Customer engagement is a dominating factor for brands to use social media channels like Facebook and Twitter. By interacting with their customers through social media, not only can brands increase customer satisfaction rates, but also attract new customers.

For the most part, social media is a free channel that takes advertising to a whole different level by bringing brands closer to their target audience, and by personalizing their experience online.

Frequent user centric updates and user interaction are the key to increasing customer engagement, but here are five other ways brands can increase social engagement on Facebook and other platforms.

Make interaction easy

With Facebook rolling out Timeline for business pages, some users may find it difficult to interact with your page. Include simple call to action phrases to increase participation and allow users to share information. Remember that your customers are visiting your Facebook page for a reason – they want to know more about your brand, are interested in your products or services, or want to share feedback.

Include links to important tabs below the cover image. Tabs like reviews/recommendations, contact us, e-store, and blog are ideal for an e-commerce website.

When making a status update about a new product, ask for feedback rather than mentioning the product USP. When sharing a new blog post, ask what your users feel about the subject.

This opens the door for conversation, increasing social and online engagement. Posting updates with specific call to action phrases allows users to feel involved with your brand.

Understand what your users want

This is the fundamental premise for building engagement on any platform, social or otherwise. Any business must invest resources in finding their audience – the demographic, geographical location, income level, and so on. By doing this, you can understand what products and services will appeal to them.

Once you have this information, social media planning will be a breeze. Status updates that resonate with your audience build engagement and drive traffic to your website, thus increasing conversions and generating a positive return on investment.

Share what is relevant

Your Facebook fan page is not your personal Facebook page. While it may be interesting to share what you had for breakfast or how the weekend went, refrain from doing so. Your updates should always promote your brand, directly or indirectly.

If your company had a BBQ on the weekend, share it because it personalizes your brand. Refrain from sharing anything that may have a negative impact on your brand.

By sharing content that is relevant and highly targeted to your users, you increase customer participation.

Use productivity tools

Productivity dashboards like HootSuite, TweetDeck, and Buffer are a must have for all social media strategists. They help you plan your strategy weeks in advance and save time by reducing the manual effort involved in updating multiple channels.

These tools also make it easier for users to participate on multiple social channels.

Measure customer engagement

A strategic step in increasing social engagement is to analyze your current customer engagement rates. This can be done through Facebook page insights, Google Analytics, and other web analytic tools.

Use these simple tips to build a strong relationship with your customers. Remember, these tips are not set in stone – feel free to adapt them according to your business goals.

Khushboo Aulakh writes on behalf of www.broadbandgenie.co.uk, the comparison site for broadband internet and iPad contract deals for your social network needs.

Read the full post: Five Simple Ways to Increase Social Engagement with your Customers

Our faithful WordPress software is evolving at least as quickly as its competitors. This development means that there is now a lot more that can be done with the software than a simple process of blogging. Without the need to move to a new platform, we can now access a wealth of services that can transform our online marketing strategy and move us from being simple bloggers to advanced advertising specialists. Even if you’re not a blogging aficionado, you can still benefit from the enhanced functionality of the software without ever again having to pop up another post. Result!

There are two basic ways you can use WordPress for additional functionality. The first is by using a plugin that enables you to retain your existing site and theme, or you can choose to upload a new theme which takes over your entire site and brings a wealth of new functions. Please note none of the links below are affiliate links.

Job Board Services

For people looking to either source jobs, or advertise them online, WordPress has some great plugins that you can use to draw the right sort of customers to your site. The following can be easily installed, letting you open up your site to new revenue streams for the job search market, choosing whichever industry niche best fits your site.

- WPJobBoard
- Jobpress Simple
- Job Manager
- WPCareers

Review Builders

Online reviews are a huge draw, whether people want the latest news on cinema listings, movie reviews, and books, or are looking for somewhere to share their own opinions. Adding a review builder to your WordPress blog is a great way to bring in more traffic and provide your customers with a safe and reliable platform.

- Easy Review Builder:
- GD Star Rating
- WordPress Review Theme
- reviewsPRESS

Classified Ads

Every industry sector can benefit from advertising revenue, and WordPress supports a comprehensive set of online marketing tools that can tap into this lucrative market.

