Last month we setup an email campaign for delivering HTML newsletters to the membership database of the New Zealand Snowsports Instructors Alliance (NZSIA). Our chosen platform was Campaign Monitor. And we were impressed. The functionality was extensive, the approval process for campaigns was thorough and the reporting stats are substantial. 100% recommended!

For NZSIA the newsletter performed well. 50% of recipients opened the newsletter (which is very high for email campaigns), 25% clicked a link and only 0.35% unsubscribed. Pretty good results I’d say. The fact that the recipients of the campaign were a highly targeted market certainly helped. However the newsletter’s clean and simple design plus, getting back on topic now, the well-thought-out readable content would have made the biggest impact – particularly with the clicked link and low unsubscribe rates.

Yep, content is still king, that’s for sure. However, without the vessel to communicate such content the message would have never reached the audience. In this case the vessel was an HTML email campaign in the form of a newsletter. In another cases it might be a Twitter stream or a Vimeo channel, but the vessel must be matched with the message and suited to those you’re trying to reach.

A crucial aspect of Web site management is tracking performance and observing visitor behaviour. This process provides valuable insights that can be used to improve a Web site, create happy, loyal customers and make an online business more successful. This post talks about three plugins that make this process easier on your WordPress site.

Linking your site with analytics and testing tools

There are numerous plugins that offer analytics reports on what users are doing when they visit your WordPress site, but we much prefer to use Google Analytics for this task. It offers many controls, features and useful tools that really can’t be matched by any single plugin. My first recommendation both integrates your site with Google Analytics and extends its capabilities at the same time.

Google Analytics for WordPress

First and foremost, this plugin makes it easy to add the Google Analytics tracking code to your pages. Rather than adding the code to your footer template and uploading it via FTP, you simply paste your account ID into this plugin’s settings page and it does the rest.

The second benefit on offer is the ability to track outgoing links and file downloads. Google Analytics for WordPress automatically tags any links that lead out of your site. This lets you see the most common exit points and how much traffic you are sending to sites you link to. It is handy to watch out for any unexpected patterns.

Google Website Optimizer for WordPress

Website Optimiser, is a free website testing and optimisation tool from Google. It is built to enable experiments to test the performance of different page designs (commonly called A/B tests, or multivariate tests – this video shows a good example).

This simple plugin lets you optimize your landing pages (as posts or pages) using the Google Website Optimizer without needing to edit the HTML code of the theme. It adds extra input boxes to the ‘Edit page’ or ‘Edit post’ pages to enter the Google Website Optimizer scripts setting your page up as part of a GWO experiment.

Blog Metrics

This plugin is one of the few available to offer statistics and measurements specifically for blogs (rather than for traditional Web sites). It shows a simple snapsnot of activity on your blog, based around author contributions (average posts per month and average words per post), and reader responses (average comments per post and average words per comment). These metrics go beyond the traditional measures of visits, page views or clickthroughs and show levels of engagement with an audience. After all, that is what any good blog should have as its main aim.

Note: For more more ideas on these types of metrics read the original post by Avinash Kaushik which inspired this plugin.

Well that’s it for now. A dozen plugins we at Tactic Group use as standard to make a great publishing platform even better. I hope it’s been a useful series, and look out for more WordPress related posts on this blog in the future.

From its solid foundations WordPress is very ‘search engine friendly’ out of the box. Its default themes and template system are built on modern Web standards and the clean, valid code makes it easy for search engines to find, understand and index content. However, that doesn’t mean there is no room for improvement for those wanting to take every possible advantage when creating exposure for their products or services.

The plugins I have selected today enable little tweaks and techniques to make your site play nice with search engines – and ultimately help them help people find their way to you.

Making your site search engine friendly

Google XML Sitemaps

XML sitemaps are a tool webmasters can use to make it easier for search engines to understand the structure of their site and index pages more accurately. This plugin automates the process of building and updating a sitemap and runs quietly in the background. When you first fire it up, you’ll be prompted to build a sitemap manually. Following that, every time you publish a page or post the sitemap will be updated automatically.

Many standalone, 3rd party tools are available for creating sitemaps quickly. However the ability to automatically update your sitemap every time you post, and check search engines picked it up in-tact, saves a lot of time and keeps things neat and tidy.

KB Robots.txt

Another handy Webmaster tool is the robots.txt file. This is a simple text file that sits on your server waiting to instruct search engine spiders on which pages and directories they should and shouldn’t add to their indexes. For example, on our corporate site we have a testing directory where we try new things and show clients work in progress for their feedback. We don’t want these test pages to accidentally show up in search results so we don’t allow any search engines to index them.

Robots.txt files are easy to write but, like a lot of my recommendations in this series, having a WordPress setting page to manage it is very handy and keeps things neat. This plugin does exactly that. Once installed it offers a simple textbox for editing your robots.txt, then when you save the changes it will create or update the file right away.

