WordPress originally saw the light of day in 2003, and is now being used on thousands of different websites in countries all over the world. WordPress is designed to be a simple open source blogging tool that can be taken advantage of in two different ways: You can either take advantage of the hosted option, or you can take advantage of the free software download option.

WordPress offers a number of additional features that can be downloaded and installed, and these extra features are known as WordPress plugins. These WordPress plugins make it possible for you to customize your blog so that it suits you, the genre of your website and the nature of your audience as well. There are a wide variety of different WordPress plugins that you can choose from, many of which are downloadable directly from WordPress, while others can be found elsewhere on the internet. If you are new to blogging, it may be difficult for you to figure out which WordPress plugins will best suit you. Here are some of the mot popular WordPress plugins that are available online for free download.

* All in one SEO Pack –

This is a WordPress blog that helps to optimize your titles, generating automatic META tags as well. It gives you the chance to override titles, setting any descriptions and meta tags that you want. Depending on what version of WordPress you are using, you can usually simply install this plugin to have it work straight away with little work or issue.

* Akismet -

This is a truly fantastic tool, helping you sort out potential spam in your blog. It will check all of your comments to analyze whether or not they are legitimate, allowing you to review the potential spam so that you may decide whether or not to keep the comments accordingly.

* Twitter Tools –

This plugin is capable of integrating your WordPress blog and your Twitter account together. Twitter is a free micro-blogging and social networking service that can be easily integrated into your WordPress with the right plugin.

* WordPress Stats -

Although there are many different ways that you capture data and statistics regarding your website, most offer more information than you really need when it comes to blogging. The WordPress Stats system was designed specifically to focus on the information that a blogger actually needs.

* DMSGuestbook –

This is a guestbook plugin that can be easily customized, which makes it possible for you to change colors and customize mandatory fields where users can fill out certain information that you are looking for. You can fully manage all of the user entries, and you can even edit or remove posts before they are shown on the website.

Each WordPress plugin has its own unique set of advantages and benefits that can help to turn your blog into a user friendly place. With so many different plugins to choose from, it is worthwhile to spend time searching for what is available, selecting those plugins that will benefit you, your blog and those who are visiting to read.

Originally posted 2009-02-06 08:00:54. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

There are several million WordPress blogs that you can find on the internet, but unfortunately the majority of them are not properly optimized for search engines. This article is going to touch on some SEO tips for bloggers using WordPress to host their blog, because with the right tips it is easy for you to make your WordPress blog more search engine friendly.

Here are some SEO tips for bloggers using WordPress:

Make sure that your WordPress blog’s permalink structure is set up to be optimized for SEO. This way, whenever you publish a blog, the URL for your blog post will be optimized for search engines. Every time you publish a blog post, the post will have a permanent URL which is known as a permalink. The permalink option by default is set to something less than optimal, but you can easily change it to better suit your SEO needs. The most ideal website link for your blog posts is http://www.yourdomain/category/name-of-post. This will ensure that your blog post’s category and its title are going to appear in your URL rather than simply a page number.

Make sure that you install the All-In-One SEO Pack, or a similar plugin, which will allow you to better customize your blog posts for the sake of SEO. The All-in-One SEO pack is a plugin that allows you to add in custom titles, custom meta descriptions and custom keyword tags for your blog posts and your home page.

Optimize each of your blog posts for a lower competition longtail keyword. Do a little bit of keyword research before you choose a keyword to write about. Visit the Google AdWords Keyword tool and find a longtail (more than 2 words) keyword that does not have a lot of competition. Choose something with fewer than 10,000 searches per month and write a blog post about this keyword. Use different keyword phrases for each of the blog posts that you write, and make sure that you use the keyword enough times that search engines will rank you for it.

Make use of social bookmarking services in order to bookmark each of the blog posts that you make, such as StumbleUpon and Digg for example. There are a number of other services that you can use as well including SocialMarker and OnlyWire that will make it easier for you to submit your blog site to a number of different bookmarking services all at the same time.

Optimize not only your blog posts, but also your home page as well. Your homepage is likely going to get more traffic than any other one of your blog posts, so make sure that you increase the number of visitors to your home page as well as your individual blog posts in order to achieve the best SEO results.

Photo Credits: OliBac

Originally posted 2009-10-09 03:30:47. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

There are a variety of reasons for why WordPress is one of the best blogging platforms on the internet. Many people try different blogging platforms, but they end up coming back to WordPress because it offers so much greater functionality. Here are five of the greatest reasons for why WordPress is the best blogging platform to use regardless of whether you are brand new to blogging or have been blogging for years.

1 – The Plugin Functionality –

WordPress has a seemingly endless supply of plugins that can be downloaded, installed and utilized for absolutely free. The installation of these plugins is easy, and involves uploading the plugin to your blog space and simply activating it through the admin section in your WordPress site. Whatever you end up needing in terms of functionality, there is more than likely a number of plugins that can be downloaded and installed to improve the capability of your blog.

2 – The Theme Functionality –

Most people are going to be interested in customizing their blogs. There are literally thousands of completely unique themes out there, offering one column, two columns or three columns, graphics, color combinations and a variety of other details which allow for complete customization of your blog to suit your needs, the theme of your blog and the needs of your readers.

3 – Auto Ping Functionality –

Many scripts may offer this particular possibility, but many free blog hosts do not offer auto ping, meaning that you are going to need to ping yourself after every single post that you make. On the other hand, WordPress can do the pinging for you, which makes your life significantly easier and saves you a lot of time in the process.

