All Entries in the "Wordpress & WP Plugins" Category

Why Do I Need a Blog?

Why do I need a business blog and why should I hire someone to manage it for me?

By now, most business Website Owners have learned there are advantages to having a company blog. But why do I need a company blog? How will it really help me?

Most bloggers, even those who have been blogging for a long time, do not truly understand all of the ways a blog can benefit your business. They are good bloggers. They even may know a little about SEO and can put all the keywords and phrases into your blog. But do they really know about blog marketing and what the benefits are for their clients? Do they really know SEO or the technical aspects of operating a blog?

Do you know all of the benefits of having a business blog?

Let’s see;

Why does my Business need a Blog?

A business blog is the most cost-effective way to add fresh content to your website daily.

It is the most affordable way to build link popularity.

A business blog can make you money through Conversational Marketing.

A business blog will help drive more traffic to your website.

It gives you a place to offer special deals, make announcements, issue press releases, and get feedback from customers.

You can have a private blog that your employees or shareholders read.

There are way too many ways your company can benefit from a business blog to list on one page. As they say; “Think Outside The Box” and create new ways blogs can be used. All the uses for a blog have not even been invented yet. Be the first to try something new. Call us at 786-317-8774 and get a free business blog consultation. We’ll brainstorm with you!

Your business blog can be within your website or on it’s own domain name.

Your company blog can be used to help capture a specific search phrase or phrases in the search engines.

You can have a company blog in your website and one on its’ own domain name, each achieving a different purpose.

You can have multiple blogs all working for you at the same time. The options are endless.

It is not a one-size-fits-all deal. Our Blog Consultant will talk with you, analyze your business, and come up with a strategy that benefits your business. Click here to get a free business blog management quote.

Blog Management and Marketing

Blog Content

Your blog content will make a lot of difference to how well you do with both the search engines and with visitors. Whatever your goal is for your blog, to make your blog popular to read, to make sales, to drive traffic to your website, to get people to sign up for something like a newsletter or affiliate program, or something else, you will need good, original content.

Not only do you need good original content on your blog, you need it every single day.
Blog search websites like technorati.com and Google’s BlogSearch list blogs by the most recent posts that match the user’s keywords. If you are not posting daily, you can get buried beneath all of the other blogs that do one post or more every day. Our daily blogging service will make sure your blog is updated every day or more often if you choose that option.

Blog Posting is more than just writing. If you want your blog to be interesting to user and also rank well in the search engines, you need to know how to structure your blog posts properly.

Do you know the proper way to write your blog post titles?

Do you know how to use keywords in your blog post for the search engines without seeming spammy or obvious to your readers?

Do you know how to use good anchor text and a proper linking strategy?

Our bloggers are trained to write relevant, interesting blog posts that are also optimized for the search engines. Read more about our Daily Blog Posting Service.

Social Bookmarking and Social Networking

Social Bookmarking and Social Networking are extremely beneficial to your blog. It can help you with link popularity, attracting more visitors to your blog, more comments on your blog posts, and even help you rank better with the search engines. However, social bookmarking is time consuming.

Many people try to automate the process for that reason. Automated social bookmarking will not get you all of the benefits that social networking will get you if you take the time to do it yourself. Most business owners do not have the time it takes to participate on these social networks. That is why Blog Content Provider does it for you. Our basic social bookmarking package comes with our Daily Blogging Service, but we also offer social bookmarking as a standalone service. Read more about our Social Bookmarking Service.

Professional Full Service Blog Management

Let our staff completely manage your business blog for you. We will handle everything. We will choose a domain name for you where necessary, provide blog hosting, do the installation, create or choose a blog template, optimize your blog for the search engines, provide the daily content, and do the social bookmarking. You turn your business blog over to us and we do it all for you. Read more about our Complete Business Blog Management Service.

