We all love links!

Welcome to the first installment of a brand new feature on the ManageWP blog!

Every Friday we will be linking to the very best content that we have read in the previous seven days. You will only find the cream of the crop here – no fluff.

Let’s not waste your time on introductions though – it’s time to start reading! For your ease of browsing we have sorted the posts into four categories.

Blogging

Bloggers should always be working to improve their craft. Take direction from these great posts.

• 17 Copy-And-Paste Blog Post Templates - seeking blog post inspiration? Look no further than these 17 templates!
• The proper way of reading blogs - a distraction-free method of reading blogs that you have probably not thought of.
• How to Create Resource Pages for Your Blog - most blogs should utilize resource pages. Learn how to here.
• Blogging Trumps Traditional Advertising in ROI Head-to-Head - confirming something that a lot of us already know – blogging is quickly becoming one of the most effective means of advertising.
• The evolution of a blogger - what stage are you at in the evolution of a blogger?
• Romancing Your Blog - this week’s list wouldn’t be complete without a reference to Valentine’s Day, would it?
• Creating a Corporate Blog People Want to Read - knocking down the stumbling blocks that many corporate bloggers encounter.

WordPress

We all love WordPress. Here are some tips and tricks on how to make the most of our favorite content management system.

• WordPress permalinks FAQ : Your Guide to choosing the right Permalink Structure - all WordPress bloggers should have a good understanding of permalinks. Find out what you need to know here.
• 7 Free Twitter Bootstrap Themes for WordPress - Bootstrap is all the rage at the moment. Check out how you can integrate it with your WordPress blog here.
• How to Install WordPress Locally on Your Computer in Four Easy Steps - having a local version of WordPress can be handy (or even vital) for any blogger.
• Integrating Google Gadgets Into WordPress Themes - extend the capabilities of your WordPress blog with Google Gadgets.
• Control Where Widgets Are Displayed With Widget Logic Visual - a more user-friendly update to the fantastic Widget Logic plugin.
• Determining Which Plugins Are Slowing Your Site Down - speed up your WordPress blog by finding out which plugins are slowing it down.

ManageWP

The latest news and views on your favorite WordPress site management tool.

• ManageWP Is Now Managing Over 100,000 WordPress Sites! - the week wouldn’t be complete without mention of ManageWP passing this huge milestone.
• The Best WordPress Plugins You’ll Ever Need - guess who made the list?

The Best of the Rest

For those articles that we loved, but don’t fit into one of the above categories.

• Optimizing Images to Reduce Load Times - it may not be a glamorous topic, but quick load times are vital to the success of any site.
• How to tell if your site should be concentrating on search or social - social signals are becoming more and more important. Find out what you should be focusing on to achieve good rankings here.
• Prove It: What Makes You Trust a Website? - trust is an underestimated factor when it comes to user experience.
• Usability Rules for Content Sites - simple fundamentals that you can apply to your site now.
• 4 Ways to Improve Ecommerce Conversions with Better Landing Pages - even small tweaks to landing pages can make a huge difference.
• How to Set Up an Email Account that Uses Your Domain Name - a simple solution to a common requirement.

What Was Your Favorite?

Did you read a great article this week that you think is worthy of sharing with the ManageWP readers? Let us know in the comments section!

Creative Commons photo courtesy of Orbmiser

If you read last week’s post on what you need to know about how your website is ranked, you will no doubt be keen to know about how the fundamentals discussed convert into actionable strategies. That is in part what we are here to explore today.

As you know, there are two broad factors that determine your ranking – relevance and authority. In this post, we are going to focus on the first factor – how you should employ onsite SEO to make your site relevant to the search engines.

Of course, every site is relevant to something – but it is what your site is relevant to that makes the difference. If you are not methodical about how you craft your onsite SEO, if you do not focus on the intended relevance of your site, you will not rank as highly as you could.

Whilst it is true that many sites with poor onsite SEO rank well in the search engines, that is because their lack of solid onsite SEO is made up for by a healthy level of authority. It is a bit like a baseball pitcher whose lack of accuracy is compensated by a powerful fastball. He would be even better if he could throw that same fastball more accurately, right?

Onsite SEO Is Key

So make no mistake – onsite SEO is extremely important. Not only that, it is a darn sight more easy to implement effectively than offsite SEO (which we will discuss in a future post). The quality of your onsite SEO is entirely within your control – the same cannot be said for offsite SEO. Invest time in optimizing your site accordingly, and you will reap the benefits.

Just one more thing before we start – this post is deliberately not going to go into great detail on certain matters. Onsite SEO is a strategy that is subject to rife over-analysis, and it is not our intention to overwhelm you with little tweaks that may or may not make a small difference to your rankings. If you get the fundamentals right, that should be all you need to concern yourself with.

With that said, let’s take a look at the simple and actionable steps you can take to optimize your website for search engines.

1. Meta Tags

There are only two meta tags that you need to concern yourself with – title and the description. Whilst your page’s the title isn’t technically a meta tag, it is closely related to the description, and should be considered alongside it.

As you can see, a site's title and meta description is prominent in search engine results pages.

If you read our previous post on SEO, you will understand fully that search engines rank pages, not websites. Although they will consider your site as part of the ranking process when they assess a page, it is the relevance and authority of the page itself that is most important.

And so when it comes to your page showing up on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP), there is nothing more important than its title and description. Effectively utilizing these two meta tags is arguably the most important part of onsite SEO. There are two reasons for that:

1. Search engines attach a great deal of weight to the keywords contained within the title and description.
2. The percentage of click-throughs from the SERP will be affected by the wording within those two meta tags.