All-in-one SEO Pack

Last, and by no means least, we have what is arguably one of the most valuable plugins available for WordPress. As its name suggests this plugin is like a Swiss Army knife for managing important aspects of your site’s SEO.

Most of its features give you more control over your metadata (extra information embedded in a Web page to describe its contents). Including your keywords in these metadata elements makes your site more findable for potential customers who are searching for products or services like yours.

The crucial areas of metadata for SEO are page titles and meta-descriptions. Search engines heavily rely on these to understand what your site is about, and commonly use them to make up the snippet shown when your site appears in search results. All-In-One SEO Pack lets you edit these elements on a page-by-page basis, and if you know how to use them it can make a huge difference to your rankings and click-through rate.

Something Google et al frown upon is duplicate content. With blogs this can be a hard thing to avoid (mainly due to category, tag and archive pages being very similar and numerous). All-In-One SEO Pack lets you instruct search engines not to index these navigation pages and concentrate on your destination pages (i.e. the valuable stuff). Another time-saving feature of this plugin is automatically generating canonical URLs. I would be going way off-topic if I described those here, but for anyone who is interested, this post from SEOmoz explains what they are very well.

Note: I have also heard good things about a similar plugin called Headspace 2, but I haven’t studied it in detail yet.

So I hope your WordPress plugin fix has been satisfied for another week. Next week will see the final part of the series (well, maybe the final part. There could be more), where I’ll share some recommendations for analytics plugins and cool tools to track visitor behaviour on your WordPress blog.

WordPress is renowned for its ease of use and its extensive features for keeping a site running smoothly. The comment moderation is first-class, the user management is a breeze, and with the help of the security plugins I recommended last week it’s simple to keep your installation safe. So what other areas of site management are there to improve?

Three areas we like to have covered, on our own sites and client sites, are backing up the data WordPress holds, a user-friendly way of managing site updates and rooting out broken links from site content. (Broken links are also a big issue in the world of SEO, but I wanted to include them this week because of their impact on user experience).

Making your site easy to maintain

WP DB Backup

It is always a good idea to back up your data. Even if you’re new to managing a Web site I’m sure you’ve felt the frustration of your computer crashing and losing hours of work because you hadn’t saved it. Magnify that a few times and add the horrors of lost revenue to it. Not the stuff pleasant Friday afternoons are made of.

If the worst happens – your site gets hacked or a server dies – it is relatively easy to reinstall WordPress and start from scratch, but what happens to all your settings and content? This plugin offers quick and simple ways to back up your database with peace-of-mind as a welcome side-effect. It includes options for scheduling regular backups and manual ‘backup and download’ features.

WP DB Backup also has a ‘backup and email’ feature to send the archive file to any address you specify. We currently advise setting up a dedicated email box and sending daily backups there. Simple, free and effective off-site backups. Very handy.

Maintenance Mode

From time to time you’ll need to update your theme or edit some templates. For scheduled maintenance and technical updates it’s useful to put a very clear and prominent message out for users so they understand why the site is down or not performing as it usually does. This plugin makes that very easy to do so from right inside the WordPress admin/authoring area.

When activated (with a simple on/off switch), it puts up a temporary splash page in place of your site, notifying visitors of ongoing maintenance and when to expect the site to return. You can edit the default holding page however you like to customise it for your site. This process is so much easier than uploading a temporary page via FTP each time to do the same job.

Maintenance Mode has the added benefit of only redirecting to the splash page users who are not currently logged in to the system. Those who have admin accounts, and are logged in, will see the site as normal. This is fantastically useful if you are discussing changes with colleagues or clients, for example.

Broken Link Checker

If you’ve been blogging for a while it’s easy to clock up dozens of outbound links. The speed at which things move on the Web makes it inevitable pages or even sites you link to will be moved, renamed or even disappear completely – leaving a less than perfect experience for your readers.

This plugin helps you keep track of those and offers a handy interface to update or remove broken links from your content (recommended to run it every couple of months). It checks through your posts, pages and blogroll for problem links and gives you a work queue to fix them.

There are many link checker tools out there offering the same features, but being able to do it all from inside WordPress is a big win.

So that’s it for this installment. Hopefully these will make your life easier when it comes to WordPress. If you have a recommendation I might have missed please leave a comment to let me know. Also check back next week for three more essential plugins – all focussed on making your site search engine friendly.

There are over 8,000 plugins available for WordPress. I’m not claiming these are the only plugins you’ll ever need. The plugins I’m listing here are those we’ve used time and time again for specific tasks. Each of them does their job very well, and as a result we’ve grown to love them.

