Tag Archives | Love

Blog Comment Plugins For More WordPress Website Traffic

Blog Comment Plugins For More WordPress Website Traffic

Comments are a great benefit of blogs. People can give you feedback on the posts you write. You also know you have traffic and sometimes people follow other people just to see their comments. With WordPress you can add plugins to add extra benefits to both you and your commentators.

Akismet

This spam plugin comes installed with WordPress, you just need to activate it. This plugin catches most spam and occasional “”ham”” these are comments it is not certain are spam. You do not have moderate as much as with out it.

Subscribe to Comments

If your readers like a post, they may like the comments as well. With this WordPress plugin they can subscribe to a particular post and comments and a notice will be sent to their email with each new comment. Then they can unsubscribe to some or all posts when they want.

Nofollow Case By Case

People like to comment on other blogs so they can get a link back to their own site. This will boost their page rank with search engines which will boost your comment rate. With many Dofollow plugins you follow every link that comes into your website. With “”Nofollow Case by Case”” you can selectively choose to make a comment nofollow, or you can choose nofollow for a particular comment author.

Top Commentators Widget

This is a plugin that you can add to your widgets in your sidebar. With this the top commentators on your blog are listed each month. Also with their control form you can manage the commentators. You can also exclude certain ones, which means you can exclude yourself and other writing partners.

Comment Luv

Share the love with this comment plugin. When they comment on your blog it will add a link to their last blog post. This benefits both of you because people are more likely to comment when their posts show.

WordPress Thread Comment

This allows people to comment on an existing comment. The comments will flow logically instead of being yet another comment.

Most Commented Widget

Rather than show the top commentators this WordPress widget shows a snippet of the most popular post. People can be curious about your most popular post or page and this will show them the one with the most comments.

Disqus

Growing in popularity is this plugin / website. Disqus works with Aksimet and blocks more spam. It adds the ability to like comments and subscribe. Readers can visit see not just check out the commentators, see what blogs they have and which other blogs they visit and comment. It also allows you and visitors to like comments, similar to Facebook.

0

Ways to Increase your Search Engine Rankings

Ways to Increase your Search Engine Rankings

As a website owner you’ll know how important it is to raise your search engine rankings and that it’s the most valuable traffic around. If you want to make money online with a website then it’s almost apparent that you’ll need to get some search engine rankings in your niche. There are plenty of ways out there to increase your search engine rankings and you should try to use as many of them as you can. You can guarantee yourself that thousands of other webmasters are out there doing the same so if you want to compete with the big boys then you’ll need to know the tricks.

The reason search engine traffic is so important and vital to your success is because it’s the most targeted traffic around. If people are finding your website for terms they search in the engines then you’re doing something right and should benefit from your hard work. It takes time for the search engines to rank you well though and you can reflect the degree of difficulty by how much competition there is in the search engines. If there is low competition then you’ll be able to easily get high rankings, but as the competition increase in the search engines then you’ll have to work hard to earn the rankings. We’ll now take a look at some of the methods you can use to increase your search engine rankings.

Build Backlinks

The first thing you need to work on is your backlinks and this is an ongoing process that never really ends. The search engines love seeing websites consistently building backlinks as then it seems important to the search engines so you should work on building backlinks every week. You also don’t want to build a bunch of backlinks at once and then stop because it could hurt your website rather then help it out. Build naturally and you’ll notice a great influx of your search engine rankings as time progresses.

Optimize Your Website

You can work on all the link building and promotion in the world, but if your website isn’t optimized for the search engines then you could be in trouble. You should always have an updated sitemap on your website so that the search engines can easily index your website without any problems finding pages. You also need to make sure you optimize the keywords you’re targeting throughout your website. Places to add keywords on your website are in the meta tags and in the content. If you’re website is properly optimized and you build links around the keywords optimized on your website then you’ll be well on your way to some great keyword rankings in the search engines.

Both of these two methods are the main methods you need to worry about when building your search engine rankings up from the ground. Of course having great unique content is also a must, but apart from content and search engine rankings there isn’t much else to do except collect your checks. You’ll need to maintain your search engine ranking campaign over the long-term though if you want the revenue to stick, so owning a profitable website is basically a full-time job.

