Week 3 | Optimizing Your Online Presence

You know you need an online presence. You know you need to blog consistently to get more business. And you know that you are falling behind further and further each day. But, you still can't seem to get the time to sit down and figure it all out.

Does this sound like you??

Below is week 3 of an 8 week e-course that I offer on my website. The course is 100% free and helps you build your online presence in 8 weeks. To get weeks 1,2 and 4-8 just hop on over to my social network marketing website or just click on the BIG button to your right that says 'Start Now'  and sign up ;)

Ready to get busy?

Week 3 | Optimizing Your Online Presence

Last week we installed our WordPress blog, fixed our permalinks, installed our plugins and chose our theme for a clean, authoritative look.

This week we will be going over the plugins that we installed, get them configured for our WP blog and set up some syndicated content.

PLUGINS
First, let’s go over some of the plugins that we installed last week. First I will explain what each one does and then I will go over syndication to get you started with some content on your blog.

Askimet**
Askimet is an anti-spam plugin that has become the ultimate essential. If you do not install this and set the API key, then you will receive MANY spam posts from automated bots. This is very simple to get up and running. Just follow the instructions in the warning that will appear at the top of your site after you activate this plugin.

All in one SEO**
All in one SEO does several things for your blog to help with SEO. One of the most important is that it allows you to create a custom title and description for each of your posts so that you have better chances of appearing for your key terms. Every time you post a blog, scroll down below the blog and enter a custom title and description that includes your key phrase for the post. You can use my SERP tool to make sure you are using the correct amount of characters. http://www.cherylwaller.com/SEO_SERP_Tool.html

Simple Facebook Connect
Simple Facebook Connect comes with several options that you can activate to integrate with Facebook on your blog. For now we will only be using the fan box with this plug-in. Many of the options require that you set up a Facebook application for functionality. For the purposes of this course, I will not be getting into how to create an application.

Google Analyticator
Google Analyticator allows you to integrate Google analytics into your blog. Simply set up your Google analytics account (www.google.com/analytics) then go into Settings>Google Analyticator to set this up for your blog.

Mailchimp (if you use their service)
Mailchimp is optional. Please follow the instructions under settings. This is very easy to get going.

Constant contact (ditto the above)
This is optional. Please follow the instructions under settings. This is very easy to get going.

Visitors Who’s Online Maps
I personally love this plug in. While Google Analytics is great, you get real time visitor information with Visitors Who's Online Maps. Once you activate this plugin there will be a warning to install maps. Just click on the link provided in the warning and this is all set to go.

WP Captcha Free
WPis a great little program that works like a captcha without the user having to decipher squiggly little lines into some type of discernable text. It works in the background to prevent bot spam.

WP auto tagger (or yql autotagger.. pick one.. your choice)**
One or the other, using these will help create tags for your posts for better indexing in the search engines.

WP super edit
WP super edit is a great little plug in for formatting your posts. Once installed, you will have better options for formatting text and graphics.

Yet another related posts plugin (requires template files to be moved into your theme folder)
This plugin is great because it encourages readers to stay on your blog and read additional posts about the same topic. The only drawback is that when you install this, you will have to use an FTP to move files from the YARPP plugins folder to your theme folder. If I just lost you with the last statement then just skip this plugin or send me an email and ask for help and I will see what I can do for you.

YouTube widget
YouTube Widget allows you to place a YouTube video of your choice in the sidebar of your blog.

Pretty link lite
Pretty link lite, once activated, will give you a little tool bar on your dashboard that allows you to shorten links using your own URL.

TweetBacks & TweetBacks helper
TweetBacks & TweetBacks helper work together to scan twitter for comments about your blog posts. It will then pull those in as comments about the post and allow you to moderate those ‘comments’.

Feedwordpress & Feedwordpress duplicate post filter**
Feedwordpress & Feedwordpress duplicate post filter are the ULTIMATE essentials for your WordPress blog and we will be using this later to pull content into your blog. Just get these both installed and activated and I will be going over Feedwordpress here in a few minutes.

YD Feedwordpress
YD Feedwordpress helps with pulling images with your syndicated blog content. Again, just get this installed and activated and we will get more into this in a moment.