To put it simply, if you are trying to rank for the keyword “sprinkler system”, you must ensure that those words are contained within both the title and the description.

Furthermore, you should word the title and description in a manner that will promote more clicks from the SERP. Don’t just set your title and description to “sprinkler system”. You could for instance set the title to “How To Choose The Best Sprinkler System”, and the description to “Are you overwhelmed by the choice of sprinkler systems available? Find the right sprinkler system for you here!”

Put yourself in the searcher’s shoes. If I am interested in sprinkler systems and I come across a site with a title and description like that, I will be likely to click – even if the result is not number 1. Your position on the first page is not the sole factor in determining the click through rate.

When it comes to length, try to keep your title under 70 characters, and your description under 160. These are roughly the limits imposed by Google before they cut off your text.

2. Permalinks (Your Page’s URL)

Another factor that search engines consider alongside your title and meta description is the URL of the page itself. A classic example of the power of an URL in determining the placement of a page in the SERP can be found in a search for the keyword “credit cards”. Here is the very first result in Google for that search:

The top results isn’t Mastercard, nor is it Visa. It is a credit card broker. This site is far less authoritative in terms of offsite SEO than the main credit card suppliers, but it still beats them in the rankings on the strength of its domain name.

So picking the right domain is important. But it is very difficult these days to pick up “valuable” domain names. What you can do however is name your permalinks appropriately. Let’s look at the sprinkler system example again. The ideal permalink for such a page would definitely be “sprinkler-system”. You don’t need to worry about wording the permalink as you would the title – just include the exact keyword that you are targeting, and nothing more. The less words there are for search engines to take into account, the better.

3. Your Content

If you are targeting a specific keyword or keywords, you need to make it easy for the search engines to recognize that fact. We have already discussed how you can do so with the meta tags and permalink, but your content is also a vital factor.

As the very tired phrase goes, "Content is king" (but not of the jungle).

The first place you should start is with your h1 tag. Just like your page title, the h1 tag is weighted more heavily than many other onsite factors, so you must ensure that it is worded appropriately. Typically, it is good practice to match your h1 header with your page’s title.

Secondly, you should consider the bulk of the content itself. This is an area that really gets over-analyzed amongst SEO “experts”, but you can keep things pretty simple and experience positive effects. Forget about keyword density – just aim to write with just two things in mind:

1. Your keyword
2. Your audience

It is that simple. You want to include your keyword appropriately within your content, but you also do not want to forget that you are writing for human beings – people will get turned off very quickly if you are stuffing keywords into your content in the hope that search engines will rank you higher. Moreover, “keyword stuffing” tends to actually have the opposite effect on your rankings to what you would wish for.

4. Media

Search engines don’t just look at the words on your page – they consider media too. There are two good reasons for including photos and videos on your site:

1. It increases user engagement
2. It is good for onsite SEO

You should already be including photos as a bare minimum on your site. The key to optimizing images for SEO is in the filename and the alt text. Going back again to our sprinkler system example, the image should be named “sprinkler-system.jpg” (or equivalent), and the alt text should be “Sprinkler System”.

Want to see an example of how this can all come together? Try searching in Google for “ManageWP loves sprinkler systems”. See what comes up.

ManageWP loves sprinkler systems!

Ideally, you should be naming the alt text to compliment the context of the image itself, so don’t be afraid to mix things up. For instance, you might include a photograph of a particular brand of sprinkler system, and set your alt text as “[brand name] sprinkler system”.

Not only does this make your site far better in terms of accessibility (i.e. to those who cannot view images but instead read the alt text), but it offers you the additional potential to rank for “long tail” keywords (that are less searched for, but more specific).

Videos are also great to include on any given page. It doesn’t take long to search YouTube to see if there are any related videos available that may benefit your readers, and including one will do no harm to your onsite SEO.

All You Need

Yes – there is a lot more that can be said about onsite SEO. But to be quite frank, a lot of it is either misinformation, or not adequately proven to offer beneficial results. There is no such thing as perfect onsite SEO, and at the end of the day, we do not know exactly how search engines determine the relevance of any given page.

However, if you follow the common sense route and optimize your pages as per the suggestions above, search engines will be able to easily tell which keywords you should be ranking for. It is then just a case of getting your offsite SEO right to make sure that you can beat similarly-optimized sites (or lesser optimized sites with greater authority). So stay tuned for our guide on offsite SEO, coming soon!

What Do YOU Do?

Do you follow the strategy outlined above, or do you do things differently? Perhaps you have additional pointers for onsite SEO that can help other readers. Let us know in the comments section!

Creative Commons images courtesy of Â°Florian, Ian Sane, Robert S. Donovan and hj_west

The land is dry but the ideas are flowing in Phoenix, AZ.

So says the official WordCamp Phoenix 2012 website. This year, ManageWP is a proud sponsor of the event, which is highlighted on many a calendar of top WordPress developers.

The event runs from 24th-26th February, and with a huge breadth of quality speakers, is destined to be one to remember for WordPress developers and users alike.

The Schedule

On Friday, the event will be hosting a number of day-long classes, catering for WordPress users of every skill level.

On Saturday, you can attend “tracks”, with subjects ranging from WordPress experience “jumpstarts” to case studies of WordPress awesomeness.

On Sunday, it will be time to collaborate with your new found friends by expanding your understanding of core code, plugin development and other advanced development topics.

Meet James!

Our very own James Mowery is going to be at the event on Friday and Saturday, and he would love to connect with you in person! Get hold of him via his Twitter account or by email.

We are delighted to be sponsoring this event and hope to connect with many of our users. We are always seeking to improve and expand upon the capabilities of ManageWP, and there is no better way of doing that than connecting with our users directly.

