Great WordPress Plugins: Identifying Another One Of Them Another of the great WordPress plugins that deserves special mention is ""Simple 301 Redirects"". One thing about essential WordPress plugins is that if you do not know about them or do not know how to use them, you do not realize how great a functionality you are leaving out of your content management system. ""Simple 301 Redirects"" is a good example of this. I recollect that I have been in and out of internet marketing three times over the years before this my final stay. Each time I resurfaced on the internet marketing scene, had I known about this great WordPress plugin, no doubt my search engine rankings would be higher today. I simply would have deployed it to transfer my old blog posts to the new amended/updated pages and thereby seamlessly preserved the old pages rankings. But alas, each time I resurfaced on the internet marketing scene, I simply discarded the old blog posts and posted new/updated pages of these old blog posts on my new blog without linking the two. That is one of the many setbacks great WordPress plugins like ""Simple 301 Redirects"" set out to correct. It provides an easy method of redirecting requests to another page on your site or elsewhere on the web. It’s especially handy when you migrate a site to WordPress and can’t preserve your URL structure. By setting up 301 redirects from your old pages to your new pages, any incoming links will be seemlessly passed along, and their pagerank (or what-have-you) will be passed along. Note that ""age"" and ""number and nature of backlinks"" are critical factors in search engine rankings. Any action you therefore take to preserve these for your blog posts will definitely positively impact your search engine rankings. I’ll give you a perfect example here. I wrote a blog post in December 2009. At that time, I still was not as thoroughly grounded as I am now in search engine optimization (SEO) and so was not optimizing effectively for my intended keywords. I recently changed the title and made some minor adjustments to the body of the blog post and were it to be before, I would simply have left it at that. Does it strike a chord in you that anytime you do such and leave it at that you are simply beginning your SEO for that post all over again? All the backlinks to the previous post will be gone forever. So also the age, as the new blog post will now be indexed afresh while the old blog post on subsequent visits by the Google bot will read ""not found"", again compounding your crawl errors in your Google webmaster tools. Note that all these ultimately negatively impact your page rank. So what did I do? I simply inserted my old url in the ""Simple 301 Redirects"" interface and pointed it to my new url which I also inserted in the interface and saved. Just as simple as that and wow! a whole lot has happened with those simple steps. The backlinks and age of my old blog post will be seamlessly passed over to my new blog post and the page rank of my web page preserved. Let me explain another purpose to which you can deploy this plugin that I have identified as one of the great WordPress plugins. If you go into your webmaster tools account, you will see indicated, crawl errors that resulted while the search engines were trying to crawl your web pages. You can rectify some of these errors and thereby have a more ""efficient"" website which will impact positively on your search engine rankings by utilizing this plugin to redirect some incorrectly specified links to their originally intended destination. Those links that you have control over and can still amend such as your backlinks in forums, you can make amends to. But what of incorrectly specified links that you no longer have access to? For example, links on your articles republished on other sites. This is again better explained with an illustration. I erroneously inserted a link in one of my articles which was republished on another site and noticed the error from ""crawl errors"" in my Google webmaster tools account. The link led nowhere i.e. 404 page and I subsequently redirected it to its originally intended destination, thereby preserving that backlink. This becomes very important when you realize that you can have many of such errors over time.The ""Simple 301 Redirects"" plugin’s many uses can only be limited by your imagination. In summary, the ""Simple 301 Redirects"" is one more of the great WordPress plugins.
Tag Archives | Functionality
Improved WordPress Experience With Premium WordPress Plugins
By Randy R on June 3, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes
Improved WordPress Experience With Premium WordPress Plugins
WordPress has offered people from across the world with an easy, cost-free, and open-source blogging platform since 2003. Considered the best and most popular blogging tool at recent times, WordPress has also provided opportunities for developers to create premium WordPress plugins designed to address the needs of millions of WordPress users.
