Wordpress - An introduction

There are a variety of plugins out for Wordpress, and as time goes on the Wordpress community only seems to get bigger and better. Everyday, there are more and more users submitting plugins which are nearly all 100% available for free to the general public.

If you are not already using Wordpress, then what are you waiting for? Getting started is easy, free and fun! If you already have your own hosting then you can go ahead and download the platform directly onto your computer and then follow the simple instructions of installing the software on your server. Don’t worry, if you don’t have any hosting, you can host a Wordpress blog for free. That’s just a classic example of how great the Wordpress community is!

Those of us already using Wordpress are more than likely aware of these plugins and probably have a few installed already. (Note: Wordpress comes pre-packed with two plugins). Through-out this article, you will find some useful tips, tricks and plugins that will improve your blog across a variety of areas including SEO, reader experience, admin interface, commenting systems and such.

Handy Tips & Tricks

A few of these tips are really basic and simple but I am sure some of these will benefit even the more experienced Wordpress users.

1. Permalinks: A nice feature of Wordpress is that is does cover a few of the essentials. Setting up some nice, easy to remember permalinks is a walk in the park via the Wordpress administration backend. Simply login to your Wordpress backend and navigate to “Settings” > “Permalinks”. Most people prefer the “day and name” or “month and name” settings as they display the post title, however, you can also use your own custom setup. Some people also prefer to have .html added onto the end of the URL’s. This can be done by selecting the “Custom Structure” option, entering your structure and adding .html on to the end. For example, if you had: %postname%, simply change this to %postname%.html
2. Change your tag line: Most of you will be reading this and thinking to yourself that this is pretty obvious, but I can’t believe how many blogs I have seen with the standard “Just another Wordpress weblog” as their site tag line or slogan. Change from the standard setting via “Settings” > “General Settings”. Enter a nice catch phrase or some descriptive sentence, maybe even throw in a few popular keywords to improve your SEO, but please make it something unique and change from the default.
3. Verify your settings: Again, this is fairly basic, but please make sure you go through your settings and look at each page to verify the status of each option. If you don’t want users to register, then disable the feature. If you don’t want to allow comments for whatever reason, disable it. In “Settings” > “Discussion” you can also change some of the settings for the popular feature, Gravatars. I use them on this blog and I find that they add a little bit of interactivity with your commentators and your blog.
4. Writing: I have included a separate list below. These are just a few simple tricks that you can use to maximize your blog potential and fine tune your writing skills.
   • Stick to one general category. When you write and publish a post, try to make it only under one category. This way it is only in one spot and you will get less penalized by search engines for duplicate content
   • Make your content scannable. What does this mean? When you read something, typically, you don’t read every single word. Our eyes like to skip certain words and we really like nice laid out content. Using lists, pictures and diagrams are great ways to help make your content interesting and scannable.
   • Write grammatical content. Don’t write like you’re on MySpace commenting on your best friends profile. Avoid words such as u, ur, m8 etc. Also make sure your sentences make sense and have full stops, capital letters etc.
   • Proof-read your content. I can’t stress this enough. Sometimes after I make a post and I don’t proof-read it, I look on my blog and start reading it again and notice some stupid mistakes and typos that I have made. There will more than likely be a few in here. So proof-reading helps to avoid typos and mistakes.
   • If you are trying to achieve a relatively high SEO ranking, then make sure your keyword density is right. Don’t try and specifically write your keywords in every second word and mention your keywords millions of times. And on the opposite, make sure your density is not too low. Having a low density of keywords will basically make your keywords ineffective.
   • One final point that I wanted to get into is pages. I can’t remember where I read this, but someone once told me a nice little trick. If you are receiving a huge amount of views on a single post and it is a huge hit, why not make it into a page? Usually, pages will be available at the top of your blog and they typically stand out. The link to the page will appear on every post and when you make new posts, your page won’t get buried as opposed to some of your good posts.
5. RSS & subscriptions: Having a huge database of RSS subscribers and email subscribers is a nice benefit. Not only does it make you happy to see how many successful readers you have convinced, but it is also a good sign of how many of your visitors are frequently visiting your site and not just landing on it once and running away. That said, it is quite hard to get these subscribers. Make your links to these features prominent. Little of your subscribers will actually get the idea of subscribing and looking around for the link, it’s actually the opposite. Many people will only realize what a good idea subscribing will be once they see the link poke them in the eye. Personally, I have tried to subscribe to many site’s RSS feeds and I have had to literally hunt around and spend a good 5 to 10 minutes trying to find the links. Some blogs don’t even have any links for these features! This all leads onto my next point…
6. Write and publicize for your readers: When I say this, I mean it. Don’t try and stuff your posts full of keywords, or don’t try and make your site completely SEO compatible at whatever cost it is to your visitors. Make sure your blog is readable and simple. Don’t have a huge header. Make your content start as soon as possible instead of making your visitors scroll down a couple of pages so they can start reading. Basically this point is just to reiterate on the purpose of a blog. It isn’t too make a cool looking site. It isn’t to get a good SEO rank (although that’s a nice bonus). It is all about readers and building a community. So respect your readers and write for them and what they want to know about. Stick a poll on your site (like I have) asking some in-depth questions, and from your results, write posts based on the answers that people submit.
7. Be patient and stay in there: This really only applies to the newer blogs and bloggers. If you have just started your blog and were hoping to get thousands of visitors per day but are only receiving a few per day, do not worry. Don’t give up and don’t stop trying. Stay in there, produce some fresh content as many times as you can. Search engines love fresh content and it is in particular important for blogs that have just started out. Later on, once you have built up a nice fanbase, then you may start slowing it down to only a few posts per week. But at the beginning it is very important to write as much as possible.
8. Backlinking and link exchaning: My final point for the tips and tricks section is that you should get into exchanging links and getting some backlinks placed to your site. Even if these links don’t drive direct visitors to your blog, they will definitely help your rank. Search engines are a big fan of backlinks and link exchanges. But be careful, make sure you get backlinks that are related to your site and topic. You don’t want for example a recipe site that has nice cooking tips to link to another blog that is related to cars. It just won’t work, and if anything, the search engines will see this as a bit of link spamming which is definitely not good. Get some links from sites that are related to your site. For example, a site about cars could link to another site that sells car tires for example. This would work and add to your link database.

