It didn’t matter if I was registered with someone’s blog or not – the picture I added to my profiles didn’t show up! Then I heard about Gravatars (“Globally Recognised Avatar”).

Here’s how it works:

• You sign up for a f’ree account at http://en.gravatar.com/
• Enter your primary email address on the sign-up page, check for the confirmation email, click the confirmation link, and your account has been created.
• Now you can upload your photo (a square image – 80 x 80 pixels is ideal) which will be associated with your primary email address web-wide.
• You can add other email addresses and associate them with different photos/images if you like.

Once you’ve done this, whenever you post a comment on a blog which has “Gravatar” activated (and a lot of them have nowadays), your picture will appear next to your comment if there is one associated with the email address you use in posting the comment.

That’s all there is to it.

Simple

I suggest that you go and set up your gravatar right away – it will help to build your image and reputation online.

1. Akismet - stops comment spam almost completely;  installed automatically with all WordPress installations; you just need to activate it with a WordPress API key;
2. WordPress Database Backup – this backs up your WP content with this plugin & emails it to you on the schedule that you choose; you must ensure you also have Hosting backups of files too
3. Google XML Sitemap – prepares a sitemap for the search engines & pings them when it is updated. You may need to do your first build manually (depending on your hosting), but it will be automatic after that.
4. Platinum SEO Pack - this is one of the most useful plugins. Search Engines pay MOST attention to Title Tags, so use this plugin to add keywords into your Title Tags, as well as descriptions on static pages and important posts, and of course keywords!
5. Ping Optimizer – you need to register for this plugin (you can unsubscribe once you have activated it within WordPress); it ensures you avoid “ping spam”.
6. Broken Link Checker – a simple plugin that validates links on your blog – allows you to fix or delete broken links, so ensuring that you have worthwhile & up-to-date info for your visitors
7. Page Link Manager – this allows you to stop pages showing in the navigation bar at the top of your WP site; the widget version controls pages in your sidebar.
8. Google Analytics – I use the plugin “WP Google Analytics“, but there are many good ones to choose from.
   *** VERY IMPORTANT : if you use Google Analytics, you are legally obliged, under their TOS, to have a privacy policy that mentions that you use cookies on your website.
9. cforms +++ – this plugin is free, but not in the WP directory; you can download it from http://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin/; it allows multiple variations of contact forms within one site, which get emailed to you if someone fills one in.
10. Onlywire & Tweet This – these plugins allow visitors to your site to Tweet about your post/site, or submit the URL to social bookmarking sites.

Here are a few extra plugins that are quite handy too, but not essential:

• Top Commentator – this plugin allows you to encourage competition among your commentators; this will be more effective once you have a community that are actually commenting on your posts.
• Clickbank Hopad – you need a Clickbank account first

+++with some plugins, you can use almost any variation from within the Plugin repository, but with others I strongly recommend you stick with my recommendation.

WARNING:

Do be careful when adding too many plugins; some are not well coded and can completely crash your site… I know, I’ve done it!! The list of plugins above works, and they work well together, so they should be a good start for you all.

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Here is a summary of 8 excellent tips to improving the SEO of your blog:

1. Content is King - quality, relevance, freshness … you can’t underestimate the importance of content!
2. Anticipate What People Will be Searching For – how will people search for information that YOU want them to find? Remember write you keyword list from your visitors perspective, not the perspective of your thoughts or what you have written in the post.
3. Titles Titles Titles – structure your post titles carefully (include keywords) and make sure you populate title tags with keywords too.
4. Keywords in other parts of your post – use the keywords people will be searching for, in your post – but make them relevant and in context!
5. Link to Your Own Posts – this is a little like getting backlinks, but within your own site. But don’t over-use!
6. Links from Outside Your Blog – useful for page ranking, and attracting visitors; you can also help get backlinks by commenting in forums & other blogs, and adding in your website details where they are asked for.
7. WordPress Plugins – use the tools that WordPress contributors create; they can be pretty powerful at helping with SEO. For example, “All In One SEO Pack” makes it easier to add in title tags & keywords.
8. Readers Begat Readers – give your readers good value & interesting content, and they will tell their friends about you… and the friends will tell their friends about you … and…

Here is a link to the original article I wrote this summary from; credits to Darren Rowse of Problogger.

Enjoy this!

Cheers,

Tracey

I’m on Perry Marshall’s email list, and got this interesting email today, which will put SEO (and free traffic) into a bit more perspective for readers.

