Automated Wordpress

If you operate a WordPress site for business reasons you should be careful choosing your method for adding Meta Tags, because eventually, if your Meta Tags are not portable, you are going to invest time and/or money moving them.

Problem
The latest WordPress documentation says:

To add meta tags to your site, simply add them to the header.php template file in your WordPress Theme, specifically in the head section near the link for the style sheet.

That works fine until you change your blog to a new theme. The meta tags do not follow you to the next theme. So you will need to re-edit the header.php file. Worse, if you forget to edit the file, it may not be obvious at first. Your search engine rankings may go down if the Google, Yahoo, or Bing search engines cannot verify your site – an activity they do from time to time. But it could you a long time to trace this back to the missing meta tags, and meanwhile your site is losing Web traffic, which means you are losing money.

Not good.

Solution
Use a WordPress Meta Tag Plugin.

The best way to find a WordPress Meta Tag Plugin is to search for it in the WordPress Administrative Console under menu item Plugins and sub-menu item Add New. I am using Meta Tag Manager WordPress Plugin from netweblogic. Just download it, install it, and activate it according to the instructions. It shows up as a menu item under “Settings” in the Admin Dashboard. Click on menu item Settings and sub-menu item Meta Tag Manager and it pops right up.

Add new tags and save the changes.

You are done.

Double Check Your Work
Finally, make sure the tags are really showing up. Navigate to your blog, and use the browser “view page source” capability to view the source of the page. Make sure the meta tags are included.

By: Samuel Mela

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For those not familiar with WordPress, it is a free Content Management System that has grown to be the most popular choice when it comes to creating a blog. While still being used as the number one blogging platform, many marketers and webmasters have moved all their websites and mini-sites to WordPress.

WordPress is considered to be the best platform to write and publish any content very easily from any computer connected to the internet. With a few tweaks to the standard layout (theme) of a blog, it is possible to easily create mini-sites and sales letters using the CMS we all learned to love. By changing the layout and theme to a more minimalistic look and removing columns you can make WordPress appear like any HTML coded sales letter or mini-site commonly found among Internet Marketing.

How well does WordPress mini-sites perform, is the plain “old-school” HTML better?

The benefits for webmasters are endless, WordPress is super fast, easy to use and comes with thousands of downloadable plug-ins and features. As far as SEO is concerned, WordPress is brilliant and webmasters believe it is favored by Google more, and often WordPress sites gets indexed quicker, but in my opinion it is always about the quality content the website contains. From your visitor’s point of view, a WordPress mini-site would mean a better overall experience and fresher look. WordPress has excellent web 2.0 features and very popular membership plug-ins, making it a perfect CMS for mini-sites with “members only” areas.

Using WordPress for mini-sites or sales letters gives you complete control and freedom. And really takes no effort to maintain or even setup your website. If you have not yet used WordPress before it is no problem, WordPress will have you running your own blog or mini-site empire in no time and no experience is required.

By: Ruan Otto

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Here is the big debate in the blogosphere: which is better, WordPress or Blogger? If you have made up your mind to start blogging but is still quite undecided which of the two most prominent free blog hosting service would be best for your business, then here are some ideas that can help you in your decision making.

Most people use WordPress, but again the choice would depend on you. Thousands of newbie bloggers, however, choose Blogger simply because it is free and offers more customization preferences if compared to WordPress’ free version.

WordPress.com offers themes that can be used for a specific blogging purpose, though you cannot do anything to make it more personalized. You also cannot use a theme offered by other websites because WordPress does not allow uploading of themes other than their own free themes and even plugins. In this context, Blogger has captured the hearts of a first-time bloggers since they can easily upload themes or widgets that they find online and design their own if they have web design and coding skills. In addition, even with all these customization activities, the service remains free.

If you are only into “hobby blogging”, which is posting your thoughts and personal views on just about anything under the sun and keep in touch with friends and colleagues, Blogger would be a better option over WordPress. Creating a blog in Blogger is uncomplicated and does not need a lot of effort in setting up. All you have to open a Google account choose your site title and it’s URL, then you already have a blog. After this, you can begin sharing your thoughts already, with hardly anything on your blog, except your posts.

If you were into serious blogging, however, WordPress would be much more advisable. By opting to upgrade and paying a certain amount, you can get total control on various customization of your blog site. You can personalize it according to your specific purposes for the blog – home business promotion, network marketing, etc. Upgrading your account on WordPress would enable you to place free themes and plugins that are available on the Internet.

If you cannot seem to decide still, then it really does not matter. Whatever blog platform you use, what matters most is getting your blog contents properly indexed by the major search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Alexa, achieving a better rank on these search engines and attracting a constant stream of traffic to your site.

If you are into serious blogging, then you are likely looking to your blog as a means to make money, more or less. Making sure that your blog has a steady stream of traffic will also ensure that the online income you would like to earn is possible.

Quite a notable number of people who use free blogs hosted by Blogger have attested to earning hundreds, even thousands of dollars each year. The secret may not lie on the type of blog platform they used but by how they helped people find a solution to a problem. Remember this: the blog software is not the key to earn money from your blogs – your content is actually the main ingredient to help you get the big bucks.

Whatever, blog platform or free blog hosting service you use, do not neglect it and put your energies on creating, relevant and good content that would drive traffic to your blog and make it rank for specific keywords that your target market is searching for.

By: Diane Mumm

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Yes, I know. Almost every site that talks about WordPress will have a list of their Top 10, Top 20 or Top whatever plugins that they recommend. If you ask me, what I need on my site is not what you need on your site and vice versa. I see this question pops up a lot. It goes something like, “Just installed WordPress. Any plugins to recommend?”. In this article, I will tackle that question with my recommendation of basic plugins that most sites need.

The Basic Plugins

Akismet

You want people to comment on your blog posts but you wouldn’t want any spam to get there. Akismet comes as standard with WordPress and the only thing you need is a WordPress.com account to get an API to work with this plugin.

Google XML Sitemaps

Help Google and other search engines index your site better. This plugin automatically generates a sitemap used by Google and other search engines for their robots to index your site.

All in One SEO Pack

By default, WordPress is not very SEO-friendly and this can also be said of certain themes that you might use. All in One SEO Pack can help you fix those problems and very little response will be needed by you to make your site SEO-friendly.

Contact Form 7

Give your site visitor a way to contact you via email. Contact Form 7 strength lies in its simplicity. Create a form in the plugin settings, a shortcode away and you will have a simple contact form on your site.

Google Analyticator

To know how well your site is doing and where your visitors are coming from, some kind of statistic is needed. This is where Google Analyticator comes in. Open a free account with Google Analytics, change the plugin settings and you are ready to collect statistics.

Add to Any: Share/Bookmark/Email Button

The easiest way to market your blog is to get your site visitors do it for you. Having a button that lists many ways for your visitor to share, bookmark or email your blog post will make it easier for them.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Make your visitors browse your site longer. Show them a list of related posts to the one that they are reading. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin will automatically create a list of related posts for the current post.

Why These Plugins?

My recommendations are based on using simple plugins to extend the capabilities of WordPress. In my opinion these plugins should come as standard with the WordPress core files. These plugins also works out-of-the-box with the only changes that you need to make are the plugin settings. Nothing such as having to make changes to your WordPress core files or themes.

By: Rezdwan Hamid

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