Choosing the Right WordPress Plugins

It can be difficult to decide just which WordPress plugins you should install. We’re spoiled for choice and that’s for sure. If you’re just starting up with your WordPress blog I suggest you don’t go installing plugins right and left, since you can slow your site and there’s no sense installing plugins you really don’t need.

However, there are five that I would recommend for everyone:

1. WP Super-Cache
2. Feedburner FeedSmith Plugin for WordPress
3. G-Lock Double Opt-in Widget
4. WP Cumulus Flash Tag Cloud
5. Enhanced WordPress Contact Form

WP Super-cache for Speed

WP Super-cache plugin is essential because it speeds the load time of your site. It actually lightens the load on your server. If your site gets heavy traffic, and if you’re hoping for an appearance on Digg’s front page, or to go viral on Twitter, then you need this if you want to try and avert a server crash from the traffic spike.

Feedburner FeedSmith Plugin for WordPress

Failing to provide a convenient way for visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed is a serious mistake. Feedburner has its advantages and disadvantages but it does allow subscribers to choose how they will receive your feed. You will obviously need to create an account with FeedBurner for this too.

G-Lock Double-Optin Widget

The G-Lock signup form allows you to collect your readers’ emails so that you can use them in the future: the first rule of internet marketing is get connected with your visitors so you can forge a relationship.

WP Cumulus Flash Tag Cloud

You might wonder, when i’ve just finished telling you how you shouldn’t be gung-ho with the plugins, why I’m telling you to install a flash tag cloud. But WP Cumulus isn’t just any old flash tag cloud. I find it one of the most useful widgets of all for the sidebar. First, it reassures visitors that they are in the right place by displaying all your keywords–both the main ones and the long-tail, and it makes it easy for them to find what they’re looking for with a click.

But I have found another use for it. You know how when you’re writing a post it’s difficult to make sure you’re including links to all your relevant past blog posts? Well this tag cloud makes that so easy. You simply click on related keywords and you get a list of all the blog posts that use the keyword. Now tell me that’s not useful to you!

Enhanced WordPress Contact Form

It is vital that visitors to your site have a safe, reliable way to contact you. Nothing drives away business more effectively than failing to give your readers a way to connect. Joost de Valk’s contact form allows you to control its appearance through CSS (don’t worry he shows you how). You can also alter/add fields, and it even allows you track where the visitors are coming from and if from a search engine, what keywords they used. This neat little form also prevents spam, which I’m sure you’ll be relived to hear.

This is a follow-on post for my post on the Rise of the Blog as a Business Gateway over at SEOscoop.

If you read the post and the comments you will see that Glenn over at Divinewrite raised so many good points that I realized I’d left out some important information.

More About WordPress and SEO

I can’t find any decent usability studies, but there’s a ton of information all over the web that talks about WordPress’s SEO-friendly setup. There are a couple of hitches: duplicate content is one but you can largely cut that out by disabling the content preview (excerpt) pane if your blog is set up like that, so that the whole post is featured on the front page instead of only a part of it. If you’d like more on how to make your WordPress setup more friendly, you can’t do better than The Definitive Guide to Higher Rankings for Your Blog.

The most obvious example I can think of for how successful a blog can be for business is my own. My main business website has been Wellwrittenwords since 2002.

My Blogging for Business Experiment

As late as 2006 I decided to experiment with blogging for business after seeing how blog posts were doing so well for my clients. I didn’t want this associated with my main site in case it didn’t work out, so I bought (in retrospect) a terrible domain name: marketmou.com and set up the blog as a sub-domain. Within months I had a PR of 4. Meanwhile, due to changes in Google’s algorithms, my Wellwrittenwords.com site lost page rank from 4 to 3.

Traffic rose steadily with Marketmou and despite long periods of inactivity and things not going the way I wanted, I continued to get good traffic and increased incoming links with practically no effort.

Getting my Google Page Rank Back

So a few months back I decided that I’d been torturing myself long enough. The marketmou domain name was now annoying me to the point of insanity. So after careful consideration I took the decision to cannibalize it and import the posts to my Wellwrittenwords site. I simply don’t have time to keep them both going and my main site was suffering: a stupid situation since Wellwrittenwords has the domain age that is so coveted. Yes, you get SEO points from Google just for having an aged domain.

Within weeks I had my PR of 4 back on Wellwrittenwords. When I post I am often at the top of Page 1 of Google for a search on the relevant keyphrases. To take an example from this week, please Google ‘SEO self regulation.’ It was the first time I had mentioned that phrase on my site (so the Google authority attribute was not from some previous post) and the same day, March 11, I was at the top of Page 1 on Google.

Now, if you will, take a look at my post of March 12: Failproof FaceBook Strategies for Growing Your Business. Google the phrase. Now Google FaceBook Strategies for Growing Your Business. See what I mean?

Still doubt that WordPress–or blogging–is the reason? Remember that pages on a static site take days at least to get indexed. The quickest I’ve ever hit page 1 of Google for content on a new page of a static site is a week. With my blog it’s consistently hours.

Permanent Text on Your Blog’s Front Page

As for Glenn’s point about putting a blurb on your site’s main page: there are so many ways to achieve this with a blog. You can easily modify a WordPress template to include a text box in the main content column right under the header. In fact I do it for all the blogs I work on. Sometimes it’s just to urge people to sign up for the RSS feed, but often there is other information there too. Also you can insert any text you like into the widgets in the side bar. No problem at all inserting any text you want to show up on a permanent basis. It is also possible to add a page to your blog (with some templates–not all) that is static so that the blog posts show up on a secondary page.

I don’t think the goods and services come off as an afterthought on a blog at all. Rather, you can demonstrate to your clients that you really do know about all the goods and services you’re offering. This is often reassuring to potential clients, not to mention that it gives them a chance to interact with you in an informal way before they purchase.

