Internet Marketing Strategy

Last time, in WordPress on Steroids Pt. 1, I expressed the important of accommodating users who were accessing your website via a mobile browser. Now, let’s make the experience better for all of your users.

WordPress Optimization

Optimizing your website now prepares you for an influx of traffic in the future, as well as just making things run smoother (not to mention faster) in general. Optimization is an ongoing process that never really stops, but you can do one thing immediately, and that is to start using caching.

DB Cache is a caching engine that stores database query results as opposed to html output, resulting in less space on the disk that is taken up for cache storage. Your visitors always get real information while keeping CPU use to a minimum.

Leveraging Scheduled Posts

Most blog authors use the scheduled post feature to pre-load content into WordPress to be displayed at a future date. Why not build reader anticipation and generate hype for posts you’ve already scheduled? Well, it’s easy, with this little snippet. You can place it anywhere in your template files, or create an HTML Widget and place it in there.

$show = 5;
$q = new WP_Query('post_status=future&order=DESC&showposts=' . $show);
if ($q->have_posts()) {
    echo "<ul>\r\n";
    while ($q->have_posts()) : $q->the_post();
        echo "<li>";
        the_title();
        echo "</li>\r\n";
    endwhile;
    echo "</ul>\r\n";
}

Expose ALL Content to Readers & Search Engines

It’s very common to see a “Most Popular Posts” or “Featured Posts” widget on a blog, and yes, they are effective. However, this draws the reader to a very specific point in your site’s workflow, and this point is at the very end of the user experience. Why not highlight all of your content equally? You can do so by showing off random posts from your archive in your sidebar, with the Random Posts Widget. Who knows? You might have more diamonds in the rough than you think, and you could get your user stuck in an infinite loop!

I set up so many WordPress blogs, for myself and others, so its really easy to overlook a step or two during the setup process once in a while. Let this post be a reminder to you, readers, and myself, to add these five nifty plugins. We do want our websites to be the best that they can be, no?

WordPress Automatic Upgrade
I definitely try to remember to install this on all of my WordPress blogs, it saves so much time when you have twenty or more blogs to upgrade when a new version comes around. WordPress Automatic Upgrade does exactly what the name details, automatically (well, you click a button in your control panel after it alerts you a new version is available) downloads the newest stable release of WordPress, and installs it. Perhaps we’ll see this plugin included like Akismet someday?

Live Comment Preview
Shows your readers exactly how their reply to your post will appear, in real time. Pretty neat feature that really increases the interaction between the user and your website.

WP Auto Tagger
WP Auto Tagger makes great use of the Yahoo! API to match search results against your current post’s content and provides relevant, popularly searched tags automatically. It doesn’t override any tags you suggest, either.

Nicer Trackbacks
The way WordPress displays trackbacks to your posts from other websites is kind of ugly, and kind of not that SEO friendly. Well, don’t forget to change all that to suit your needs with this WordPress plugin.

Most Commented Posts
Show your hottest topics with this plugin, which displays these posts in your sidebar much like the “Most Popular Posts” or “Recent Comments” sidebar items.

Don’t forget to bookmark the Five Most Overlooked WordPress Plugins, so you don’t forget next time!