Useful Plugins

Below is a compilation of some of the plugins that I have installed and some that I don’t but thought were worth mentioning. Using plugins all comes down to user preference and choice. One thing to remember is that if you don’t need a feature on your blog, don’t add it. For example, if you have a blog that is about pets and you wanted to add a plugin that displays a slideshow of some cool wallpapers to your sidebar don’t do it. You may be thinking that it sounds pretty cool and the plugin itself probably is a cool one. But what you are doing is creating clutter. You want your site to look as clean and simple as possible. One thing that I like to think of is that my readers are all a bit stupid. I know this sounds like a weird idea, but I like to think of this as it drives me to make my site as simple as possible. By the way, I don’t really think this, and I love you all! So let’s get onto the list:

• Askimet: Arguably the best plugin for fighting spam comments. It comes pre-installed with Wordpress and all you have to do is activate it. I recommend it to be used by everyone whatever your blog is about. It helps me out a lot, and once you get big, trust me, you will be getting a HUGE amount of spam. You don’t want to be caught out for a tonne of spam links that appear on your comments and all link to mysterious sites (mostly porn/virus sites). Once spammers see that there comments are getting through they will post even more spam. So be smart, and fight those spammers!
  Askimet at Wordpress
• All In One SEO Pack: Without a doubt, this was the first plugin I installed. It’s pretty much the best plugin for its area. It has a nice simple interface and easy-to-use features that don’t confuse you. Basically the plugin allows you to add title, description and keyword meta tags to each post and page and really adds those finishing touches to your SEO rank. For example if you had a post about dogs but your general blog was about cats, then anyone searching for cats would get to your site, but all “dog” searchers wouldn’t. That’s where this handy plugin comes along and really allows you to get driven visitors to each post instead of your blog in general.
  All In One SEO Pack at Wordpress
• Better Comments Manager: This plugin will only be needed when your site gets bigger and you get a lot of visits and comments on your posts. Until then its effects won’t be fully tested, but it’s always better to be protected earlier on than to get caught out later. Basically this plugin gives a new section where you can see all your comments under pages and allows you to easily modify them and displays info about each comment nicely. It even gives you some nice AJAX editing capabilities so you don’t even have to reload the page for most of the edits!
  Better Comments Manager at Wordpress
• Commentluv: I like this one again, as it also adds a bit of interactivity with your commentators. Basically this plugin attempts to ping the latest post from your commentators blog, if they enter a link that is, and displays is nicely. This is a good way to show your appreciation to your commentators and give a link back to them. Most of the time your readers and commentators will have a blog that is generally related to yours, so displaying a link back to them can sometimes be helpful as you will both be under the same category.
  Commentluv at Wordpress
• Google XML Sitemaps: Where would I be without this one? Creating sitemaps by hand can be a bit of a daunting task, especially if you add content regularly. Not only that, once you have your sitemap built, alerting each of the major search engines about the sitemap update or addition can also be a bit of a handful. Thankfully, this plugin does all of the work for you. Whenever you edit a post or publish a new one, a link is added to the sitemap and then not only that, the plugin then proceeds to notify the search engines that they should re-download the sitemap because of the new additions. Simply marvelous!
  Google XML Sitemaps at Wordpress
• Exec-PHP: This ones for all those programmers out there. Ever needed to run a query of PHP or do a small easy task in PHP inside your posts or pages? This little plugin is great as it is a nice lightweight plugin that will simply render all PHP code inside a post between the normal PHP tags. I love this plugin because it is such a simple idea, yet this plugin is so helpful.
  Exec-PHP at Wordpress
