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WordPress is one of the most well known blogging platforms. In recent years it has evolved so much that people like myself use it as the CMS of choice for all their websites. As well as this you can install a wide range of plugins, acting like extensions/add-ons to the WordPress platform, that can really help your site or blog in many ways. Here are 8 plugins I make sure I have on all WordPress sites:

1. WordPress SEO by Yoast

2. Google Analytics

Another plugin by Joost de Valk, which helps you connect your WordPress site to a Google Analytics account. If you are interested in analytical data this is a great plugin as it lets you segment data directly from the plugin settings page so you don’t have to learn code yourself!

3. W3 Total Cache

Google doesn’t like websites that take a long time to load. In fact, they actually use page load time as a factor on where to rank your site in their search results. This plugin helps this by using a number of methods to reduce page load time.

4. WP Smush.it

smush.it is a service owned by Yahoo! that lets you compress your images to the lowest filesize without reducing any quality whatsoever. Simple really! If you already have a bunch of images on your site that’s fine – there is an option to “bulk smush.it” which will go through each image already uploaded and compress them for you.

5. Facebook Comments

I developed this one This plugin inserts the Facebook Comments system into your site and places it above the native WordPress comments form. Once installed and configured you can then manage all comments within your Facebook account. I use this for a few reasons:

1. There is less spam activity as you need to be logged into your Facebook, Yahoo!,  AOL or Hotmail account.
2. The comments are now indexed by Google, which means they are more SEO friendly than they were a month ago
3. When someone comments on a post or page, the comment can be posted to their Facebook profile. This adds a social aspect to your site as the comment will appear on their friends’ news feed with links back to your site

6. Twitter Feed

Another one I developed. This feed is a more SEO friendly way to output your latest tweets, search results, hashtags, mentions and favourites into your site. Using a simple shortcode is all you need to do to insert the feed and is highly configurable.

7. Gravity Forms

This last one isn’t free but I use it all the time and is, in my opinion, well worth the money. This plugin takes contact forms to a whole new level! This highly versatile plugin helps you insert forms of any kind into your site from a simple contact form and questionnaire to a fully fledged entry form to create new posts within your own site. Everything can be configured from what is asked, whether new questions should be asked based on what has been entered already, and your thank you message once the form has been completed.

8. Simple URLs

This plugin lets you manage outbound links and track them by clicks. So, for example, your blog site is at myblogname.com. Your link to somewhere you want to track outside of the site is abc.com. Instead of directly linking to abc.com you can make a Simple URL like myblogname.com/go/abc. This is good for a number of reasons. The main reason I use, is to use them for affiliate links. This way they are easier to give out to people, they’ll be tracked and you can keep them within your own domain and change where they link to at any time.

This article was written by Alex Moss, partner at Manchester SEO agency Pleer. He provides freelance SEO for all kinds of businesses as well as developing WordPress Plugins. You can find him on Linkedin or follow him on Twitter.
Follow @alexmoss

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The home page for IFTT simply reads: “Put the internet to work for you”

It’s so simple, you think somebody must have invented this before, but to be honest this is the first time we’ve come across IFTT or any of its ilk and we love it.

So what is IFTT?

Well IFTT stands for “If This Then That”. In programming terms its the very basic function that makes the internet, applications, operating systems and the like, all work. Now with the help of APIs and some clever tweaks it is being put to use on the internet and internet driven applications.

So if everytime you take a photo with your phone app you want it published to Twitter and stored in your online drive you can. The very steps that might take you an hour to manually complete, you can automate within seconds. You just use IFTT to set up the triggers and hey presto no more worrying about human error meaning a missed-out step.

It is all based around tasks, triggers and actions. Simply choose the channel – Facebook, Google Calendar, etc and follow the step-by-step instructions. You can turn actions on or off, edit them or delete them. Yet its value is in the fact that if you set it up once correctly, you may never need to worry again, you can automate the ‘knock-on’ actions.

You’ve probably been using similar tools without knowing. Plug-ins that automatically tweet your latest blog, automating Facebook comments to be tweeted etc. Yet IFTTT goes even further. You can even include the weather. We’ve just set-up an auto-tweet to send out a message to our followers when the weather is predicted to drop below 5 degrees C. So like other tools you can schedule your tweets but with IFTTT that needn’t be based on time, it can be based on various other conditions. What’s more you don’t need a smartphone to use it, just a plain, simple browser.

We are only just getting to grips with IFTTT ourselves but what we’ve seen so far we love.  We’re sure there will be many clones to follow. Life just got easier.

Have you used IFTTT? Can you recommend anything similar?

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If you are not up on the lingo, bounce-rate refers to the percentage of visitors that leave a site directly from a specific page. It may sound complicated, but with a simple free analytics tool and following these 6 tips you can soon be understanding it and addressing any high bounce-rate pages with success.

1. Don’t cheat on Keywords

You might think it is clever to use high-traffic keywords but if the traffic you drive to your site has no relation to what they were searching for, what’s the point. You will only serve to frustrate and see those visitors leave straight away.