- Classifieds Theme:
- ClassiPress
- Classifieds
- ClassifiedTheme
- wp-classified

Voucher Codes

Online vouchers are a burgeoning trend; Google and Yahoo!, among others, are currently looking for ways to tap into this money spinner. You can follow the trend on your site by featuring discount vouchers and coupons for your industry or geographical area.

- Coupon Press
- WP Coupon Plugin

Squeeze Pages

Squeeze pages are simple landing pages, designed to solicit opt-in email addresses from prospective subscribers. WordPress enables you to create them quickly and easily, in addition to publishing customized landing pages for customers.

- SqueezeTheme
- Optimize Press
- FlexSqueeze
- WP Squeeze

E-commerce Market

A solid strategy for e-commerce means more revenue for your site, enhanced traffic, and increased services for your customers. You can use WordPress plugins to link to various sites that will pay you for your traffic, or sell your own products directly from your site.

- Amazon Reloaded
- AmazonSimpleAdmin
- WP e-Commerce
- Ecwid
- ShopperPress

Directory Services

Searching online is a key element in providing a comprehensive service to your customers. Whatever your industry sector, there will be people out there who will be drawn to a site that offers a good, regularly updated, listings service. The following are the best WordPress plugins for directory services:

- DirectoryPress
- Business Directory
- WordPress Link Directory

Social Networking

When it comes to optimizing your site for your customers, are you tapping into the best that social networking can offer? BuddyPress is a free, open-source plugin that enables you to create your own niche community.

Read the full post: When is a Blog Not a Blog?

CrankyAds looks like a solution to these problems and as it’s run by old friend Yaro Starak (with another online friend Blaine Moore now working for CrankyAds) it’s definitely time for a look at it.

Installation

CrankyAds is a WordPress plugin so installation is a breeze. Just download from their site and then in WordPress go to Plugins > Add new. Select Upload and browse to the zip file to upload, and then select Activate.

When returned the plugin page, a nice Start here message is shown under their plugin:

I’m a little disappointed that for a free plugin they’re not in the WordPress.org plugin repository, as it would make installing it, and updating it, easier, but that’s not unusual.

First use

Clicking on the Start here take you to the settings page. However you have to either register an account or sign in with your current account details. Registration is done on the settings page and is quick and easy. Once done you are taken to the Zones setup page. Zones is a familiar term if you’ve ever used advertising software and essentially refers to the regions or areas of the site you want to sell ads on. So you may have a header zone, a sidebar zone, or a footer zone. What is nice is the page shows a couple of YouTube videos walking you through step by step how to step up zones, which you can open in a new window to follow along.

Adding a Zone

This is as simple as giving the zone a name – like Header zone, a description and then selecting whether it is to have image ads, text ads or video. Then you set the size, the amount (and currency) that you want to charge for that ad space, and the duration that charge is for (i.e monthly).

If you want you can have multiple prices for a zone, so if they sign up for a year instead of monthly it would work out cheaper.

You can also have multiple ads per zone. This is especially useful for sidebar 125×125 ads where you might have 4 or 6 ads slots, not just one like in the header.

Once done you have the choice of adding a widget to display the zone or you get given the template code to add to your theme in the exact location you want the ads.

Advertiser Setup

Below is a screen shot of the default ad in my sidebar on a test side, and also the auto-generated page a potential advertiser is taken to when they click on an ad.

If there are more zones than just one, the plugin highlights the zone that the person had clicked so they know which one is relevant to them.

If they like what they see they can click Order now. They are required to login to (or register for) CrankyAds as that is where their (and your) campaigns are managed.

Pros

There’s a lot to like about the plugin.

• It’s free and doesn’t add any branding to the zones (it does on the advertise page, but as advertisers need a CrankyAds account this is no problem for me)
• Setting up an account is quick and straightforward
• Adding and configuring zones is really easy and the preview shows you what you’re getting so there’s no doubt
• Makes taking payment really easy
• Advertisers have control over their ads without any involvement from you
• You can allow advertisers to have multiple campaigns per ad slot they buy
• You can upload your own ads/campaigns to fill in the unsold zones with your own, perhaps affiliate, ads
• The upcoming marketplace will make it easy for potential publishers to find your site. For this CrankyAds will take a portion of the payment as a fee, but ads sold directly through your site do not incur this fee of course

Cons

This is more of a wish list than a cons list.