A lot of people ask me about the merits of buying clicks on search engines with AdWords, vs. getting free visitors with what’s called “search engine optimization” – loading up your web pages with strategic keywords so you can get ranked #10 or #3 or #1 on Google’s free search.

Well at first glance free is certainly better than paid, but there are some big IF’s that you need to consider first!

Remember: you can only optimize a website for maybe ten words and phrases – not hundreds – so you should choose very, very carefully.

But the most important thing is choosing the RIGHT words and phrases to optimize for.

Now here’s the kicker:

If you don’t use a pay per click strategy to determine which words and phrases actually attract paying customers first, you will almost always choose the wrong keywords. The words you initially think you want are almost always different than the ones that actually work – believe me, I’ve made that mistake many times.

Considering it takes 30 days to several months to see results when you’re playing the search engine optimization game, you CANNOT afford to target the wrong keywords.

When you do pay per click campaigns properly, you’ll see that there are almost always a few really productive words and phrases that only 2-3 people are bidding on, instead of 10 or 20 bidders. What that means is that those people are not optimizing their websites for those same keywords either.

Well just like pay per click, search engine phrases have varying degrees of competitiveness. If you want a #1 ranking for the phrase “Digital Camera” it’s going to be a LOT harder than getting a #1 ranking for “Kodak DX6340″ which is a popular digital camera. And the traffic will be much more targeted, too. When you do search engine optimization, you must pick battles you can win.

So here’s the lesson: Use my Definitive Guide to Google AdWords to properly set up a pay per click campaign, determine which keywords are productive, THEN do search engine optimization based on what really works. Then you’ll get all kinds of free traffic and even more income from your website:

http://perrymarshall.com/adwords

Recommended tools for Keyword research:
http://perrymarshall.com/google/tools.htm

Best,

Perry Marshall

So use the tools to help with free traffic, but remember FREE TRAFFIC isn’t something you can achieve overnight – you need research into keywords, coupled with a bit of advertising to get you going.

I hope you found this useful!

cheers,
Tracey
The Simple Web Company

The Automatic Blogging Plugin is a great piece of software which interfaces with the article directory “Article Base”. It’s a WordPress plugin which you upload & install in the usual way, once you have purchased it.

(Note: it is not available through the WordPress 2.7.+ “Add New Plugins” function, as this is premium (paid for) software.)

Pro’s:

• There is a long list of categories (over 300) from which to choose articles – for example, Antiques, Home Business, Education, Personal Finance, Internet Marketing, and many more.
• You can super-niche by adding in keywords e.g. within the category of Blogging, you could add the keyword “Traffic” – this means only articles about blogging and traffic will be posted to your blog.
  Warning : be careful of the combinations you use; if you become too prescriptive you might not find any matching articles, which means no posts!
• If you’re comfortable editing PHP files you could conceivably add more of your own categories. (Backup the plugin files before you do any editing!)
• You can set the post frequency to vary the time of day, so it looks less automated.
• TIP: If you go to the sales page and then exit, you get an offer to get $10 off the current price

Con’s:

• Article Base is a good article directory, but doesn’t have quite such rigorous editorial controls as EzineArticles, so I find I need to check the articles that are being posted in case small grammar changes need to be made. It’s a small price to pay though, for the convenience of the automatically generated content.
• As with all Article Directory’s TOS, you need to leave the author bio in place; you do however have the option to reduce the font size of this area so it’s a little less obvious to your blog readers.

Conclusion

Money well spent if it frees up your time to do other Marketing activities!

“Hmmm, interesting!”

The plugin “Pretty Link” has been rated 4/5 stars; you can read more about it, and download it, here.

To quote the plugin page, “Pretty Link tracks each hit on your URL and provides a full, detailed report of where the hit came from, the browser, os and host. Pretty Link is a killer plugin for people who want to mask their affiliate links, track clicks from emails, increase the reach of their website by spreading these links via Twitter, forums or comments on other blogs.”

I’ve created short URLs & have put them out on Twitter to see what happens – it’s very simple to install & administer, so worth a look. It’s too soon to check out the stats and so on, but I’ll update this post when I have some more info for you.

Hope this is useful!

Cheers

Tracey

I gave a talk at Daniel Wagner’s monthly Mastermind Even on April 16th. It went well!

As promised, I’m publishing the Resource List from my talk the other day. I do hope you enjoyed it if you were able to attend.

