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.
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Why Use WordPress
By Randy R on April 30, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes
Why Use WordPress?
Are you interested in starting your own blog? Are you using a blogging platform right now and they’re just not happy with that? Well, I’ve great news. I have been blogging for quite some time and have used pretty much every blogging platform out there.
I have finally came to realize that there is no other blogging platform that is comparable to WordPress in my opinion.
WordPress is a far superior blogging platform and there are quite a few reasons why. I will list just a few in order to keep this article relatively short period
The Ease-Of-Use
WordPress by nature is just very easy to use. When it comes to writing down your thoughts and categorizing them in an easy to use and read format WordPress nails it.
The control panel that WordPress uses is super simple. You login, click a couple buttons, start writing and then click another button in your post is ready to be read by the world. Does it get any easier?
Search Engine Friendly
WordPress comes out of the box pretty search engine friendly. Although, you do need to change a few things after you install the blog.
The first, in my opinion, would be the permalink structure. Unfortunately, when you first set up your blog the permalink structure is not very pretty. But luckily that is easily corrected. Now, thepermalinkstructure is just a sample of what you can do with the default WordPress platform.
The Plug-Ins
Oh the plug-ins. You definitely cannot forget the plug-ins when it comes to WordPress. The wide range of plug-ins that are offered for WordPress for absolutely free is astonishing. You can find a WordPress plug-in to do pretty much anything you want.
Especially optimize the blog for search engine performance. A wide range of plug-ins that are available will make your blog a powerhouse when it comes to dominate in the search engines.
The Themes
WordPress has thousands of themes that are available. You can pretty much find a theme for any niche you can possibly imagine. The themes are well coded and very sharp.
You can find many styles of themes that will fit your personal needs, and most likely you will find it for free.
Anyway, that is just the few small reasons why I choose WordPress over the other blogging platforms. I could go on and on for hours about why you should use WordPress, but unfortunately I am limited to the space I can use here today.
But, knows this… WordPress is the number one blogging platform out there right now. That is my opinion at the time of this writing.
How to Engage your Blog Readers
By Randy Roedl on April 29, 2012 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, Blog Posting, Blogs, Conversion
How to Engage your Blog Readers If you have a flagship blog and you’re trying to build an audience of regular readers then you’ll need to be able to engage your blog readers. If you don’t engage your blog readers then they’ll never come back to your blog or join your RSS subscriber feed. There are different techniques that you can use to assist you in engaging your blog readers and we’re going to look at some of those methods. Engaging your blog readers has nothing to do with marketing or promoting your blog. It also doesn’t involve anything to do with link building or anything of this nature. To engage your blog readers it needs to be on-site improvements that you make and we’ll take a look at those now. Blog Post Titles You should make titles that aren’t just stuffed for the search engines as this isn’t very ideal for building a reader base. You need to build nice long detailed titles so that the readers knows exactly what you’re offering within that certain post, and then they can click it if they want to read about it. Your titles should also have some personality in them and not just some generic plain title lacking any personality. Blog Post Body The blog post itself should be broken down into smaller bits of information and the best way to do this is either with bullet points or sub-titles. This way it’s much easier to follow down the page and more readers will be inclined to read the information. You want people to find the information useful and they won’t be able to do that if they don’t even read the information you post about. Use a Picture Try breaking up the text up a little bit by implementing a picture into your blog posts. Try to also add your personality into the pictures you choose so that people can begin to adapt to who you are. To build a blog readership you need to show personality and become active within your blog community. Some blogs may also require more pictures in the blog posts, for instance the celebrity niche should have small galleries under each post as the best blogs do. WordPress Theme You should buy a wordpress theme that is customized for your blog as then you’ll stand out from the other bloggers and it will seem like you care about your blog. A nicely designed theme can attract many readers to stick around to see what information you offer. WordPress themes are very cheap as well so you won’t need to break the bank when buying a theme. These are some of the techniques you can use too engage your blog readers and have them coming back to your blog more then once. If you can build a readership then as long as you continue posting engaging and informational posts then the readers will stick around and you’ll grow further. This is the most profitable blog you could develop, but it also takes the most amounts of work and time to do.