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Why and How to Ping Your WordPress Blog

October 30th, 2009

WPDaddy keeps on providing you with helpful tips in order to simplify your efforts and help you get the most pleasure and benefits from your everyday writing. Today we are going to touch upon the easiest and the most convenient way of making your weblog even more popular and profitable - blog pinging. Haven’t heard about it yet? Then learn the following suggestions we have kindly prepared!

Pinging is known among bloggers as an XML-RPC-based push mechanism with the help of which the server is informed about all updates implemented within your blog via an XML-RPC signal. When the ping server receives a signal it creates a list of weblogs which have refreshed their content. The thing is a summary or your full new post will be added to your pinging service database and your post link will appear in this service recent ping page. Sometimes pinged data history is also indexed which provides search traffic.

Simply speaking, blog pinging is about generating traffic to your site and requires minimum time and efforts. All you have to do is subscribe to one of the pinging services and update your weblog content regularly in order for these services to index and rank your site. In such a simple way you will increase your blog rankings and get more traffic to it. You are also allowed to attach your weblog to several blog pinging services but you should be attentive with that - if they notify the same web services your weblog may be considered as spam. In fact there is a lot of cases of a real ping spam so be careful not to be included in the number of blog spammers.

Blog pinging also implies pingback which is one of the linkback types - the ways of getting notification when the user links to one of your documents. This helps you as an author to keep track of the users who link or refer to your articles. Pingback implies an XML-RPC request which is sent from one site to another in case of reference. When your website get a notification signal it goes to the site of the referrer and checks whether a live incoming link exists there. In case the link really exit the pingback will be recorded successfully, thus such mechanism makes pingbacks less spam-prone than trackbacks. As for WordPress, it supports automatic pingbacks which means that all the links in the published article are pinged when the article is submitted.

Blog pinging possesses several great advantages - it is free of charge and highly effective at driving important traffic to your blog. Besides, it is user friendly - most of the pinging services require you to enter only your blog URL and name to start, and seldom your IP address is required additionally. Among the most popular online pinging services are:

Ping-o-Matic!
Pingoat
Pingates
Autopinger

So don’t waste a minute and subscribe to one of the pinging services to increase your blog traffic and earning potential as well as improve your status and credibility!

Posted in Blogging Basics | 1 Comment »

Ultimate List of Tools for Your WordPress Part 2

July 29th, 2009

Well, this is obviously the sequel of my previous post Ultimate List of Tools for Your WordPress Part 1, where I gave you the selection of the most useful WordPress plugins for your posts, RSS feeds, video and comments maintaining. So, without further ado, here is the second part:

Statistics

* Backlinks inbound links counter
This plugin allows you to track all incoming links using MSN.
* Bsuite
This great plugin tracks your page loads, top performing posts, search terms that were used on incoming links and gives the list of related posts at the end of each entry.
* CountPosts
Allows you to see how many times each of your posts gets visited without counting visits from the admin.
* FeedBurner StandardStats
This plugin allows you to easily install the FeedBurner script to let you monitor your RSS feed statistics.
* FeedStats http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feedstats-de/
Displays your feeds stats and measures the length of stay on your site at your dashboard.
* Live
Lets you see new comments, grabbed feeds and posts visited in real time.
* Open Web Analytics
This plugin allows you to track visits and unique visitors, page views and clicks, referring websites and even shows your visitor geography on Google Earth.
* Search Phrases
Very simple plugin that displays search terms that brought your visitors to the blog of yours.
* Ultimate Google Analytics
Allows you to easily add the Google Analytics script plus counts downloads and outbound links.
* WP-Stats
Gives you general stats - number of posts, comments etc.
* Alexa Rank
Well, displays your Alexa rank at your web page.
* Google PageRank
Displays your Google Page Rank at your web page.
* Impress
Lets you boast about the number of your users and posts, pages and comments, categories and many more on your weblog.

Social Bookmarking

* Digg Button
Gives you the opportunity to add Digg button anywhere within a post using a simple code snippet.
* JPF Add to Reddit
Allows your readers to easily and fast submit your posts to Reddit.
* Share This
Lets you add multiple social bookmarking links and email-this feature in one single button.
* Sociable
Adds links to 61 social bookmarking sites.
* Socializer Plugin
Gives you the ability to add your posts to almost 40 social bookmarking sites.
* WP-Notable
Allows you to add the links with icons of multiple social bookmarking sites to each blog entry.
* wphotspots
Allows you to track the activity of your posts on a number of social bookmarking sites.
* Ma.gnolia Widget
This widget lets you display links from your Ma.gnolia account.

