WordPress is an open source content management system, or CMS for short. It uses PHP/MySQL to operate and for the less techie people out there – if you can get past the installation of it, you’ll get on well with wordpress.

WordPress is very user friendly; to the external user but also behind the scenes (within the admin panel) you have a ‘dashboard’ with several options, when you click on that; it will open subheadings making your experience that bit easier – however I even find myself looking through a few options to get where I want to be, but I’m one of those guys with no sense of navigation!

Large community base

This is what I believe makes WordPress so successful, the amount of plugins, themes, guides and fellow users makes it a must have for any blogger! When someone mentions blog – most people now think ‘WordPress’.

The plugins are plentiful and you can find one that does just about anything, which is pretty useful if you aren’t a great programmer. – Oh, and most plugins are free!

SEO Optimization

Whats the point in going through all that time and effort if no one is going to read your site? WordPress is SEO compliant and through the use of beautifully clean coding, being web compliant (meeting web standards), and categorising everything – it is the search engines dream site!

There are also many plugins available to further your SEO Optimization for your site, such as the All In One SEO Pack (click link to one of my previous articles)

Fully Customizable

I mentioned at the start that WordPress is completely open source – but this doesn’t say enough! Changing the code is so simple and can be done very easily, it may just take a little bit of common sense or asking on the WordPress Forums  – WordPress is your world!

All In One SEO Pack for WordPress is a very useful tool developed by Michael Torbert and is a must for anyone using a WordPress blog.

I find this one of the most critical tools in relation to my blogs as it allows me to optimize my keywords for each of my individual posts making my site easier to be found on search engines. At the bottom of each page where you add a post you will be presented with this box, shown below

Now as you can see you can add custom titles to each post easily, add a description and add keywords specific to each page (provided you use good SEO techniques) you get up higher in the search engine rankings

The All In One SEO Pack also gives you options to customize the search settings for your index page so you can have keyword specific phrases for you main page and leaves keywords more specific to your individual posts, which is really what you want to do. Most searches coming from engines lands on a specific page of information in which people want to find; and this pack gives you that added advantage of ranking higher on the search engines.

Sometimes when looking at someones blog who is new to scene I find that they’ve just edited their META tags on header.php in WordPress so the same keywords and description is displayed the whole way throughout the site; this is bad practice as keywords should be custom to each post and this will be more optimal.

The plugin is described as ‘working straight out of the box’ and this is ideal for new users, but if you’re more advanced you can fine tune the settings to your own specification and what you believe is best.

This is truly a genius plugin and the best in my opinion.

To download the plugin or to see more information ; visit here – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

On a previous post Choosing the right webhost I talked about hosting with One.com.

Basically I decided this feature its self merited a post of its own – if you sign up tget a website from One.com you will get a free £50.00 AdWords voucher.

£50.00 is a decent amount of traffic for your website and especially since its coming from Google you’re getting solicited traffic from people who would be interested in your website.

Definately worth signing up to if you have to renew your webhost.

Monitoring your web traffic is an important part of being a webmaster, it shows yous bundles of information which if you analyse and think about you can use it to better cater for your visitors and thus increase your revenue.

I use Google Analytics to tell me information about who visits my sites and it gives me a wealth of information about where my visitors are from, how many pages they visit, how many page views I get per day and how many people visit then click off my site after one page, this is known as ‘bounce rate’.

So once you sign up to Google Analytics, they will provide you with a little piece of a code which you put into the code in your site. (tip: insert it at the top of your page as it makes loading faster) this allows google to collect information about your visitor and will collect it on your Analytics page.

So how do you use this information?

Simple.

Now, if Analytics is showing you that most your visitors are from a certain country – You should make your ads more specific to this region, although many advertising schemes automatically target ads, there are some which let you select your specific ads.

If your bounce rate is high there could be a number of reasons; shoddy design, bad content, too many ads or simply that they were mislead in coming to your site.
Research shows that if a website uses pop-up advertising people are incredibly likely to click off a website straight away.

Analytics will also show the New VS Returning visitors and this is a good performance indicator which can be continually monitored as to how well your website is doing. If over the space of a month your returning visitors has dropped its time to take action – maybe you need to increase the frequency you update your content or increase the quality of your content. Maybe that large fancy redesign you did of your webpage has made it hard to navigate and people just don’t want to sift through it to find what they want?

Whilst on the subject of page design – is your website accessible to peoples browers?
The ‘technology’ tab will allow you to see what computer, browser, version of flash they’re using but most importantly, their screen resolution. Smaller screen sizes and resolutions are still something which needs to be catered for – Even today, despite using my  17″ laptop and my 1366×768 resolution I still find on about 1 out of every 100 websites I visit I may need to bottom scroll due to bad design. My reaction: Click off site.