You Can Still Attend

The event has actually sold out, but we still have a couple of tickets left. So if you want to attend, drop James a line and we’ll see what we can do! Alternatively, you can volunteer at the event, which grants you free entry.

Be sure to check back on the blog regularly – James will be posting regular updates from the event. We’ll be sure to include plenty of pictures, and maybe even a video or two! And for all the latest news, you can follow WordCamp Phoenix on Twitter and on Facebook.

Us internet folk often struggle to focus – there are just too many darned distractions. If it’s not Facebook, it’s YouTube. If it’s not YouTube, it’s Lolcatz. And as you no doubt know, the list goes on and on.

The key to blogging effectively is to lay down some sort of structure. If you are the kind of person that can lose hours on social networking sites, you surely understand that you must change your ways. We all have the same amount of hours in a day – it is what we do with those hours that makes all the difference.

With that in mind, today we have a whole host of productivity tips and tools that can help turn you into an efficient blogging machine in no time.

1. To Do List

Some people are seemingly allergic to To Do Lists. Others claim that they are a hindrance to productivity, which to be frank, is a load of baloney.

That's right - baloney.

To Do Lists are extremely effective tools when used in the right manner. The key is to not allow your brain to be distracted. To be most efficient, your brain must be allowed to focus on the singular task at hand. This is not possible if you are worrying about the 20 other things that you have to do. But if all of those things are on a To Do List, they do not require your conscious thought. You know that you will come to them in time.

There an enormous number of To Do List programs and apps available. The best this author has ever used is Outlook’s built-in Tasks feature, but great alternatives include Remember The Milk, Todoist, and Google Tasks.

2. Partition Tasks

This tip follows on directly from the previous. In order to be most efficient, you must focus on one task at a time. That means no distractions. If you are sitting down to write a blog post, you shouldn’t have your emails or social media profiles open. You shouldn’t be listening to music or have one eye on that slow-cooking chilli you’ve got simmering away in the kitchen.

The damage is not only in the one minute you may move away from your task – it is in the constant “background” distraction if you are not totally focused on what you are doing, in addition to the time it takes to return back to your previous level of focus. So stick with one task at a time, and you be far better focused and more efficient.

3. Plan Ahead

If you want to be truly efficient, you should never feel like you have nothing to do within your allotted work hours. You do not want to waste your most efficient hours twiddling your thumbs.

Thumbs: not for twiddling.

When it comes to running your own blog and/or business, there is always something that you can be doing. It takes but a few moments in the morning (or at the start of the week) to plot out the tasks that you should be focusing on in your available time. If free time is available, you can take the opportunity to decide if you want to create additional tasks, or take a break.

4. Evernote

Most people have heard of Evernote by now, but many still do not use it. It is the ultimate in brain dump technology – anything you think of, anything you want to read – it all goes in Evernote.

Its potential applications are numerous – you can use it as storage for all of your blog post ideas, to save web articles that you want to read at a later date, to store your shopping list. And it syncs across all major platforms, so you should never be without it.

Whenever inspiration strikes, Evernote is ready to record your genius for future prosperity.

5. Dropbox / Google Docs

We now live in a world where your files must be accessible from multiple platforms. This is especially the case if you are working with a Virtual Assistant. The two most popular (and arguably the best) file sharing tools are Dropbox and Google Docs. Both offer their own advantages.

Dropbox offers you 2gb of free storage, with paid options beyond that. It stores your “master” files in the cloud, and synchronizes those files with specified folders across all of your devices.

Clouds: deceptively good at storing files.

Google Docs is a web-based file storage system, which allows you to use Google’s proprietary software to add and edit common filetypes such as text documents and spreadsheets.

Each tool has its own unique advantages. Dropbox effectively allows you to replicate your documents’ folder structure, and there are no restrictions on filetype. Google Docs allows simultaneous editing.

6. Simple Filesharing

Sometimes we want to share files with those that don’t have access to our Dropbox or Google Docs accounts. Whilst there are an enormous amount of options available, the best we have found is Ge.tt.

This is file sharing at its most efficient – no signing up or logging in – just upload and share files with a couple of clicks.

7. Partition Your Email Inbox

Emails come in a variety of flavors – some far more important than others. It is a good idea to prioritize the handling of your email by setting up automatic filters. These will send your emails to specific folders or tag them appropriately, depending upon who they are from, the subject line, or any other number of factors.

So you can leave emails from your more challenging clients for when you have more patience...

If for instance you work for clients, you can set up filters to route emails from them into client-specific folders. You could also set up a tag for all submissions via your blog’s contact form, so that you can address all such emails at one time.

Any email client worth its salt comes complete with filtering options. If yours does not, our recommendation would be that you move to Gmail.

8. Macro Common Messages

If you have a popular blog, you will no doubt receive many emails from readers. Over time, common questions will emerge. An easy way to save time in handling such questions is to set up a macro that duplicates a stock answer, without you having to write it out every single time.

For PC, you can use Phrase Express. For Mac, you can use TextExpander. Either program allows you to store snippets of text that you can quickly paste into any program via a key combination.

9. Google Reader

The days where you would add a website to your browser’s favorites and periodically go back to it to check if there are any new updates are long gone. Some people claim that RSS is dead, but for anyone who wants to keep up to speed with multiple blogs, it is by far the best option. What is easier – manually accessing 20 websites to see who has updated their content, or simply allowing the content to come to you?

Whilst there are plenty of RSS readers out there, Google Reader is our favorite. It has a clean and functional design, and allows you to separate websites into particular categories.