There I rest my case. If it’s not convincing enough I’m content. We bloggers are stealing the show–ssshhh.

I have been offline for a while because my ISP had a technical problem that affected a whole batch of DSL subscribers. FAIL.

Back to Business!

So when I finally got back online I had a whole pile of work to catch up on. I only had three-and-a-half hours sleep last night. But so far today I have installed a WordPress theme, tinkered with two others, and caught up with a whole load of email correspondence.

One of my clients chose a really great WordPress theme over at Revolution. Very nice theme, although a little complicated to set up–much more so than regular WordPress themes.

I may decide to use one of those themes on here, they’re so professional-looking. We shall have to see if I even have time to get around to that any time soon.

The blog is taking over!

Interestingly I have had a number of clients recently who want WordPress installed on their main website. They have heard good things about it’s flexibility and the fact that in general, the search engines love it. It certainly makes it easier if a number of people need to upload content to a website. I love it and always encourage anyone who wants to install WordPress.

WordPress Makes Search Engine Optimization and Pleasing Visitors Easy

The major advantage in using WordPress is the fact that it becomes really simple to add new content to your site on a regular basis. This alone will make the search egnines, and Google in particular, love you to bits. More to the point, if there’s plenty of interesting information on your website your visitors will love you too.

Increasingly the Internet is being seen as the global village predicted by Marshall McLuhan. Our networks extend over continents, professional domains, social milieus, generations and just about every other demographic you can think of. So whenever we want to achieve anything we automatically have access to a wide selection of people whose input can be highly valuable to us and dramatically impact our level of success.

Over the past week I’ve called on some of my Internet friends for their wisdom and expertise, while I was setting up this blog. As usual, they were unstinting in their generosity, both with time and nuggets of hard-won (and when you pay for it, expensive) specialized consulting knowledge.

Twitter is fabulous and it’s my networking tool of choice. Leaves most of the others standing–including FaceBook for me. But I digress as usual.

I’ve asked my Twitter network for advice on my design and color scheme, how to import the posts from my old blog, help with troubleshooting feed problems (Feedburner was jettisoned as a result) and a host of other stuff. I’m sure I’ve driven them nuts–I’m thoroughly sick of the subject myself at the moment–but they were all patient. So they deserve a big mention.

Top of the list is Mich D, who is quietly brilliant, working away in the shadows. He wrote a guest post for me on Blackhat SMO tricks. I think you’ll agree there’s lots of valuable information here as well as some fresh and unique perspectives. He said he loved the design, and that while it was pink, it wasn’t “fluffy.” I took that as an approval. Mich gave me the most fundamental help when I told him I was having trouble importing posts from one MySQL database to another. Why bother? He asked. You can import blog posts, even across platforms, through your WordPress Admin interface, and I did, and it worked beautifully. Thanks Mich!

In case you’re having he same problem, in the WordPress Admin panel for your old blog, select Manage Posts and click on Export from the options on the dashboard. Save the resulting WordPress file to your hard drive. Then go to the WordPress Admin for your new site, select Manage Posts and then select Import. Browse for and upload your saved file, and voila, you’re done. But don’t forget to do 301 redirects for your posts or you’ll have duplicate content issues big-time.

Kimberley Bock made me feel more comfortable with my choice of color scheme. I say ‘more comfortable’ not because I had doubts about what I like but because a couple of my other friends had mentioned that they weren’t 100 percent comfortable with my choice. You could say I was suffering a confidence crisis.

In particular, Richard Dewick, AKA Makaman, had strong reservations about my choice of color. He also reminded me to follow my own advice and make the font a readable size, which I did. He also reminded me about posting my Twitter feed to my blog, which I haven’t had time for yet. But I will. Richard also hated my logo. I don’t think he’ll like the new version either, but it’s the best I can do for now. Whaddya say Richard?

Ultimately I felt my choice of WordPress theme was totally vindicated by Chris Garrett who said:

You have to connect “you” to your target audience, if pink fits both, forget what random internet folks say

I totally agree with this. A small thing like your color scheme could put off a small minority of visitors, but overall I think it’s true to say that if a reader senses that you’re not holding back, and that you’re communicating who you are at a basic level, with no artificially-set parameters, they’ll respect you more for it. And I’ve never been one to try and impress, so this concept suits me fine. It’s not that I take a devil-may-care attitude. More that I like to communicate honestly, including who i really am.

But Chris got me thinking about how to really connect with your audience. What’s the secret? Obviously your theme and choice of colors is going to be a superficial first-glance thing. But there has to be more to it than that. What are blog readers really looking for?

In the end I came to the following conclusions:

Connecting with your audience is all about being who you really are. It’s about being willing to take the risks associated with sharing your innermost thoughts about what you do and how you think. You may leave yourself vulnerable to the piranhas that live online, but you’ll also make contact with a solid readership base who are looking for authenticity. You’ll also make genuine friends. The Real Thing is impossible to fake and it’s priceless.

So in the coming months you can look forward to some hard-hitting opinion, state-of-the-art SEO information, and tips on how to get your blog or website off the ground. Most of all though, you can look forward to my blog as an honest expression of who I am.

UPDATE: I have changed the theme several times since this–I’m now using Streamline by StudioPress (link in footer). Still love to know what you think.

It has been a hectic few days. However, I finally decided to go with the theme you now see. It’s called Optimism and it’s by–well they already have a link at the bottom!

I’ve also got my contact form up-and-running and I’ve written a cursory About page. For sure there is a lot left to do but I am functional.

I’m still working on importing the posts from my other blog so that I can setup the redirects. Haven’t had time to look into that properly yet. Comments and suggestions are always welcome. Meanwhile enjoy this music that I feel goes with the theme. 03-enchantment