We’ve identified four areas of WordPress that can be beefed-up for easier management and better business: Security, Maintenance, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Analytics. It’s quite a long list so I’m going to break it up into four weekly posts. This week I’ll look at Security and reinforcing your WordPress site, keeping any vulnerabilities to a minimum.

Making your WordPress site more secure

Before addressing plugins, the critical point of securing WordPress is to make sure you upgrade to the latest version ASAP and keep all your plugins up to date. Assuming you’ve done that, here’s three plugins we use to harden WordPress:

WP Security Scan

This plugin “scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions”. It makes updates to your site (such as hiding the WordPress version number), which all make it harder for hackers to break in.

It’s best to run Security Scan soon after launching a new site, as a few of the fixes it advises are fiddly to do afterwards. Further to an initial scan when you first activate this plugin, it is definitely worth checking the settings and report after every upgrade you do.

Login Lockdown

This plugin protects you from brute force password discovery (i.e. a type of hack that systematically tries to login until it finds the right password).

Login LockDown works by recording the IP address and timestamp of every failed WordPress login attempt. If a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range. Administrators can see a list of banned IP addresses, and if someone gets locked out by accident administrators can manually grant them access.

Exploit Scanner

This plugin scans through the files in your WordPress installations and looks for potential traces of hacks or malware that might have made their way in. It does return a lot of results that turn out to be false alarms but it’s worth wading through these to look for anything unusual or unexplained.

We advise running this plugin every couple of weeks or so, or any time you hear about a new security threat doing the rounds.

So that’s this week’s installment. While Login Lockdown can just run in the background, Security Scan and Exploit Scanner do involve a bit of regular time and effort to prove their worth. That said, when it comes to security it pays to be paranoid and costs to be complacent. Anyone who has had their site hacked will tell you that!

Look out for part two where I’ll introduce a handful of plugins to make maintaining a WordPress site easier.

Whilst both Doug and myself are the leading partners in the Tactic Group business, we’re both still self-contractors and have fingers in a number of other pies. Recently Doug has launched his own Web site promoting his services as a specialist User Experience Designer. Check it out at dougsomerville.com.

Me, well that’s been a bit of a roller coaster ride. I’ve recently published a book about skiing and snowboarding in Japan, called Snow-search Japan and am currently in the land of the rising sun promoting the book whilst doing a little other work. To keep track of all the projects I’m involved in I decided to start a mini scrapbook of projects with Posterous.

2010 will see Tactic Group begin a number of new projects including a Blog strategy and design project for the New Zealand Snowsports Instructors Alliance and a re-design for our own site. Watch this space!

More recently we undertook a social media strategy and monitoring project for Cardrona Ski Resort in New Zealand.

Both were fun, interesting projects that, not only opened new doors for Tactic Group, but helped us push our knowledge and abilities in a number of different web mediums. We’ve since written a casestudy about each project that provides a good insight into the processes and techniques we employed, check ‘em out…

Cardrona Casestudy

A Social Media strategy and monitoring for one of New Zealand’s premier ski resorts. Here’s a snippet from the casestudy itself…

Utilising RSS and various web applications we created a monitoring and recording system that allows Cardrona to not only see what is being said when, but to respond to concerns quickly and engage customers in online conversation almost instantaneously.

Snowsports Coaching NZ Casestudy

A web research, design and e-learning project for a new coaches’ education initiative. Here’s a snippet from the casestudy itself…

What begun as a research and design venture, evoloved into a full site development project, complete with content strategy, a CMS install, Social Media intergration, and an e-learning solution in the form of online coaching modules.

There’s more projects on the horizon for Tactic Group, including a large event-based blogging project, a self-funded project or two, and a small re-design of our own site. Check back soon.

This led to a good foraging through many blogs for inspiration. What I found was an abundance of information and advice about how to create good headlines. There really is endless amounts of articles that have been written on this subject, so I thought I’d boil a few down for our audience here at Tactical Thinking…

At Copyblogger: How to Write Headlines That Work

In this post Brian Clark, Author of Copyblogger, outlines eight different types of headlines all suited to different situations.

He begins with direct and indirect headlines, i.e. one that states the selling proposition directly or one that uses curiosity to raise a question in the reader’s mind. Here’s a relevant example for our audience:

Direct – “50% off on all 2009 outerwear!”
Indirect – “Why pay full-price for your new jacket?”

He goes on to describe News headlines, How-to headlines, Question and Command headlines, Reason Why headlines and finally Testimonial headlines. Very useful stuff as it opens the doors to many more headline-writing options.

At Wordbiz: 5 Easy Steps to Write More Effective Headlines

This post by Debbie Weil gives five solid steps to writing, as she puts it, “more effective headlines”. The first three steps in her process are excellent and very relevant for our audience here. They are as follows:

1. Appeal to your target audience’s emotions – think easy, quick and simple.
2. Identify their trigger words – use words like easily, reduce, create, deliver, protect.
3. Consider using a software writing tool – perfect for those lacking in time, writing skills or just a little untimely lack of creativity.

