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Here are some of my favorite WordPress plugins for traffic and conversion.
You probably already know why WordPress is pretty much a favorite content management system…it’s flexible, SEO friendly, easy to work with, and most of all, it has so many awesome WordPress plugins that make complex tasks easy.
1. All In One SEO Pack
The be all and end all plugin for SEO. It generates meta tags automatically, it allows you to setup your URL canonicalization properly, and all in all, sets up your on-page SEO to give you a strong foundation for your link building efforts. A must have for all WordPress blogs.
WordPress plugins for analytics and site maps
2. Ultimate GA
Ultimate GA is the easiest way to set up Google Analytics on your blog. Since I’ve learned how important it is to track everything properly, WordPress plugins have been the easiest way that we’ve found to setup Google Analytics on your blog.
3. Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps will automatically generate a sitemap of your website – making it easier for Google to crawl your site. It’s imperative that you have a sitemap and this is the easiest way to get one set up.
4. Akismet
No one is going to respect your blog or take you seriously if it’s covered in spam comments. Akismet is a very powerful WordPress plugin that will crush spam comments before they show up on your site.
WordPress plugins for the other fast rising technology
5.WPtouch Iphone Theme
With more and more people browsing the web from their phones – it’s important to have your site optimized for mobile browsers. If you’ve ever looked at sites that are not optimized – they are hard to use on mobile phones. This plugin will set your page up so that it looks great and easy to use on mobile web browsers.
6. UpPrev: NYtimes Style “Next Post” animated Button
This is one of my favorite plugins – you see it on our site when you scroll to the bottom of each blog post. It shows a “Next Post” button when you scroll to the bottom of the screen, keeping readers engaged and pushing them through your website. It is an awesome plugin to keep people on your site – building your relationship with them and ideally, getting them more interested in buying your products!
7. Thank Me Later
This is a great WordPress plugin that automatically sends an e-mail to commenters on your website thanking them for commenting on your blog. It’s great for visitor retention – and c’mon, how many times have you been personally thanked for commenting on someone’s blog? It’s sure to stick in your visitors head and they’ll definitely become return visitors.
8. Broken Link Checker
If you’ve got broken links, you lower peoples trust in your website – they’re going to ask “Does this guy take himself seriously?”. Always important to make sure all the links on your site are working properly and you’re not sending people to dead ends.
9. Sharebar
Another neat plugin that Tom and I really like a lot – the share bar is the thing you see on the left side of the page that follows you as you scroll. It gives the option of customizing what “Sharing” mechanism is there – be it Twitter, Stumbleupon, Facebook, etc. It looks sharp and works great. (P.S. I also like Sharedaddy plugin)
10. Facebook Comments For WordPress
This is a great plugin to add a ‘viral’ aspect to your website. It allows people to post comments with their Facebook profiles, and the comments they post will show up on their Facebook account for everyone to see. A very easy way to get more eyes to your website.
There are 100’s of great WordPress plugins, but these are my top favorites. Which ones do you use on your website? What are your favorite WordPress plugins? Let us know in the comments!
Don’t Know WordPress Yet? NO Problem… Learn The EASY Way HERE
Filed under Wordpress Plugins by on Mar 30th, 2011. 
Without SEO, what do you think you’re building with?
I’ve never seen a building that was built from the roof down. I know that sounds ridiculous, but that is exactly the way many website owners think they can build one. We spend hours and days trying to get traffic to our sites without building from the ground up! Unless the foundation is laid, there’s nothing that you can drive a nail into.
I’ve done everything from article submission to social media to videos, to try and drive traffic to my sites and get a higher page rank. Guess what happened? Very little!
Then, I decided to do seo on two sites, but never really did anything else to get traffic… I did nothing of any consequence on these sites like I did with the others and yet, I started seeing a higher page ranking!
SEO is the absolute most powerful thing you can do to build the foundation of any website!
When I checked back on these two sites months later, I couldn’t believe that one site had a page rank of 2! A Page rank of 2 and I never added any more content, added no more links, had made NO changes whatsoever and yet I now had a Page Rank 2! Do you see the power of seo?
If you already have a site that is ranking, but have not fully done the seo on all pages of the site, you will be pleasantly surprised at how much difference it makes. It could take you up 2 or more page ranks very quickly.
What’s the real reason most people don’t want to do seo?
Simple… it’s work and it’s complicated to remember every little detail that needs to be done to get it perfect! Anytime it’s complicated and takes too much effort, most of us just don’t do it!