Blog SEO and Programming

Blog Installation

Wordpress claims you can install wordpress in just 7 minutes. Some cpanels have fantastico that will automatically create a database and install wordpress for you. But is that all there is to installing a wordpress blog? No. There are better ways to securely install a wordpress blog on your server.

Then you need to choose the right plugins to enhance the usability and improve the SEO of your blog. Every blog is different. Every blog has different goals and obstacles. So choosing the right plugins is more than just going to someone’s favorite list of plugins and using them all.

Some blog service companies brag that they install wordpress with more than 80 plugins! Wow! 80! How many of those plugins do you really need? Usually just a few. We securely install your wordpress blog and choose plugins for you that fit your specific needs. Read more about Blog Installation.

Blog Setup and Configuration

A lot of people will tell you that choosing the settings in the admin area of your wordpress blog is self-explanatory. To who? There are a lot of choices to make in the admin area.

An experienced Blog Manager knows which settings are best to use from experience. For instance;

Do you know the best sites to put into your ping list?

Do you know the proper way to create categories?

Post Slugs?

Is time-stamping a good idea?

Do you know how to configure all of the plugins or get an API Key?

Our Blog installation specialists will set everything up for you. Read more about Blog Configuration.

Blog Theme Installation and Editing

Here again, it sounds easy. You choose a theme, upload it to your themes directory, and voila! You’re done right? No. Choosing a theme isn’t as easy as it sounds. There are tons of free themes on the web. You could buy one from a designer. You can have one custom made for you.

Do you know a good theme from a bad one? I mean besides how pretty it is. Did you know that sometimes free themes have hidden malicious code in them, put there by the programmer/designer?

Are you able to determine good code from bad code? Is the code in the theme written in a way that will hurt your chances in the search engines?

Do you know how to edit the php in the header.php file, sidebar.php, or footer.php to add the enhancements that will make your blog both more attractive and more productive?

Choosing the right theme for your blog is more than just finding one that looks nice. You do not need to have a custom blog theme built. You can use a free blog theme. But you need to know how to choose the right one. Our Blog Installation Service includes choosing and installing the right theme for you. If you want a custom theme, you can read more about Custom Blog Themes here.

Blog SEO

You need to optimize your blog for the search engines. That means editing the code of your blog theme, setting up proper permalink structure, creating the right categories, and even choosing the right plugins, among other things. Our Blog SEO specialists go over your blog theme line by line to get rid of unwanted or unnecessary code.

We fix the blog title structure. We install and configure your blog plugins. We create a proper permalink structure. We edit your blog template to install feedburner, email scripts, affiliate buttons, or whatever else you need. Our clients are very happy with the search engine rankings their blogs are getting. Let us show you how we can improve your results. Read more about Blog SEO.

If you are not sure what you need, call us at 786-317-8774 for a free business blog management or SEO consultation.

Twitter Counter Plugin For WordPress

Do you have a Twitter Counter Plugin for WordPress? This is actually a pretty useful plugin. It displays the number of Twitter followers you have in a little icon that looks a lot like the Feedburner Counter icon. Each time you increase the number of followers you have your counter goes up in number and displays how many current Twitter followers you have. Of course, you have to be a Twitter user.

Among the features included in this plugin are:

* Display TwitterCounter badges
* Display Twitter Remote
* Sidebar widgets included for ease of use
* Complete customization from within the comfort of WordPress Admin
* Deactivating plugin will not kill your theme
* Clean uninstall if you choose to delete the plugin

That’s one plugin I don’t mind recomming. Get the Twitter Counter plugin for WordPress.

WordPress Tip: What To Do When Permalinks Don’t Work

Here’s a good article on WordPress permalinks. Can’t really argue with it.

When WordPress Permalinks Don’t Work

By Royce Tivel

You have just completed the installation and configuration of your new WordPress blog–by the book. You proudly log into the dashboard and select a customized permalink (I use /%postname%/) and then hit the “Save Changes” button to save your configuration. Your blog now–goes crazy. When you try to access your blog, your browser returns nasty error pages instead of your blog’s content.