At NEWSTECHZILLA: Headlines and Titles – Writing for Readers AND Search Engines

Lastly, I picked out this post by Scott Adcox, as a way to explain the relevance of SEO in crafting better headlines.

Crafting better headlines isn’t just about using appropriate words. Of course, the words have to be relevant to the audience and topic of your article/post. However, your headline must also utilise keywords where possible, to help improve your site’s search engine optimisation.

In Scott’s post he discusses using appropriate URL’s for your articles. He also covers Title Tags – particularly relevant for search engines.

In Summary

When I’m writing any article or post, I’ll always make sure I have a title to begin with, no matter how poor it is. Whilst writing, I’ll revisit this title many many times, helping it evolve with the context of my piece. Unfortunately, this isn’t always enough.

So next time you’re struggling to write a suitable headline or title on the web, ask yourself these three questions:

1. What type of headline do you want to use?
2. Who are your audience?
3. How can you optimise it for search engines?

…And refer to posts above to help you find some answers.

It all depends on what you’re searching for, right? If you already know the name of the business, it makes sense to flick to the appropriate ‘white’ page. But if you only know the name of the service ‘yellow’ is the way to go.

This same rule is applied to Google everyday by millions of users across the world, often without a second thought. One might search for ‘4 wheel drive cars’ or ‘Subaru Legacy’. ‘Backcountry packs’ or ‘DaKine’. Maybe even… ‘Web Design’ or ‘Tactic Group’.

So which approach is typically you? Yellow or white?

Today I came across this post by Seth Godin entitled ‘How to make money with SEO’ – sent to me by my esteemed colleague Doug (thanks for that mate and sorry to steal your thunder). The title did nothing for me so my initial impression was not one of shock and awe, but the first couple of paragraphs certainly got my interest:

There are two ways to use SEO to help your organization. One is reliable and effective, the other is a glorious crap shoot that usually fails but is wonderful when it works. I’ll start with the second.

The most common way to use search engine optimization is to find a keyword (like “plumbing”) and do whatever you can to ‘own’ that word on Google. This is Google as the Yellow Pages (with free ads).

The Yellow Pages are terrific for plumbers, because if you need a plumber, that’s where you’re going to look. Buy the biggest ad, be the first listing, you get calls. Google is a revelation because it’s a super Yellow Pages and it’s free! The problem: how to be the first listing, because being the 40th listing is fairly worthless.

Well the obvious answer to that is paying for a sponsored listing. But for this scenario let’s ignore that. So what’s the alternative so the Yellow Pages?

The other way to use SEO is a bit more organic. (Let’s call it the White Pages approach). It involves owning a keyword that you already own. Do a search on ShoeMoney in Google and you’ll find 340,000 matches. Wanna guess who’s first? ShoeMoney. Why is this surprising? After all, he invented the word and he owns the domain.

Someone hears about Jeremy’s site from a friend or from a blog or from some other source. They want to visit his site and they type it into Google. He told me that he gets five times as much traffic from this search term as any other on Google.

The power of this technique is that with determination and patience, you will certainly win. It requires inventing a trademark and then building a business or service or organization around this trademark that people actually talk about. You want to be able to say to someone, “just type ____ into Google.”

This is the simplest description of the two main SEO strategies I’ve ever come across – hence the post here on Tactical Thinking. But let’s draw some parallels in our own industry…

Type ‘Snowboards’ into Google and you’ll get 5,450,000 results. Quite a lot really. Now type in ‘Lib Tech’. You’ll see Lib Technologies comes up first, but where were they in the ‘Snowboards’ search? Half way down page 6!

Years of persistence and brand building (plus the help of a particular superstar snowboarder) has put the Lib Tech name near the top of recognised brands in the snowboard marketplace. But I ask you this: What would have happened to them if they had just jammed a web site full with key words like ’snowboards’ and hope they might reach the top?

Of course, this is somewhat of a moot point as Lib Tech were around before web sites and have been building their brand for years. But you can see the parallels and hopefully this helps you understand the importance of building a brand over time rather than just getting heavy with SEO and Google Adwords.

Take the time to read the rest of Seth’s post. He finishes it off with a nice and simple step-by-step guide for following his ‘White Pages’ approach.

In this short film from TED, Polish designer/art-director, Jacek Utko, presents a case-study on how good design boosted the the flagging circulation of several eastern European newspapers. His story goes beyond graphic design.

While Jacek is talking about design in a very visual medium, I love his sentiments on going beyond visual design, changing the look of the newspapers and transforming the experience. The business and financial gains he shows are astounding!

Via 37Signals.