If I told you that there is an easy way to get the job done and get your web or blog pages fully optimized so the search engines just love your site, would that sound good to you? It sure did to me, but that’s not what really got me excited about using seo to maximize my rankings.
I bought an expensive seo suite of search engine optimization tools for my html sites and it requires a constant monthly fee to use. I hate monthly fees!
Well, if you use WordPress themes for your blogs or websites, which you should, then this plugin for seo will absolutely be the best news for you since “sliced bread!” (In fact, I’m using it right now as I write this article!) Every time I add to the article, I simply save the draft and look at my seo score on the right seo pressor score box!
I know exactly how the seo spiders will look at my page. It even does many tasks for me automatically, like bold my keywords, italicize my keywords and underline my keywords, without me having to lift a finger!
It’s like having a seo professional walking me through “every step” of my article, so I get it just right! It is without a doubt, one of the very best values I’ve spent money on since starting in this business!
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Mar 4th, 2011.
We all know that Google changes their algorithm like we change underwear. (Well, hopefully you do anyway…)
What happens when you type a keyword into the Google search box? Your query is sent to Google machines and compared with all the documents stored in their index to identify the most relevant matches. In less than a second, their system “spits out” a list of the most relevant pages and also determines the relevant sections of text, images, videos and more. What you get is a list of search results with relevant information presented in “snippets” beneath each result.
Google always tries to give you “exactly what you want.” That’s been the goal from the beginning.
The “new” key ingredients of Google search in 2011 are:
Relevance
Comprehensiveness
Freshness
Speed
- Relevance. Google’s one main innovation was Page Rank, a technology that determined the “importance” of a webpage by looking at what other pages link to it, as well as other data. Today they use more than 200 signals, including Page Rank, to order websites, and they update these algorithms on a weekly basis. (They offer personalized search results based on the web history and location.)
- Comprehensiveness. In 1998 Google launched with about 25 million pages, which even then was a small fraction of the web. Today they index billions and billions of web pages, and their index is roughly 100 million gigabytes. They continue investing to expand the comprehensiveness of their services. In 2007 they introduced Universal Search, which made search more comprehensive by integrating images, videos, news, books and much more into their main search results.
- Freshness. In the early days, Google bots crawled the web every three or four months, which meant that the information you found on Google typically was out of date. Today, they’re continually crawling the web, ensuring that you can find the latest news, blogs and status updates minutes or even seconds after they’re posted. With Realtime Search, they’re able to provide us with breaking topics from a comprehensive set of sources, just moments after events occur.
- Speed. Their average query response time is about one-fourth of a second. The average blink of an eye is one-tenth of a second. Speed is a major search priority now, which is why they don’t turn on new features if they will slow down their services. Instead, search engineers are always working on new features and ways to make search even faster. In addition to smart coding, on the back end they’ve developed distributed computing systems around the globe that ensure you get fast response times. With technologies like auto complete and Google Instant, they help you find the search terms and results you’re looking for before you’re even finished typing.
Since these are the areas that Google is focusing on, shouldn’t you be working on these areas to improve your sites traffic? You should be…
If you want an SEO, Internet Marketing Company that works toward those goals in tandem with Googles algorithms, give us a call or go to our website for a FREE look at your current SEO efforts.
We can tell you where to start. http://abundantlifeconsultingservices.com/
Filed under Google, Internet Marketing by on Feb 15th, 2011.
by Michelle MacPhearson
I had a great idea for a business about 2 weeks ago. Checked the domain name and it was available. Quickly plotted out a no-fail traffic strategy in my mind. Did some brief checks on dropshipping and production of the physical goods and everything was A-OK. It looked golden.
Still, I decided to sleep on it. What looks like a stroke of genius at 11pm can, and often does, pale in interestingness as soon as the next day.
Next morning comes and I still really like the idea. But I didn’t go ahead with it (yet). Why?
To have a successful business, you’ve got to get radically, painfully honest with yourself.
And that means being 100% dead-on truthful about the current status of your projects and whether you can realistically take on additional projects.
Last week Lynn Terry wrote this about taking ONE site from start to profit:
I always recommend that you focus 100% on ONE site or project – all the way from start to profit. And then to maximum profit potential, even… Your website is not finished until you’ve targeted every keyword phrase related to your topic, and you have a Top 3 ranking for each of them.
