Boost Exposure With These Tips And Plugins

A cou­ple of notes. First off, my per­sonal coach­ing pro­gram has room for three more stu­dents. As a mem­ber, you can ask me unlim­ited ques­tions, one ques­tion at a time, which I will answer. This is a great oppor­tu­nity to be men­tored by me, personally.

Sec­ond, one of my stu­dents in my per­sonal coach­ing pro­gram, asked: “Michel, I’m start­ing a blog using Word­Press. Do you have any gen­eral tips on things like lay­out, plu­g­ins, design, etc?”

In my last arti­cle, I talked about the fact that I don’t spend much time on search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO). How­ever, I didn’t want to con­vey the idea that SEO doesn’t work. It cer­tainly does.

One web­site my wife and I launched late last year went to #3 in Google for a very generic key­word in just 5 days, and finally reached #1 in just 9 days. So SEO does work. In fact, it was a con­tent site using Word­Press as the con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem (CMS).

How did I accom­plish this? I do use sev­eral plu­g­ins and Word­Press as a CMS, even for non-​​blogs, because its built-​​in SEO and ping­ing func­tions do help a lot, with­out much effort. (That’s why I don’t spend much time on SEO!)

But let me give you my quick list.

Please note that this is not an exhaus­tive list. How­ever, some of these basic tips can be imme­di­ately applied to your web­site to help you get yours up to speed in very lit­tle time.

If you don’t use a blog as a way to deliver your con­tent, even for a reg­u­lar web­site, I rec­om­mend it highly. My friend Andy Beard often speaks of using a blog — par­tic­u­larly Word­Press — as a CMS for reg­u­lar web­sites, and I com­pletely agree.

(My flag­ship site at The Suc­cess Doc­tor, Inc. is com­pletely WordPress-​​driven, and it’s not even a blog.)

Other than its SEOish fea­tures, there are many other ben­e­fits — post­ing new pages and con­tent in a snap, tem­pla­tized process through­out the entire site for con­sis­tency, user-​​friendly admin­is­tra­tion panel, and more.

As for lay­outs, here are some tips:

Place Side­bar On The Right

For blogs, put your side­bar on the right. There are three rea­sons for this:

1. It opens up the left-​​hand side for cre­at­ing eye grav­ity (i.e., the “golden tri­an­gle” sec­tion, which eye­track­ing stud­ies show peo­ple read first, is a per­fect place to put impor­tant con­tent or calls to action, includ­ing AdSense ads for greater click­through ratios).
2. Peo­ple read from the left, but they scan from the right. I’ve found that putting the side­bar on the right attracts more response than the left. (But on reg­u­lar, non-​​blog sites, some­times the left is best. I’m still test­ing this.)
3. The last rea­son is, and unless you’re a cas­cad­ing stylesheet pro­fes­sional who knows how to posi­tion your con­tent, the main con­tent is on the left and read first by the search engines.

Focus On The Top­most Section

The upper­most sec­tion of your web­site (the first screen that appears the moment you land on a site), which is often called the “above the fold” sec­tion, is the most impor­tant part of your web­site. Things like main head­line, calls-​​to-​​action, opt-​​in forms, etc are best placed there.

In fact, always add an email form for peo­ple to sub­scribe to your site, and an RSS link for peo­ple to sub­scribe to your blog, in this sec­tion — espe­cially at the top­most por­tion of the sidebar.

Encour­age Email Subscriptions

Ask for peo­ple to sub­scribe to your site (in the case of a blog, offer them to sub­scribe to your feed and even to an email list, to be noti­fied of new con­tent). Make sure it’s promi­nent, par­tic­u­larly in the top­most por­tion of your side­bar, for example.

Also, put an RSS feed link, an email opt-​​in form, and, in the case of blogs, social book­mark­ing links on every page and fol­low­ing every post. Bot­tom line, encour­age at every pos­si­ble chance for peo­ple to sub­scribe to your web­site some­how — par­tic­u­larly to join your email list.

(If you use an autore­spon­der ser­vice like GetRe­sponse or Awe­ber, they also have RSS noti­fi­ca­tion ser­vices, too. Or you can use Fee​burner​.com’s native email sub­scrip­tion form, or Feed​Blitz​.com. For exam­ple, I use GetRe­sponse’s blog auto-​​notification feature.)

“Iconize” Your Pages/​Posts

Add an avatar or icon to your post or page — one that rep­re­sents some­thing related to the con­tent. Make sure the avatar is linked to the page or the whole post, as a lot of peo­ple click on the pic­ture. (I’ve tested this with CrazyEgg​.com, and 45% of click­throughs come from peo­ple click­ing on the avatars themselves.)

