Archive for September, 2009

Why You Should Be Using Wordpress on Your Website

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

If you do not have a blog, then you should. With a blog you can encourage user interaction, start conversations, ask questions, post content, and much, much more. Also, search engines love blogs, and therefore blogs can rank more highly than similar websites. You have probably noticed that you come across many blogs during your searches, so you should know that I am not lying.

You may have noticed that I tend to love Wordpress blogs. In fact, what you are looking at right now is a Wordpress blog that I have put onto my website. You may have also noticed that I have created Wordpress themes that you can use for free.

Why do I like Wordpress so much? Well, here are a few of the reasons that I absolutely love Wordpress blogs and why I think everyone should be using them:

1. Anyone Can Use It

Anyone can add a Wordpress blog to their site either using Fantastico or through Wordpress.org. This means that anyone can add a Wordpress blog to their website, or make their website a Wordpress blog. It is also free, which means you can have a great blog set up on your website in no time!

2. It is Search Engine Friendly

Wordpress blogs are designed in a way that is friendly for search engines. This means that your blog will get indexed quickly and rank highly with little effort on your part. You can also get plugins that can enable you to really set up your posts and pages so that they easily rank in the search engines.

3. You Can Choose From Thousands of Themes

With Wordpress you can choose from thousands upon thousands of themes so your blog will look like whatever you want it to. You can even get themes that look like normal websites, but still have all the benefits of a Wordpress blog.

4. No HTML Required

If you have no knowledge of HTML, it doesn’t matter with Worpress. At times it can be helpful, but HTML is not needed to have a fully operable Wordpress blog.

5. Thousands of Plugins & Widgets

Probably one of the best parts of Wordpress is that you can use thousands of plugins and widgets so that you can automate many processes including SEO, and you can add many cool features such as polls, surveys, language translators, and basically anything you can think of to your blog!

These are just 5 of the reasons you should be using Wordpress blogs. If you are not already using one, you should seriously look into it right away. Wordpress is an amazing tool that if you aren’t using, you are missing out.

To Your Success,

Shawn Horwood

If you would like to take your internet/affiliate marketing to the next step, then I want to help you! Visit my blog for more Articles, Resources, Product Reviews, Search Engine Optimization Tips, Profitable Niches, and more: Make Money Online Blog

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WordPress SEO Tips

Wednesday, September 9th, 2009

Here are some steps you should take to optimize your WordPress blog for search engines:

1. Change the Permalink Structure: By default, the Permalink structure in WordPress is very dirty, with url’s being shown as ?p=123 etc. You can easily change this by going to the permalinks tab of the WordPress settings, and using a custom structure like /%postname%/

2. Optimize your Meta Tags: Write unique title tags for every page, and also write meta description tags for every page. You can use the All in One SEO Pack to make your life easier.

3. Use only excerpts of your post on the home page, category page and tag pages. This should help you to avoid facing duplicate content issues

4. Use the Xml Sitemaps plugin to generate a sitemap. The plugins default settings are fine. Simply upload and activate the plugin and you’re fine. But one other thing I do is to submit the sitemap to Google.

5. Use Proper Internal Linking Structure: It is very important to maintain a good linking structure within your blog. It helps keep visitors on your blog and helps in improving search engine rankings. Here are some steps you can take to improve your internal linking structure:

6. Optimize your Images: some of the ways you can do this in are – Use keywords in the alt attribute. – Include keywords in the image names – Enter a description in the title tag. – Use the Seo Friendly Images Plugin

7. Ping Sites after publishing new posts. Go to the Writing Tab and scroll down to the update services box. Add a list of sites you want to ping when you publish new posts in the box. Use the MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer Plugin

8. Make sure your code is valid. Use the W3C Validator to check the same.

9. Make sure that your blog title is an h1 on the home page and that your post titles are an h1 on the post pages.

10. Choose between www and non www version of your site and redirect one to the other. You can use the Redirection Plugin for this. Another plugin which you can use is the Enforce www. Preference. I redirect the non www to the www, but you can do whatever you want, it doesn’t really matter. Also, you might want to redirect the index.php version of your site to the homepage.

11. Lastly, use a related posts plugin, and use simple text based navigation. Also, optimize your anchor text when you link to other pages.

For A list of the best WordPress plugins, check out this post on Best WordPress Plugins. Another post you might like is this roundup of the Best Web Layouts

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Posted in Plugins | 1 Comment »