What are plugins? WordPress plugins are simply defined as prepackaged codes that can enhance the features and functionality of a website or blog. Various plugins offer a wide range of advantages for WordPress users. For one, plugins can help optimize a WordPress blog so that it gets a high ranking in search engines. Second, plugins can monitor site statistics such as page views and visitors. Third, plugins prevent comment spam from flooding a blogger’s WordPress account. Other useful WordPress plugin features include photo galleries, advertisement manager, and social bookmarking. WordPress plugins make it easy for bloggers to add functionality to their blogs without the need for tedious and complicated coding. With the many benefits a blogger can get from free WordPress plugins, it is no wonder that developers take them a notch higher-that is, they develop various premium WordPress plugins to suit different blogging needs.
Although premium WordPress plugins has not yet fully taken over the prominence of free plugins, the former’s importance cannot be underestimated. Compared to free plugins, premium plugins give more assurance that they are appropriately supported, updated, and improved.
In fact, there are a number of premium plugins considered by many as the best there are on the market. Most of these good premium plugins have useful features for search engine optimization (SEO), affiliate marketing, and advertising purposes. Premium-designed WordPress plugins for SEO provides users with full control over their blogs from the WordPress dashboard. For affiliate marketing purposes, some premium plugins enable the blogger to manage his or her affiliate links using the WordPress dashboard. In addition, affiliate-oriented premium plugins make it easy for bloggers to put advertisements into their blogs. On the other hand, plugins that are made for advertising help users manage the advertisements on their blogs by automating paid reviews, text links, banners, and collecting payments for the blog owner. Some premium plugins allow bloggers to create a number of full-featured review websites.
All in all, premium WordPress plugins can meet the needs of most bloggers in terms of earning money online. Premium plugins provide solutions for bloggers who want to monetize their blog by helping them do it successfully. The monetary benefits are worth the money spent for purchasing these plugins. With premium plugins for WordPress at their disposal, bloggers do not need to acquire technical knowledge or skills to maximize their blogs’ potential to drive huge profits. Before purchasing premium plugins on the Internet, a conscientious blogger should do an extensive research on certain premium plugins that can cover his needs. Of course, careful preparation is important in any undertaking. Enhanced WordPress experience and improved money making strategies can be achieved if bloggers use the right premium WordPress plugins for their needs.
How to Make a WordPress Website – Make a Brand New Website By the End of Today With These 4 Steps
By Randy R on May 2, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes
How to Make a WordPress Website – Make a Brand New Website By the End of Today With These 4 Steps
Want to know how to make a website in just a few hours or less? WordPress is the answer. Here’s a basic 4 step process to that will help you make a website from scratch and be online by the end of today.
Step One) Buy a Domain and Cheap Hosting Plan- In order to make a website, you need these two things. There is no way around it. But the good news is, these are both cheap things to purchase. The hosting account will be the place where you place your website files. The domain name will be the name of the website.
Average Hosting Cost- Less than $10 per hour.
Average Domain Cost- Around $10.
Step Two) Install WordPress on the Domain- What? Install it on the domain? Don’t worry, this is as simple as clicking the WordPress button, then choosing the domain you want to put it on from a drop down list. Done.
Step Three) Customize The WordPress Site- Click on Appearance and choose from 1,000’s of Themes that will change the look and functionality of the website itself. Some themes are very customizable, whereas others are just “”plug and play””.
You can choose between thousands of Plugins as well, which help to further enhance the usability of the website. Some plugins will help you insert YouTube videos, or add star-ratings, or tables, or anything else under the sun you can think of.
Step Four) Publish the Site- All you have to do to put the website onto the web from here is click “”Publish””. Voila! You are on the web with a fully functional website.
The most important step is to find a quality hosting plan that will give you everything you need to make a WordPress website.
