Matt Cutts who is one of the faces of Google recently gave a great interview to The WordPress Podcast with lots of good tips on how to properly promote your site.
This is about an hour long, but well worth a listen. The beginning is a bit tech-ish, but hang in there it gets good.
There’s a WordPress slideshow program that I use, like and recommend. It’s called ShowTime Slideshow.
You can just plug it in and it works great, but you can also change almost any setting for your show.
First you post your text and then put your images at the end of the post, in thumbnails one right after the other.
Use the thumbnail mode and press the “link to image” button. So if your visitor clicks one they will see the larger image.
Then anywhere that you want the slideshow to appear you add
You get
(post continues past slideshow)
If the visitor’s browser can’t see the slideshow, it degrades nicely.
You get a row of clickable thumbnails.
Wade Richards is my customer. Have a look at his site.
He’s a musician using wordpress tools to promote his business and doing a good job of it.
When I make a website, I like to keep the actual content as plain text and css. Especially in the header section.
There are things that you always want to be found for, like your name and contact information.
Sometimes fancy effects can make the important stuff harder to see and that’s not good.
There are lots of cool toys, and widgets, but I like to keep them mostly in the sidebars, out of the content.
WordPress has a feature that you might like.
On any of your posts click the Preview Changes “Status: Published Edit” link and there is a checkbox which will make the post the first one to show in the listings (sticky).
You can use this for your featured listings.
This feature is also available on the “edit” –> “quick edit” menu
When first starting or adding to a website one of the first things that you want to do is to decide on which keywords to target. These words should be action words to get your visitors to do whatever it is that you want them to do when they land on one of your pages.
Usually a new client will ask me which keywords should I pick and how do I use them? I usually first explain that keywords can be and usually are more than one word. How it can be very hard to get to the top of a search results page for a one or two word keyword that is very competitive (like “web design”). It can be much easier to get to the top spot for a more narrow keyword (“web design Pittsburgh”, “web designer western PA” or “WordPress expert Pittsburgh”), but because the action inferred from that keyword is more specific to what you do, the traffic from a search term like that may also convert to sales better if you pick the right one.
Another great advantage in more targeted keywords is if you are buying keyword ads you can save quite a bit of money not getting clicks that aren’t really interested in what you have to offer.
It’s always best to have one unique page per keyword and to use your keyword once in the main headline, maybe once more in the sub-headline and a couple of times in the body text. It’s a good idea to read the page out loud before it’s published to see if it sounds spammy. If you have overused your keyword it may be considered spam by the search engines or worse by your human visitors.
To help my clients pick good keywords I have been sending them to a older post where I suggested some free keyword research tools (two of the three still work). I’m writing this post today because I found a new free keyword tool from WordStream and I thinks it works really well so I’m now recommending it to everyone.
The other day I wrote about how I sometimes find myself trying to talk a client out of doing something one way or another. Some of those times my client will decide to do things their way. I will then do what the customer wants because they are the customer and they know their customers better than I do.
Sometimes it works out well and sometimes not so well. Yesterday I read a post on the Wilson Ellis Consulting blog called Are Your Personal Preferences Costing You Money? They wrote about almost the same thing. It’s really impossible to know what will work for a site and what won’t, unless you try everything and thoroughly test your results.
I wrote the other day how much I like using WordPress for other things beside this blog. WordPress Can Do Anything
Today I found another great post with all kind of more things that you can do with the new WordPress 2.8 on the 1stwebdesigner site. They have great resources and tools.
More and more these days I find myself recommending WordPress for much more things than just blogging. I’ve found that WP can be used to do just about anything the the best content management systems (CMS) can do and to me it’s by far the most user friendly and easy to learn system that there is.
There are so many great things that WordPress can do that it’s impossible to list them all here. Now with widgets you can do even more. Smashing Magazine has a great post on thing you can do with widgets on WP. It can give you even more great ideas as to what WordPress can do.
Read more about what WordPress can do
It never fails. Yesterday I wrote about removing the nofollow attribute from my WordPress comments and then last night there was an update that put it back. I also found out that the nofollow goes back further than I thought so I was just not paying attention.
The update was broken by the way (it’s a good thing that I can write html) so there is another one coming soon
If you don’t want to do it yourself I did a quick search and found quite a few plugins that will remove the nofollow for you.
I also found a great post on the Web Pro News site by Chris Crum. He gives some very good reasons why you want comments on your blog. They are important and valuable so why would I want to discourage commenters by adding the nofollow attribute to them.
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