If any of you are like me, you have your own self-hosted WordPress blog in addition to your ActiveRain blog... well if you are anything like me, you have several WordPress blogs. What I love about WordPress is that the open source nature of it means there are literally thousands of plugins which will customize your site that are just a simple click away.
There are tons of plugins for pretty much anything. You can customize your sidebars, create custom forms, add your Twitter feed to your site (come on, you knew I was bringing social media into this somehow didn't you?) and so much more. I want to share a few of my favorites with you in case you weren't familiar with any of them.
1. Google Authorship - You probably are familiar with this from ActiveRain. This is where you tie your blog profile to your Google+ account and then the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) will return your profile picture along with the link to your blog entry when you show up in someone's search. One benefit to this, aside from the obvious, is that even if people don't click on your link, they see your picture on the Google results page, if they are in the early stages of searching for a home or buyers agent and keep seeing your face every time they do their research they will start to recognize you. That will increase your chances of converting them to a client in the end.
2. nrelate Related Content - This one will add links to related blog posts to the bottom of each of your blog posts. Not only does it add the link, but it will add the featured image of your posts along with a snippet of the related post. What this does for you is gives the reader of your blog post a chance to find more information on the subject that drew them to your site, keeping them on your site longer and solidifying you as the authority on the subject.
3. Tweet Old Posts - This one is cool if you use Twitter and like sharing your posts there, which is a great way to drive traffic to your website. You just set all the variables so far as how far back in time you want it to pull posts from, how often you want it to post, any hashtags you want it to use and things like that. I have mine set to go back about 9 months and to post pretty often. This really drives a ton of traffic to my site.
4. Yoast WordPress SEO - This is by far the best SEO plugin I have used (and I have used a lot of them). One of the beautiful things about this one is that it scores your post as you write it. It shows you improvements you can make to insure that your post is fully optimized and gives you a green light when it is ready to go live. It is pretty much fool proof.
** Please share your favorites that I may not know about in the comment section. Then I can rewrite this with everybody's additions and link out to your sites. **
Comments (2)Subscribe to CommentsComment