Archive for the ‘WordPress’ Category

Now this is a little plugin that has escaped my notice so far, but one that Sarah spotted ages ago as being useful as she’d installed it on a few collaborative blogs we work on.

The Count per Day plugin sits quietly in your Dashboard and provides you with a wealth of immediately accessible information:

• Total visitors
• Visitors per month
• Browsers
• Visitors per day
• Reads per day
• Visitors per post
• Latest counts (20 most visited posts in last 7 days)

It’s great for offering you an immediate snapshot of topics, titles and styles that attract visitors.

Having recently noticed someone selling their Internet marketing wares recently and including the fact that Google picks up their blog content within an hour as a selling point, I’d rather like to point out that this is actually a simple thing for most people. It is not some magical SEO bonus bestowed upon those in the know; it is standard practice if you make it easy for Google to do such.

Think about it. What does Google want to do? What is its purpose?

Google’s aim is to provide you, the searcher/user/however you like to be known with the most relevant websites for your search. And the best way it can do that is to work those spiders hard – sending them out to updated and new content as fast as their little legs can manage (ok – enough with the analogy now!).

So how can you tell Google that you have fresh content? Well if you include a XML sitemap plugin then you’re doing it! A sitemap simply lists all the pages within a website, so any changes to this list are easily spotted and updated. When this post goes live, I’ll check Google after 10 minutes and will be surprised if it’s not listing already – not magic, rocket science or fairy dust – it’s just what Google does if you help it.

We use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin but there are several available to you (as with most plugins!). To then set this up, Settings, Google XML Sitemaps – go through each option and set to what you want. It’s quite a list, but don’t be daunted. If you’re at all unsure, leave the standard, default settings in place, or get us to check yours with you. One thing to watch is not to request updates too frequently – any such settings will be suggestions anyway, but if you do update Google too often with the same post, that may not be well-regarded. Let’s face it, daily is more than adequate for most of us – it’s not that long since we had to wait months for our pages to be listed in Google – now we’re talking in hours or even minutes.

Babs

Well, literally not figuratively . Or is it the other way around?

I was thinking about premium WordPress plugins.

What do you use?

If you don’t use them, why?

I have two.

One I lost. Yup, forgot what it was called and where I downloaded it. The other one is an RSS bomber, which I have yet to use. At least I know where that one is!

Out there in the big wide WordPress plugin world, there are many premium plugins that enhance your SEO, promise to fetch you traffic and even bake you a cake of you let them. Ok, I am making up the cake baking bit, but if there was one, I’d know about it.

So can your words be music to my ears? Can you tell me what you recommend as premium WordPress plugins, point me to any reviews that have caught your eye?

If you have created a WP premium plugin, come and tell us about it, as I said I am all ears today

Sarah

There are many WordPress plugins that enable you to harness the power of Twitter; the following are a few that you may find useful: 

TweetMeme Button
Used here on blogmistress.com – the retweet button up in the right hand corner of posts! It’s really simple to use and let’s anyone retweet your post. So if you’re reading this – click it to try it out

TweetMeme Twitter Follow Button
Places a follow me button on your site. Nice and simple – install this plugin, go to widgets and place in your sidebar then add your twitter username.

WP to Twitter
We mentioned this in a previous post – What, Why, How – WordPress Plugins and having had a look at the settings and trying it out it’s very handy for automatically tweeting your published posts.

This plugin can send a default message when new and edited posts/pages are published but also you have the option of writing a custom tweet for a post.

It’s all pretty simple to setup, there are advanced options but to test this out I was happy with the default settings and just popped in my twitter account username and password.

And if you want to show your Twitter stream in your sidebar, there are a number of plugins available, but we like the look of Twitter Widget Pro – partly because it has been tested on the latest version of WordPress (at time of writing – some weeks into the latest release) and because it handles twitter feeds well, including the @username, #hashtag, and link parsing, amongst other things.

Of course, as with all plugins, the thing to do is search for your ideal plugin yourself, taking into account when it was last updated, how many people have downloaded it, and even popping to the WordPress.org site to view comments, etc.

Have fun!

A leading UK money making and money saving website run by a TV personality is currently recruiting for a part-time Web Developer to be based in central London, so I thought the Blogmistress readers may just be able to help as it does sound like a brilliant job…

This is a great opportunity for a focused and ambitious individual seeking an IT challenge.

Purpose of the Role/Key Responsibilities:

- To direct the creation and maintenance of the site

- To develop more interactive elements for the site

- To redevelop and redesign two sister sites

- Dealing with day to day IT Issues for employees

- Providing users with appropriate support and advice

They need someone with:

· Advanced technical skills including knowledge of WordPress, HTML and PHP. N.B. we are really looking for a WordPress genius – the whole site is based on it.

· Reliability – we need you on hand as soon as issues arise, and available to speak to our team members as and when they need you

· Ability to work both independently as well as with team members- good people skills are a must

· Experience in working with content management systems

- Willingness to work in our central London office.

Company benefits

· Flexible working location- if you get the job done, and done well, we can discuss you working from home on chosen days

· Working amongst TV and PR environment

· Fun, young dynamic team

· Great CV experience

Times and Pay

We are looking for someone who can commit to three days a week. This should increase to 5 days a week in a few months. We pay industry rates according to experience per day.

N.B. You MUST be able and willing to work in our office most of the time. This is NOT suitable for anyone outside of the greater London area.

Please send your CV to jasmine.birtles@moneymagpie.com

We will only reply to successful applicants. Sorry, but if you don’t hear from us it is because we do not have time to reply to everyone.