• FeedBurner FeedSmith: Usually, there is no way to manage your subsribers and it is quite hard to keep track of them. But there are some sites which offer programs and utilities to help manage your subsribers. FeedBurner is one of these sites and is probably the biggest. It offers complex and simple statistics about your subscribers and really gives you the fighting edge over your competitors. This plugin simply allows you to connect your blog RSS to your FeedBurner registration. Note: You will already need to have registered at Feedburner and setup your account etc. for this plugin to work.
  FeedBurner FeedSmith Download
• Robots Meta: While this plugin is pretty handy and helps out a lot, I am bit confused as to why it is quite unpopular and not many people know about it. When search engines index your site they typically scan you site and get EVERY page. Now, if you are running a Wordpress installation, this means it will index category pages, post pages, archive pages, tag pages, author pages, login/register pages and even the admin pages. This of course resolves in duplicate content usually produced a huge amount of times. This plugin fixes that all up for you by adding some nice coding to the head section of each of the specified pages to not get indexed by the search engines.
  Robots Meta at Wordpress
• SEO Friendly Images: Whilst, I typically do not post many images inside my posts, many people do. One common issue is however, that you always forget to add the title and alt attributes to your images. Not only is this bad for your SEO (This is because search engines cannot read images and instead rely on the alt tag for a descriptions) but it also renders your page non-compliant to the W3C XHTML standards. This plugin will easily add the title and alt tags to all images that do not have any tag added to them. It uses the post title and other titles to generate descriptions for the images. However, you can simply override these settings by adding your own alt and title tags to your images and the settings for this plugin will not be shown.
  SEO Friendly Images at Wordpress
• SyntaxHighlighter: This is a plugin that I only recently became aware of. If you have a blog that has code examples of some coding languages such as CSS, PHP, HTML, Javascript etc. then you will usually include your code between code tags. This plugin comes in handy as it renders all coding nicely for you and really helps display your examples. Below is a small example of what I mean:

  
  <html>
  <head>
  <title>Code It Red</title>
  </head>
  <body>
  Code It Red
  <h1>Welcome!</h1>
  </body>
  </html>
  

  SyntaxHighlighter at Wordpress

• Wordpress Database Backup: One thing that many bloggers constantly forget is to backup their data. What would happen if you blog suddenly disappeared? Would you have a recent backup that has all your data so you can easily get it all back? If not, then you should definitely get this plugin as it has the ability to send emails or provide downloads all containing a backup of your blog.
  Wordpress Database Backup at Wordpress
• WP Super Cache: If you are getting a lot of visitors and your server that you are hosted on isn’t really top notch, a nice little way that you can still speed up the loading and lessen the load on your server is to enable this plugin. In short, it adds a caching system to your blog which pretty much “takes a snap shot” of your posts and simply loads that up really quickly for your viewers rather than querying the database every time.
  WP Super Cache at Wordpress

The end - Or is it?

Well that just about sums up my post. Hopefully after reading this all you have learned some tips and tricks as well as learn about some knew plugins that all can really help you make the most out of your blog. Of course there are many plugins out there that didn’t get a mention and the list only shows a few of my favorites. I am using more plugins that what is actually on the list, but these are the main ones that I think should be shared. Everyone’s blog will be different, and thus, everyone will always have different plugins installed. Furthermore, some people may find other plugins of similar nature, better than others. For example, I like All In One SEO Pack, but HeadSpace2 is a plugin of similar functionality and it really comes down to personal choice.

If you have a tip, trick or plugin that should be added to these lists, I would love to hear them in the comments. Credit will of course be given. Looking forward to seeing all your views and opinions!

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