Blogussion » wordpress plugins

How To Give Your Visitors More

Karan Singhal — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 04:00:51 +0000

If you’re a blogger, it isn’t hard to figure out what you visitors came to your website for: content. And as a webmaster, it’s your job to give your visitors what they’re looking for. There are many ways to do this, especially under the world’s best and most expandable blogging platform, WordPress.

Why is Giving Important?

Giving your visitors more gives your visitors a reason to stay on and come back to your website later. If you’re blogging for income, this means more ad-clicks, more affiliate sales, and most importantly, more subscribers. You easily can appear to have tons of content on your website to both users and content-hungry search engines, which you actually already do, but the visitor doesn’t usually see this. All of these benefits without writing a single word of extra content. Internet browsers are constantly looking for and sharing content.

By using the techniques outlined below, you can lead them to your content using nothing more than your own blog.

Use “Related” Plugins

The WordPress plugins that tell visitors which content on your website they’d likely find interesting are amazing. These addons use special algorithms to know what your visitors are looking for with accuracy. But these plugins don’t stop at helping visitors find new content. They also help search engines find and index more of it and, using internal linking, they add to your website’s link popularity.

How?

These kind of plugins create networks of links in seconds for every page of content you write. Content links to more content. This is an internal linking wonderland, and internal linking does pass PageRank. There is no reason, especially if you use WordPress, to implement a “Related Posts/Content” to your blog, preferably after each post.

Use “Popular Content” Widgets

As we already know, it is very important to give your visitors more content. A good way to do this is to highlight the best parts of your website. And in blogging, that is your content. But more specifically, which content? Your most popular content. Your most popular content is content that your readers have signaled to you to be the best on your website by commenting and sharing.

But why is it important to make this content even more popular?

Don’t overdue what’s popular, just make them aware

You know because it’s popular that this content is good and well-liked. If a visitor gets pulled into an article like this, they may feel inclined to share, read more, or even subscribe to your blog and buy a product. Many people disagree and say that you shouldn’t work on making your popular content more popular, but rather do the same for your unpopular content. Although this is true in a way, it is false in many more ways. Still, do not overdo this, your popular content should only be featured on a widget on your sidebar or footer, and nothing more.

Use “Random Content” Plugins

A new nearly-unlimited source of new content

The major flaw of the “Popular Content” plugins is that they only show a top few of your posts, and they don’t change too much. Random content plugins fix all of this. They show your user a few posts on your blog, picked at random – when you refresh your browser, a few new posts will be shown. This creates an effective solution for easily giving your readers a new nearly-unlimited source of new content right from your sidebar. Plus, these plugins are easy to set up and you can get them running in seconds, whilst popular content plugins may take a few days to setup as they gather post traffic data.

Have an Internal Structure, and Not Just Within Your Posts

Another way to give your visitors more of your content is to make it easier for them to read it.

The problem with most blogs is a lack of internal structure. This mistake has the power to anchor a website’s search engine rankings. But by internal structure, I don’t mean the structure of your content – that’s a completely different post. I mean how your website as a whole is structured. With blogging systems evolving quickly, it is becoming easier and easier to forget about this.

So what should you do about this?

Simply structure your site in an easy to understand way. Make sure that a visitor can easily find what they’re looking for, and be sure to use categories and tags effectively. Also add nofollow links to archives and categories within your blog sidebar/footer. This minimizes what the user has to go through to get more from your blog, and therefore increases your conversion rates, whether they are for RSS or ad clicks.

“3 Clicks Rule”

One related rule I try to follow myself is the “3 Clicks Rule”. The rule states that no page should be more than 3 (link) clicks from your homepage. This makes sure that no page on your website is too weak in terms of link popularity and that each page can be reached with little effort from the visitor. A great way to implement this on your website is to use a Sitemap and link to it within your footer so each page is only 2 clicks away from any other page.

First Sights

Always give your readers more

Your blog is a home to tons of quality content. But what does the visitor see? Only the first page of your posts. It’s important to put some of your blog (sidebar/footer) to use giving visitors more content. The tips above are some great methods you can use to help visitors get more from your website. They also provide a way for you to build your active community - the more content a reader sees, the more comments they make. Finally, giving your users more also gives search engines more to index and builds the link popularity of all of your posts automatically.

Thanks for reading! If you liked this article, be sure to retweet and share! It won’t promote itself!

Breakdown of the 28 WordPress Plugins That Have Contributed to the Growth of our Blog

Alex — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 04:00:01 +0000

If you use WordPress, there’s no doubt that you know of all the free plugins and modifications available for it. Without all of these plugins, a lot of the features found on many blogs today wouldn’t exist.

