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Top Seven WordPress Plugins For Your Blog

By on November 14, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Top Seven WordPress Plugins For Your Blog

Many bloggers are using WordPress and with good reason. It is the most popular blogging software in use today and one of the biggest reasons is the ability to add functionality through the use of plugins. Plugins can turn your run-of-the-mill blog into a high powered online tool capable of bringing traffic and profit to your site. Consider using the top WordPress plugins on your current WordPress blog or on a future blog. You won’t be disappointed. Happy Blogging.

7. Page Mash

This is a simple WordPress page management plugin. The Ajax interface allows you to drag-and-drop the pages into the order you like, modify the page structure by dragging a page to become a child or parent and toggle the page to be hidden from output. You can also see the id of the page which is often helpful for theme developers. If you have a WordPress site with more than just a handful of pages, PageMash is extremely helpful.

6. All in One SEO Pack

The All in One SEO Pack plugin automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engine by allowing you to fine tune things like your page title and meta tags. This plugin is extremely easy to use as it works great straight out of the box. If you are an advanced user, you can customize virtually everything. And if you are a developer, this plugin has an API so your themes can access and extend the functionality of the plugin.

5. Google XML Sitemaps

Perhaps the most downloaded WordPress plugin, the Google XML Sitemaps plugin not only automatically creates a site map linking to all your pages and posts, it also notifies Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Ask.com when you make changes to you site. If you want to include pages that are part of your site but not part of you WordPress managed content, you can do that to.

4. WP Super Cache

If you have a popular WordPress website you should seriously consider running WordPress Super Cache to improve the performance of your website. If you are not caching your pages, then every time a visitor comes to your site, WordPress has to pull together various pieces of information out of a database to put your page together. If you have a high traffic site, this is can really become a problem. WP Super Cache will store a copy of each of the pages on your website so that after the page has been assembled from the database once, WordPress can rest and just keep serving the static html copy of the page. This might be a bit techie, but the idea is you can dramatically speed up your site and reduce the load on your server by using WP Super Cache. If for no other reason, use this plugin so you don’t have to panic when your friend says, “”I just Dugg your site.””

3. NextGEN Image Gallery

If you want to display a photo gallery, show a series of product images, or just publish a slide show from your most recent vacation, the NextGEN image gallery is the plugin for you. NextGEN Gallery is a full integrated Image Gallery plugin for WordPress with a Flash slideshow option. Among the many features, NextGEN Gallery includes a thumbnail generator, sortable albums, and a water mark function.

2. cformsII Form Plugin

If your looking for a free form management plugin, cformsII is an extremely powerful plugin for setting up contact forms on your WordPress site. You don’t need to know any PHP or write any code. You can visually build forms in the WordPress admin panel. Then, navigate to the page or post where you want to use the form and there is a button in the WYSIWYG editor that you click and up pops a list of forms that you have made. Simply click on the one you want and your form is inserted into your page. Update your page and you the form is live. You can specify required fields, default values, and there are plenty of styles to make your form blend in perfectly with your site.

1. Gravity Forms

If you want the best forms plugin WordPress has to offer, you need Gravity Forms. Gravity Forms is an amazing plugin for managing online forms. Some of the incredibly useful features include conditional form fields which means you can show or hide a field or entire sections of the form based on a value selected in another field. You can pre-populate form fields using querystring, shortcode, function or hooks.You can even schedule when forms are available by assigning a start date and end date for when your form is live on your site. Supposed you want to run a contest where the first 50 people that fill out the form win a prize. Gravity Forms lets you set a limit on the number of entries a form can receive. Pretty much anything you ever wanted a form to do, Gravity Forms can do it.

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What-are-article-directories

By on November 4, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

What are article directories?

Article directories are sites that will allow you to publish articles online. But why should we write articles and publish in article directories rather than publishing it in our own sites? It’s because the article directories would already be getting lots of traffic and hence if we publish our article in these sites, then our article will be seen by many with much less efforts. But what will we be getting when others see our article? There are many advantages like the ones described below.

For each article that we publish in article sites like ezinearitlcles, we’ll be allowed to put about 3 links in them. And through these links we can make others to visit our site. Not just that, these links will be helping us to get some quality link juice as well. Yup, this is one of the ways to increase backlinks and at the same time search engine ranking of our sites. After you write an article, simply put a link or two to your sites at the end of the article. Yup, its that simple.

