WordCamp Atlanta answered questions about WordPress
WordCamp is a conference type of event that focuses squarely on everything WordPress. Everyone from casual end users all the way up to core developers show up to these events.
Presentations at WordCamp Atlanta covered design, development and content for beginner, intermediate and advanced WordPress users.
Several people I met at WordCamp Atlanta are not yet using WordPress. They have creative ideas and stories to share, and are attracted to the open source platform — the support of the WordPress community.
It’s easy to install WordPress and dive into blogging. Install and write. Easy-peasy.
Now, some of us are stepping back to consider more strategic questions.
Who am I? Where am I going? Why?
Seth proposed a list of questions we need to answer before we spend money on a website. WordPress is free, so we get started first, ask questions later. To be successful we must answer these strategic questions:
- What is the goal of the site? In other words, when it’s working great, what specific outcomes will occur?
- Who are we trying to please? If it’s the boss, what does she want? Is impressing a certain kind of person important? Which kind?
- How many people on your team have to be involved? At what level? Who are they?
- Who are we trying to reach? Is it everyone? Our customers? A certain kind of prospect?
- What are the sites this group has demonstrated they enjoy interacting with?
- Are we trying to close sales? Are we earning permission to follow up?
- Are we telling a story?
- Are we hoping people will watch or learn?
- Do we need people to spread the word using various social media tools?
- Are we building a tribe of people who will use the site to connect with each other?
- Do people find the site via word of mouth? Are they looking to answer a specific question?
- Is there ongoing news and updates that need to be presented to people?
- Is the site part of a larger suite of places online where people can find out about us, or is this our one sign post?
- Do we want people to call us?
- How many times a month would we like people to come by? For how long?
- Who needs to update this site? How often?
- Does showing up in the search engines matter? If so, for what terms? At what cost? Will we be willing to compromise any of the things above in order to achieve this goal?
- Will the site need to be universally accessible? Do issues of disability or language or browser come into it?
- How much money do we have to spend? How much time?
- Do we understand ‘everything’ is not an option?
What’s your experience? Did you dive in and start writing? Is your site a strategic decision? Let’s talk about it in the comments.
How do people find YOUR content on the Internet? The key starts with great search engine optimization (SEO). Here are 5 of the best SEO plugins.
Some themes for WordPress will confuse your sub-header tags based on the page they are to be displayed on, but this plugin will automatically reset them to make them more SEO friendly by moving them down one spot in the hierarchical tree. In other words, h2 becomes h3, h3 becomes h4 and so on.
Images can be a great source of traffic as people search for images of various subjects, and this plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.
If you must have duplicate content on your site for whatever reason, SEO No Duplicate will allow you to state which version of the post search engines should index while ignoring the others.
The post slug is the blog title you see in a browser’s URL bar, and if it’s too long, search engines won’t take a liking to it. SEO Post Link comes with an already populated list of words to cut from a title when it turns into a URL to make your post addresses that much friendlier. You can set it so that it’s limited to a certain number of characters, cut short words, cut unnecessary words and more.
Interlinking your blog can be the key to getting more people to read more of your posts, but it is time consuming and tedious to do it by hand. SEO Smart Links does this for you automatically when you tell it what words to link to what URLs, and it also allows you to set “nofollow” and “open in window” comands for the links.
Do you have SEO favorites? Share them in the comments.
You can blog your heart out, but if you don’t have good SEO, then odds are you won’t have many readers. Luckily, the WordPress plugin community values SEO and has developed a number of plugins to help.
Nofollow Case by Case – This plugin allows you to strip the “nofollow” command from your comments, and then you can apply it to only the comments you don’t wish to support.
Platinum SEO Plugin – The Platinum SEO Plugin offers you such features as automatic 301 redirects for permalink changes, auto-generation of META tags, post slug optimization, help in avoiding duplicate content and a host of other features.
Redirection – For any number of reasons you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, but then you risk losing that page’s status in search results. Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more.
SEO Blogroll – Do you worry that the people you link to in your blogroll are feeding off of your PageRank? With SEO Blogroll you can make separate sections for various groupings of links, with an unlimited number in each, and all of them will receive the “nofollow” attribute.
SEO for Paged Comments – With the introduction of paged comments in WordPress 2.7, there was a potential problem with search engines thinking you had duplicate content as the post would appear on each page. This plugin aims to take care of this issue for you until the folks at WordPress change things up.
Have another SEO plugin to recommend? Tell me about it in the comments.
WordPress Founder Turns 25
WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg turned 25 today. In addition to his work building the massively popular blogging platform, Mullenweg was named among…
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With more than 120 million blogs in existence, how do people find YOUR content on the Internet? The key starts with great search engine optimization (SEO), which is an art and a science that helps search engines discover your content and understand how relevant it is to specific search queries.
You can blog your heart out, but if you don’t have good SEO, then odds are you won’t have many readers. Luckily, the WordPress (
) plugin community values SEO and has developed a number of plugins to help. Here are 20 of the best SEO plugins to help you choose the right tags, tell search robots what to work on, optimize your post titles and more.
Have another SEO plugin to recommend? Tell us more about it in the comments.
All in One SEO Pack – One of the most popular plugins ever for WordPress, this plugin does a bit of everything for you from helping choose the best post title and keywords, to helping you avoid duplicate content and more.
Automatic SEO Links – Automatic SEO Links allows you to choose a word or phrase for automatic linking, both internal and external, set anchor text, choose if it should be “nofollow” or not, and more. One of the best features of this plugin is that it will only do this for the first occurrence of a word in a post so you don’t have to worry about spamming your post with numerous links to the same thing.
Google XML Sitemaps – An essential tool in any blogger’s armory of SEO tools. While the name only mentions “Google (),” this plugin creates an XML-sitemap that can be read by Ask, MSN and Yahoo also.
HeadSpace2 – This plugin allows you to install all sorts of meta-data, add specific JavaScript and CSS to pages, suggests tags for your posts and a whole lot more.
Meta Robots WordPress plugin – An easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page you choose on your blog. You can use it to make your front page links into “nofollows,” prevent indexing of search pages, disable author and date-based archives, prevent indexing of your login page and numerous other features.
Nofollow Case by Case – This plugin allows you to strip the “nofollow” command from your comments, and then you can apply it to only the comments you don’t wish to support.
Platinum SEO Plugin – The Platinum SEO Plugin offers you such features as automatic 301 redirects for permalink changes, auto-generation of META tags, post slug optimization, help in avoiding duplicate content and a host of other features.
Redirection – For any number of reasons you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, but then you risk losing that page’s status in search results. Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more.
SEO Blogroll – Do you worry that the people you link to in your blogroll are feeding off of your PageRank? With SEO Blogroll you can make separate sections for various groupings of links, with an unlimited number in each, and all of them will receive the “nofollow” attribute.
SEO for Paged Comments – With the introduction of paged comments in WordPress 2.7, there was a potential problem with search engines thinking you had duplicate content as the post would appear on each page. This plugin aims to take care of this issue for you until the folks at WordPress change things up.
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