Category: WordPress Tips
10 Steps for A Successful Business Website on WordPress
1. Prepare some real contents that may be interesting to a group of people (Contents are the King! Know your audience.)
2. Find and sign up a good hosting service that gives you PHP, MySQL ( if you've already have one, you may skip this.)
(We don't like Windows hosting, which may also be more expensive. Linux is great)
3. Do the simple basic WordPress installation on your website and add a good theme (could be free!) and add your own logo for branding
4. Install some must-have WordPress plugins
(for better security, fighting spam, better SEO, social bookmarking, etc.)
5. Build Basic Menu for Your Site ( About Us, Contact Us, Our Products/Services) AND
create some useful information pages on the topics related to your products!
6. Set up Google Analytics for your site and put the code into your WordPress site
7. Submit your site with Google webmaster tool
8. Promote your site on Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube!
9. Update your website at least 3 times a week with useful and fresh contents!
10. Respond to comments on your web contents And
add more popular content according to your Google Analytics reports.
If you just want sell your products or services without offering any useful stuff ( free tips or handy tools), your visitor won't come back to your site again even you got a way to direct them to your site ( via Google Adwords, or other paid advertisement). If you don't have time to write yourself, hire some good copywriters.
If you'd like have to hire someone to help you with any of the above steps, please contact one of our WordPress professionals.
Matt Cutts:WordPress Hero
We have been search for WordPress heroes (top WordPress users), but forgot Matt Cutts, who himself may not realize that he is one of the WordPress heroes.
Why? First of all, his speech on WordPress at the WordCamp San Francisco and the great SEO results with WordPress inspired and encouraged a lot of people (business website owners, Web developers, SEO experts )including me and many of my clients to switch to WordPress from other platforms. At that WordCamp, he confirmed my early observation was right. Matt notes “WordPress takes care of 80-90% of (the mechanics of) Search Engine Optimization (SEO).” at his slide 12 of the 50 at "SEO for Bloggers"
Second of all, his only Website is running WordPress with an Alexa ranking 4,193 (as of this writing)
.
It proves that WordPress can handle pretty heavy traffic with ease. (Alexa says 50% of sites are slower )
If you are serious about SEO with WordPress, you should watch this video over and over again:
These points should be noted
Plugins recommended by Matt Cutts:
- Akismet
- Cookies in Comments
- WP Super Cache
- Enforce www. Preference
- Feedburner Feedsmith
Avoid Backlink Obsession (BO): Sometimes fewer links are better than more. (check out slide 18)
Don't forget image search, videos, etc. ( this point encourages us to think of add some more images for our posts and create more video tutorials for Youtube or other video sites.)
Find some more tips by yourself at his page: "Matt Cutts on WordPress".
Why WordPress?
Why A Business Use WordPress?
Here we list some top reasons why a business site would use WordPress as the publishing platform?
- It is so easy to use! If you can type, you can add new contents to the WordPress Website. For bloggers and marketing professionals, they can focus on writing great contents that are most interesting to their readers or customers. It is so easy to upload a photo or image, or create an online album, or embed a video (from Youtube or other video sharing services) to go with the articles.
- It is powerful and extensible. There are so many free or affordable WordPress plugins to give your business websites the features you need. You can also pay an experienced WordPress developers to add the functions you need when you cannot find the plugins you need and the their services are so affordable compared to others. You can run an online store using WordPress platform; you can get paid via Paypal, Google Checkout or other payment gateway for your online or offline services (for membership websites providing internal contents, or the tuition of your music schools, private preschool or after schools.)
- WordPress Themes and Template System can give your business site great new looks and interface while keeping your existing contents. There are so many free WordPress themes for those doesn't anything about Web design to choose from. For those with special needs, it is so easy to hire a WordPress designer to create the themes according to exactly what you want.
- For SEO (search engine optimization), WordPress is the best Web Publish platform that major search engines (such as Google, Bing and Yahoo) love. Just imagine why Matt Cutts, the most famous Google search expert, use only WordPress for his own website ( http://mattcutts.com/blog/ ). Besides the WordPress built-in SEO friendly Website structure and features, you can get lots of free SEO plugins to help you optimize your pages and posts for search engines.
- WordPress is the best Web development platform with short turn over; it is great for business sites with limited Web development budgets. So many Web developers are turning to WordPress to develop turn-key business websites because it is a very efficient development framework based on PHP & MySQL, the most used Web technology for the most of the websites in the world ( right! ASP, .Net or Java are not as popular as PHP & MySQL). This development framework is proved to have the least learning curve too.
- this list is growing on and on...
The list above is only the beginning, please submit your reasons to use WordPress for your Web sites in the comments, and you will be surprised how many WordPress users are willing to share their excitement and success with WordPress.
Main Differences of WordPress.com Sites & Self hosted WordPress Web Sites
There are many benefits and disadvantages of the free WordPress.com sites.
The pros first. The advantages of a free WordPress.com site,
- You can don't need to pay a penny;
- Fast setup! You got rich features already set up for you (e.g. iPad WPtouch theme plugin for a mobile version of your site. SEO friendly permanent link was setup for your posts by default, but they put the dates as subfolders in the URL, which is not recommended by Matt Cuts. http://wp89.wordpress.com/2011/05/09/turnkey-wordpress-website-service/ should be http://wp89.wordpress.com/turnkey-wordpress-website-service/ without the date instead. You can only do this with your own hosted WordPress sites.)
- It's great to beginners to get familiar with the WordPress interface, features and functions
- You don't need to worry about the software upgrade; WordPress takes care of all the upgrades automatically for you.
- You are not alone; you can find a huge community of WordPress.com users who love to share experiences and tips on using WordPress.com
The greatest disadvantage of the free WordPress.com sites compared with the self-hosted WordPress sites is that you cannot use the WordPress plugins you create or find free available out there to extend the features and functions. Also you cannot use any themes (custom ones) other than the themes they offer.
Limitations of WordPress.com websites:
- Adsense, Yahoo, Chitika, TextLinkAds and other ads are NOT allowed. You cannot even put the affiliate links like clickbanks.
- Uploading file formats only allowed: .jpg .jpeg .png .gif .pdf .doc .ppt ( for security purpose)
- No custom css (unless you upgrade for $15/year ), no custom themes( or edit themes), no custom plugins
- Limited upload space: 50MB ( upgradable to 1000MB for $20/year)
For someone who just need a blog for simple task, you may be satisfied with the free WordPress.com service. For some bloggers or serious business site owners, you must get your own hosting service to run your own WordPress websites with so much more features and functionality to extend. In our later articles, we are going to talk about how much more we can do with your self-hosted WordPress websites.
WordPress Tips:(1)
How to Reset Your Admin Password If Your forget the Email or Have No Access To the Mailbox?
Sometimes, you may forget your admin user name and/or password, and even forget the email you use for that admin account. Dead? Reinstall? No, we can have an easy way to reset the password if you have access to the MySQL database.
Suppose your WordPress tables use the default prefix wp, then you may use phpMyAdmin (most hosting services offer you that handy tool to manage your databases.) If you forget which database you use for that WordPress installation, you may go to the WordPress installation folder, and open the wp-config.php and find the database name.
Then go to wp_users, and browse the user ID 1, you can modify the user_email value and then go to WordPress site to request a reset. After you get the password reset, you may restore the old user_email or the encrypted password string if you make a copy of them. Before you restore the old password, you may even create an additional admin account for future use. For security purpose, some people even remove the user with ID 1 and use other user account as admin.