You recheck everything again, but can’t find any problem with your installation procedure. Using your FTP program or the WebShell utility at your web-host’s control panel, you verify that all of the necessary WordPress files and folders are in place and that the permissions are set correctly. In desperation, and using the control panel’s phpMyAdmin interface, you also verify that the MySQL database has been installed correctly and that the installer has configured the database tables. What could be wrong?

Before deleting your WordPress files and folders and zeroing out the database prior to trying a new installation, you grab a cup of your favorite beverage and relax a minute. You think about your installation. You remember that your new blog worked perfectly before you elected to change the permalink structure. Maybe it’s time to look at the server’s error log for the blog’s domain to see if it points to the root problem.

In the server’s error log, accessed from the web-host’s control panel, you notice the following error entry:

[Sun Mar 29 13:30:38 2009] [error] [client ...] Options FollowSymLinks or SymLinksIfOwnerMatch is off which implies that RewriteRule directive is forbidden ….

Bingo! Now you remember seeing something when you used your control panel to set up your blog’s domain. You log into your control panel and select the “Web options” icon. Right at the top of the options page you see that the “Symbolic Links” option is disabled. You enable and apply this option–and now the health of your blog is restored.

Well, almost restored. One nagging error continues to be recorded in the error log:

[Sun Mar 29 22:07:14 2009] [error] [client ...] File does not exist: …/favicon.ico

When a browser accesses a web site, it always looks for a favicon.ico. WordPress does not install a favicon.ico by default. You need to either create your own or upload something suitable. Once the favicon.ico is uploaded into the blog’s root directory, this log error will disappear, too.

P.S. The Error log is your friend. Be sure to look at it from time to time.

For more articles, tips, and tutorials of interest to WordPress users, please visit these web sites:
http://www.blog.selectdigitals.com
http://www.selectdigitals.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Royce_Tivel

Need WordPress installed on your new blog. Get your WordPress installed and SEOd by the WordPress Blog experts.

WordPress Blog Optimization

We talk a lot about blog post optimization, but what you very seldom see, here or elsewhere, are tips on how to optimize your actual blog software. WordPress is an open source blogging platform, the most popular on the market. You should begin your blog optimization efforts by ensuring that the settings in WordPress are set to maximize your search engine optimization. Here are a few tips to help you do that:

• Start with your theme. Your first step in blog optimization in choosing a suitable theme. WordPress has thousands of free themes available for download, but not all of them are good themes. You are better off sticking with themes that are proven. Don’t use a theme that is from a first-time developer. They tend to have the most problems. Also, make sure your theme has developer contact information just in case you need it. And don’t choose a theme that has a lot of extemporaneous code. Otherwise, most of your themes should be good. But if you choose a theme and after about three or four weeks you don’t see any blog posts getting indexed at the search engines and you know you have good inbound links then test another theme to see if you get better results.
• Move to settings. After picking a theme, click on Settings on the back up administration area of WordPress. Make sure Blog Title and Tagline have eye-catching attention-getting content and that you use your primary keyword in both fields.
• Add a ping list. Under Settings again, click on Writing. Scroll down to the bottom and in the Update Services box add as many ping services as you can. Don’t just pick the top ones, but do include Pingomatic, Technorati, Coreblog, Blogstreet, Google Blogsearch, and Blogflux at a minimum. There are other ping services, particularly some foreign ping services, that I’d recommend as well. The reason you want to include foreign language ping services is because some of them will get you indexed through the back door of the search engines more quickly than places like Pingomatic and Technorati. One mistake that many new bloggers make is to stick to Technorati or Pingomatic and that’s it, but by limiting yourself to the larger ping lists you are cutting yourself short.
• Use Summary for feeds. Under the Reading tab below Settings, select Summary for your feeds rather than full post. This will force your RSS subscribers to visit your blog in order to read your entire post. Most subscribers will not have a problem doing this if they want to read your blog and getting your readers to your blog will register more traffic with your analytics software, which is measured by the search engines for quality and user experience, factors that may influence your future rankings. This is particularly true if your blog has a low bounce rate.
• Permalinks. Click Permalinks under Settings. This is very important. The structure of your blog post URLs, called permalinks, is very important for SEO purposes. You want your primary keyword to appear in your permalink. To make sure that happens, ensure that you write each blog post title to include your keyword, but also set your WordPress setting to Custom, Day and name, or Month and name. I prefer Custom because it allows me to move the date to the very end of the Permalink and put my keyword closer to the beginning.