This is regarded as one of the easiest way to build backlinks to your sites. Not just that, you’ll be getting free traffic as well. Famous article directories like ezinearticles are viewed daily by millions of people. Most of them are webmasters looking to publish articles in their site. Yup, it’s allowed to copy the articles published in article directories to our sites. But we when do it, we should copy the links as well – that are put at the end of the articles by the publisher of the article. This way, people who publish articles are guaranteed that, if someone is using their articles in their sites, they’ll be getting backlinks from their sites as well. But people won’t be copying crap articles to their site. So, write quality articles and publish them in article directories. This way, you’ll getting a lot of one way, quality backlinks and traffic, free to your sites.

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On-Site SEO Optimization

By on August 18, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

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.

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Niche Blogging

By on August 15, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Niche Blogging – What Exactly Does It Mean?

As blogging became more crowded and more blogs were being created everyday there came a time when there were to many general bloggers around and many smart webmasters decided to start creating blogs based solely on niche markets. A niche blog is a blog that is narrowed down in topic so that it doesn’t fall into a general category. An example of this would be instead of having a celebrity blog you would have a Paris Hilton blog. As you can see you’ve went from the entire celebrity niche which is too big for person to blog about to just Paris Hilton niche which is easier to blog about and remain on top of all the news. As you know some celebrities have enough news that a blog could be updated everyday with new content and there are also some celebrities that have thousands of search engine searches everyday. This means that by narrowing your audience down you cut down on some traffic possibly, but you’re also going to have a more authority blog by making it in a niche. Many niches to this day don’t have an authority in the niche and that simply means there is still opportunity for more people to take control of a niche market.

There are niche markets everywhere and for every topic you just need to use your imagination. One important thing to remember is not to make your blog to narrow of a niche though because then you simply run into problems with content. It can hard to constantly update a blog about a certain tool or something so instead of blogging about a brand of hammers blog about all hammers. Hammers would be considered a good niche because you’re narrowing it down from the general niche of tools. You can take anything basically and make it into a smaller niche and the reason it’s smart to do so is because you can make a lot more money. Many internet marketers talk about how important it is to get targeted traffic to your products and lead offers and the best way to get targeted traffic on the internet right now is through a niche blog.

If you think about all of your traffic should be targeted because frankly I don’t know anyone who’s looking for clothes find there way onto a blog about hammers. It simply doesn’t happen and if it does then it’s a mistake obviously and it won’t a visitor who stays very long on the blog. All the traffic you get should be people interested in hammers, this means you know have a bunch of people interested in hammers coming to a blog you own. Lights should be going off in your head right now, because by having people at your blog interested in hammers you can now sell hammers on your blog and make a pretty penny.

It could take months to build up the readership on the blog before you start making money but once it starts coming in you’ll be set for a long time to come. If you choose like hammers then if you market yourself properly you could ensure income for life because people will always need to buy hammers. The fact is more people are moving online to buy products and if you can make a niche blog about a certain product then you could be in for big money. Don’t choose a product that gets upgraded every year though because then all the work you do is a waste once the upgrade comes and people stop wanting the old version.

There is an unlimited amount of money that can be made for bloggers who begin narrowing their efforts down to niches and if done properly it’s a goldmine. There is also a lot less work when you create a niche blog because often times it doesn’t need to be updated to often, basically only when there is something going on in the niche of the blog which could be once a week or even once a month. You’ll want to post at least once a month so that you can ensure your blog maintains its traffic and revenue though. When you begin marketing your niche blog you should try finding directories that are specifically related to your niche as they will be valued higher then general directory submissions. Also try obtaining links from other webmasters that already have blogs or sites in your niche, this is a sure fire way to get the search engines you want to see in the quickest amount of time. Remember to stay natural with your link building campaigns though or else you could face problems down the road once the search engines catch on.

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5 Ways WordPress Can Help Your Business Make Money Online

By on August 6, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

5 Ways WordPress Can Help Your Business Make Money Online

It is no longer a secret that without a website a business or organization is doomed as far as competition is concerned. This because most people are now conducting searches exclusively online to find the services they want and they must be able to find your business. If other competing businesses or organizations appear in the search engine first, then those customers will go to those businesses. Another layer of strategy that can help you as an online entrepreneur is blogging. Blogging has taken the online world by storm and many individuals, organizations and business entities are scrambling to have a blog presence and also to master the tools associated with blogging, the best being WordPress. But what is needed for one to master WordPress?