• The plugin should be in the WordPress.org plugin repository (apparently it will be soon)
• There should be other default locations built in. Max Banner Ads uses hooks to allow you to select to insert ads within a post or at the end of a post, or just in the first post etc. This would really help people with no technical knowledge to insert ads in their desired location
• The automated Advertise here page should have configurable design or at least an option for dark websites. I would like to be able to change the colors, wording on the button and add some other text at the beginning of the page

Summary

CrankyAds is a great, free, easy solution to adding adverts to your site and making it easy for advertisers to sign up completely hands off for you. You can download it here

Read the full post: CrankyAds Plugin Review

The problem with this is that you’re getting no benefit from this parking page. A way around this is to create a launch page. This is essentially a page with some details and an email address capture box. You can also hold competitions with prizes for people referring others to sign up on your site.

There are a few ways to do this.

LaunchRock

LaunchRock started this idea (or at least made it mainstream). They provide a hosted launch page that allows you to create a page to collect email addresses, track stats of those signing up and allow people to gain credits for referring others with their link. This helps you build your database and can help build some anticipation if you have some cool prizes.

However this isn’t hosted on your own site, and can be a tiny bit tricky technically depending on your skill level to use your own domain name. However it is a great free solution and pretty quick.

If you want more control and are going to be using WordPress for the website once it’s ready, then you might as well use a WordPress theme. There are some free and paid for options out there.

LaunchPad Theme

LaunchPad is a great free WordPress theme. It creates a nicer looking parking page for your site, but the optin email is only done through Feedburner. If you want to use e.g AWeber, then you will need to hack the code to do that. It’s not that difficult to do, and it’s a simple and easy theme to use if you just want to use Feedburner and want to change things yourself. Hover it doesn’t include any social sharing or tracking options

Launch Effect Theme

Launch Effect is another free theme but with a paid-for premium option. It’s worth mentioning that the makers provided me a free copy of Launch Effect Premium so I could review it but that has no effect on my review (nor did they even insist on doing a review).

I’ve set up a demo here so you can see how it works – BulletproofBeer.com. The theme does the same as you would expect but allows to you easily change the options. So you can add your own background (which nicely resizes along with the browser), change the font types, colors, sizes and so on.

You can see on the a href=”http://bulletproofbeer.com/” target=”_blank”>demo I’ve added a Spotify music player but you can easily add a video, images or just have text. The “learn more’ link is optional, the color can be changed easily too, and the sub-pages have a standard sidebar widget area you can use. There are many options making it easy to change the look of the page without any coding – as part of the review I refused to do any coding (as tempting as it always is!) to see how flexible it is.

You can easily add a progress indicator and/or fancy countdown clock. Images have a lightbox photo gallery effect automatically (images appear in the same screen over the top of the page).

Some of these features are premium only, but what’s not is the AWeber, MailChimp and Campaign Monitor integration. As well as adding the email address to WordPress, you can sync it with e.g. an AWeber list and build your email list through there. Which is great!

Also the premium version allows you to have a full designed blog on the site too (with slide down tab at the top to sign up) and coming soon is Paypal integration to more easily allow selling of products on there.

The single site license is only $35 for lifetime updates which is pretty cheap, even if you only use it for a short period of time (which often turns into a long time if you’re anything like me!). The unlimited site version is $65.

In future they’re updating the mobile version and possibly creating it as a plugin to work with any theme rather than taking over your current one.

To me, Launch Effect seems an inexpensive and easy way to get a parking page up there and doing something for you. There are lots of controls and no coding or complex stuff required, you don’t even need a newsletter system, though it integrates with a few, it will still collect email address (and other fields if you have the premium version) right into WordPress.

Read the full post: Launching a New Site Easily

The trick to getting reassurance that you are on the right track with your business, products, and services is to ask your customers how they feel about them. It may sound obvious, but many people forget to ask their service users for feedback, even while every other element of their online business is carefully attended to. Feedback for an Internet business owner is the equivalent of getting assignments marked at college, or getting a “thank you” card in the post after cooking up a great meal for friends. It’s a way of gaining reassurance that things are going well, and that all your hard work is paying off.