Google XML Site Maps**
Google XML Sitemaps is another ULTIMATE essential for your blog. Get this installed and activated as soon as possible. What this little gem does is automatically build your sitemaps for submission to search engines and then NOTIFIES them of changes for you in the background.

SEO tag Cloud widget
Although WordPress has its own tag cloud widget, SEO tag Cloud widget allows you to limit the amount of tags and presents the tags to search engines in a more SEO friendly way.

Social profiles widget**
You can list links to all of your social networks with social profiles widget . This is a very easy plugin to use and allows you several options for the buttons that are displayed. You can choose from different buttons and different sized buttons to compliment your WordPress theme.

Digg this O’mine
Digg This O'mine adds a ‘digg this’ button of your choice to all of your blog posts. Once installed and activated, just go into settings to choose how you would like the button displayed.

Auto SEO tags
Auto SEO tags is another automatic SEO tag generator. This little guy takes incoming queries from search engines and adds them to the appropriate posts.

Simple Facebook comments (requires configuration with Facebook API)
Like with simple Facebook connect, simple facebook comments will require you to set up an application within Facebook. However, this plugin, once installed properly, allows visitors to comment on your blog without logging into WordPress.

**The plugins with the two stars are the BARE minimum you need to install for this course.

FEEDWORDPRESS SETUP

Now that we have all of our plugins installed and configured, let’s move into content. One of the greatest things about WordPress is that you can syndicate (or republish) content  that is relevant to your industry and business without worrying about copyright infringement. By using RSS feeds from other blogs, you can add as much or as little content as you would like.

How is this NOT stealing content?

Simply because that is the beauty of RSS (Really Simple Syndication). With the emphasis on syndication.

When you syndicate a blog, WordPress automatically notifies the other blog that it is being syndicated. This is called a pingback. When a blog is syndicated, this pingback works as a sort of ‘vote’ for the blog you are syndicating. This is good for the other blogs SEO. Now, as long as you setup your syndicated feed correctly (to give proper credit on your blog), you should never run into problems with copyright infringement.
 
LET’S GET STARTED

So let’s get started with your first syndication. For purposes of this course, I will be using a Wall Street Journal RSS feed.

First, we need to locate a feed to use. So let’s go over to the Wall Street Journal and find one we think has relevant content that will help our blog. http://blogs.wsj.com/

I am going to sort the list by Business and choose a blog about Law just for demonstration.

After I click on ‘Law Blog’, I am going to look to the right of the blog above the authors box and locate the RSS icon. I click on that icon and look for the RSS URL in the browser bar.

I copy that URL and head over to the admin section of my blog. There I’m going to head to the dashboard and scroll down on the left hand side to Syndication.

I will paste the URL that I just copied from WSJ into the feed box and click ‘add’.

WordPress will now locate the feed and show me different alternatives for the feed. I will pick the one that shows the images and where the feed is presented in a visually appealing manner. In this case, WordPress only returns one feed and it looks fine. I will click ‘use this feed’ and then I will work on configuring the feed.

Let’s start with ‘feed’ and then move on to each of the following: posts, authors, categories.

Rather than spend a lot of time here, I am just going to give you the settings for each.

FEED
Default Settings

POSTS
Just make sure that the permalinks point to the original website and you are not accepting comments or pings. Save Changes.

AUTHORS
Click on the radio button for ‘All posts syndicated from this feed…’ and then select ‘Will be assigned to a new user’. A text box will appear. Enter WSJ (or the name of the syndication source) and then save changes.

CATEGORIES
First make sure that you are ONLY creating new post tags (not categories), leave the filter on ‘won’t filter’, then scroll down to the bottom.

Here with categories you can use your own discretion. Depending on the feed, create categories that match the topics of the feed, select those categories. Deselect ‘uncategorized’ and then save changes.

That’s all there is to it for adding a feed. Once you have added a few feeds, then we can turn on the automatic updates so that you have fresh new content coming through your blog.

To turn on automatic updates, go to feeds & updates. Select ‘automatically check for updates after page loads' and then save changes.

That’s it for this week! Next week we will start working on your different social profiles and then we will come back to your blog in week 8 to connect everything together. Between now and then you will have accumulated plenty of content to push to the social networks so that your blog does not look empty when the masses of traffic come through to see your blog!

Don’t forget to sign up for weeks 1,2, and 4-8 on my social network marketing website! See You Next week!

-Cheryl