In this article, I want to share with you guys the 28 plugins we currently have installed here and how they have contributed to the growth of our blog.

It’s a long list, so get prepared for a little reading! Lucky for you guys, I took the time to sort this whole list out pretty neatly.

We can’t be the only ones promoting our posts, see what options we give our readers to promote our content.

Give a variety of sharing options

We use a plugin called Add to Any, and it adds a little button below our posts that gives you many options to share the post on social network sites.

Display retweet, digg it, and many other buttons

We use a plugin called Digg Digg to display the retweet button and digg button in our posts. It is much more effective than Add to any because it makes tweeting or digging a post much simpler.

How we encourage reader discussion

We take the time to write articles, so to ensure that people read them and create conversations, we use the plugins below to initiate more comments.

Create a higher incentive for commentators

Whenever someone comments on a post, we give them the ability to show their latest post on their blog after their comment with a plugin called Commentluv.

Increase comment initiatives: Remove the nofollow tag

We have also made our blog dofollow. On a blog with the nofollow tag removed, more “link juice” will be given to anyone who posts their link onto our blog with their keyword in it. If you want to learn more about Dofollow links, read the benefits of a dofollow blog and the pros and cons of nofollow and dofollow.

Easiest way to start email conversations

Communicating through email is a very easy way for readers to communicate with you one on one. It is so important that you need to have a good, reliable contact form for people to fill out. So, for that reason – we use Contact Form 7.

We also use a plugin called Really Simple CAPTCHA to protect our contact form from spam.

Keep Conversations Going

Subscribe to comments makes it easier to keep discussion within the comments alive. It allows reader to check a box, and then whenever their comment is replied to – they get an email which should bring them back to your blog and keep discussion going.

Blog Optimization

From speeding up your blog to smartly organizing it, the plugins below are not ones you want to overlook.

Organize your feed readers into one place

With FeedBurner FeedSmith, you will be able to keep track of every last subscriber if you use Feedburner. With this plugin, you can get a more accurate number of people who subscribe to your blog as it will make everyone subscribe through FeedBurner.

Move JavaScript files to the end of your page, decrease load time

Plugins and themes often call a lot of external scripts. JavaScript can really slow down the loading time of your pages, so by using a plugin like JavaScript to Footer, you can move the scripts from the header to the footer, which will significantly decrease the loading time on your blog.

Save your blog from pinging suicide

Every time you update a post, WordPress sends a ping to any ping service. If this happens too much, your blog can get labeled as a ping spammer, and you can miss out on plenty of traffic without these ping services on your side. We combat it with MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer.

How to get pages and pages of content seen by search engines

A sitemap is important for your SEO. It allows search engine bots to easily navigate through your blog and index the pages within your blog. With Google XML Sitemap Generator, a sitemap will be created for your blog automatically and will be updated as you add more pages (posts) to your blog.

Reduce image sizes significantly and decrease load time

Images are an important part of your blog, but they also can increase the loading time of your site. With a plugin like WP Smush.it, images will be compressed when you upload them and the best part is it does it all in the background without interrupting your publishing process.

Speed up your blog through page cache

The best way to speed up the loading time of your blog is to cache the pages with a plugin like WordPress Super Cache.

Making content more accessible

It’s important to make as much content as possible within easy reach of your readers so good content doesn’t go to waste. Here are the plugins we use to keep as much content as we can visible.

With the latest posts by category archive, we can do just as it says – display a list of the “x” latest posts from any category. I wrote a tutorial a couple weeks ago using this plugin as an example to create a favorites post list.

Show off Popular, Recent and Similar Posts

In our sidebar, we display the most popular posts on our blog, under every article on the blog, we show a list of related posts, and on our Archives page, we show our most recent posts. All of these plugins help get the most relevant content to our readers.

We chose the three plugins above because of how easily customizable they are, but they do require the Post-Plugin Library plugin to function.

How to create a great archives page

On our Archives page, we used a plugin called smart archives reloaded that creates a very organized list of your posts sorted by month.

See how we used this plugin to create our archives page →

Numbered Page Navigation

Rather than using the “previous” and “next” page links to navigate through our pages of posts, we decided to create a numbered navigation so you can easily select what page you want to jump to. We used WP Page Numbers.

See more benefits of this plugin →

Breadcrumb Navigation

At the top of our content area, we have a breadcrumb trail that lists what page you are on, and the pages you visited to get to that page. It’s very useful for not just SEO, but for driving more clicks to sub pages.

Miscellaneous Features

Below are just some of the cool little features we added to our blog to switch things up a little.