Directly soliciting feedback provides a number of advantages for your business, my own Testimonials page id proof of that. In addition to offering you reassurance that you are doing a great job online, it provides the following benefits:

Helps shape future direction.

Knowing what your customers are looking for, supports you in making enlightened decisions about your future strategic direction. Working “blind” to develop your site is much more difficult than using feedback from your customers to inform you where your business should be heading.

Boosts your motivation.

When you receive customer feedback, you no longer have the uncertainty that posting into the ether without acknowledgement can bring. By asking for regular input from your readers, you are able to ascertain that the articles you post, and the services you provide, are doing a good job in connecting to your online audience and forging positive relationships with clients.

Opens up communication channels for networking.

Customers who regularly visit your site and provide feedback are often the right individuals with whom you can forge business relationships. Those visitors who share a passion for your industry are usually great contacts for ongoing collaborations. Asking for their input into the direction your business should go can work wonders when it comes to building up a great network.

A free evaluation service.

Obtaining feedback directly from your customers, generates a strong evaluation of your blog and business. Instead of paying an agency lots of cash to develop metrics for your success, feedback can achieve the same result for free. If you’re not sure how well a certain blog post or site revamp has been received, all you need to do is create a poll and ask people for their opinion on the new changes.

Lets you inside the mind of your visitors.

Feedback can come in all forms, from survey results and online polls, right through to comments and emailed responses to your questions. When it comes to asking for feedback, there are few vehicles out there as feedback-friendly as the blog. The platform itself is designed to be interactive, built as the archetypal two-way medium for offering up your own opinions, and finding out what people think. Because of this, there are some great tools out there to do just that.

Google Docs

My personal favorite feedback mechanism, Google Docs is streamlined and easy to use. Google Docs enables you to create a new form, selecting from a range of different designs. From there, you can add the types of questions that you want answered by your readers. A range of options are available, including radio buttons, multiple choice selections, and text box fields. All the results from your feedback document are added directly into a Google Docs spreadsheet, making it simple for you to examine and analyze your collected data.

Although Google Docs is a simple and useful application, it doesn’t allow the user to add their own logo to the form, and there’s no way to be notified when you get a new response to your questions. Apart from these two negatives, it’s still one of the best tools out there for, quickly and easily, gathering customer opinions.

Survey Monkey – A popular alternative for feedback purposes, this is a well-designed application that offers one hundred free responses to your feedback requests (which is often more than enough for the average small business).

Survey Gizmo – If you’re looking for a free WordPress plugin, then this is ideal. Survey Gizmo lets you run various polls and surveys from within your WordPress blog.

WP Polls – If you’re a little technologically challenged, this free plugin is a straightforward option, allowing you to easily add a quick poll to a blog page or sidebar in only a few clicks.

Gravity Forms – Gravity Forms is a paid-for plugin but I use it on this site and it has a dizzying array of features and is suitable for intensive data gathering. A single site license is just $39.

PollDaddy – PollDaddy is an extremely popular option for creating quizzes, surveys, and polls. You can choose to subscribe to the service for unlimited responses, or opt for the free WordPress plugin that accepts one hundred responses per month.

Read the full post: What Do Your Customers REALLY Think?

This past year has been more exciting than the last and this year I’m sure will be even more so. Big things are coming, they take time, but they’ll get here.

April is even more special this year, as not only is it BTG’s birthday, and my own birthday, it’s also my son’s first birthday (on the day after mine, I’m glad he waited!).

As always I want to thank my hundreds of clients, some of which who you can see on my testimonials page. Without you, of course, I wouldn’t be here. So thank you for your patience, understanding, and trust.

If you need help with your blog or business website, let me know and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

Read the full post: BTG Turns Four Years Old

A few decades ago, we were more accustomed to waiting for what we wanted. We’d save up for things instead of going out and buying them on credit cards. We appreciated that the best things in life took time to acquire and we were prepared to hold out for them. Bread wouldn’t rise on demand, travel took hours, and we all had an in-built patience born of experience.
The advent of the World Wide Web went a long way to changing our expectations of speed. We became accustomed to typing a request into a search engine and getting an instant result on our screens that answered all of our needs. Pages began to load faster and the search engines were enhanced until we reached the present day of browsing. These days, every possible configuration of data is presented to us even before we have finished typing in what we’re looking for (thank you, Google Instant).