0

Unique Content vs

Unique Content vs. PLR Content

Bloggers have the decision to make between whether or not they will be using unique content or PLR content on their blogs, now if you don’t know what this means I’ll define it quickly. Unique content is written by either yourself or someone you hire, and when compared to with other articles on the internet it shouldn’t be the same as anything. Now of course a ton of articles will be on the same topic, but if you write it without copying from the internet then it would come up as unique. To check if your articles are unique you should use copyscape.com which only costs $5 for 100 credits. This will give you 100 credits to see if your article is unique which should last you minimum a few months. PLR content or Private Label Right content are articles written by writers who then turn around and sell multiple copies of the same article. Some PLR content is more used then other content, but generally this content isn’t too good. There is a chance the search engine might pick up the content as duplicated and they will then block your site from the search engines. You need to decide if your site is worth the risk of being blocked by the search engines, and if isn’t then don’t use PLR content.

I only use unique content on all of my blogs that I write and from doing so I get all my posts indexed quickly and also bringing in search engine traffic. The search engines absolutely love unique fresh content added to websites and if you consistently add content to your site then you will notice the search engine ranking love start coming in from the likes of Google and Yahoo.

The one problem most webmasters have with unique content is either that it takes too long to write content or it’s too expensive to buy articles that are unique. Now this is mostly true, which comes to the question again of do you think your blog is worth it? If you plan on keeping your blog for a long time and make some revenue from it then you should only post unique content as you want to keep the search engines happy. You also want to post fresh information for your readers because with PLR it gets sent all around the internet and chances are some of your readers will have read the article before. Now if this happens it could mean you have one less visitor coming to your blog now because most people don’t read blogs that use PLR and information that’s everywhere already.

Having unique content is also beneficial for when you decide to sell your blog, because most webmasters won’t even consider buying PLR websites. You may find some new webmasters willing to splash $20 at your PLR content site, but this is hardly worth the effort of even posting PLR content. When you use unique content you will fetch a much higher price when selling your blog, so even if you invest in some content from a writer it generally pays off in the end when you sell your blog. So you can think of buying unique content almost as a low risk investment, simply because you can set-up a site and try promoting something to earn some passive income or you can always turn around and sell the site to get your investment back. This is what I would call a low risk investment when dealing with internet real estate.

0

WordPress Website Setup – 5 Overlooked Settings That Could Be Hurting You and Your Readers1

WordPress Website Setup – 5 Overlooked Settings That Could Be Hurting You and Your Readers

WordPress is an open source web publishing platform used by millions of people around the world. It’s known to be relatively easy for a beginner to learn and start creating content for their blogs or websites.

However, there are few features that if not setup correctly, can do your site more harm than good. All the steps below assume that you are logged into your WordPress Dashboard (administration area).

The WordPress Tagline

The default WordPress tagline is “”Just another WordPress blog””. This acts as a subtitle for your blog or website and is meant to be descriptive of your content. Leaving this default text in the tagline text box means that your visitors and search engines will see this. It sure isn’t descriptive of what your site is really about is it?

You can easily replace this tagline with your own by going to:

Settings–>General–>Tagline

(make sure to save your changes)

Membership and User Role Rules

You have the ability to add additional users to your blog or website for the purpose of adding content or submitting articles for review. There two settings here:

Settings–>General–>Membership

Settings–>General–>New User Default Role

Be careful if you decide to let anyone register for your site. Spammers love it when this option is ticked without having hardened security measures in place first.

You will also want to choose the default role for new users wisely. WordPress allows five user roles:

Administrator
Editor
Contributor
Author
Subscriber

Each user role is allowed to access different administration areas of your WordPress installation. This can be a powerful way to organize your users but can also be potentially disasterous if one of those users accidentally deactivates a plugin or theme that your site depends on.

You can always add additional users manually without the need to open registration to the public by going to:

Users–>Add New

Set the Correct Timezone

99% of WordPress websites I’m brought in to help with do not have the timezone correctly set to match the location of the owner. The time is detected automatically, and you would think this would be OK, but it can cause a usability issue with your users.