2. Get your design right

When people click through to your site they want to know 1) they can trust you 2) that they will find what they were looking for 3) that they will enjoy their visit. If your site looks disorganised or is in garish colours your first impression will be all wrong and the click through will be wasted – more importantly if they arrive via a PPC campaign, your investment will have been wasted.

3. Optimize your page load
Just as the look of your design is important, so is the back end of that page. If your page is cluttered with code and tracking links that take ages to load, you may lose your visitor before they even have a chance to read what you have to say.

4. Get the content right
The written word is a powerful tool if used correctly. Not only can it grab the attention of your visitors when they first open up the page but you should also make sure you are using the headers and tags correctly so that the correct text is being displayed in search engines after their robots have trawled and listed your page.

5. Get link-building
In the era of social networking there is no excuse not to have a wide-range of good links pointing to your pages. Link them to specific anchor txt and you can lure in targetted traffic too, which is much less likely to bounce once on your site.

6. Use analytics to improve your pages
Google Analytics is one of thousands of website tools that allows you to examine bounce-rates. Make sure you have an account ser-up and relevant code on every page. Highlight what pages in your site have the highest bounce rate and then analyse why. Google Analytics for example allows to you rank per average time on the site, the other pages visitors viewed and also how they arrived at your site / page. Patterns are usually easy to spot. Perhaps an old listing on a well-used web forum, or maybe a coding issue on a specific page. A few tweaks and you could soon be lowering your bounce rate.

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As it battles to retain a hold on the mobile phone market Nokia has announced a deal to offer free wi-fi in London. Partnering with Spectrum Interactive, Nokia is to launch a two-month trial of a free wi-fi service in central London. If the trial proves successful, there are plans to extend the service in early 2012. With the Olympics and the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2012, London is expecting record tourist numbers and with the majority of those expected to be part of the smartphone generation, WiFi will be a key asset in attracting customer loyalty.

Under the trial scheme Nokia has set up 26 wi-fi hotspots mostly concentrated around shopping areas in the West End of London and mainline rail stations. Users of the service will not need to register or sign in to the hotspots be located on public phone boxes owned and operated by Spectrum Interactive. To avoid abuse download speeds will be limited to a maximum of 1 megabit per user but more than enough for users to stay in touch via email etc.

Free wi-fi services are already widely available in London but usually within privately-owned buildings and frequently requiring payment for a service or product from the business hosting the WiFi signal. Often they also require sign-up to an account by a third-party operator, sometimes ‘free’ actually meaning purchase of a limited amount of data usage.

Other plans for free WiFi in the capital, including via the London Underground, in time for the London 2012 Olympics have been mooted but Nokia’s move is the first to go live.

Do you ever use public WiFi? If not, what puts you off?

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Image: Danilo Rizzuti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Time: We’re always complaining we don’t have enough time to get things done. However, as a marketer no day should go by without getting up to date with your website analytics. Results matter so you have to check and see if your marketing efforts are paying off.

This article covers a few simple steps you should follow at least once a week so you can stay up to date with your site’s metrics. This is what you have to check:

Traffic

Traffic should be the first thing on your list. No matter the type of website you own/run getting traffic to your site is as important as air. And you don’t want to run out of air, do you?

When you check to see what your site’s traffic looks like, focus mainly on the number of visitors – unique as well as returning. Try to find out from this data what drove visitors to your site in a certain period of time or at a peak – maybe you ran a marketing campaign, sent an e-mail newsletter or ran a special offer. If your traffic was lower compared to a previous month, try to determine the factors that lead to a decrease – were there holidays, for instance, that could influence it?

Conversions

How is your site performing in terms of conversions? You can have a huge amount of traffic but if your visitors don’t convert, it means you’re doing something wrong. Check to see your call-to-actions, special offers or anything that would convince the visitor to convert. Take a closer look at the pages with low conversion rates and figure out how to include more opportunities for your visitors that they wouldn’t want to miss out on. Obviously, check the copy too as there might be something missing there.

Sources

Take a look at the organic searches, marketing campaigns, social media traffic, direct traffic and see if there’s a trend that catches your attention. What about the referral traffic? Anything interesting there? Use the inbound links to see if maybe there’s a linking opportunity there – maybe offer to write a guest post to generate more traffic to your site. If your blog posts are also generating traffic, check to see which ones are the most engaging and create more topics around that type of content.

Keywords

Analyze the keywords and see which ones have converted better. On the other hand, don’t neglect those keywords with low conversion rates because often these are opportunities you need to explore more. Write down these keywords and remember to use them in future content and blog posts. For an even better positioning, try to avoid general keywords and instead go with long-tail variations that are more specific to your business.

ROI

You are investing time and money in to your website, but are you generating sales to provide a return on that investment? See how you can reduce costs where possible.

As a conclusion, don’t just analyse. Review those stats but also write down some actions that need to be taken in order to constantly improve your marketing efforts.

How often do you review your site’s metrics? What metrics do you consider to be the most relevant?

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