This has had a huge effect upon our culture overall, particularly with regards to the way in which we access information and expect to have it delivered to us. Newspapers are becoming less popular as people realize the benefit of reading their news online, where they can flit from article to article in the space of seconds. Pressured for time, we are all seeking new ways of generating extra hours to keep up with our demanding schedules, and the internet is one of the tools that we use to achieve this goal.

As the average surfer spends just a matter of minutes on each site that they visit, it makes a lot of sense to ensure that our visitors find what they need quickly and easily. Nothing turns off potential customers more than having to work hard to find what they are looking for; this is a certain way of ensuring your visitors never return for a second visit. There are plenty of things you can do to make navigation quicker for your visitors, including providing great signposting to everything they need, a good search facility, and a sensible structure. Labeling clearly the information you provide and using a site index to facilitate easy navigation are also good strategies to support an efficient service provision for your potential customers.

Even if you have the best possible site in terms of design and navigation, it could be that your WordPress blog still takes a long time to load. If this is the case, you can use a number of techniques to make sure your visitors get what they are looking for in double-quick time. Having large images on your site can greatly reduce the loading speed of your pages. To cut down on loading time, reducing the size of your images to the smallest possible size – that still displays well – is a good idea. There’s no point slowly loading an enormous photo, when it only displays at 300px wide. A good plugin to help you do this is WP Smush.it, which automatically optimizes your images to the best size.

Part of the way in which Google determines search rankings comes down to the speed that your webpages load. As the search engines get more fluid in terms of how they retrieve answers to queries, it’s important to make sure that our sites are as efficient as possible. To support a quick download we can use caching. Caching essentially creates a static version of a dynamic WordPress page, which is only refreshed when any changes (such as comments) are made. This means that the page does not have to query your WordPress database to display, and therefore brings up results much more quickly.

Use a caching plugin such as WP Super Cache  or W3 Total Cache (i use this); this will allow visitors to your site to get what they need quickly. W3 Total Cache also uses ”minifying,” that involves combining multiple CSS and JavaScript files into one, and then reducing the size by removing white space and unnecessary line breaks. Both plugins enable the use of a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to speed up your site, this can be complicated and is probably best left to an expert to setup.

As long as you keep your images small, and regularly undertake housekeeping to keep your WordPress site optimized, it should be relatively easy to ensure that your visitors are provided with a seamless and efficient service. Using the caching process will also ensure that the major search engines can find your site easily, and will factor this into their rankings. With so much technology going into the speed of navigation online, it’s important to make sure that your WordPress blog has everything in place to ensure a fast, efficient, and customer-focused service.

Read the full post: Need For Speed

Every new blogger starts out at the same place: with a website, a dream and no traffic. Most blog failures occur before a single visitor views the website, so although this can be a time of experimentation, it’s also a time of urgency. Getting over that most difficult hump and drawing in your first visitors through Google can take months, but you can build your readership much more quickly by taking things into your own hands and spreading the word yourself.

Focus on Quality

When you’re just starting out, it can be tempting to publish a hundred different posts on bland, keyword-targeted subjects meant to bring in search engine traffic. Unfortunately, if your website is new you are probably doing yourself more harm than good. Google places a certain priority on the age of a website, meaning you’re unlikely to rank highly for any keyword for at least a month. In the meantime, you’ll have a blog that’s dry, boring and clearly commercialized.

Because of this, the first few weeks after a blog goes live should be spent attracting visitors by word of mouth. Many readers hesitate to subscribe to a new blog because so many shut down a month or two after starting up. In order to combat this, your blog needs to be jam-packed with exciting, fresh content that will have others dying to share it. Post regularly, but not so often that you burn yourself out. As time goes on, you’ll settle into the blogging schedule and voice that works for you.

What is good content? Nobody wants to read an encyclopedia entry on every little topic in your niche. If they did, they’d read an encyclopedia. Blogging is a platform for expressing yourself and helping others. Even a business blog will have a personal style and tone to it. Write like you care about the subject, which you should, and are personally interested in it, and readers will pick up on your enthusiasm.