10. Speed Up Media Consumption

If you listen to a lot of podcasts and watch a lot of videos, the efficiency of your information consumption drops through the floor. Whilst those forms of media are often more engaging than text on a screen, it typically takes a lot longer to convey information.

Don’t believe us? Try watching a subtitled film – you will quickly notice that you read the words more quickly than they are spoken.

Way ahead of you.

But that does not mean that you should avoid audio and video content – you just need to digest such information in a more efficient manner.

When it comes to video, you should use VLC Player. It allows you to watch video content at 2x to 4x speed. Consider the time savings here – a 20 minute video can be watched in say 10 minutes. If you work an 8 hour day, that’s 2% of your available time saved – just with one video. If you’re watching a 60 minute video course, you would be saving over 6% of your available time, with no downside.

When it comes to podcasts, you should always choose to read the transcripts (if they are available). As always demonstrated above, you read much faster than you speak, and with transcripts you are able to digest the exact same information in far less time.

What Do YOU Do?

Do you consider yourself an efficient blogger? Do you use any of the tips and tools above – or do you have your own methods? Let us know in the comments section!

Creative Commons images courtesy of quicheisinsane, jted, Ahmed Amir, apdk, eyelash_divided and gothick_matt

We here at ManageWP have been working day and night to do one thing — create an amazing service that helps users manage any number of WordPress websites. We continue to be blown away from all of the support that our valued customers have given us; we really appreciate it. And now, thanks to all of you, we have something very special to celebrate!

ManageWP has surpassed 100,000 managed WordPress sites!

100,000 managed websites is a huge achievement, and we are excited about it! We can’t even begin to express how appreciative we are to all of you who have joined us on our journey to revolutionize WordPress management. Thanks to all of you, we foresee a very positive future ahead of us.

Because we are a profitable business we have the freedom to invest resources into the development, support, and reliability of ManageWP: we will continue to work harder than ever to develop and integrate powerful WordPress management features, expand our team as the demand for ManageWP increases, and integrate with third-parties to ensure that all of the management tools and services you rely on will always be available to you in the future.

Yet the adventure is only beginning. There is still much work to be done to make ManageWP into the product that we ultimately envision, but with your continued support, we know that we will be able to achieve these goals. And, most importantly, we will be here to continue to serve all of our phenomenal users.

If you ever have any questions or suggestions, never hesitate to contact us. And if you want to show your support, be sure to Like ManageWP on Facebook!

So last week we established that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is in fact not dead. Neither is it in its final death throes, mortally wounded, or even nursing a nasty bruise.

The logical follow on from that post is to explore what you can do to optimize your WordPress site for SEO. Be warned – we are treading on dangerous ground here. SEO is a notoriously controversial topic, and one that bloggers like to debate endlessly. It is often made out to be some kind of arcane discipline, only effectively practiced by the elite.

But you know what? That is all rubbish. SEO is in fact pretty straightforward. Today, you are going to learn how search engines assess web pages in order to determine where they should be placed in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). If you want to practice effective SEO, it is absolutely vital that you learn the following before going any further.

The Two Factors That Determine Your Ranking

Before we start, there is one key understanding you must have that is not made clear enough by most SEO “experts” – search engines rank web pages, not web sites. Each and every indexed page on your website is a separate entity, capable of being individually ranked by Google. It is entirely possible that individual pages on your site will rank for more highly-trafficked keywords than your homepage. Effective SEO is based upon ranking individual pages, not whole sites.

Think of each page on your site as a single edition of a newspaper that needs to be individually marketed.

With that said, let’s take a look at how search engines determine the rank of any given web page. At the most basic level, there are two factors in play:

1. Relevance
2. Authority

If a web page is relevant to a specific keyword, it is more likely to rank for it. And the more authoritative a web page is considered to be, the more likely it is to rank for any given keyword.

That is it folks – the foundational understanding upon which all effective SEO is practiced. Be relevant, and be authoritative.

Where Does SEO Come Into It?

As there are two factors that determine your rankings in SERPs, it is a logical progression that your SEO strategy should be split into two areas.

1. Relevance > Onsite SEO
2. Authority > Offsite SEO

Let’s take a look at each one in turn.

Onsite SEO

Search engines judge the relevance of a web page by two key factors (in this order):

1. What topic does the page cover?
2. What topic does the site cover?

Broadly speaking, writing a post on a particular topic that is directly related to the broad topic of your entire site represents the pinnacle of relevance. Say for instance that you wrote a post on advanced CSS styling on a web design site. Any search engine would recognize that the page is relevant to the site as a whole, and as such, would be more likely to push it up the rankings for CSS styling related keywords.

It could be you...

Conversely, writing a post on a topic that is not related to the broad topic of your entire site will make that page less likely to rank well.  If you wrote a post on lawn care tips on a business marketing site, search engines would be far less likely to rank your page highly for lawn care related keywords. That example is of course extreme, but you get the picture. The more focused your site as a whole is, the better chance you have of ranking well in the SERPs.

What is also extremely important is how easy you make it for the search engines to understand the relevance a page to a particular keyword.

So in conclusion, effective onsite SEO is achieved by producing relevant content on a relevant site.

Offsite SEO

Let’s imagine for a moment that all of the web pages in the world were equally optimized for relevance. Under such circumstances, SERP placements would be determined by an analysis of the following factors:

1. How many external pages are linking to the page, and how authoritative are those pages (and the domains upon which they reside)?
2. How many external pages are linking to the site, and how authoritative are those pages (and the domains upon which they reside)?
3. Is the anchor text of the link relevant to the target page?

