoSmash Galleries makes it easy to create photo galleries in posts or pages that your users can upload images into for sharing with other users.
  16. Really Simple CAPTCHA – CAPTCHA field that supports multiple contact forms.
  17. Show IDs – Adds a column to the administrative dashboard to show page and post ID’s.
  18. Simple Google Sitemap – Generate a sitemaps.org compatible XML sitemap of your WordPress.
  19. Simple Image Link – Sidebar images within existing sidebar format
  20. Simple:Press Forum – Easy to configure forum that integrates with the standard version of WordPress.
  21. Simple Sidebar Navigation – Adds in a customized menu within sidebar widgets. Support multiple instances and integrated easily with tabbed sidebars.
  22. Social Homes – Adds a sidebar widget containing a subtle list of all your social homes as linked favicons.
  23. Special Text Boxes – Adds simple colored text boxes to highlight some portion of post text. Use it for highlights warnings, alerts, infos and downloads in your blog posts.
  24. Subscription Options – Adds subscription option icons for your RSS Feed URL; your FeedBurner Email Service URL and your Twitter Stream URL.
  25. TinyMCE Advanced – Enables advanced features and plugins in TinyMCE.
  26. TubePress – Displays professional YouTube galleries in your posts, pages, and/or sidebar.
  27. Twitter Friends Widget – Widget to display your Twitter Friends in the sidebar.
  28. WP-Table Reloaded – allows you to create and easily manage tables in the admin area of WordPress. A comfortable backend allows an easy manipulation of table data. You can then include the tables into your posts, on your pages or in text widgets by using a shortcode or a template tag function. Tables can be imported and exported from/to CSV, XML and HTML.
  29. WP Easy Uploader – Easily upload any type of content without the need for FTP.
  30. WP-DBManager – Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

Blogger Turns Ten and Still Dominates Competitors

Blogger is a Google application that is used by millions of people each month to produce and host personal and business-related blogs. Last month the application turned ten years old, which is rather old for Web2.0 applications. My first blog was hosted on Blogger and remnants of it still exist there today. While I’ve used Blogger in the past, I personally, have officially defected to WordPress, as I quickly outgrew Blogger’s functional capabilities.

This little birthday celebration led me to wonder if Blogger is as popular as it once was years ago. I also wonder how it fairs against the top competitors in recent years. The geek in me just could not go one wondering or let it go. I had to find out the answers to my burning questions. Well, maybe not burning, but questions nonetheless. I visited Compete to query traffic volumes for Blogger and competitor websites such as WordPress, Typepad, and Livejournal. I was actually surprised at what I discovered.

The chart represents traffic for all four sites and covers the time span of one year. Blogger is still the traffic leader with thirty million unique visitors per month. WordPress – my current darling – comes in close behind. The other sites are falling well behind at less than ten million unique visitors a month. While I don’t know if you can call ten million unique visitors per month “falling behind” in anything, there is certainly a difference in volume between the websites.

Blogger dominates because it is easy to use. I recently sent my mother-in-law to the website to host her personal blog. And it isn’t just easy and it is also free. Users can be completely clueless about website design and still create a blog because everything is drag and drop. My mother-in-law is a perfect example of why Blogger is still going strong after ten years. At age ten it is still cool because it isn’t scary, costly, or difficult for the average Internet user.

The moral of this exercise story is this – you don’t have to be young and fresh to dominate the Internet. You just have to provide value and be marketable to the masses. Blogger and WordPress have both discovered just how to do just that!


Get a Good Ping List and Ping Me Baby!

Ping list? What is a ping list and why do I need it? Website traffic is the answer!

A ping list is a list of websites that will be notified automatically each time your website posts a new blog entry. It is simple, effortless, and a critical aspect to obtaining website visitors. You post a new entry or update an existing entry and these websites will automatically be notified of this activity.

Now that I’ve told you about pinging, you may ask how do I know who to “ping”. A complete list of ping URL’s is provided below. If you are using WordPress, all you have to do is input these URL’s into the box labeled “Update Services” in the “Writing” section of your “Settings”. Next you post a blog entry and WordPress will do the rest.

Happy pinging my fellow bloggers!

Ping List

  • http://1470.net/api/ping
  • http://api.feedster.com/ping
  • http://api.moreover.com/ping
  • http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
  • http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
  • http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
  • http://bblog.com/ping.php
  • http://bitacoras.net/ping
  • http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
  • http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
  • http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
  • http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
  • http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
  • http://coreblog.org/ping/
  • http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
  • http://ping.amagle.com/
  • http://ping.bitacoras.com
  • http://ping.blo.gs/
  • http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
  • http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
  • http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
  • http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
  • http://ping.feedburner.com
  • http://ping.myblog.jp
  • http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
  • http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
  • http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
  • http://ping.weblogs.se/
  • http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
  • http://pingqueue.com/rpc/
  • http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
  • http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
  • http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
  • http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
  • http://rpc.newsgator.com/
  • http://rpc.pingomatic.com
  • http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
  • http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
  • http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
  • http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
  • http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
  • http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
  • http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
  • http://www.bloglines.com/ping
  • http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
  • http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
  • http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
  • http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
  • http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
  • http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
  • http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
  • http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
  • http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
  • http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
  • http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
  • http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
  • http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
  • http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
  • http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
  • http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/