 |
Editor's letter,
Dear Readers,
It's been a while since we touched base, so we've got quite a few updates. WordPress is getting better and better, and when version 3.0 is released it will be a whole new ballgame. With 3.0, you'll be able have your own social network on a regular installation of WP, and create custom post types for various types of content. Basically, although WP won the 2009 Open Source CMS award it's a huge step forwards for WP as a leading open source content management system for websites.
I also wanted to bring our Israel Business and Hi-Tech Events Calendar to your attention: http://illuminea.com/events/. There are so many cool biz events happening in Israel all the time that it's hard to keep track. So bookmark our calendar and keep checking back to help you plan your calendar!
Read on to learn about how to set up WordPress as your social media and SEO hub from the lecture I gave at the recent Sphinncon conference; how to properly redirect a WordPress site from one domain to another; and Facebook and Twitter Setup 101 from the lecture I gave at the recent Kishor Professional Jewish Women Social Media Conference conference; and more!
Wishing all of us a happy Pessach, and may we all find freedom and independence in our personal and national lives!
Regards,
Miriam
P.S. If at any time you want to unsubscribe from this newsletter, please just go to the end of this email and click on the unsubscribe button.
WordPressGarage.com changes to WPGarage.com!
About a year ago, a discussion arose in the WordPress community about third-party sites that use the word "WordPress" in their domain name. We posted our opinion on this issue since WP Garage has been running on a domain with the word WordPress in it. We put WordPress in our domain to show our ever-growing love for WordPress, but realized how important it is to the founders of WordPress that we take out their brand name, so we finally moved this blog to WPGarage.com instead. Come on over and take a look.
During the process, we had to do a 301 redirect from WordPressGarage.com to WPGarage.com in order to retain traffic from inbound links and search engines. It's important in this type of situation to do a 301 permanent redirect so that all of the new pages on the new site are seen by the search engines as equivalent in terms of value and ranking as the old site.
Read about how we redirected WordPress Garage, and what we learned from the experience.
Recent Posts:
WordPress for social media and SEO
I recently spoke about how to set up WordPress to be the hub of your social media and SEO activity at the Sphinncon search marketing conference. Here are the main points. The presentation is embedded further on:
- Your internet presence must be based on a hub which is your blog, or website combined with a blog. WordPress is a great platform for creating that blog or website/blog.
- WordPress is great for SEO. Yes, there was recently a kind of "WordPress SEO showdown" between Michael Gray and Robert Rolfe about whether WordPress really is good for SEO. Rolfe says it's not because the permalinks (URLs) that you can set up are limited and not perfect from an SEO point of view. Gray says that WP is not perfect, but its benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
Sidenote: before I got up to speak Barry told the audience he wanted them to see something. Then he searched for the term Sphinncon Israel in Google and our blog post about Sphinncon Israel two years ago appears on the first page.
- Social media should be used in conjunction with SEO, and vice versa. If you use the tactics of one without the other, you are missing out on a lot of untapped internet goodness like more keyword opportunities, diverse traffic streams, link building, long tail keywords, etc.
- Some good tools for integrating social media are Chat Catcher that aggregates all the conversation taking place about a post and publishing that conversation as comments on your blog; facebook fan box and facebook connect; flickr galleries, YouTube galleries; LinkedIn TypePad application called BlogLink for displaying an RSS feed on your LinkedIn profile - this app is better than the WordPress one because the WP one is limited to one WP rss feed while the TypePad app allows you to pull in any RSS feed.
- Track your feed subscriber stats with Feedburner. Make sure that auto-detect for feeds will find your feedburner feed URL, not the built-in WordPress feed URL. Can use a plugin, htaccess, or hard-code the header.php file.
- Don't forget about email. Use RSS-to-email service to make your life easier. Feedburner is free but you can't brand your mailings or add people to the list; MailChimp allows you to brand your mailings and add people to your mailing list, gives you more control.
- Track how you're doing socially with the following tools: bit.ly for tracking how many people clicked on tiny URLs you posted on twitter etc.; tweetmeme; Topsy (check out the Topsy page for Sphinncon); PostRank
- Hootsuite allows you to fire and forget the sharing of your blog RSS feed with your various twitter profiles, facebook profile, facebook fan page, and LinkedIn.
- Don't leave the growing mobile user demographic out in the cold: easily make a mobile version of your WordPress site with the WPtouch plugin.
- WordPress is itself a social network thanks to BuddyPress which allows you to create a social network on the WP platform. The most recent version of BuddyPress can be used on a single installation of WordPress, as opposed to only being compatible with WPMU (multi-user WordPress).
- WordPress and SEO - WordPress makes it easy to implement a lot of the SEO basics, like rel=canonical meta tags, redirect all pages to with or without www, add an XML sitemap. The All in One SEO Pack plugin helps you manage page and post title structure site-wide, control meta-descriptions, no-follow areas of the site like categories, and more. Yoast's Meta Robots Tag overlaps a bit with All in One SEO, but it offers additional features too.
- Google recently started to display breadcrumbs in search results. Add breadcrumbs to your site with a plugin or by modifing your functions.php file.
- Check for broken links in your site, and correct them on the spot, with the Broken Link Checker WordPress plugin.