Navigation

* WP-PageNavi
Gives you an opportunity to add a more advanced paging navigation at your blog.
* Wordpress Navigation List
Great plugin with drag ‘n drop interface that gives you the ability to easily create a completely unique site navigation.
* Multi-level Navigation
Allows you to add a horizontal dropdown, vertical flyout or horizontal slider menu to your WordPress blog.
* Simple Sidebar Navigation
This is a very simple plugin that lets you add a widget to create custom navigation in any sidebar without writing any PHP code.

This is by far not the full list of useful plugins. WordPress is that much popular exactly due to the many features created every day, thus there are thousands of really helpful plugins. Feel free to share them in the comments below.

Posted in Blogging Basics, WordPress Plugins | 7 Comments »

Ultimate List of Tools for Your WordPress Part 1

July 23rd, 2009

WordPress is the hugely popular blogging platform, no wonder there is such immense number of tools developed for WordPress powered blogs. To simplify your life I’ve made a selection of the most useful plugins and extensions to give you the ultimate list of WordPress tools.
Much has been said about such essential plugins as Akismet and All in One SEO Pack, thus I won’t touch upon them here. And don’t expect to see here tools for SEO, security, audio and image sharing as I already covered these subjects at this blog.

Tools for Posts:
* Auto Link
Automatically links keywords within your blog posts to any location you specify
* Category Posts Widget
You can specify how many posts you want to be shown within the specified category
* Code Markup
This plugin allows you to put snippets of code (HTML included) into the posts without affecting your page.
* Easy Post-To-Post Links
Use a shortcut to link to another posts on your blog.
* WP-PostRatings
Let your visitors vote for your posts. Plugin also allows to display the most or least ranked posts on your sidebar.
* WP-Footnotes
This plugin allows, well… to put footnotes at your posts.
* Yet Another Related Posts Plugin
Gives a list of old posts on your blog related to the current one
* WP-PostViews
Displays the number of times a post has been viewed.

RSS Feed Tools:
* Feed Control
Among many features this plugin gives you are the ability to exclude posts from your feed and add pages.
* Feed Footer
Adds copyright and ads to your RSS posts.
* DeCat
Gives you an opportunity to select categories that won’t be included in your feeds.
* Feed Styler
Style your feed as you want it to be.
* FeedStats
Gives you every statistics on your feeds
* Subscribe-Remind
This nice plugin allows you to remind your readers to subscribe to your feed at the end of each post.

Video Tools:
* Easy Inline SWF
Allows you to easily insert Flash files in .swf format into your blog entries.
* Extreme Video
Allows you to play any .flv file on your blog. Supports YouTube, Quicktime, Google Video and more.
* YouTube Brackets
With this plugin you do not need to copy and paste embed code to insert a YouTube video into your post, all you need is to enter an URL
* SeeTheFace
This tool allows you to record video and post it at your blog.

Comments Tools:
* Bannage
With this plugin you can ban any annoying user by name, email, or IP.
* Admin Panel Comment Reply
This plugin will add a “reply to comment” option in the comments section of your WordPress admin area.
* WP-Most Commented Posts
Displays the most commented posts at your blog sidebar
* Live Comment Preview
With this plugin you will allow your users to preview their comments before posting them.
* Edit Comments XT
Your users will be able to edit their comments.
* DoFollow
Removes the “nofollow” attributes from links in comments.
* DoFollow Trackbacks
Removes “nofollow” attributes from the trackbacks.
* Show Top Commentators
List your most devoted commentators with links to their websites.

This was the first part of the list of the most essential WordPress tools. What type of tools would you like to see in the next part?

Posted in Blogging Basics, WordPress Plugins, WordPress tips | 4 Comments »

Plugins to Monetize Your Blog

July 21st, 2009

It’s not a secret that most of us are blogging to earn some money. Thus I decided to make a list of plugins that can help you with this goal.
The most popular way of making money online is Google AdSense. There are hundreds of articles on how to make money with Google AdSense and a number of plugins that make the installation easier and faster:

* Adsense Deluxe WordPress Plugin
This plugin will add a screen to your options panel. From that screen you will be able to create AdSense ad units and manage them, decide what sizes ads should be and at what parts of your blog they should be placed.

The plugins named below will help you easily add AdSense to your blog:

* Adsense Injection
* MightyAdsense
* Google AdSense Widget

As most of the AdSense WordPress plugins require editing your theme you might find Shylock Adsense WordPress plugin to be the better choice for you as it allows to insert Adsense ads to your WordPress blog without modifying the theme.