The 3 Pages That Should Be On Every WordPress Website to Increase Its Effectiveness
By Randy R on February 26, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes
The 3 Pages That Should Be On Every WordPress Website to Increase Its Effectiveness WordPress has come a long way in its journey to become the #1 blogging platform out there today. As the features and functionality have increased over time, the possibilities for what can be done with WordPress as a website solution have increased. With today’s features, WordPress can be used to create an entire site in most cases in addition to just a blog. This article discusses which pages should be created in any WordPress blog. The 3 Pages That Should Be On Every WordPress Website to Increase Its Effectiveness
1. Landing Page or Home Page The landing page or home page, depending upon the type of web site, is critical in being able to convert your visitors to taking a specific action. It is very difficult to do that with blog entries as the home page. When people land on your blog home page, they usually land on a page with a lot of content and nothing really directing them to do anything. If any of your blog titles happens to catch their attention, then when they click on a specific post, you may be able to convert that into an action, but only if your post is written up to do just that. If not, then you will just have a reader who may or may not come back to your site. Having a landing page will allow you to prepare the visitor and guide them through the site the way you want them to go. 2. Contact Us Page WordPress makes it easy to put a contact us form on your website that will get emailed back to you when the visitor submits the form. There are a few ‘contact us’ plug-ins that give the website owner a lot of flexibility in getting the kind of feedback that will be most beneficial to them. One of the contact form plugins that gives a lot of flexibility in creating great forms called ‘Contact Form 7’. The 3 Pages That Should Be On Every WordPress Website to Increase Its Effectiveness.
The benefit of having a contact form instead of your email is it is easier to manage communications, you can outsource your customer support much more easily and you can guide the visitor much better with the information you need from them so you can better serve your visitors, prospects and customers. 3. Blog Postings Page If you are going to have a WordPress website, then you should have a blog as well. WordPress is a blogging platform so it pretty much comes with the territory. In this case, you will need to create a separate page to direct the blog postings to. When setting up the blog page, you will need to be sure to label it something that is very clear and enticing if you want your visitors to read your blog postings. Labels like ‘Blog’, ‘Articles’ and ‘Content’ are fairly popular. This is the name that will be on the navigation link for that page as well. This is why it is important to make it something that is easy for visitors to understand. Creating an entire website from WordPress is easy to do with the latest versions of WordPress. It is very easy to create the basic pages that will allow a small business owner to get a website up and running very quickly. Having a landing page, a contact us page and a blog page is a great foundation to build from. Once that foundation is there, additional pages and features can be easily added. The 3 Pages That Should Be On Every WordPress Website to Increase Its Effectiveness
Some Things to Watch Out for When Choosing a WordPress Theme
By Randy R on February 18, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes
Some Things to Watch Out for When Choosing a WordPress Theme
There are literally hundreds of WordPress themes out there and the quality can vary markedly between different suppliers. Some of the more popular options in the marketplace at the moment include the Thesis Theme, the Genesis Theme, Woo Theme, Elegant Themes or even that vast range of themes available through Theme Forest.
It’s important before deciding on a particular theme supplier to have a look at the pricing plans they have on offer and compare these to the rest of the marketplace. Ideally, a consumer shouldn’t be spending more than $39 on a premium WordPress theme however some themes such as the Thesis Theme do offer extra functionality for the additional cost. It’s also important to watch out for recurring monthly fees – some theme providers will charge a monthly fee for access to all the themes in their catalogue, furthermore some may charge a development fee in case you wish to apply the theme across multiple sites.
WordPress Themes are typically designed as an out of the box solution, they are provided as an out of the box solution for webmasters who have little to no design skills or even to web developers who do not have the time to continually redesign websites. However, due to the fact they are an out of the box solution it’s important to be able to control as much of the layout of the site as you possibly can, this means being able to edit all of the various elements on the homepage and maybe even change between a two and three column layout.
Some WordPress themes also come with pre-installed sliders – a slider is an image board that rotates between different images and is usually found at the top of a page. Some webmasters do not like the slider being positioned so prominently on the page and may in fact wish to remove it – it’s important then to be able to either change the images contained in the slider, or even remove it if you so choose.
An Introduction To WordPress Plugins
By Randy R on January 21, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes
An Introduction To WordPress Plugins
WordPress is an amazing CMS system that is renowned for its flexibility as not only a blogging platform, but a platform for those who are simply seeking to publish content based websites to the Internet. It is for this reason that usage of WordPress has skyrocketed over the fast few years, as such, a very active community has given the platform support by developing what would have to be the largest directory of plugins for a single platform in history. So, what is a plugin?
