Wordpress Lets You Do That?

Akismet is a free plugin for non commercial use (relaxed rules from the owner apply) that you install to your Wordpress blog. What the plugin does, is to stop and isolate spam that comes to your blog. This spam is via Pingback, Trackback, and of course via Comments.

These packets of information are first submitted to the Akismet web server to see if those who sent the packet is blacklisted on their own server. As Akismet puts it, they either give it the thumbs up or the thumbs down. The information on their web server is kept current so you don’t have to worry about new attackers.

If any spam is caught, it is isolated and you can review if you wish (in case there is a false positive). Other than that, the spam is deleted in 15 days automatically. If a spam post does get through, check it off as spam and Akismet will remember it for next time.

To use Akismet, you will need a Wordpress.com API key. This is the same key that you should have if you have previously installed Wordpress Stats. Once you have logged on to your dashboard, activate the plugin, and you will be asked to enter your API key. Once done, Akismet is ready and will do its thing in the background.

If you have an active blog, and get lots of comments, this is a very valuable tool for managing your time more effectively, and you won’t have to work out what is spam and what isn’t.

If we are truly serious about our online presence, then we have to keep up on our web statistics. Web stats tell us loads of information about our visitors. Where they came form, what they looked at, what images they clicked on, what page they left on, and how much time they spent on our site.

If you’re in the business of online marketing, then paying attention to your web stats is crucial, to tweak your site for that competitive edge. The good news is, that you can now install a plugin from Wordpress.com that will allow you to see all this information and more from your Wordpress Blog.

If you have not already got the plugin, you can get it at wordpress.com. Once uploaded to your blog, you’ll have to visit wordpress.com and register, then you will get a security key to activate the plugin. This key is called an API key. Once you have the key you will have to enter it via your blog. This key is emailed out to you, so be sure not to delete the email. If you have more than one blog, you will use the same key for each.

Once activated, you’ll generally have to wait half an hour before the plugin begins to work. The Web Stats are located on your Dashboard and there is plenty of information contained there to keep you busy. Take note of where your traffic comes from, as you can beef up your efforts in these areas, and cut down in areas where you may be dedicating a lot of time trying to get small amounts of traffic from.

Headspace II is a great plugin that is great for SEO. With it you can tag your posts, create custom titles and descriptions that improve your page ranking, change the theme or run disabled plugins on specific pages, and a whole lot more.

First, if you don’t already have it, you can get it here and upload it to you wp-content file on your server. Once activated, you can go to your settings and find it in the nav bar.

HeadSpace II has a couple of different ways of creating meta descriptions and keywords to assist your SEO efforts.

Firstly, for those of us who feel we don’t have enough time, there is the automatic way. HeadSpace II can put an excerpt of your post in the description tag and the categories associated with the post in the keywords tag.

Secondly, for those of us who need a little more control, there is the manual way. Once installed, each post now comes with a meta description and meta keyword box on the posting screen. Simply fill those two out and HeadSpace II will do the rest.

All in all a very nice little plugin that can make life just that bit easier.

Add This is a Plugin that you can add to your Wordpress site that will make Social Networking and Bookmarking, a whole lot easier for just not you, but anyone who stops by your blog.

What it does is it inserts a small button at the end of each of your posts. When you run your cursor over the button it expands and there are links displayed to every major, and a host of smaller, Networking and Bookmarking sites.

Sometimes you can insert a plugin for each of your preferred sites, such as Digg and Facebook, but this plugin caters more for your readers who may use the tool if their Bookmarking site is available. This becomes more important as your levels of traffic starts to increase.

All you have to do is to go to the Add This website, and download the plugin. Upload to your server, activate, and at the end of each post you’ll have a nice little button that you can have easy access to turbocharge your SEO efforts.

You may have noticed some people have nice looking signatures at the bottom of each blog post they write. I’m sure most of these people don’t type in this signature each time they write a post so how do they do it? Is there some setting in Wordpress that you can add this?

Well, no, there isn’t. There is however a tricky little plugin called funnily enough, Add Signature from the team at Dagon Design. Once you download the plugin and unzip it to your FTP Folder, you can upload it to your Plugin Folder on the remote server.

All you have to do now is login to your admin area and activate the it by going to the Plugin area. Once you have done this hit the settings tab and look for the DDAddSig button along the top nav bar.

Once in this page you can choose how your signature displays and on what posts and pages. Try writing your signature in HTML to get some great backlinks and anchored links back to your other Wealth Creation sites. Great for SEO. It might take some playing around but it doesn’t take too long to figure out.

The standard Wordpress format is pretty cool to start with, and it’s even free which is amazing. However we want our blogs to do even cooler stuff, so that they not only look nice and pretty, but do some pretty tricky stuff that will help you out as an author, the end user, and most importantly, help us in terms of SEO so that Google demands to put you on its front page.

The type of things we can upload to our server where our Wordpress blog lives, are things such as Themes and Plugins. You’ll get pretty used to these two things and learn to love them.

A theme is a design or layout that is made specifically to work with Wordpress. There are thousands of free themes hanging around on the Internet waiting for you to use. If you want a customised theme to suit you or your business, then it is pretty easy and inexpensive to get one made up on somewhere such as getafreelancer or Elance.

Plugins are backend pieces of code that are designed to do different things but we will get into that later. For now, we need to know how to get these things on to your server.

FTP, or File Transfer Protocol for the geeks among us. A technical term that really says put something from my computer on to a remote computer (server in this case). Very easy to do once you have done it a few times.

First you will need an FTP Client (software) to do this. If you’re a real tech, then you can do this through Windows, but if you are like me, use a separate program designed to do FTP. A fantastic client around at the moment is FileZilla, an open source program (free) that is worth its weight in gold. CuteFTP is another, and if you’re a designer, then you may choose to use Dreamweaver.

Once you have your FTP client, you have to punch in the setting for your server, such as root directory, user name and of course password. Hit connect and if everything is OK you’ll connect to the remote server and be able to see in real time the entire file layout of your blog.

Now as this is a blog, personally I do not get the entire remote site and make a copy on my own computer like I would if it was a static website, but you can, especially if you want to back up the site. The simple thing to do here is to drag your theme and plugin files from your computer and drop them to the correct folders on the remote site. The correct folder is usually found in /wp-content/. Do this for as many themes and plugins that you may want to upload.

It may sound difficult (or maybe it’s the way i explained it that has confused you), but it really is easy once you have done it a couple of times. Uploading is not just limited to these things either. Images, webforms and documents can all be uploaded just like a normal web site.

Soon, we’ll look at what to do with these things that you have uploaded and how to use them.