* AdSense Manager is also a very good WordPress plugin that will help you manage your ads. It generates the code automatically.

* Google Ad Wrap
This fruitful plugin wraps posts and comments at your blog inside Section Targeting tags thus giving you better targeted ads.

And these plugins will help you track your AdSense earnings:

* AdSense Sharing Revenue and Earnings System WordPress Plugin
* Adsense Clicks Tracker
* Adsense Earnings WordPress Plugin

Another popular resource of money for bloggers is Amazon.com. There are several plugins that can help you add different Amazon ad types to your WordPress blog.

* Amazon Autoposter
This free and user friendly plugin automatically posts Amazon products on any keyword you specify, thus helping you earn money with Amazon affiliate program.

* Amazon Associate Filter
This plugin will automatically add your associate id to all Amazon links in the posts and comments at your blog.

What affiliate programs do you use to monetize your blogs?

Posted in Blogging Basics, WordPress Plugins | 1 Comment »

How to Add WordPress Plugin. Simple Guide

July 16th, 2009

Almost every post at this blog is giving you useful and sometimes not that useful but curious plugins. It never occurred to me that someone of you may not know how to actually add those plugins to your WordPress powered blogs. Thus I’m going to fill in the missed point and give you a simple guide on how to add a plugin to your blog.

There are WordPress plugins that require editing your WordPress Theme template files and ones that do not require such modifications. Both types are installed the same way, just follow these simple steps:

* Download the desired plugin.
* Log-in to your WordPress admin panel.
* Click on Plug-ins on the left side of your panel.
* Click on Add New and then on the Upload Tab.
* Browse the downloaded plug-in file at your computer and click on Install Now.
* After your WordPress finishes the installation process click on Activate Plug-in.

That’s it, your WordPress plugin is added and active.
Generally this is everything you’ll need to do when adding a plugin, if there are other requirements the developer will for sure specify them, so read the text files that come with your plugin carefully. Besides, some plugins may require configuration, most WordPress Plugin authors give clear step-by-step instructions of the required configuration, so read these carefully as well.

Posted in Blogging Basics, WordPress tips | 3 Comments »

Is Your Blog SEO Friendly?

July 14th, 2009

We’ve discussed the importance of search engine optimization here more than once. But I think one more time won’t be a waste.
So, let’s revise what exactly SEO means and how it works.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is a process of improving the volume and quality of your traffic received from search engines. To understand SEO better you should know how search engines work. This is pretty easy - such search engines as Google and Yahoo use a program called a “web spider”. These spiders crawl the web and collect info about the web pages (content, links etc.) and deposit this info to the search engine’s database. When you want to find something on the web and type your query in the search box the search engine has to do one simple thing - to find the most relevant info in it’s database. To make your blog more relevant to probable queries you should make it rank for the factors that form the search engine algorithm higher. This is where SEO will help you.
Here are things you should check and plugins you should add to make your blog SEO friendly:

* All in One SEO Pack
I already told you about this extremely useful plugin. It allows you to add meta tags, titles, descriptions and keywords to your blog posts.

* Google XML Sitemaps
If you want google spiders to crawl your weblog better you should help them - create a sitemap. This nice plugin will help you do the task easily and fast.

* Sociable
This is a great plugin I’ve already mentioned at this blog, it allows your visitors to bookmark your posts at 99 social bookmarking sites. Find more WordPress plugins meant to help you increase traffic. http://www.wpdaddy.com/blog/2009/03/increase-traffic-with-wordpress-plugins/

Things to check:

* Add Titles and ALT tags to the images you use in your blog entries

* Make sure your meta descriptions are unique and do not repeat your content

* Make sure your theme uses header tags correctly:
- Your blog title (your main keyword) should be placed in an h1 tag.
- Your post titles should be placed in h2 tags.

These are very basic SEO tips for beginners, if you have more simple tips feel free to share them in the comments below.

Posted in Blogging Basics, WordPress Plugins, WordPress tips | 2 Comments »

Is your content easy to read?

June 10th, 2009

The readability of your blog posts is the key to your success. You expect your readers to get the message put in the blog posts you write, but how can they if your blog is not comfortably readable? Below are few tips to help you improve your blog readability

* The post should be clearly separated from the design. The beginning and ending of your posts should be visually obvious.

* Be neat. No one likes too long articles even if the subject is interesting. You most likely can say in 20 words the same thing you said in 45 for instance.