4 – The Trackback –

The trackback feature is an important one if you want to know who is reading and responding to your blog, and if you want to be open about who you are reading and talking about in your blog. If you link to a post in another blog using WordPress, WordPress will automatically make a comment in the post that was linked to in order to facilitate communication between the two different blogs.

5 – The Overall Feeling of Simplicity –

WordPress is an extremely user friendly blogging platform. By using cpanel, you can install WordPress in a single click in most circumstances. After the WordPress blog is installed, you are pretty much ready to get going, provided that you do not want to do any tinkering beforehand with stats, themes and other details. You do not have to know anything at all about computers in order to set up a WordPress blog. When it is installed and ready to go, you simply have to log in to your WordPress panel, which is also extremely easy for you to use in most circumstances.

Ready to start using WordPress? I have tried lots of hosting providers and one is without a doubt the best in my mind. Host Gator. Use the coupon code BlogTrafficExchange to receive $9.94 on the package price.

Originally posted 2009-02-06 05:25:34. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Blogging with WordPress offers users so many choices, including a variety of plug-ins that meet different needs. Some are for fun and others are very functional and useful for a variety of purposes. No one would want all these plug-ins in their blog, though, and some are more well-suited to some types of content than others.

But all of them when used with the right blog can make the blog more dynamic and easier for the reader to use, as well as keep them interested and coming back.

Related Posts: This plug-in shows a linked list of related posts at the bottom of a post. This is excellent for keeping readers at your blog. They’ll finish one post and see list of others that contain relevant content, and keep clicking through and reading as long as they’re interested in your content. This plug-in is great for any blog, especially those with many older posts that they still want to bring to the attention of readers.

Adsense Deluxe: This plug-in allows you to place Adsense ads on your blog. Adsense is Google’s pay-per-click program. If you run Adsense ads on your blog, when people click on them you get paid. The amount of pay varies by ad, topic and a variety of other factors, with ads ranging from 1 to 3 cents per click up to several dollars per click. Adsense uses the content of your page to determine which related ads will run, making it more likely that your audience will click on those ads. These are best for very niche blogs on a specific topic.

All in One SEO Pack: This plug-in helps you optimize your WordPress blog for search engines. It will help you choose titles, descriptions and keywords to help you get better listings with the search engines.

Feedsmith: Feedsmith sends your blog to Feedburner. This allows those who prefer reading blogs via RSS feeds to do so without having to visit your site. Many people will sign up for feeds rather than have to visit every blog site they read every day. If you don’t get your blog in a feed, you’re missing out a valuable chunk of readers. There are dozens of plug-ins designed to help you copyright and optimize your feed, including advertising on it.

Askimet: Askimet stops spam in its tracks. When comments and trackback links are spammy, Askimet catches them and asks your approval before posting. You can search comments then by IP to find all the comments by one person, as well as searching by user name. This can really save you from spam on your blog.

WP Captcha-Free: This plug-in stops automated commenting without requiring each commenter to type in a hard-to-read captcha. This blog plug-in is designed more for bot and automated spam comments, while Askimet catches individually posted comments, too.

WordPress Popular Posts:  This plug-in adds a widget to your blog similar to the Related Posts that you can customize in a variety of ways to show the information that you want it to. The plug-in shows your most read blog posts.

Photo Credits: myuibe

Originally posted 2009-06-05 05:55:24. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

If you want to have a blog or website that’s in newspaper format, WordPress is the ideal medium. There are many other services you could use, but because WordPress is so user friendly it’s easy to set up your blog to look like a newspaper (or a website, or whatever you want).

Why is WordPress so good for setting up a newspaper?

First of all, you can start a WordPress blog for free. You can also pay, of course, but if you’re just experimenting and trying to figure out what you want and how you want to do it, then it doesn’t cost anything. If you choose, later you can have your own domain and a variety of other paid features.

But even if you don’t want those things, you can completely lift your content from WordPress and put it somewhere else. They claim no ownership on anything you’ve published through their service. You really need to read the fine print on many other “free” services and even paid ones. Now and then you’ll find a clause in the fine print that gives them actual ownership of whatever you put up. It’s doubtful they’d try to take to the content from you, but why let them stake a claim on your content, just in case?

WordPress is also perfect for a newspaper because of the tons of free templates that are available. So you sign up for free and you can browse a variety of blog templates until you find the free one you want. They have some designed just for that newspaper look which makes them perfect.

And because WordPress is so popular, if you wanted to purchase a layout or pay to have one designed just the way you wanted, it would be easy to find a developer who could do that for you. Yet, you will most likely be able to get started with a free theme, if that’s what you want. You can even design your own. There are tutorials all over the web about how to design your own WordPress theme, so you have several options.

WordPress is so easy to use that with only the smallest time learning how you can easily update your newspaper blog and fill it with great content. You can add content and preview it, save it as a draft and tinker as much as you want before anyone else sees it, so you have the ability to get it just the way you want before it goes live.

It’s easy to go back and change a post in your WordPress newspaper blog, too. You just edit the post and go in to add or change something with very little hassle. If you know HTML you can enhance your content with it manually, or use their rich text editor which makes it easy to add formatting like different fonts, italics, bold, images and other great additions. All these add up to make WordPress a great place for a newspaper blog.

Photo Credits: Hamed Saber

Originally posted 2009-05-25 05:02:39. Republished by Blog Post Promoter