Before we get into becoming a WordPress expert, let us see why blogging is absolutely essential

Search engine dominance

One reason why it is absolutely essential to have a blog is because search engines love blogs. This is because search engines are content-driven and blogs are usually constantly adding content from the blog owners and the comments from the readers. Blogs therefore have constantly-updated content.

Interaction

If you have a business, a blog is the best way to interact with your customers and show the human side of yourself. Your customers are also able to sound off on your blog. The blog is also where you should be able to explain your products

WordPress is the blogging platform leader

There are many ways to set up a blog. There are also many blogging platforms. One of them is Google’s blogger, another is WordPress. There are many others but these two are the best. Blogger is easy to set up and has a huge following. But WordPress is the industry leader and standard. If you want to be an expert blogger, you absolutely have to tap into the power of WordPress and learn all that it has to offer. It is an extremely easy platform to learn and whether you are an expert or a novice, WordPress can transform your organization’s blog.

WordPress has a very large online support community. This means there are thousands of modules, plugins and coders that are wholly dedicated to enhancing WordPress. With this kind of support, WordPress can practically do anything from simply blogging to deploying complex and professional interactive websites.

Some people feel that WordPress is difficult to learn. This is simply not true. You can actually become a WordPress expert in 24 hours especially if you view video tutorials.

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Can I Build My Blog Links to Quickly

By on March 21, 2011 in !Randy Roedl Internet Marketing, Blog Business, wordpress, Wp Headers, Wp Themes

Can I Build My Blog Links to Quickly

Bloggers constantly are working on building links to there blog and you can believe on many webmaster forums there are bloggers discussing whether or not links can be built to quickly on a blog. I tend to believe that as long as you’re building natural links to your blog, then you won’t be penalized and I haven’t seen any evidence to show me that bloggers have been punished for building natural links too quickly. The problem is that some bloggers use unethical techniques or automated software to build links and these are the people that are punished. Any type of link building that looks unnatural to the search engines will usually result in your blog becoming banned from that search engines index. Being banned from Google could ruin the whole blog and you might need to start over again on a new domain if it happens so try to make sure you only use ethical link building techniques.

If you feel the method is dodgy then don’t do it for your blog, instead test it out on another domain you own and see what happens. This is how I find out if many of the services offered around webmaster forums are worth it or not. If it bans a new blog then I don’t really care and its lesson learned for cheap, but if you use the service on your good blog first then if it’s a shifty service you might be in trouble with the search engines.

As long as you follow basic rules then you will be fine when building links. For instance many bloggers are good at writing content and therefore receive a lot of link bait, which results in a ton of backlinks very quickly for the blogger. The search engines don’t punish the blogger for this as it’s a natural form of link building. If you use an automated program to submit your blog to a thousand directories then you might need to be a bit concerned about Google and the other search engines banning your blog.

If you think your site might be banned then check the index of the search engines to see if your blogs pages are still appearing in the search rankings. Also check your stats to see if there is a big dip in the search engine traffic, because this either means you’re in the sandbox or banned. If you’re in the sandbox this could be because your domain is new and therefore you’ll need to wait a few months to regain your search engine rankings. In the meantime you should build more backlinks to your blog though.

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Can’t-Live-Without WordPress Plugins

By on October 12, 2010 in Randy Roedl

The debate rages among bloggers surrounding what are must-have plugins for WordPress. Naturally, everyone has their personal preferences that depend on what they are trying to accomplish by blogging. But I was rather horrified to read a forum post discussing WordPress plugins stating that all you need in the way of plugins, “if you have good content”, were All in One SEO Pack Google XML Sitemaps and StatPress. Now, these are great plugins and I use them all on everyone of my sites. But to say that these three are all you need, regardless of not whether your content is good, bad or mediocre, is, well, just wrong. If you want to increase your on page SEO; decrease your page load time (a key factor for ranking in Google with their latest algorithm change); hide your affiliate links and find and remove lines of code or text quickly and easily and more you need a few more plugins in your arsenal. Here is my top-ten list of great WordPress Plugins. These are all free plugins. 1) All-in-One SEO Pack–This plugin helps your SEO right out of the box, without any configuration. To increase your on-page SEO, it allows you to add title, description and keywords to make your posts more search engine friendly, but it’s not a requirement. 2) WP-Super Cache–A caching plugin is a must with Google’s new emphasis on page load speed. WP-Super Cache allows logged in users to disable caching, which is important if you are trying to do some editing on your site without the pages constantly …

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