Explaining the mechanics of these factors can be extremely complicated, but there is a simple explanation that serves well.

Link Authority

Let’s say that every web page in the world was ranked by authority, from 1 to 10 (let’s call that PA). Similarly, consider the domain upon which the page resides to be ranked by authority as a whole, again from 1 to 10 (let’s call that DA).

If a page with a PA of 5 and a DA of 5 linked to a page on your site, that link would be more valuable than a page with a PA of 3 and a DA of 3 linking to the same page.

When search engines consider the authoritativeness of a link, PA takes precedence over DA.

To get a rough measurement of the authority of any given web page, just check its PageRank. PageRank is an algorithm that was developed by Larry Page of Google many moons ago, and is still used by Google as a way of measuring the authority of web pages when determining the value of a link. You can check the PageRank of any page by using this tool.

Larry Page - likes to name algorithms after himself.

Please note that PageRank is determined per page. There is no such thing as “domain PageRank”. However, when it comes to judging the authority of a site, use the PageRank of the root domain (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/).

Link Relevance

The relevance of a link’s anchor text (i.e. the text that you click on) to the page it is targeting is incredibly important. The more relevant any given anchor text is to the page it is targeting, the more powerful the link will be considered by the search engines.

Let’s say you wrote an article on the best vacation destinations of 2012 and it was linked to by an external page with the following anchor text: “The best vacation destinations of 2012″. That is an example of a highly relevant anchor text. If instead the anchor text was “click here”, search engines would not value the link as highly.

Whilst an understanding of the mechanics of offsite SEO does get far more complicated than our brief introduction above, you could spend a lifetime trying to better understand how authoritative one link is from the next. The explanation above gets you 80% of the way there.

And as we all know, the last 20% is the hardest to learn, with the least benefit.

So in conclusion, effective offsite SEO is achieved by attracting a high number of authoritative links to the web page that you wish to rank for.

What Next?

We have focused heavily on theory in this post, but it is absolutely vital that you understand the mechanics behind SEO before you start learning the strategies you can employ to better optimize your site. Trying to implement a strategy that you don’t fully understand is doomed to failure.

But fear not! We are just getting warmed up. Stay tuned for future posts that will cover the different strategies you can employ to best optimize your WordPress blog for search engines. Sign up for a free trial of ManageWP now, and you will be informed as soon as new posts are published on the blog!

Creative Commons images courtesy of Wikipedia, olleolleolle, kevin dooley and An Phan Van

WordPress beginners - be proud of your noob status!

Finding out handy little features within WordPress that were previously unknown to you is always a good thing. It is not unusual to regularly find out about new features that would have been of great help in the past.

This is especially common if you are new to WordPress, and today our focus is on the beginners. Having said that, plenty of intermediate and even advanced WordPress users do not have a complete grasp of all of the little tips and tricks you can employ in using our favorite content management system.

We revealed 5 such features in part 1 of this series, and today we have another 5 for you!

1. Author Name Display

We’ll start with something really simple. If you like to include an author attribution or bio box in your blog posts, you may be somewhat frustrated by the way in which your name is displayed:

Having the name “admin” is hardly likely to fill your readers’ hearts with warmth, is it? Fortunately, there is an easy solution. Just select “Users > All Users” in your WordPress Dashboard’s sidebar, and pick the user that you wish to edit.

You will then be presented with a screen full of various options. Let’s focus on these fields for a minute:

What you enter into these fields will determine what is displayed in your posts. As you can see, the username cannot be changed, but the other fields allow you to set the author name as whatever you please.

Just enter your first and last name, as well as a nickname. You can then select how you wish your name to be displayed by selecting from the options in the drop down menu:

Once you’ve done that, the author name will change automatically across all of your blog posts:

2. Order Pages

You are likely to have a few pages on yourWordPress blog; such as About, Contact, Privacy Policy, and so on.

By default, WordPress presents pages in alphabetical order, like this:

But for most WordPress users, alphabetical order will not do. As we never tire of saying here at ManageWP, any reader who hits your site is likely to be impatient to discover what it is that you have to offer. With that said, it would be better for the pages that will best serve new users to be placed as far to the left as possible (given that the majority of people read from left to right).

Say you had a “Start Here” page, full of links to your best blog posts. You want new visitors to see this link straight away, but in the example above, such a page would be the furthest right option. Fortunately, there is an easy to way to change the order of your pages.

Let’s say for our example above that we want to order the links from left to right as follows:

1. Start Here
2. About Me
3. Contact Me
4. Privacy Policy

Yep, sorry – we’re ditching the “A Is For Aardvark” page. It has served its purpose.

I have used numbers in the above list very deliberately, as they are the numbers we will use to determine the order of the links in the blog’s navigation bar.

Just select “Pages > All Pages” in your WordPress Dashboard’s sidebar, and you will be presented with a list of all of your pages. You will note that extra options appears as you hover over each page, like so:

If you click on “Quick Edit”, you will be presented with the following fields:

For the purposes of this tip, we are interested only in the “Order” field. All you need to do is assign the numbers above to each of the respective pages, and hit “Update” when you are finished. The end result of this is that the pages will be ordered as we determined:

Please note that you cannot move the Home link from its position to the far left, without resorting to some coding jiggery-pokery. But to be perfectly honest, that is where it belongs.

3. Contextual Help

In our rush to find solutions to simple problems, we often do not stop to consider whether help is immediately at hand. And when it comes to using WordPress, help usually is just one click away.

WordPress offers contextual help for every single page on the Dashboard. Take the Add New Post screen, for example. Just click on the little “Help” tab at the top right of the screen, and you will be presented with this:

As you can see, a considerable amount of assistance is available, right at your fingertips. Before heading over to the WordPress Codex or Support Forums, check that the answer to your question isn’t staring you in the face.