• Resource list: click here

• The good news is, it can be done automatically within WordPress.
• The bad news is that if you update a post several times, you send out a “ping” each time, which can cause you to be labelled a “ping spammer” … even thought there is no bad intention on your part at all!
  
  By default WordPress pings all your specified directories whenever you post a new topic in your blog. That sounds good, right? Well, not really – because WordPress also pings whenever you edit and update any existing post… so if you edit a post 15 times then WordPress will send 15 pings to each ping directory you alert.
• The other bad news is that, if you post-date posts to appear in your blog at some future date, the pinging takes place when the blog is created, not posted… resulting in pings to posts that can’t yet be viewed. This can damage your credibility with your readers, as well as annoying the ping directories & search engines.

Enter the heroes!!! …

these are the guys at MaxBlogPress, with their plugin called “MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer“.

When you use this plugin, it manages your pings in a far more sensible, and ping-friendly way.

• When you write a new post, your blog pings and notifies all the ping services in your directory list that it (the blog) has been updated. This encourages search engines and different blog directories/services to index your updated blog properly.
• Now the really good news: when you edit an existing post, it won’t send another ping to ping services – this prevents any sort of “spamming” activity & stops your blog from getting banned.
• When you post-date a post by editing the time stamp to a future date, this plugin will ping only when your post actually appears in your blog on the scheduled date. So if you pre-write 10 posts for a 10-week schedule, one ping will be sent each week as the post “goes live”, instead of 10 pings being sent all at once on the day your write all the posts.

The Good and The Bad

• This plugin is free to download from this page: “MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer“
• When you activate the plugin, there is also a link in the text about the plugin, that you click so you go straight to the admin panel for the plugin; no more searching for where it is under your Tools or Settings toolbars!
• You do have to register the plugin, which involves a double optin step as well as an OTO (One Time Offer), but considering this plugin is free, that seems a small price to pay… and of course you unsubscribe if you find that the email communications aren’t useful to you.

Conclusion: this is a very worth-while plugin, and one that I have now installed on my main business sites.


P.S. You can check your website’s page rank at the website http://www.prchecker.info/

Karen polled a number of her Twitter followers to help her compile the list, and to get a different perspective on things. This is in itself a good tip – akin to interviewing people to make good digital audio products! So those of you considering that in future, remember this : )

Enjoy the ebook!

Tracey

PS A tip from a Twitterer I follow: “Be careful: don’t send personal or private information in the Twitter Direct Message system.” As with many public sites, no part of it is encrypted, so private or personal details are hackable, even in a 1-2-1 message with a follower!

Brian from “SEOPress Formula“, one of the many newsletters I subscribe to, says this:

About a week ago or so, I sent you an email about helping people to buy stuff they need or want. It is really a simple process.

1) Identify what folks are searching for.
2) Create a list of “money” keywords within the niche.
3) Create a website based on the money keywords.
4) Cash checks.

Sounds easy right, truth be told it is not rocket science. If I can do this … you can too.

It is simply a matter of understanding how people search, how Google and other search engines evaluate web pages and addressing these issues as you create a site.

One tip I want to give you today is based on the part about “helping people to buy”.

If the goal is to sell lawn mowers through the ebay affiliate program (or any other online merchant for that matter) then you should ONLY create content based on lawn mowers.

I see lots of webmasters adding all kinds of fancy whizz bang graphics, web 2.0 buttons, flash elements and what not too their site because they can.

WordPress makes this really easy ….

However just because you can add all kinds of cool banners and images does not mean you should. In fact … it can dilute your sites content.

If someone wants to find a hard to get part for their “lawnboy” lawnmower do you think they care about flashing images, banners and cool looking graphics? No they do not!

If they search Google and end up on your site you want them to be able to find exactly what they are looking for, quickly and easily.

When I design sites today they are simple, clean, easy to navigate. This makes it very easy for my site visitors to get just what they are looking for.

Next time your working on a web page Tracey make sure your sites content is very tightly focused on your main theme.

Only add elements to your site that helps people to find what your site offers.

An example:

If your selling lawnmowers do not add a link for people to sign up for an adsense account (or any other offer that is not a lawnmower offer).

Your visitors are looking for lawnmowers … then give them lawnmowers, and nothing else.

The key point here, for anyone wanting to ensure they have good SEO, is point 2 right near the top:  Create a list of “money” keywords within the niche. How will YOUR customers be searching for the products or services you offer? Please yourself in their shoes for a moment & that can really help.

Good luck!

Tracey