Hopefully this article has given you insight into a very useful tool which you can use to increase traffic, visitors experience and reduce your bounce rate.

Testimonials are apparently the words of what a customer has said about a business or product – so whats the problem?

Everytime I go on to a website and I see a ‘testimonial’ section it sets alarm bells off in my head thinking that the website is going to scam me or ask me to buy a useless product that doesn’t even work – so I generally just click off the site and go back to what I was looking for.

I’m sure everyone who reads this will know what I’m talking about and if you’re still asking why you shouldn’t use them, here’s my top 5 reasons:

1. They’re use on just about every scam site on the internet.
2. There’s no way to properly verify them.
3. They make it sound that you really need to force something on them to sell your product or service.
4. They can be written by anyone and makes you sound too good.
5. They’re aren’t verified.

Now, reason number 5  is my main point as to why you shouldn’t use them – who is “Mrs Brown from England” or “Mr Smith from the USA”? … Do you know them? Do you believe they said this? Can you prove they said this?

To the more aware internet user in these days, this type of marketing is completely unnecessary and causes more harm to your cause than having nothing there at all.

If people has something good, or bad for that matter they will write about you on a review site, their own personal site or even their blogs.

Please avoid the use of testimonials.

Some people ask “how do I get people to visit my site?”

Content is the reason why you visit websites, right?

So whenever a site, like this one is just starting out unfortunately it is a long, hard road before you actually get people coming to your blog on a regular occurrence.

This is by far, not my first site  and I do realise that at this moment I’m practically writing to a non-existent audience, so why write? Well, without a build up of content no one will ever visit your site, unfortunately you can’t get the traffic first, content is what makes people come.

Now, just because you’re trying to fill your site with content it doesn’t mean you can slack and put up poor content just to fill blank space, all of the content on your site must be relevant and follow suit of your websites aim and what you wish to bring to the readers.

Speaking to no one seems a little insane, but eventually people will stumble upon your site and your page views will rise provided you provide good quality content on a frequent basis.

Follow this golden rule and follow SEO and other marketing techniques on this site and you’ll be getting page views in no time!

A few days ago a friend of mine rang me up and asked me if he should get a website and I advised him to do so – he owns a small car valeting business and I was shocked he already didn’t have one.

While I was still chatting to him on the phone I quickly loaded up Googles Keyword Research tool and I advised him in a minute that there are 110 monthly searches for his service in his local area.

Although this doesn’t seem like a lot but I believe this service has a lot of customer loyality – once they find someone who does a great job at a good price they won’t even look for anyone else to do the job. I advised him he his potentially losing out on many customers by not having a site online.

My friend, Greg who owns this business is now keen to get a website on the go and he’s going to try and tackle this task himself so I’m sure I will get many, many phone calls from him with questions. (the joy)

Out of these 110 searches there are 5 (poorly designed) websites offering the same service – if Greg gets even 10% of these searches which is 11 people and provided they use his service and take the £25.00 valet that is an additional £275 of income for his business in a month. Greg also advised me customers get their vehicle valeted around twice a year so over the course of the year he has a potential £6600 increase in income just from one website which can cost £9.00 per year from one.com.

Now he is just as curious as I am to see how much extra business he recieves from advertising online – and I will post the figures on here in the future.

Choosing the right web host for your site is always a tricky process. There are literally thousands of web hosting companies out there and when you decide to get your website up and running you need to make this decision.

I personally use one.com and their   packages start at just £9.00 per year and includes a free domain name, 3 gigs worth of space, unlimited bandwidth and to top it off you also get a 15 days risk free money back guarantee. I have taken them up on this and cancelled a website within 3 days of this and got refunded all of my money back – they didn’t ask any questions.

This is the best value web host I’ve found out there with uncompromised customer service and offers all the features you would expect from any other web host. If you need more data space their 10 gig package is around £12.00  for the year.

I’ve used 1&1 in the past and they offer a great service too with very detailed traffic reports and statistical tools however they’re quite pricey and their basic packages start at £4.99 per month which also includes a  free domain name.

Now, I opted for the cheaper one because I can’t justify paying almost £60.00 for a service from 1&1 when I can get the service from one.com for a lot less.

One.com also gives their customers a free £50.00 Google Adwords voucher which is definitely worth it. In simple terms you get £50.00 worth of traffic for absolutely free!

I tend myself to be a loyal customer and there’s nothing I like to see better than when a company does offer a very useful, great value and customer focused service – hence why I’m writing this article.

If any of you guys would like to see me add a list of great webhosts or anything, just leave a comment or drop me an email with your suggestions.