4. Clever Permalinks

There are many reasons why you might change your mind as to the structure of a permalink (i.e. the URL) after you have published a post or a page.

Shown here is the headline of this post, and its corresponding permalink.

Most typically, you will have hit “Publish” before checking the permalink. WordPress does have a habit of occasionally mangling permalinks – especially if you have included special characters. Additionally, if you write your headline and then change it later on, the permalink will still reflect the wording of the original headline.

When it comes to changing permalinks, one option is to install a URL redirect plugin and set up a new redirect from the old permalink to the new one every single time you make a change. A far better solution however is to just change the permalink and be done with it. Because WordPress is clever enough to spot that you have changed the permalink and set up an automatic redirect from the old to the new. Pretty cool, right?

We have just one word of warning in using this feature – if you create a new post in the future that matches an old permalink, you may run into problems. In reality, this is unlikely to happen, but be wary of creating permalinks that may possibly be inadvertently duplicated in the future.

Embedding YouTube Videos

Any blogger worth his or her salt has embedded a YouTube video into a post. In fact, if you take a look around the blogosphere, a lot of people are seemingly doing it for fun. After all, syndicating YouTube content is a great way of adding additional depth to your content.

But for anyone who is new to YouTube, learning how best to embed videos into your content can be confusing. Just inspecting the Embed options within YouTube itself is overwhelming enough:

Yikes. But there is no need to deal with any of that rubbish – WordPress offers a totally straightforward YouTube embed feature. Here’s what you do. Click on the “Embed” button just below the video that you want to use, and copy the short URL that is shown.

Then just paste that URL directly into your post’s Visual Editor in WordPress. That is literally all you need to do! WordPress will fetch the video from YouTube for you and display it in your post, just like this:

You may notice that the above video starts at 1:40. With the greatest of respect for the author, he spends the first 1:39 minutes waffling on aimlessly, so we wanted to get you straight into the action. It is easy to do this with the additional options available to you in YouTube:

There are additional options you can play around with if you want to insert the iFrame code into the HTML Editor, but for beginners, this is a quick and easy way of embedding YouTube videos.

Over To You

Today we have covered 5 simple tips that allow you to squeeze additional functionality out of WordPress. But there are many more tips just like this.

WordPress beginners – do you have any tips that you can share with your fellow newbies? And for those who are more familiar with WordPress, do you have beginners tips similar to those above? Let us know in the comments section!

Creative Commons images courtesy of Andrew*

When it comes to driving traffic to your blog, Twitter is a force to be reckoned with. Even relatively modest Twitter accounts can produce a healthy level of traffic. Take the personal blog of one of our team members here as an example.

The above is a screen shot of the top two referring domains from the past seven days. As you can see, Twitter referred the second most amount of visitors to the site.

And above we can see the total number of visitors from all sources for that same time period. As you can see, there were a total of 1,420 visits. Based upon the above figures, Twitter accounted for over 8% of traffic to the blog. And that is from a Twitter account with not even 1,000 followers.

It Gets Better

This recent article over at awe.sm claims that Twitter drives four times as much traffic as typical analytics data suggests. Such a claim should be taken with a pinch of salt, but it is certainly valid to a degree. Traffic referred by Twitter is not always properly accounted for, with visits from desktop software and indirect referrals via other social networks being two good examples.

It has in fact been demonstrated that Twitter can account for well over 20% of your total visits. Take this post by Steve Scott as an example – he was able to drive over 5,000 visitors from Twitter in the month of January. There can be little doubting Twitter’s power in driving traffic to your blog.

Now let’s get down to the nitty gritty. Yesterday, we gave an overview of the methods you can employ to gain more followers and visitors. Today, we are going to go over a select list of tested and approved plugins that allow you to better integrate your Twitter account with your blog, and automate certain tasks.

So without further ado, let’s go through the plugins.

1. WP to Twitter

If you followed our advice with regards to publishing your posts at the optimum time, you will be scheduling your posts, rather than simply publishing them when they are finished. As such, you may not always be at your computer to share your posts when the time comes.

That's right - some people actually leave their computers for short periods of time.

Fortunately, that doesn’t have to be a problem. Just install WP to Twitter on your blog, and it will tweet out your new posts for you as soon as they are published.

Download it here.

2. Tweet Old Post

This plugin is similar to WP to Twitter, apart from it will periodically tweet out links to your archived posts, as opposed to new ones.

It has various settings – most importantly, you have the ability to set how often tweets are sent, and you can also exclude categories or individual posts.

Download it here.

3. WP Tweet Button

Once you have started to collect a few followers, you are likely to get far more traffic from people tweeting your content, than you doing it yourself. And that is where WP Tweet Button comes in.

WP Tweet Button in action.

As you can see from the above screenshot, the plugin places a tweet box in your blog posts. If people like your content, this gives them an easy opportunity to tweet it.

WP Tweet Button offers you a great deal of control over the placement of the button, as well as its functionality. Features include (but are not limited to):

• General and post specific settings
• Various placement and alignment options
• WPTouch support
• Google Analytics support

Download it here.

4. Digg Digg

If you are keen on social sharing but don’t want to just limit yourself to Twitter, Digg Digg is your best option.

As you can see from the above screenshot, Digg Digg places a floating share bar to the side of your blog’s content. It can also place share buttons within your post’s content, and much more.

Download it here.