Create a Stream of Quotes

In our sidebar, we have a section dedicated to blogging quotes. We found an amazing plugin called Stray Random Quotes which comes with great features to create a random quotes section like we have in our sidebar.

Display Latest Tweet(s)

Another feature within our sidebar is the latest tweet spot where the most recent Twitter updates from our @Blogussion account are displayed.

RSS Reader only messages

Some people choose to read our blog content from their feed reader without visiting our blog. With the plugin RSS Footer, we can add extra bits of information after each post that will only show up to people reading through our RSS feed.

Useful Admin Options

The plugins we use below add some pretty nifty options to our admin panel that make us depend less on 3rd party applications and more on WordPress.

Spell & Grammar Check Articles

It’s important that your posts are published with the best grammar and spelling as possible. Content should not only be informative, but clear and easy to follow. We chose to go with After the Deadline, which is probably the most effective plugin of its kind for WordPress.

Traffic Tracking

I like to open up my WordPress dashboard and see what the daily traffic stats are for the blog. So, I use a plugin called WordPress.com Stats to get a very accurate reading of daily pageviews, most popular post of the day and more.

Stop spam in its tracks

Everyone knows this and probably uses Akismet. It’s probably the best anti spam plugin for WordPress.

Backup your database

Backing up your blog is a very important precaution you should take every day. With WP DB-Manager, you can get a backup of your database with many options to make the process more automated.

Share With Us

What plugins do you guys use on your own blog? Did you happen to see any plugins from our list that you use at your own blog? Share all of your plugin inquiries in the comments section below!

Photo by baboon

16 Free Phenomenal Plugins That Will Enhance Your Comment Area and Start More Conversations

Alex — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 16:03:45 +0000

The comment area on a blog is a very important place on a blog, and I feel like many bloggers under-utilize it. Sometimes, to get a good conversation started on a blog, there’s more to be added than just a comments form and the threaded enhancement.

There are many nifty little hacks out there to enhance the comment area, but not all of those hacks get as comprehensive as some of the things I am about to list below.

16 Awesome Comment Enhancing Plugins

What I have compiled below are a list of 16 plugins you can add to your WordPress blog that will enhance your blog in the aspects of the comments area. Hopefully with these enhancements, you should start to see some kind of increase in comments per post.

Comment Redirect – After someone comments, redirect them to a new page thanking them for their comment. You can include whatever you want on the page like your RSS feed, link them to related posts, etc.
Minimum Comment Length – Will force your commentators to write more than just a couple of words. Increases better conversation, decreases useless comments!
Comments Vote – Give your readers the ability to vote the best comments to the top positions of the comment area. Also, they can vote to push down the useless comments. Great way to truly get the most from your readers!
ReplyMe – This will email a user any time their comment is replied to on your blog. It’s great for creating ongoing conversations, and will drive back more people for more interaction.
Ajax Comment Preview – Allows users to click a button and preview what the comment will look like exactly as it would be posted on the blog.
Thank Me Later – Sends an email to someone who has commented on your blog to thank them. You can edit whatever text you want to display in the email with a variety of tags.
Tweetbacks – Displays a trackback type formatting of all the times your link was mentioned on Twitter.
Commentluv – Shows the latest post from the commentators website after their comment.

In the most recent update of Commentluv, the option to style the output was removed. There is no class for it in the Style Sheet, so if you want to customize it use #comments abbr {...} It’s a long shot, and may conflict with the abbr tag if used anywhere else in your comments area.

Comment Info Detector – Get a little more personal with your readers, this plugin shows what country they are from, the browser and OS they use.
WP Ajax Edit Comments – Allows user to edit their comment after publishing for a set amount of time you set.
jQuery Comment Replies – Hides replies to comments, and gives you the option to show/hide them. Useful for keeping top level comments in focus, which usually have more “meat” than replies.
Quote Comments – Quote someone else’s comment and have it show in your comment wrapped in your blockquote style.
IntenseDebate – A complete overhaul of your comments area, makes everything look very organized and professional.
GD Star Rating – Highly customizable rating system to rate comments in the community.
Fun with in-text comments – Add sets of questions, or any other pieces of information to dropdown boxes, let your readers choose from them and include in their comment.
@ Reply – Reply to users with Twitter like functions. Click on the “reply” icon and it will automatically insert a link to the comment authors name in your comment.

How Does That Work For You?

16 killer comment enhancing plugins should hold you over for now right? There’s some great stuff up there!

I personally like the idea of Comment Quotes, Tweetbacks and Commentluv. I think I will be adding some of this stuff to my blog!