Internet Marketing Strategy

I’d like to re-address the topic of WordPress plugins. Last time, when I shared with you my must haves for deploying WordPress based websites, I touched on the fundamentals. What I’m going to show you today is how to make your WordPress website soar above your competitors!

First, I must stress how IMPORTANT it is to have a MOBILE ENABLED website. If your website cannot be read easily on a web capable phone or mobile internet device, your website is CRIPPLED! You’re in a 100 yard dash and you’re JOGGING! If you’re equipped and capable enough to make your own mobile theme, the more power to you, for those of you who don’t have a designer’s or coder’s bone in your body, you have several viable options:

• WPtouch is a hybrid WordPress theme/plugin. It allows you to pick and choose what content you want to display to mobile browsers, and based on your formatting, plops your data into a beautiful, easy-to-read, mobile WordPress theme.
• Mobify is more of a manual tool, you kind of have to know what you’re doing, or at least have someone who does at your disposal. It has a web editor that allows you to style your mobile them yourself. Just using the default style it has after choosing your content won’t cut it. You have to work some CSS magic.
• WordPress Mobile Edition will give your website an iPhone-like makeover. Not much room for customization here, but you can add more mobile user-agents via the settings page.

Now, this last little tidbit isn’t a plugin, but it definitely helps amp up your WordPress. Encouraging communication between yourself and your readers is an endless task, so give them more reason to respond to you by reversing the order of comments, displaying the newest comments on top, right below your post. It’s just a simple setting change, go to your Discussion Settings in the administration area, and choose to display newer comments at the top of each page.

Remember, the internet is always changing, and so are the ways we communicate on it. Show your readers you are informed AND HAVE AN OPINION about current events in your niche, and they will be drawn to speak to you.

This neat little trick will force all browsers that are trying to access your website from domain.com into a standardized gateway of www.domain.com for increased search engine consistency, as well as a consistent aesthetic appearance to regular users.

Add the following snippet of code to the .htaccess of your public html directory where you would like to use this.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^([^\.]+)\.your-website\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

Updated .htaccess to allow subdomains at the suggestion of Jim, The Blogaholic. If you don’t want this functionality, just remove the third line!

Voila, 301 forwarded to the same homepage every time!

(BTW, this also prevents having such a varying pagerank between domain.com and www.domain.com some of the time.)