While I don’t necessarily advocate only working on ONE site at a time, the heart of the message I absolutely agree with, and that is….
RADICAL INTERNET MARKETING HONESTY
- If you’re about to start a new business project, you better be done with the ones already on your plate!
Interestingly enough, folks often consider themselves “done” with a site/project because they find it’s not profitable. They’re not ranking high enough quickly enough and jump to thinking something must be wrong with the (keyword research, backlinks, conversion, traffic volume, etc.) data.
We lie to ourselves. We ignore and hide parts of the truth. We don’t want to be the one responsible for shitty results. I think Seth calls it the “lizard brain.”
Fact is, most of the time, a lack of ranking, income, traffic etc. is directly related to our lack of actually being DONE with a project we once started with the best of intentions. We get bored. New ideas beckon to us. The work of content creation or link building gets tedious. So we lie in our own heads and say the work has been done.
It’s human nature, so we don’t need to get down on ourselves because of it. We just need to be aware, because once we’re aware of a habit or behavior, we can change it.
5 WAYS TO BE RADICALLY HONEST ABOUT YOUR IM BUSINESS
What does it mean to be “done” with a project? For those of us who build content / affiliate sites, here are some questions to ask yourself when you think you’re “done”:
- Did you do your keyword research? I mean really, really DO your keyword research. How competitive is your market? How many links, what PR, what types of linking domains do you need to beat your competition? How much traffic will you get at the #1 position for your top 5 keyphrases?
- Since you’ve got all the data to clobber your competition backlinks-wise, did you REALLY go out and get all those links? Do you have an internal linking plan as well? If you run your backlinks against your competition in Yahoo & Google, are you kicking the competition in the rear? Are the links you got really comparable (in PR, type of domains, variety of unique class C’s, hosts, registrars) to your competition? Is your anchor text comparably varied? Did you build links and are ranking for more than just your main KW phrase?
- Perhaps you’ve got your rank and your traffic but the site isn’t bringing in the kind of money you think you should be making. Have you tried different monetization methods (Adsense, affiliate offers, CPA offers, etc.)? Have you split-tested those different monetization methods against each other? Have you split-tested the size, color, placement of those monetization methods? This is how you maximize your revenue.
- Is your content crap? Really though, is it bad? Google announced on Friday that, “we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.” If you’re running a pure autoblogging kind of set-up or other scraper site, you may be headed for a drop in rankings – or that could already be the reason you’re not getting the ranking you want. But even if you’re using original content, if visitors are hitting your site and they immediately think it sucks, they’re likely to hit the “Back” button instead of one of your monetization methods. Check your bounce rate – lower is better. Get real – is your content good enough to engage a real visitor?
- Are you building a list? Are you offering an incentive to encourage new subscribers to join? Have you split-tested opt-in boxes and call to action text? Do you have a follow up sequence in place for your list? Do you also broadcast to your list frequently to keep them coming back to your site or to introduce them to new products / services you have available?
Most of the time, there are still things to try before we have to turn in the towel, hang our heads and realize all this internet marketing nonsense was a waste of time.
You’re not done until the questions above are done.
But the good news on the flip side is, you haven’t failed until you’ve done all those things too.
Filed under Internet Marketing by on Jan 25th, 2011.
More often than not, marketers jump into SEO without being fully prepared. Although it is easy to do, it could eventually have harmful effects on the business. In this interview with WebProNews, Heather Lutze, the Director/Owner of the Findability Group and the author of The Findability Formula, explains how marketers need to understand the foundation for setting up an effective search marketing plan in order to have maximum findability.
As she discusses, there are many dangers with jumping into search. For starters, the technicalities can quickly overwhelm people. Search efforts are also often isolated to one division, such as PPC. As a result, businesses could end up missing out on a lot of benefits they could be receiving from search. Another danger is that many marketers think they know what their searchers want, when they actually do not.
“Don’t stand in judgment of your own search, let your searchers tell you what they want,” says Lutze.
She goes on to point out that marketers need to focus on all 3 areas of search. These areas are PPC, SEO, and Social Media. She says if a business really wants to be findable, it needs to be where users expect it to be. Since it’s difficult to know where the users are, she advises being present in all 3 areas.
By utilizing these 3 components, businesses can develop a consistent message across all its channels, which will increase their chances of being findable.
Are you getting the maximum findability out of search? Watch the video HERE
Filed under Marketing Online by on Aug 11th, 2010.