There are other ways that you can optimize WordPress for better search engine results. Some plugins can be of great assistance here. But you can also tweak some of the code in your templates to ensure better results. That is more advanced than what this blog post needs. For now, as a bare minimum, use these strategies to optimize your WordPress blog before you start writing.

7 Twitter Tools For Bloggers

If you aren’t on Twitter yet then you are way behind. Twitter is one of the best tools for bloggers. You can drive so much traffic to your blog from Twitter and many of your followers are targeted traffic and will be repeat visitors. You can actually start relationships with people like you on Twitter and end up doing business with them.

Mashable recently posted about 100 tools for Twitterers and on their list are 6 tools specifically for bloggers. Here is Mashable’s list:

95. Add to Any: Get your posts shared on Twitter by using Add to Any on your WordPress blog.
96. TwitThis: Make use of this plugin to send Twitter messages about your blog post.
97. MyTwitter: Use the MyTwitter plugin to display your Twitter status on WordPress.
98. Twitpress: Twitpress will send out a Tweet every time you post a new blog entry.
99. TwitterCounter: With this plugin, you can display the number of followers you have on Twitter.
100. TwitterFeed: Announce your blog post on Twitter with a customized message using TwitterFeed.

I would add one more Twitter tool to this list. It’s called Twitter Tools, a WordPress plugin that allows you to tweet your blog posts and turn your blog posts into tweets. At the end of each day Twitter Tools will compile a mashup of your tweets and post them as one post on your blog. It’s a cool tool and I highly recommend it.

Twitterdoodle: Add Keyword Content To Your Blog Automatically

I don’t often recommend automatic content creation tools, but TwitterDoodle is one that I’d recommend, but not for every blog.

The idea behind Twitterdoodle is to stream keyword-based Twitter messages into your blog as posts. This adds keyword-based content to your blog, increases traffic, and boosts your search engine rankings. It does this almost like magic once you set it on automatic.

Let’s say you write a blog about dental services. You can set Twitterdoodle to search Twitter for keywords related to your dental blog. You can choose keywords like “dental services” or more specific kewyords such as “veneers” and “braces” and have those Twitter messages run through your blog, putting several messages into one blog post. You’ll begin to see yourself getting more traffic to your blog and higher search engine rankings for those keywords that you target.

Twitterdoodle also allows you to input certain Twitter usernames to opt out of the Twitterstream. So if you get complaints then you can take those Twitterers out of your content stream.

Is this a fair use of content? Some people, to be honest with you, don’t like it. They’ll call you a scraper. But if you aren’t selling advertising on those pages where the Twitterstream appears or you aren’t using other people’s content in other ways that give you profits at their expense then I see nothing wrong with it. The problem with streaming other people’s content is when you use it to their detriment or your unfair gain. Since anyone can gain access to Twitterdoodle and use it in the same manner to rank for important keywords, there is no unfair advantage.

Twitterdoodle is a WordPress plugin. If you are an existing client of Blog Content Provider, we’ll be happy to install Twitterdoodle and set it up for your for $30. Call Chris or Allen.

Time To Upgrade Your WordPress

If you’ve been a customer of Blog Content Provider for some time then there is a chance that you are still on WordPress 2.6.1, but the latest version of WordPress is 2.7.1. In fact, developers are currently working on 2.8.