* Underline the links. Links are expected to be underlined, thus do not disappoint you readers Thus if the links are expected to be underlined nothing else should.

* Don’t break up the posts with the adverts. Putting the ads in the middle of the posts you just annoy your readers and distract them from the article.

* Use italics and bold. If the reader doesn’t have time to read the whole post you’ll help him skim through the text highlighting the key elements. Note that if you use italics and bold there’s no need to change the color and size of the highlighted words.

* Put the post images at the beginning of the post. Post images are used mainly to attract attention, thus they work best when put at the top of the page.

* Centre the images that are a part of the article (charts, diagrams etc.) Thus you’ll show the reader that the image is a part of the text not just an element of decore, and don’t forget to skip a line before and after the picture.

* Use common fonts. Make sure your posts are written with common fonts that everyone has.

* The sidebar should be short. The sidebar competes with the post for attention, thus the sooner it ends the better.

These are only few things to consider when writing a readable post.

What else do you do to improve your blog readability?

Posted in Blogging Basics | No Comments »

11 Tips on Making Your Post Titles Prominent

May 26th, 2009

You may think your blog post titles don’t really matter, but the thing is - they do matter a lot.
How does a random person decide whether to read a blog post or not? It doesn’t matter if the named person found your blog post at the searcher or at his feed, or at any of the social bookmarking websites, or even by simply surfing the web, the first thing the decision whether to read a post or not depends on is the title. Thus the title should be really great, catching and intriguing. There are loads of information at the Net on how to make your post titles prominent and catching, I collected the most reasonable tips to give you a simple yet useful check list. Note that not every of these tips is good for every blog post you write, everything depends on content, thus remember that you blog post title should reveal what your blog post is about, everything else comes later.

* Use keywords
* Hint what your reader will “get” from reading your post.
* Debates and controversy are the powerful tool for attracting readers.
* Use words like ‘free’, ‘discover’, ’stunning’, ‘warning’, ‘easy’, ’secrets’ and other power words.
* Promise something. But don’t forget to back the promises up at the post.
* Reach out to your reader. Using “you” in the title as well as in the post itself makes it more personal, thus more vivid for readers.
* Ask questions. These are good not only in attracting readers but also in stimulating comments.
* Be humorous. Humor is a great tool, but it has to be funny, remember that.
* Always right for your readers, not the search engines first.
* Simplicity is the key. No one likes too complected words and highbrow content.
* Lists are among the most popular posts.

Well, have I missed something? Do share your tips and advice in comments below.

Posted in Blogging Basics | 4 Comments »

WordPress as a CMS: how to build a portfolio website

April 30th, 2009

Deservedly considered to be the best blogging platform WordPress is not just that. Its ease of use and maintenance makes it the most ultimate CMS (Content Management System). CMS is a Web application used for creating and managing HTML content. CMSs usually provide tools that allow creating and managing content with little or no knowledge of programming. The easy to understand and operate WordPress admin tools allow you to create literally every possible type of website without tech skills from your side. There are hundreds of ways to use WordPress not as a blog but as CMS, creating an online portfolio is one of them. So how can you actually do that? Well, there are few ways.

* You can add image gallery WordPress Plugins to your blog thus adding the new functionality to it. This is an easy way to show your pictures to the world.

* The other way is to change your WordPress theme to a pre-made theme that is especially designed to be a gallery. Here you should decide whether you want a free or a premium theme for your online gallery.

Portfolio Extended is a brilliant example of a free wp theme for online galleries. It’s three column, adSence ready skin performed in nice red color palette.

free wordpress portfolio theme

Flipbook photo blog wp flash template is an awesome example of a premium theme for portfolio. The use of Flash makes it live and vivid.

Here are some brilliant examples of WordPress used as a portfolio website to inspire you:

Freshivore. A personal page of a designer from California featuring a very nice portfolio of his works.

wp portfolio

Best web gallery. A brilliant web design showcase built with WordPress.

wordpress gallery

How would you use WordPress as a CMS?

Posted in Blogging Basics, WordPress Tutorials | 3 Comments »

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Why and How to Ping Your WordPress Blog

Ultimate List of Tools for Your WordPress Part 1

How to Add WordPress Plugin. Simple Guide

Is Your Blog SEO Friendly?

Top 10 Video Tutorials for WordPress Beginners

Is your content easy to read?

11 Tips on Making Your Post Titles Prominent

WordPress as a CMS: how to build a portfolio website

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