- Easily add internal links with SEO Smart Links plugin that allows you to enter a word, and then tell the system that whenever that word appears on the site, it should link to a specific page. There are quite a lot more plugins that I mention, but why not view them yourself in the presentation embedded below.
- Optimize your site for speed- the speed with which a page loads is apparently considered for its ranking. Therefore, you need to speed up your pages. Check out the presentation for some ways how.
- You also need to secure your WordPress site against hackers. Some ideas for that are in the presentation too.
Ironically, even though I mention all the plugins above, if you really want to promote your site online, it shouldn't be running too many plugins since that can seriously slow the site down. Many of the plugins I mentioned can be run briefly to accomplish something, and then deactivated once you don't need them to do their deed anymore.
To check out the presentation click below:
Check out my presentation on Facebook and Twitter 101
Case Studies
Recently illuminea completed two major WordPress based projects that we wanted to share with you. Firstly because, honestly, who doesn't like to show off their mad skills. More importantly we want to show you how amazing WordPress is and what it can do for a website.
Tene Investment Funds
Tene Investment Funds is an Israeli private equity firm focusing on established growth companies in Israel with leading global market positions. They turned to illuminea to help them redo their site with the following goals in mind: a professional presentation with a usable and flexible content management system that would give them complete control of the content on their site. illuminea developed the site on WordPress, utilizing WordPress' built in functionalities and adding advanced customizations to meet Tene's specifications, including the following:
- Flash header with changing images that Tene can manage and change themselves
- Ajax sliding portfolio section featuring the companies that Tene supports with complete control from the admin
- News and archive section based on WordPress' blogging platform
- Customized Team section with a unique profile photo gallery for each team member
- Customized login area for limited partners to see user-specific announcements for their company.
These elements presented Tene Investment Funds with a high level, professional, and easy to manage website: http://tenecapital.com
Loolwa Writing Services
Loolwa Khazzoom is a widely published writer on a diverse range of topics for leading magazines and newspapers — including Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, Yoga Journal, Seventeen, and more.
Loolwa approached illuminea for rebranding and a redesign of her website to reflect her writing services as a freelance writer. Loolwa's goal for rebranding was to promote herself as a professional writer with a creative edge. We designed the logo by incorporating her unique signature and giving it some elegant finishing touches.
With the logo in place, we began to address Loolwa's needs for her website. Loolwa needed her website to showcase her writing samples, be a place for potential clients to contact her with writing gigs, improve her ranking in search engines, and become a social media hub. And from a site manager perspective, she needed to easily manage the content on her site, which is why we used.. wait for it... WordPress!
Here are some of the unique features that we implemented on Loolwa.com:
- Feature sliding portfolio to showcase her writing samples
- Easy to use archive of writing samples for potential clients to browse through by magazine title or by topic
- Built-in blog to display her latest thoughts on the writing industry and be able to publish keyword rich content to boost search engine rankings
- Social media hub: illuminea set up profiles for Loolwa on the major social networks: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Delicious. illuminea also set up blog posts to automatically update on her various networks so readers could interact off-site as well.
View Loolwa's site at http://loolwa.com/
Useful links
Google Analytics for Facebook Fan Pages Facebook Insights shows demographic details and interactions on your pages BUT limited to show information of fans only. It is far less sophisticated and comprehensive when compared to the free Google Analytics. One of the limitations of Facebook Fan pages is that you can only run limited Javascript on it and Google Analytics needs Javascript code included to correctly track visitors. They successfully managed to get ALL functions of Google Analytics working on their Facebook fan page (including visitor statistics, traffic sources, visitor country, keyword searches with all other powerful reporting & maps overlays etc).
Explore the Power of Custom Post Types to Maximize WordPress as a CMS - WordPress MU and BuddyPress plugins, themes, support, tips and how to's
One of the most exciting features coming in WordPress 3.0 is custom post types, which will vastly expand WordPress’ CMS capabilities. You can be one of the first users to pounce on this functionality by setting up a WordPress 3.0 test site and installing the new Custom Post Type UI plugin. Prior to WordPress 3.0 if you wanted to utilize custom post types you’d need to write the new post types into the database as well as an interface to let you easily handle them from within WordPress. WP 3.0 has this functionality built in and the Custom Post Type UI plugin will help you to start taking advantage of it.
50 Beautiful Business Card Designs Long gone the days when you simply handed over a white piece of paper with your name and contact info on it to potential clients. Nowadays, who do you think clients will call first, the guy with his name on a sheet of paper or this other one with her name engraved in this colorful plastic wonder?
22 Useful Online Chart & Graph Generators Have you ever encounter situations where you need to create a simple yet good-looking chart, graphs or diagrams and all you have is your browser? Charts are good and effective way to show relationship between entities but sometimes creating one can be pretty challenging especially when your favorite word processing software is not around.
| |
Say goodbye to the "irrelevant corporate website"
The days of the irrelevant corporate website with content that is never updated are over! Contact us to find out how we can help you create an effective, contemporary web presence that attracts and engages users.
Visit our site to learn more. |
|
Twitter Profile
Friendfeed Profile
Facebook Profile
LinkedIn Profile