Why? Imagine I live in California and my site offers news and updates about the Stock Market or Wall Street. Further imagine that I schedule an article to post at a specific time in order to target either my night owl readers or the early risers about a specific stock tip.

Well, if I’m in California and I schedule my article to post at 5:00am what happens if I didn’t set my timezone to match my location? You guessed it, that article would be published based on whatever timezone is set by default. This would not position my site as having “”breaking news”” for my target market.

What timezone is set by default? The timezone that gets chosen is directly based upon the timezone that is set on the server computer at your hosting company. I host some of my websites with West Coast based hosting companies but I live on the East Coast…therefore I need to make sure to set my timezone to Eastern Standard Time instead Pacific Standard Time.

(scheduling your article post times is a built-in feature of WordPress by the way)

Set Update Services

When you publish a new content WordPress provides a way for you to let other people now you’ve updated your site. Go here:

Writing–>Update Services

You’ll see that there is an text input box with one web address inside it. That address connects your website with the Ping-O-Matic search engine update service. Every time you add something new, your site tells Ping-O-Matic and Ping-O-Matic tells various search services.

You can add more update services to this list so you can be assured that any new content you create is automatically being distributed and indexed by a variety of update services. You can view a long list here.

Creating Human Readable URLs

When you create a page or blog post in WordPress, it is given a unique ID for use in the programming code and database. Because of this, when you view a page or post url in your browser address bar, you see something similar to this on the end of your web address:?p=123

The code at the end of that url address above is referencing the page/post ID of 123. That’s not very readable or descriptive to a person is it? Additionally that address contains absolutely no keywords that could be utilized by search engines to help them return relevant results to your content. Luckily, you can change how these look and make them much better.

Go to: Settings–>Permalinks

You will see that you have four choices of different url structures to choose from:

Default
Day and name
Month and name
Numeric
Custom Structure

I use different Custom Structures based on the needs of particular websites and I would recommend doing the same. You can learn more about Custom Permalink Structures here.

0

Important Reasons why you should become Active in the Blogosphere

Important Reasons why you should become Active in the Blogosphere

There are millions of blogs out there on the internet and thousands of them are promoted on a daily basis and updated regularly. This means that in most cases there will be other bloggers in the niche that you choose to blog about, and although there your competition they can also help you out. You don’t always want to look at your competition as your enemy when it comes to blogging because there are ways you can benefit from other bloggers in your niche. The importance of becoming active on the authority blogs in your niche is becoming more important as each day passes and you should make sure you start commenting now. If you’re unsure as to why you should spend time becoming active on the authority blogs in your niche that’s fine as we’re going to take a look at some of the reasons now.

Reason #1

The first reason you want to become active on blogs in your niche is for the backlinks. The backlinks only count in the search engines if there do-follow, but nowadays there are lots of bloggers who use the do-follow feature on their comments. You should find all of the blogs that offer do-follow comments in your niche and you should make a note of commenting on these blogs regularly. The search engines love relevant links so by commenting on blogs similar to yours you’ll be getting about as relevant as links as you possibly can manage to get.

Reason #2

Commenting on blogs helps to also gain traffic for your blog over the long-term, and is one of the main benefits of commenting on blogs in your niche. As visitors see your comments on the blogs they’ll be able to click your link and visit your blog. You won’t get to much traffic from doing this, but it adds up over time and you should use any advantages you can over your competitors. The traffic you get from the comments will also be targeted and could result in a long-term reader of your blog or even a customer.

Reason #3

If you comment regularly enough on the authority blogs then the owner will begin to take notice of you and it could benefit you and your blog. As you grow a relationship with the other bloggers in your niche you open up your chances of exchanging links with them. To get an authority backlink in your niche usually means spending a lot of money, but if you can grow a friendly relationship through blog commenting then you may be surprised what the bloggers may do for you. If your blog has good content then they’ll have no problem linking to you in one of there posts, and this is when you get the real traffic.

There are even more reasons as to why you should become active in the blogosphere, but these three are the main reasons that I do it. You don’t need to go to blogs in your niche and spam all the posts on them as this will just upset the blog owner. You should comment on a regular basis as the blogger adds new content, as then they’ll know that you continually check their blog out and will make them more likely to check out your blog.