5. Twitter Digest

This is a seriously cool plugin, and one that any blogger who likes to post periodical “link mashups” should take note of. Twitter Digest will extract all of your recent tweets and publish them as a post, like this:

There are a multitude of customization options, and you can do a great deal in terms of customizing what is seen. You can set the post to publish automatically, or be saved as a draft, so that you can edit it before publishing.

Download it here

What Do You Use?

So we have listed what we think are the 5 most useful Twitter plugins for WordPress. But have we missed any that you think are worthy of being on this list? Let us know in the comments section!

Creative Commons images courtesy of houdini_cs and eldh

Create a traffic jam at your blog with Twitter.

If you are a regular reader of the ManageWP blog, you will know that we are big on social media. Whilst there is no doubting the dominance of Facebook in terms of its market share, Twitter represents an opportunity boost traffic like no other.

Most social media “experts” will tell you that effective social media marketing is an art, rather than a science. But here’s the secret when it comes to Twitter – it is the only social network for which you can use quasi-scientific methods to boost your followers, and by extension, your blog’s exposure.

Here is the (admittedly oversimplified) step by step process to boosting traffic to your blog via Twitter:

1. Increase your number of followers
2. Tweet links to your posts

When you distill the process down to its most basic form, that is it. There are of course plenty of nuances – for instance, you won’t be popular for long if all you do is tweet your own posts. To become a respected authority on Twitter, you will need to provide links to a wide variety of resources. But in a nutshell, more followers equals more traffic to your blog.

The more followers you have, the bigger your blog can be.

With that in mind, there are two key questions to address:

1. How do I get more followers?
2. How do I maximize traffic to my blog via my tweets?

Today, we have a list of 5 resources that you can use to address those two questions.

Step 1 – Finding Followers

It is a well-known fact that a percentage of people that you follow will follow you back. That percentage will vary based upon a number of factors, but we are concerned with just one – relevance.

In trying to build your own follower base, you must make sure that you are targeting people who are relevant to your blog’s niche – i.e. people who will be interested in your content. Following 100 people per day in the gardening niche, when your blog is about cars, is not going to produce results.

So how do you go about finding relevant followers? There are plenty of resources available, but today we are covering three of the best.

1. We Follow

If you have been using Twitter for a while, you will be following most of the big players in your niche. But if you are not, you should be. Finding these guys is a piece of cake with We Follow. Just select a category or type in a search query, and related Twitter users will be displayed by order of influence, or followers. Take this search for SEO as an example:

If your blog focuses on SEO, It is a safe assumption that the followers of these guys will also potentially be interested in your content. So all you need to do is manually follow them. It is likely that a healthy percentage (somewhere between 20-40%, based upon our research) will follow you back.

2. ManageFlitter

Another way of finding likeminded people is to perform searches on Twitter. Say you were in the gardening niche. You might choose to search for tweets that include the keyword “gardening”. But forget using Twitter search then manually adding followers - ManageFlitter can save you a whole lot of time.

Just sign up for the service – the majority of its functionality is free to use. Hit the “Follow” tab at the top of the page and enter your search term. ManageFlitter will present you a list of all Twitter users who have recently posted a tweet featuring your chosen keyword. You can then add these users with just a few clicks by hitting “Quick Edit”, selecting the users, and then hitting “Follow”:

The other invaluable tool that ManageFlitter offers is the ability to unfollow those who are not following you. This is something that you will need to do on a regular basis, because once you get to 2,000 followers, Twitter will only allow you to follow more people if the number of people following you is higher.

3. Just Tweet It

Just Tweet It is a growing directory of Twitter users, sorted by category. So if your blog is in the social media niche, you just need to click on the relevant category and start following the people who are listed.

As far as we are aware, there is no way of mass-adding Twitter users with this service, so it is somewhat time-consuming. However, it does offer you a tailored list of likeminded Twitter users, which can’t be a bad thing. Also, you should consider registering yourself in the directory to boost your chances of being followed.

A Quick Word About Mass-Adding

Twitter frowns upon those who add and remove too many Twitter users on a regular basis. However, there is far too much paranoia amongst many of those who fear that mass-adding and mass-removal is a death trap.

Twitter is looking to penalize people who use Twitter as a method of spamming people. If you are providing value by offering insightful tweets, and links both to your blog and others’, you are unlikely to be penalized. As a best practice, we recommend that you add and remove no more than 200 people per day. It is of course up to you to decide how conservative or speculative you want to be.

Step Two – Tweeting For Traffic

Twitter offers huge potential for anyone looking to boost traffic to their blog. And although you can start sending traffic to your blog from Twitter today by throwing up a few tweets here and there, a more deliberate strategy will result in a far better result. Here are the two  tools you need to in order to maximize Twitter traffic to your blog.

1. Tweriod

Tweriod’s concept is both simple, but extremely useful. Sign up to the free service, and in a short space of time, Tweriod will analyze your followers’ most recent tweets to find out when they are active. Using that data, it will provide you with a graph showing the optimum times to tweet.

Based upon our research, there can be a 50% swing in the number of Twitter users online, depending on what time of day it is. This means that you can reach twice as many people if you tweet at the right times.

2. Buffer

But who wants to wait for the optimum time to tweet, right? Well, there is absolutely no need to with Buffer. This free service (with extra feature available with a monthly subscription) allows you to “buffer” your tweets, based upon times that you set.

Tweriod and Buffer combine beautifully to allow you always tweet at peak times. Simply decide upon the number of times you would like to tweet on a daily basis, determine which times are best using Tweriod, then set your Buffer accordingly.

Is That All There Is To It?

The fact is, social media is more of an art than a science. However, Twitter’s format as a social network gives us a unique opportunity to stack the odds in our favor through methodical processes.

