Two years ago I moved from blogger to self hosted wordpress for my blog. For a various reasons, I was curious what this wordpress was, more control over my post (e.g. backup) and that I could easier modify the templates among some others.
Pretty much right way hits on the main blog (woollypigs.com) climbed from just about five a week to ten a day! I had worked with SEO, web design over the years so I had a pretty good idea what to do. But blogger wasn’t the platform for getting hits to my site, for some reason.
Now I will soon passing 200 hits a day, yes my sites are not the busiest blogs on net but it is somewhere to start and mostly it is a hobby for me.
I have read plenty of sites “how to get more traffic”, “better SEO’ing” etc and learned some do’s and don’t. What I have found out is that there is a few plugins for wordpress that can help you to get more traffic. Below is the ten I use with good success in no particular order.
Akismet:
Anti spam in the greatest form. There is nothing worse reading a blog with tonnes of spam comments. Akismet puts stop to that, lucky it comes with your wordpress so you just need to activate it.
“Used by millions, Akismet is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from comment and trackback spam“.
WP to Twitter:
Does what it says on the box, send your post to your twitter account so you don’t have to. Great way to be a little bit faster and organized while you build your blog. And then get twitter to post to your facebook and have even less work to do.
“Posts a Twitter status update when you update your WordPress blog“.
http://www.joedolson.com/articles/wp-to-twitter/
Google XML Sitemaps:
Along with Google webmaster tools this is a great way to update your sitemap and get various search engines to crawl yours site. Pretty much set it up and leave it be.
“This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com to better index your blog“.
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/redir/sitemap-home/
WordPress.com Stats:
See how many hits and what search words found your site today. Along with Google webmater tools and Google XML Sitemaps you will learn a lot about who, when, where traffic is coming to your site.
“Tracks views, post/page views, referrers, and clicks“.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/
All in One SEO Pack:
Enter you own META tags, keywords, description and title. Only use this one if you know a bit about SEO’ing.
“Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog“.
Comment Notifier:
To keep you visitors in the loop, so they know what is going on on your site. Very simple to set up and use and your readers can tick the box if they want to get updates when there is a new comment. Just remember to reply to your comments, it makes your readers happy and they will come back.
“Let blog visitors to subscribe to comment threads, receiving an email in their mailbox on new comments“.
http://www.satollo.net/plugins/comment-notifier
CommentLuv:
Give a little back rub to your readers when they comment. An easy way for your commenter’s to get a link back to their site/blog.
“Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commenters blog by parsing the feed at their given URL when they leave a comment“.
http://comluv.com/download/commentluv-wordpress/
WP-Optimize:
Last year I was playing around with various plugins and updates which caused my site to come to a crawl. This tool you do not need to use often but it cleans up your wordpress database and speed it up. You do not need to know anything about apache etc though it does help.
“This plugin helps you to keep your database clean by removing post revisions and spams in a blaze“.
http://www.ruhanirabin.com/wp-optimize/
W3 Total Cache:
If you find your site is a bit slow and you want to speed it up. It will create a HTML copy of your .php pages, which makes your site faster to load.
“The fastest and most complete WordPress performance plugin. Dramatically improve the speed and user experience of your site“.
http://www.w3-edge.com/wordpress-plugins/w3-total-cache/
Yes that was only eight plugins, the last two only one is a plugin which I have on my watch list and the last “plugin” is a website that will help you get a faster blog.
Wordbooker:
Get wordpress to post your blog onto facebook and then pull the comments over there back to your blog. Brilliant idea and it somewhat worked until it fell over for some reason and I had plenty problems with it. Though YMMV and I might have a go at it again, since I really liked it.
“This plugin allows you to cross-post your blog posts to your Facebook Wall“.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordbooker/
So you use all these or even more plugins you will probally notice that your site suddenly is no faster than a snail, this is where this last “plugin” comes in. computingunleashed.com – speed up wordpress ultimate guide to make sites super fast did just that, 16 brilliant ideas, plugin that just does what it says on the tin, speed your blog up.
Bonus:
Before you even start laying around with you blog and ad adding new plugins to it, do a backup!
Use site if you want a backup of your database, http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Backups. Though it didn’t do much for me since my database was corrupt.
An other way to back up is go to your Tools tab hit the export sub menu, and then click the Download Export File and you will get a nice XML file with all your pages and post.
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