We don’t recommend upgrading with every new release, but we do recommend upgrading about once a year (at the least). The reason you want to upgrade your WordPress to the latest version from time to time is because older versions frequently pose a security risk. If you are running an older version of any software then you are making yourself vulnerable to hackers and other malicious online creatures. We’d hate to see anything bad happen to you.

If you need to upgrade WordPress, let us know. We’ll be glad to help. If you’d prefer to do it yourself, that’s OK too, but you need to get it done.

5 WordPress Plugins Every Blogger Should Know

It’s difficult if not impossible to run a WordPress blog without at least one plugin. I recommend the following plugins as plugins that can benefit every blogger, but the only one that is absolutely essential is the first one on the list. All others are helpful and I’d strongly urge you to consider them:

• Akismet - Akismet is WordPress’s default spam catcher. It will catch about 90% of your spam. If you set your WordPress settings to require a moderator approval before a comment goes live then that should get all the rest. Don’t run any kind of blog without a spam catcher.
• All In One SEO Pack – Your SEO will be tremendously improved with this plugin. Each post will have its very own title and description.
• AddThis Social Bookmarking Widget – You can also use other social widgets that do the same. I like AddThis. It makes it easy for your readers to bookmark your posts.
• SRG Clean Archives – If your WP archives doesn’t work, this plugin will save the day.
• Feedburner Feedsmith - Run all of your RSS feeds through Feedburner for easier tracking and better stats. Good plugin to have, especially if you want to include links in your feed footer.

There are many more plugins that can be useful for WordPress, but I’d say these are the five most basic plugins for any WordPress user. Akismet is a necessity, the others are a strong recommendation.

3 Social Services That Are A Must For Your Blog

If you blog for your business then I’d recommend the following three social media services at a very minimum:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• StumbleUpon

With Facebook, you can have your blog posts automatically filtered through your Facebook profile so that your fans can read each post from Facebook. Your fans that are avid Facebook users are more likely to visit your blog through Facebook than any other service, even an RSS feed. Using Facebook in conjunction with Twitter is a very valuable combination. Install Twitter Tools plugin into WordPress so that your blog posts automatically post to Twitter. And you can create your Facebook settings to sync with Twitter so that every time either your Facebook status or Twitter status changes then they are both updated. So that blog post you just made that suddenly updates your Twitter status also updates your Facebook status. Powerful! Instant promotion to all of your fans on both services.

StumbleUpon should be used for its traffic possibilities. There is no automation for SU, but you can submit your content to StumbleUpon and share it with a handful of friends. If it is content worth reading then they will vote on it and share it with their friends. For many bloggers, StumbleUpon is the highest or second highest source of traffic.

Get bookmarked.

The Weakness Of Twitter Tools

We’ve talked about Twitter on this blog a couple of times in the last couple of weeks.

Friday we talked about a WordPress plugin called Twitter Tools. We recommend it despite some prejudice against automation where Twitter is concerned. But I do agree with Michael Martine’s analysis for the most part.

I like Twitter Tools because you can still develop relationships like Michael is talking about and still use Twitter Tools to automate your blog post Twitters. Since you will likely tweet your blog posts anyway, why not use a tool that does that for you? As long as you do not do it excessively then you aren’t really spamming, and as long as you are using Twitter the way it is meant to be used beyond your automated Twitter post, then I’d say Twitter Tools is a good thing.

But it does have one weakness (which is actually a strength). You can only automate three blogs under one account. Yes, there is a limit – and I’m not sure if it’s a Twitter Tools limit or a Twitter limit, but there is a three blog limit. Don’t try to automate all 50 blogs that you own. It won’t work.

So I recommend using Twitter the way you would normally use it, but add Twitter Tools to your WordPress plugin list and automate your blog posts. That way, you don’t forget to tweet them and they are Twittered every day. Plus, since you are interacting with others and being social in addition to the automation, and you aren’t automatically adding friends because you are doing it manually, it shouldn’t be an annoyance to other Twitterers. Uh, I mean Twits.