A WordPress plugin is a simple script or software package that extends the functionality of the WordPress platform further than what the original developers of the platform have decided upon. It is for this reason that the CMS is quite raw, and offers only basic functionality such as creating posts, pages, and editing basic code. A plugin is generally installed via the plugin administration area in WordPress, and can either be done automatically from the plugins directory hosted by WordPress, or can also be done manually via FTP, or via an upload in the back end of WordPress.
In most cases, you will never need to install a plugin manually, however, as the availability of premium plugins is rising significantly, this is happening more and more. There are two plugin types that you will more than likely find. Freely available plugins, and premium plugins.
Free plugins are usually available en-masse in the WordPress plugins directory, and are searchable based on set keywords and criteria, however premium plugins are usually available via their own marketplace or shopping cart. Needless to say, the need to pay for a plugin generally warrants extra functionality such as code tweaks, creation of clone WordPress installations, and so on, more often than not, functionality that exceeds its own monetary value significantly.
Plugins can transform WordPress almost into its own separate systems. For example, there are many premium shopping cart and membership site plugins that will transform WordPress from a blog to a paid of free membership site. Some will also transform the installation into a sales letter with a payment portal, and other plugins will offer much more simple functionality such as admin extension, social media links, and clone wordpress backup files for your own security. To get started, simply enter the plugins area within your WordPress admin area, and select ""add new"". In this area, you will be able to explore plugins, and their functionality further, and most importantly, you will be able to experiment with different plugins and get a grasp of this brilliant functionality that lies within WordPress.
Monetize Your WordPress With Ecommerce Plugins
By Randy R on January 15, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes
Monetize Your WordPress Website Or Blog With Ecommerce Plugins
If you’re not generating money from your website or blog, you should be. Numerous shopping cart plugins allow you to sell your products and services online through your WordPress account, and below we outline the features of several of them for you to consider.
Browse through them to consider which plugin might be right for your site. WP AuctionsNo more listing, seller or final value fees when you use this handy plugin. Host auctions and sell items for free. Don’t forget to register your plugin with WP Auctions Live.
It will help generate traffic to your site. One item at a time in the cart is your only drawback to this plugin. FatFreeCartNo generating or pasting code using this plugin because it works within the post editor. Incorporate the add-to-cart feature within your blog posts. Note also that it integrates with PayPal and Google Checkout. eStoreThis plugin gives you fully-automated selling capability of your digital products. Deliver products without directing buyers to a webpage to download; they’ll receive an encrypted download link in their email.
The great news? It’s integrated with WordPress’ Affiliate software. WP e-CommerceThis is a Web 2.0 application that provides full-feature shopping cart functionality and allows for one-page checkout. Don’t make site visitors move from page to page in order to purchase a product. Give them a simple, easy-to-use site that they’ll gladly return to. MiniCartEmbed your shopping cart into your blog posts and use the plugin to ask for donations to your favorite cause in the process. eShopUse your pages or posts to create new products. Features include the ability to list multiple products, create an add-to-cart function, offer downloadable products and more.
How to Install WordPress Widgets
By Randy R on December 2, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes
How to Install WordPress Widgets
One of the things that makes WordPress so easy to use is widgets. What is a widget? I will try and explain them the easiest way possible. Basically, a widget is an area of a website or blog where you can control the location by dragging and dropping it. In WordPress, widgets are usually found in the sidebar section. As far as what can be places in them, there are really no limits. There are literally hundreds of different ways to utilize widgets within WordPress.
However, before you get started you should probably learn how to install WordPress widgets. The good news is that a lot of widgets come preinstalled with the WordPress package. The common ones include things like recent posts, categories, tags, and a search function.
However, if you want to add any functionality to your blog or website then you will want to know how to install WordPress widgets from plugins. Many WordPress plugins come with widgets built in so all you have to do is install the plugin and then browse to the widgets section in WordPress.
If the plugin comes with a widget, you should automatically see it listed under the available widgets. If for some reason you do not see any new widgets, then you should make sure the plugin is activated. If for some reason it is not, it will not show up under widgets. The other possibility is that the plugin does not come with a built in widget. If this is the case, you may have to find the short code that works with the plugin and add it to a text widget.
So there you have it, a quick lesson in how to install WordPress widgets.