Internet Marketing, SEO, and an extra Scoop:

Do you love wordpress as I do?

Three easy ways to find if a blog/website uses wordpress software:

• Add wp-admin to the URL and see if you can find a login page in it like thesitename.com/wp-admin
• Right click on the home page of the website and select “view page source” or “view source”. In that html source page just search for “wp” or “wordpress” you find lots of occurances.
• You will have similar content in the html “/wp-content/themes/“
• You can find a wordpress.org url in the blog footer as well.

When you do this excessively for all website/blogs you see, it shows you are a wordpress addict

After having WordPress, your favourite blog software, installed, you will need to complete the following 10 activities which by default many of the bloggers miss to. I still see many blogs with good quality content but with incomplete settings. The following 10 settings forms the basic and any complex customizations can be built over them.

1. In the general settings give a proper blog name and tagline for it.
2. Correct the url structure also to show “http://www” in general settings.
3. Make your blog visible for search engines, this is very, very important and some may miss this due to oversight. Go to privary in settings option and select the first option and save the changes.
4. Complete your profile info, with proper email, password in the users section
5. Add necessary plugins like all-in-one SEO, Google XML generator, and Socical bookmarking buttons. Socail bookmarkign buttons are very important for having your posts bookmarked. You may also have seperate twitter and facebook buttons. You can try a combination and use the one which helps in your blog traffic.
6. Change default theme to a clean custom one like thesis.
7. Remove the “Hello World” post and sample comment shown by default after you have your blog up.
8. Create About us and other mandatory pages and link them in your home page. New page can be created through page section in the dashboard.
9. Add sidebar widgets from widget section, add necessary widgets like recent posts, category, pages, and tags
10. Edit the links in link section, remove wordpress links and add your blogroll links if any.

Notes:

• Install your blog and have it up, only when you have your content, at least one post, ready. A blog with hello world or zero post is worthy nothing.
• Use the preview option after posting to your blog, this option is for testing the blog post and when you are okay, use the publish button. Publish your post only when its complete, else save the post as draft.

Action PopUp- The Ultimate Wordpress Pop-Up tool for capturing more subscribers on your blog.

BackUp Wordpress- This plugin is a Backup & Recovery Suite for your Wordpress website. It allows you to easily backup your Wordpress blog and restore previously saved versions.

Contact Form 7- This plugin will allow you to easily add contact forms to your website.

Feedburner- This plugin redirects all feeds to a Feedburner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

Google XML Sitemaps- helps you create Google sitemaps

HeadSpace 2- An extremely powerful all-in-one SEO plugin.

All in One SEO Pack- The All in One SEO Pack is another top-notch SEO plugin.

MaxBlogPress Favicon- Easily add a favicon to your blog without having to edit any wordpress files.

TweetMeme Button- Allow your visitors to easily retweet your content.

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade – As you may already know, Wordpress upgrades their software quite often. However, it can be quite a job to update your Wordpress version every time they come out with an upgrade. Thankfully, this plugin automates all of that, allowing you to update Wordpress with just a few clicks.

Breadcrumb NavXT – Adds a breadcrumb navigation system to your
Wordpress blog.

WP SuperCache – This plugin is an extremely efficient page caching system that will make your site much faster and responsive. This plugin is very useful for handling sudden bursts of traffic coming from social bookmarking sites like Digg, Twitter, and Delicious. WP-Super Cache basically creates static versions of your pages so that they can be served to your visitors without querying the MySQL database.

Popularity Contest – This plugin will help you see which of your posts are most popular.

SexyBookmarks- This plugin allows your readers to quickly and easily share your posts on all of their favorite social media sites.

Disqus Comment System – Disqus is truly revolutionizing the blog comment system, allowing you to instantly turn your blog into a social media community. Disqus allows you to create a much more interactive blog community that connects seamlessly with all of the top social media sites online.

If you want to build a stronger community on your blog, connects seamlessly with all of the top social media sites online via blog comments, and increase the viral promotion of each of your posts, then Disqus is definitely for you.

MobilePress – With mobile devices becoming more and more popular, you’ll want to make your mobile users as happy as possible. This plugin allows you to do that by turning your Wordpress blog into a mobile friendly blog.

SEO Slugs – This plugin can help you optimize your blog post URLs for search engines.

Wordpress Duplicate Content Cure – The default Wordpress structure can create lots of duplicate content within your website with the same archives, categories, and built in search pages. Each of these pages feature excerpts of the full posts with the same content repeated over and over again, which dilutes the value of the most important pages on your site, which are the posts and pages.

Pretty Link – This plugin allows you to cloak your affiliate links with ease. Using this plugin you no longer have to build redirects by hand or upload a bunch of PHP files to your server. Pretty Link allows you to shrink, track, and share any URL on the internet from your Wordpress site..

Search Unleashed – Replaces the standard Wordpress Search function
with something that’s much more powerful.

Internal Link Building – Optimize the internal link structure of your Wordpress blog. Very Powerful!!

Premium Wordpress Themes:
Some very neat WP Premium themes are available at:

http://www.studiopress.com

http://www.woothemes.com

http://wpremix.com

http://www.wpzoom.com

http://www.elegantthemes.com

http://gorillathemes.com

http://freebiesdock.com/freemium-wordpress-theme

http://www.boxedart.com