0

On-Site SEO Optimization

On-Site SEO Optimization

Most bloggers love talking about the many off-site SEO optimization techniques you can use to get better SE rankings, but most neglect to also discuss on-site SEO optimization. If you don’t have a strong handle on your on-site SEO optimization of your blog then you will never see the full affect of your off-site marketing and promotion work. I actually work solely on the on-site SEO of my blog before I even begin starting my off-site SEO methods because without on-site SEO you won’t go very far. There are quite a few ways to make sure your blog is optimized for the search engines and that is exactly what we’re going to discuss in this article.

The first thing to do is make sure all of your meta tags are filled out properly and optimized correctly for your blog. The most important tag is the title tag which basically every search engine uses to gather information pertaining to your blog so make sure that this is filled out properly. You also need to make sure you write a custom description and add keywords to your blogs pages. There is a plug-in for WordPress which lets you make custom titles, keywords and description for each page on your blog and it’s something I couldn’t live without. You don’t need any knowledge of meta tags or HTML to be able to utilize the plug-in either which I find to be awesome.

After you’ve got all your meta tags and other important tags set-up you need to then create a sitemap for your blog. Now there is a plug-in that does this for you but you should also create your own HTML sitemap which is simply a new page on your blog with links to every page on the blog. This will allow the search engines to easily crawl your site and therefore index your pages a lot quicker then if you didn’t have a sitemap.

Once done setting up the sitemap you can begin looking at your content that is already on the blog. Make sure the content is optimized for the keywords that you’re targeting and also clean up any messy code that you notice. Messy code is bad for your search engine optimization and you should do the best you can to clean up all loose ends of coding so that you’re blog is optimized as well as it can be. Also make sure you add in keywords to previous posts for the new keywords that you’re targeting as it will help.

There is more you can do to make sure you have properly done your on-site SEO but there is always more that can be done. On-site SEO is a never ending task that takes time and effort out of your schedule every week, but without it your blog won’t do well at all. The more optimized you make your blog the more exposure you’ll receive from the search engines and if you’re receiving more exposure from the SE’s that directly turns into traffic and possible revenue.

0

Check out Twitter

Check out Twitter

Twitter is one of the newer social networking pages out there. It’s free to sign up for and you should never be charged for anything on this site either. With a few different themes available you can make your own unique page, all you need to do is change those background colors to something that you like.

There are a few different ways to search for people on Twitter. You can put in the name of a friend and see if they are already registered on Twitter. Or you can look by pulling up your mailbox contacts. Invite people who you think would love Twitter, and have more followers. That’s what Twitter calls friends by the way!

You can also find people by looking at the tab that has “suggested matches”. These are the people that Twitter thinks you may enjoy following. With these types of choices you may soon be following tons of people, and they may follow you too. Not every one you choose to follow is going to follow you so don’t feel bad if it’s doesn’t happen.

Do you like to blog? Keep a blog on Twitter to keep people up to date on your daily or weekly happenings. Maybe you had something great happen to you and you feel that others on Twitter may enjoy that news put it up and post it. Or you may just like writing poetry; this is another thing that you will be able to post up on Twitter. You never know who might come to your page and see what you’ve written.

Look up a topic that you love, like “Stephen King”. Twitter will pull up others who are also interested in that topic. You can look up anything and see if there might be another who finds what you think is great to be interesting to them too. Follow them, send a message you may create a long term friendship that will last your whole life.

Also you don’t have as many flashy options as some other social networking places; it’s really not that big of a deal. In fact social networking sites are to talk to each other, not to see how many flashes and etcetera that doesn’t have anything to do with much.

Check out possibly one of the hottest social networking sites out there. Come to Twitter and see if you can find some new friends. Write blogs that will make others laugh, or just cry, depending on what you wrote. Twitter is a fantastic way to connect with other people all over the world.

You may check for those friends you lost touch with, they might be on Twitter, a nice way to reconnect with others. Another really excellent thing about Twitter is you go to a person’s page, and you can click on their followers. It’s excellent to see what other people have on their site, and you might be blown away by who you can find on Twitter.

0