Some peo­ple iconize their pages and even their cat­e­gories (or web­site sec­tions), which helps read­abil­ity and encour­ages nav­i­ga­tion. For exam­ple, take a look at the main page of my flag­ship site, and you’ll notice icons for every major sec­tion in the website.

To auto­mat­i­cally jus­tify the avatars (such as in the top, left­most sec­tion of a page or post), use CSS to do this. In the Kubrick design (which is the base tem­plate I design my own themes from, and the default theme that comes with Word­Press), it has the fol­low­ing classes:

• align­left
• align­right
• img.alignleft
• img.alignright
• img.centered

You can copy these from the default theme’s stylesheet file (in the pre­sen­ta­tion sec­tion of the admin panel), to the stylesheet file of the theme you use. You then sim­ply add the CSS class “align­left” to the image tag in your page or post’s code. For example:

img src="whatever.jpg" class="alignleft"

Install These 15 Plugins

Plu­g­ins are files you sim­ply upload to your Word­Press’ plu­gin folder, and acti­vate within your admin panel. That’s all there is to it — although some plu­g­ins do require a bit of tweak­ing of your template’s code.

I use quite a few plu­g­ins with my blogs. To list them all here would take a lot more space than I wish to take. So let me list the few that are really important.

I’ve linked to their loca­tion, although some may be out­dated. To find the lat­est ones, sim­ply Google these names, along with the key­words “Word­Pess plu­gin,” and you should eas­ily find them. (You can also check out the plu­gin data­base or Word­Press’ new plu­gin direc­tory.)

1. SEO Title Tag

This plu­gin cus­tomizes the HTML title tags, and reverses tag order for SEO pur­poses. For exam­ple, rather than the default “Blog Name | Blog Post Title,” you can have “Blog Post Title | Blog Name,” where key­words are included in the title.

(It’s a known pro­to­col that search engines pay closer atten­tion to the ear­li­est appear­ance of key­words in tags. That’s why it’s impor­tant to have keyword-​​rich titles appear first in the title tag.)

2. Ulti­mate Tag Warrior

There are too many ben­e­fits of Ulti­mate Tag War­rior to list here. For now, just note that the main pur­pose is to assign key­words to your page or post, mak­ing them eas­ier to search, as well as cre­at­ing addi­tional pages for the search engines to crawl, thus increas­ing your visibility.

3. Google Sitemap Generator

Cre­at­ing an exten­si­ble markup lan­guage (XML) sitemap for Google, you encour­age the crawler to visit all your pages. To you and me, this page means rel­a­tively noth­ing. But to Google (and now the pro­to­col is also accepted by MSN and Yahoo), this page is very meaningful.

Look at it as a short­cut of sorts for the search engines, and a bea­con for them to know what they can crawl and index. Also, the plu­gin updates your sitemap at spec­i­fied inter­vals, and auto­mat­i­cally “pings” Google each time, espe­cially when new con­tent is added — telling them your site it ready to be crawled again.

4. Ulti­mate Tag Google Sitemap Add-​​On

This plu­gin is self-​​explanatory. It adds tag pages cre­ated by Ulti­mate Tag War­rior to your Google Sitemap, thereby adding more pages to be crawled. Look at it this way: this plu­gin helps to make your Ulti­mate Tag War­rior and Google Sitemap Gen­er­a­tor work together.

5. Related Posts

This one adds links to related posts at the end of each post, which is good to encour­age both crawla­bil­ity and deeper read­ing within your blog. You can also do this with Ulti­mate Tag War­rior, by the way. But I pre­fer Related Posts because of the next plugin.

6. Add Related Posts to Feed

By using this plu­gin, you add links to related posts to your RSS feeds, too. Again, the beauty of these plu­g­ins is to encour­age deeper nav­i­ga­tion, read­ing, and link­ing. In the case of RSS feeds, blog search engines and direc­to­ries — like Tech­no­rati, for instance — can more eas­ily find and crawl other pages on your site via your feeds.

7. Pop­u­lar­ity Contest

Speak­ing of encour­ag­ing deeper read­ing, by adding this plu­gin you also have the abil­ity to track which posts or pages get the most traf­fic, read­er­ship, and return vis­i­tors. You can also use it to list them, so peo­ple can see the most pop­u­lar posts on your blog in a snap.

8. Autometa

Meta-​​tags are pieces of code in the header sec­tion of your HTML code, which are read­able by some search engines. There are many meta-​​tag plu­g­ins for Word­Press. I use Autometa, par­tic­u­larly for meta key­words. This plu­gin cre­ates meta-​​tags auto­mat­i­cally for you.

