Tips To Make WordPress Work For Your Business

I love WordPress; and, am declaring a WordPress Love Fest Week with lots of tips on marketing, security, plugins, and more.
As you probably know, WordPress is a dynamic web publishing platform and the choice of over 60 million website owners. You can use it to create a professional looking blog or traditional website quickly and without having to spend a dime on software. There are also countless ways that you can customize your WordPress site so that it uniquely reflects your business.

Thirty WordPress tips that you can use today for your site

1) Use a Landing Page

Change your site so that it displays a custom landing page instead of your current posts. Many themes have this feature, or you could use a premium solution such as PT Instant.

2) Strengthen Your Footer

Make the best possible use of the space at the bottom of your theme to include important links, a short bio or other important information about your site.

3) Update Your Theme

Are your traffic numbers flat or falling? When’s the last time you updated your WordPress theme? The answers might be related. If your theme no longer reflects the current branding of your company, then update or switch to a new theme.  It’s one of the great benefits of WordPress that a new theme will incorporate all your current pages and posts unless you choose not to.

4) Start Video Blogging

The current version of WordPress makes it extremely easy to post video content.

5) Improve Your Permalinks

By changing the URLs for the articles on your WordPress website to include fewer (but higher value) keywords, you may be able to improve the ranking of those articles on the search engines.

6) Leverage Your Images

Each time you upload an image, make sure to tag it with appropriate “title” and “alternate text” tags to assist your search engine rank. The “title” is also what appears when someone tries to “pin” your image to Pinterest.

7) Improve Your Sidebars

Use this tutorial to populate the sidebar areas of your site with content that can be dynamically selected and displayed based on a number of different parameters that you specify.

8) Add Page Numbers to Blog Post Comments

If you have a particularly active community of users who comment on your blog posts, use a plugin such as Simple Pagination to add page numbers your comment pages.

9) Hide Certain Post Categories From Your Home Page

Install the PE Category Filter to keep certain categories of post off your home page, but still keep them available on other portions of your site.

10) Let Users Register or Comment with Facebook

There are many different ways you can integrate your site with Facebook. The Nextend Facebook Connect plugin is one of the best and easiest ways to start.

11) Make Sure Everything is Current

This should almost go without saying, but take a few minutes today to make sure that your WordPress install, your plugins and current theme are all current.

12) Enable Avatars

In order to make your commenting environment more personal, you can enable avatars in the >> Settings>>Discussion area of your dashboard.

13) Check Your Site as a Visitor

If you’re only viewing your site through your admin dashboard, you may be missing out if something weird happens to the display. Logout of WordPress then reload your site to verify.

14) Add an Author Bio

Follow this tutorial to add a brief author bio to each blog post.

15) Display a Random Post as a Tweet

You beef up your Twitter account by using this simple plugin to automatically display a random post as a tweet.

16) Change Author During Editing

To be able to identify a particular author when creating a new post, you must change your default settings. From the “Add New Post” page, click “Screen Options,” then “Author.”

17) Clean Up Your Comments

While plugins like Akismet do a good job of filtering out blatant comment spam, you can also use this plugin to help you get rid of commenters who spam through their author URLs and comment links.

18) Author Sure

Show your face and build your brand in Google search results. Or in SEO-speak, make sure your AuthorRank is contributing to your PageRank. Use the Author Sure plugin for rich snippets and more.

19) Display a Random Post

If your website has hundreds of posts, you may want to make it more likely that new readers will be able to discover some of your older material. Use the Random Post for Widget plugin to display a link to a random post in a sidebar widget.

20) Members Only

Consider building a membership area of your website by selecting a new theme or plugin with those capabilities.  I have one in the works right now that I’ll be sharing with you, soon.

21) Use Breadcrumb Navigation

“Breadcrumb Navigation” is a navigation that can provide you with SEO advantages, and can make your site easier to use by your site visitors. If your theme doesn’t offer native support, consider a plugin such as this.

22) Encourage Social Sharing

Make it easier for your readers to share your website on Facebook and Twitter with a comprehensive social sharing plugin.

23) Personalize Your Greeting

Use a plugin like WP Greet Box to change the message that appears at the top of the page when someone loads your blog, depending on how they found your blog.

24) Redirect after Comment

Readers who make comments are likely to stay more active on your blog, so you can use this plugin to take them to a special page after they make their first comment.

25) Schedule Future Publication

On each new post page, there’s an option to schedule future publication of a post. This means you can prepare a number of posts all at once, then schedule them for an even publication stream.

26) Allow Readers to Easily Email Links to Your Articles

Use the WP-Email plugin to help your readers share your posts via email.

27) Disable HTML in Comments

Disable the HTML risks in your comments by using this tutorial.

28) Speed Load Times

Use a caching plugin to make your site load faster.

29) Change Image Quality

Update the default size of your thumbnails in >>Settings>>Media.

30) Install Google Analytics

If you’re not yet using Google Analytics to analyze your site traffic then install a Google Analytics plugin and get started today.
There are so many little things you can do with WordPress that can add up to big results. Just work on one thing a day and you’ll have an improved blog in no time.

If you need assistance with any of the above tips, my company and I are here to help.  Like I said at the start of this post, I Love WordPress and want to make sure you do too while getting the most it has to offer.
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