Although we can say a lot more about good Twitter strategy (and I am sure that we will in the future), the basic nuts and bolts are all contained within this article. Attract more followers, tweet links to your blog at optimum times, and the traffic will flow.

Do you use any of the tools above, or will you be doing so now? What are your experiences with finding more followers and tweeting at optimum times? Let us know in the comments section!

Creative Commons image courtesy of null0

Timing is everything.

In many walks of life, timing is critical – and blogging is no exception. The days and hours at which you publish and promote your blog posts can make a big difference to the number of visitors that end up hitting your site.

We now live in a blogging world where post promotion is carried out through a number of different mediums:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+
• Email
• RSS
• Social bookmarking

This is of course just a brief list – there are a huge number of ways in which your blog posts can receive exposure. And many of these ways are “time sensitive” – i.e. the time at which the post is promoted can have a dramatic effect on its exposure. Today, we are going to explore the methods you can employ to ensure that your blog posts are promoted on the correct days, and at the correct times.

What Days Should You Publish Your Blog Posts?

If you are writing 7 posts per week, this question isn’t necessarily that relevant to you. But for the vast majority of bloggers who publish between 1-5 new posts per week, the days on which you choose to publish can make a considerable difference to your post’s exposure.

Here’s the problem – there is a lot of conflicting advice out there. In a post published way back in 2008, ReadWriteWeb published a post advocating that Thursday is the best day. Darren Rowse suggests that you might blog on a weekend because hitting the front page of Digg is easier. Pat Flynn claims that Monday is when he publishes his best content, because his Monday posts always receive the most attention.

So let’s try and cut through the fluff and see if there are some more definitive answers. A 2007 report published by the London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance refers to a survey that demonstrates Monday and Friday are the two days on which the least work is done.

It is not unreasonable to suppose that a lower work output correlates directly with an increase in the reading of blogs and social media – which is where your post comes in.

The authors of the report have the following to say with regards to the reason as to why Monday and Friday are the “laziest” days:

On the one hand, it is feasible that productivity may decline over the course of the week as a result of increasing fatigue. The two-day weekend then provides the opportunity to rest before beginning the working week again the following Monday. On the other hand, productivity may be depressed to some degree on Mondays by the need to reorient oneself after two days away from the work process. It is also feasible that workers may lack motivation on a Monday as a consequence of this day being the point furthest from the next available day of rest or leisure (so-called ‘Monday blues’). The proximity of Friday to the weekend may thus result in higher levels of motivation – particularly if there is a requirement or perceived advantage in completing tasks before the weekend. It is unclear as to how these various sequencing effects may balance out, but one possibility is that productivity may be at its peak in the middle of the working week, say on a Tuesday or Wednesday.

Here’s the skinny – if the London School of Economics can only speculate, so can we. And when you are presented with conflicting advice or foggy conclusions, there is only one thing you can do – test. Publish posts, note how they perform, and adjust your schedules accordingly. It may sound like a copout, but no one can tell you what timing is best for your blog. There are just too many variables in play.

But before you start testing, try to think logically, rather than statistically. What demographic are you trying to target? When are they most likely to read your posts? In the post already referenced above, Darren Rowse suggested that “weekend specific” blogs should post on a weekend, despite Saturday and Sunday being notoriously slow for web traffic. Don’t be afraid to go against the grain if your instinct tells you that your demographic will be sitting in wait for your blog post on a specific day.

What Time Should You Publish Your Blog Posts?

Fortunately, this question is easier to answer. You can be somewhat scientific about determining when the best time to publish is.

First you must consider timezone. It is very easy to discover when the majority of your audience is up and about. First of all, you can make a reasonable assumption that most people will only be reading your blog between the hours of say 8am and 11pm. So you know that you should be publishing your blog posts between those hours in the most common timezones amongst your blog’s readers.

The second thing you need to do is to find out what the most common timezones amongst your blog’s readers actually is. To do this, just login to your Google Analytics, click Audience, then Demographics, then Location.

You will then be presented with a color-coded map of the world that looks a little something like this:

The darker the green, the more visitors there are from the corresponding country. As you can see from the above map, the majority of visitors can be found in North America, but there is also a good concentration of people in Europe – especially the UK.

From there, it is pretty easy to decide when posts should be published – at a time where you can reach the most number of people across the most relevant time zones. A good time under the circumstances of this example would be 11am EST. That would be 8am PST, and 4pm GMT. Although you can vary the timings and assess the results, publishing your posts at 11am EST will give your post a good chance of being seen by the majority of people.

Does It Really Matter?

For many mediums of promotion, the day and time at which a blog post is published does not matter. For instance, RSS readers and email subscribers will have the post waiting for them when they get around to reading it, regardless of when you publish it.

That does not however make the above advice redundant. Social media is one of the most powerful ways of promoting your blog, and when it comes to social media, everything runs in real time. Take Twitter as a clear example. Say that you tweeted your new post out at the exact time where the fewest number of your followers are active. You will receive far less page views than you would have done if you had tweeted at the optimum time.

The topic of timing does not end here. Twitter, and how to make the most of it, is in fact our next port of call – and as part of Monday’s article, we will be delving even deeper into making the most of your blog posts with good timing. Stay tuned!

What Do YOU Do?

As you can see, timing the publishing of your blog posts should be based far more upon your own analysis, rather than the opinions of others. Your blog is a unique entity, with a unique readership – there is no “one size fits all” solution.

So on which days and at what time do you publish your blog posts? Do you put much thought into it? How important do you think timing is to producing popular posts? Let us know in the comments section!

Creative Commons photo courtesy of aithom2