(But if you want more con­trol over your key­word meta-​​tag, you can use Ulti­mate Tag War­rior instead. If so, then for the descrip­tion meta-​​tag, you can use the Head Descrip­tion Tag plugin.)

9. AdSense Deluxe

With this plu­gin, I can eas­ily add Google AdSense ads to every post, page, side­bar, and more. But in spite of its name, the plu­gin also allows you to add any code, graphic, or piece of con­tent, in spec­i­fied blocks, to your blog — and not just ads.

10. Semiologic’s DoFol­low

I described the beauty — and my rea­son­ing — for using this plu­gin in a pre­vi­ous post about dump­ing the default nofol­low attribute. It’s partly for increas­ing crawla­bil­ity, espe­cially inter­nally, and partly for reward­ing com­men­ta­tors to my blog.

11. Ping­Fix

One of the many rea­sons why Word­Press is such a great con­tent deliv­ery sys­tem is cer­tainly because of its native ping­ing process. That is, when you post a new entry, page, or arti­cle, it auto­mat­i­cally pings a vari­ety of search engines and direc­to­ries. Ping­Fix sim­ply enhances this feature.

12. Sub­scribe To Comments

One of the most impor­tant things you can do to your blog, as men­tioned ear­lier, is to encour­age peo­ple to return to it as much as pos­si­ble. This requires in large part the addi­tion of email opt-​​in forms and RSS feeds.

But this plu­gin noti­fies by email your blog’s com­men­ta­tors of new com­ments within a thread in which they have par­tic­i­pated. By encour­ag­ing con­ver­sa­tions within your blog, you are also increas­ing greater key­word den­sity to your posts and pages that are indexed.

(You wouldn’t believe how much traf­fic I get because of some key­words included within the com­ments’ sec­tion of my blog. The more com­ments you get, the greater the key­word den­sity, and the greater the expo­sure will be.)

13. Enforce www. Pref­er­ence and
14. Perma­link Redirect

These two plu­g­ins are incred­i­bly impor­tant, and I’ve placed them together for a very impor­tant reason.

Search engines some­times do not rec­og­nize dif­fer­ent URLs (web­site addresses) as being the same when dif­fer­ent pro­to­cols are used to access them. For exam­ple, to you and me, the fol­low­ing URLs are the same and all lead to the same page:

• your​blog​.com
• your​blog​.com/
• your​blog​.com/​i​n​d​e​x​.​php
• www​.your​blog​.com
• www​.your​blog​.com/
• www​.your​blog​.com/​i​n​d​e​x​.​php

But to the search engines, how­ever, these URLs rep­re­sent six dif­fer­ent web pages. If peo­ple link to sev­eral of these pages, your pager­ank will suf­fer as a result of what is com­monly referred to as “pager­ank bleed­ing.” Also, it may cause your pages to be flagged for dupli­cate con­tent, thereby being unnec­es­sar­ily penalized.

The above plu­g­ins solve this prob­lem by redi­rect­ing users — and search engines — to one, sin­gle URL. (With Perma­link Redi­rect, you can also redi­rect your blog’s native feed URL to third-​​party ser­vices like Feed​burner​.com.)

And finally…

15. Socia­ble

We talked about email forms and RSS feeds. In addi­tion, this plu­gin adds links to social book­mark­ing and net­work­ing sites for quick, one-​​click use. You can add them to every post and page, and even on other parts of your blog such as the sidebar.

If some­one has an account with any of these pop­u­lar social link­ing ser­vices, like Digg, del​.icio​.us, MyYa­hooWeb, Netscape, Red­dit, Furl, Stum­ble­Upon, and more, they sim­ply need to click on a link to instantly add the page or post to their account, and share them with the rest of the world.

(Aside from encour­ag­ing link pop­u­lar­ity, crawla­bil­ity, and traf­fic, this plu­gin also uses icons to make them eas­ier to spot and use by the read­ers of your blog. For me, Digg, del​.icio​.us, and Tech­no­rati are def­i­nitely must-​​haves.)

I think that’s about it (that’s com­ing to my mind right now). Admit­tedly, there are quite a few other plu­g­ins in use, and I may list more of them at a later time. But these are def­i­nitely the most impor­tant ones on my list.

Want More?

Hope­fully, this will help you. And keep in mind, this a reprint of an answer I gave a coach­ing stu­dent, and the kind of answers I give with my per­sonal coach­ing pro­gram.

If you want to be part of my men­tor­ing club, join now while the three avail­able spots — and the low price — are still avail­able. I’m sure that these spots will be taken before the end of the day. So I urge you to act quickly.

I’ll leave you with a ques­tion. What plu­g­ins do YOU use that have cre­ated vis­i­ble results with your blog? Please add them in the com­ments below.

About the Author

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