Get Involved in the Community

Once your blog has several good posts ready to share, it’s time to find some readers! The best place to start is on blogs similar to your own. These blogs have readers that are interested in your niche, and bloggers generally encourage discussion and sharing in their comment sections. Leaving your name and URL in a comment will alert readers to your blog’s presence, and you’re sure to get a few curious clicks.

Remember, it’s a lot easier to pick up a bad reputation than it is to earn a good one. Always leave full, relevant responses to blog posts, and take the time to read others. Planting a link is only one benefit of interacting with the community, and getting involved in discussions can help you establish yourself as a dedicated and knowledgeable blogger.

There are other ways to get your blog out there, most notably social media websites. Services such as StumbleUpon can bring sharp spikes of traffic, but are usually poor for driving in a dedicated readership. Twitter, on the other hand, can be a valuable tool if used properly. You may want to start a new account for the blog, or share it on an established Twitter account. Don’t just tweet a URL to your latest posts; instead, spend time responding to tweets and following others. Facebook automatically shares blog updates to interested friends and family, who can in turn share it with their circle of contacts. However, you should focus most of your efforts on targeted readers, which can be difficult to accomplish on a social website like Facebook.

If you write quality content and successfully draw in a small group of returning readers, your blog will be well on its way to success. You can’t expect to have 500 blog visitors in your first month, but with patience and dedication there’s no limit to what you can achieve with nothing more than the internet, a computer and your own wits.

About the author: Sam is a blogger and a contributing writer for Quick Sprout, one of the leading marketing agencies. He takes a particular interest in topics pertaining to social media trends and SEO techniques.

Read the full post: How To Get Your First Blog Visitors

As business bloggers, traffic is the ultimate goal through which we measure the success of our online venture. Without traffic, our blogs are relegated to the lonely ether of the uninhabited World Wide Web, hiding sulkily in an unseen corner. Traffic means visitors. Visitors mean sales. Sales mean revenue. It’s safe to say that the more traffic we get online, the happier and more successful we will be with what we do. When it comes to generating the maximum amount of traffic, it’s impossible to have too much footfall through your site.

With so many sites available online for every single industry, it’s getting increasingly difficult to attract a consistent audience. Blogging is one of the most competitive ways to make an income as everyone has interests and passions that translate well to this type of communication. From topiary to train spotting, aardvark grooming to zoology, there is a blog out there that is focused upon gaining a wide readership through the regular posting of articles. That’s not to say it isn’t possible to get traffic to your site, it simply means that it is more challenging than it has ever been before to attract customers to your online presence, and then keep them there once they’ve arrived.

A secondary factor reducing traffic to sites is our expectations of instant gratification. The longer the World Wide Web is out there, the more we have increased our expectations of it. Customers no longer want to patiently wade through reams of information in the same way as they would approach a newspaper or magazine. When they browse online they want their requests answered instantly, their queries resolved in seconds, and the ability to navigate through a site quickly and efficiently. We have less patience as the Web has become more streamlined, and cumbersome navigation is a sure-fire way of deterring customers from visiting you again, and retaining the traffic that you generate.

There are loads of organizations out there who offer all kinds of deals to direct traffic to your site. While the benefits are pretty self-evident, it doesn’t do any harm to outline the rationale behind having a strategic approach to increasing visitor numbers. The law of averages dictates that the more people visiting your site, the more likely it is that you will make sales. Getting your products and services out there in front of as many people as possible gives you the best possible opportunities for selling.

The problem with signing up a company to “buy” you traffic is . . . it doesn’t work. You may get people who are conned into coming to your site through links, or adverts that mislead visitors into stopping by, but these are not potential customers. The good news is that there are a few simple steps you can take to make sure that not only does your online traffic increase, but it is generated by real, viable customers who are coming to you because they are actively seeking the services or products that you provide.

Luckily, there are lots of different ways to encourage people to come and visit your site. One of the best ways to open up communication channels and spread the word about your products and services is to take up regular blogging. By writing keyword-rich articles, you can invite the principal search engines to enhance your ranking, thus attracting visitors who are searching for exactly what you provide. The more content you add to your site each day, the more opportunities you will have of being picked up by search engines.

A good RSS service such as FeedBurner provides a really good-looking feed for your readers if they’re into that, and has the added advantage of providing you with accurate subscriber statistics to enable you to track your progress. It also gives people the option to sign up to email updates when you post new content.

A software package such as Google Analytics lets you take a look at the keywords that people searched on before they arrived at your site. It also allows you to check out what are the most popular articles that people view on your site, helping you to fine tune your own content production strategy. When you start to get more people visiting your site, give them a reason to stay involved, such as offering a free product.

If you’re looking for ways to increase traffic through WordPress, try the Subscribe to Comments plugin; if someone leaves a comment, the plugin notifies them when another visitor comments on the same post. In addition, mobile plugins like WPtouch can make your site instantly mobile-friendly, enabling people to use their smartphone to view your site.

Finally, incorporating a range of social bookmarking icons for sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and others on your site, can help new users to find you and encourage them to share your content with other people. Sociable, ShareThis, and AddThis allow you to make the most of your traffic by establishing an ongoing relationship and generating new, targeted traffic to your site.

Read the full post: How To Generate More Traffic To Your Site, For Free

InternetWorldStats.com statistics suggest that there are over 190 million sites online, so the chances are that you have hundreds of competitors focusing upon your industry, prepared to scoop up your customers if they decide to look elsewhere for what they need. This means that it is more important than ever before to ensure that you have a great search facility on your business site, so that people can find what they need and stick around. The longer your customers stay browsing your site, the greater the likelihood that you’ll receive repeat visits, and brand loyalty will encourage them to part with their money as you become a trusted source of information.

If you haven’t already implemented a sound search strategy for your site, it’s time to take a step back and evaluate your blog with the eyes of your customers. What do they predominantly come to your business to find? Can they find it? Web “best practice” advocates that no information should take more than two or three clicks to reach; does this apply to your site, or do people have to hunt around aimlessly in an attempt to find something useful? Take some time to consider your site with a fresh viewpoint, working out how it functions from your customer’s perspective. If it’s not really giving them what they need quickly, it’s time to revamp the site and make it more accessible and easily navigable.

Basic Searchability

Blogs that make customers have to think too hard are not good websites. Your customers need to be able to browse your site effortlessly, without having to battle an invasive or obtrusive layout that detracts from their visitor experience. The following tips provide an overview of search best practice for your site:

• Every page on your site needs to have at least basic navigation aids.
• Your navigation needs to indicate the current page that your visitors are on.
• Each link needs to be clearly marked as to where it leads.
• Each link should be unique and, if it is repeated, make this clear to the customer.
• Link categories need to relate to products and services, rather than your business information.

Including a comprehensive sitemap is great practice as it allows your visitors to easily locate a single page that has everything they need to access the pages they’re looking for.

Enhanced Searchability

The majority of WordPress themes already have an integral search bar as part of the basic setup, but if your blog doesn’t already have one, you can put a search widget into your side bar pretty easily. If you know PHP, just key in the following:

<?php get_search_form(); ?>

Although this works, the functionality is fairly limited, and there are a number of things you can do to enhance it to make things easier for your customers.

The Search Everything plugin works to improve your default search by also searching tags, categories, pages, comments, and much more that the default WordPress search doesn’t. The best thing about it is that it doesn’t require anything else other than just activating it, and then choosing what you would like to be included in the search.

You could also try the Search Meter plugin. This records what people are searching for, and can provide invaluable insights into the topics people are trying to find on your site, allowing you to appropriately tailor your site content.

The Google Custom Search also adds additional functionality to your blog. You can add it in manually (www.google.com/cse/) or via a plugin. The Google plugin doesn’t override the WordPress search, but you can replace it easily enough to make the Google application the primary tool. This allows you to use the power of Google to make your site searchable and also allows you to monetize the search results page by adding your Adsense ID to the adverts that Google automatically includes.

Finally, consider adding the Lijit search plugin to your site; it takes over the default WordPress search box, so requires no additional coding. It allows you to monetize search results and adds great features such as image thumbnails in your search results, and searching of your social networks. This means that you can bring back relevant tweets, YouTube videos, photos from Flickr and more.

Read the full post: Making WordPress Searchable