Greatson Media – Saco, Biddeford Maine Website Design & Hosting

WordPress is one of the most powerful web design tools anyone can use when building their websites. No longer just a blogging platform, it has been developed into a fully functional CMS that is far more flexible, user-friendly than most other Content Management Systems.

The reason I love WordPress so much is because it is highly customizable. There are hundreds of thousands of plugins and themes available that allow me to create a website with any features I could ever want. Through the use of plugins and themes I cannot only build simple blogs, I can also develop fully functional websites with shopping carts to sell products and services or even create membership sites and community portals.

The biggest advantage to using WordPress is being able to automate almost all of the on-page SEO tasks and even some of the off-page tasks. Through the use of plugins, I am able to get my websites indexed in Google quickly, often within minutes.

Because most of the SEO process is set up to run automatically, every page of my websites are fully optimized to get the best possible placements in the search engines. No other CMS makes it this easy.

Since I have used WordPress so extensively over the past 5 years, I have tested out many of the plugins that are out there, and believe me, there are literally thousands. Over the years, I have compiled a list of essential plugins that I begin with for every site build I do. I have a few premium professional plugins I sometimes add, but the bulk of the load is managed with the following 9 free plugins.

9 Best WordPress SEO Plugins

1. SEO Ultimate

I used to use the All in One SEO plugin, but have found that this one is not only better; it also has a ton more features. This plugin not only allows you to manage your Meta tags for all of your pages, posts and site-wide titles, keywords and descriptions, it also eliminates duplicate content by implementing canonical URLs.

SEO Ultimate also allows you to set a noindex/nofollow tag for individual pages or posts – very useful if you want to republish an article or have any pages that you do not want to get indexed by search engines. Another cool feature is adding a text box with your link details at the bottom of your posts and pages to encourage natural link building from your visitors. There are more features to this WordPress plugin, but the ones I have covered are the most important to me.

2. PubSubHubBub

This is a plugin created by Google and it can be responsible for getting your site content indexed really fast. Its publish and subscribe protocol is an extension to the standard Atom and RSS. Some of the hubs currently using this protocol are Google Reader, Google Alerts, FriendFeed, and many more. The main function is real-time pinging of your new content to various hubs throughout the internet where users can subscribe to your feeds. Because it is done in real-time, your new content can be indexed within minutes. Although WordPress has a built-in ping feature, PubSubHubBub will complement that function and make it unnecessary for you to spend money on pinging or bookmarking services.

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O.K. so you think you have an idea or even a product to sell through your brand new internet business.

Internet marketing is a brilliant business to be in. There are boundless opportunities to run online businesses which can make incredible amounts of money, if you have established that there is a market for your chosen niche or product, and have done the necessary research.

All set, ready to go?

Er, not quite.

You should establish a presence in your market before you unleash your product to the world.

If you are about to start an internet business, then you should be wondering about attracting traffic to your site. There are many advertising options available, but if money is tight, some of these options may not seem practical.

Advertising can be expensive especially if you are not too sure what you are doing. Money can be swallowed up very quickly if you do not study advertising techniques.

Promotion can take many weeks or even months to show results, and then may not be effective.

Many courses and books sold by some of the gurus are sometimes out of date. Outdated material and tactics which you pay for then find they just do not work.

You may have an excellent website, but bear in mind blogging is now probably more effective than a static site.

Of course, the most traditional way of running an online business over the last few years has been websites, and is still a very successful method.

However, blogging has moved to the fore because search engines seem to favor blogs over the standard static website.

For those who can constantly add to or update their blog, visits by search engines will become a more regular practice, which will give you more chance of a high ranking in the search engines.

The reason is that search engines seem to prefer blogs over traditional static sites and it is possible to see a page on your blog ranked on the first page in Google within 24 hours.

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The hype around social media just keeps getting louder. Every week a new campaign and a new platform is released. So why has social media gone mainstream?

Online networks, including social ones, evolve and take on a life of their own. In the real world, for multi-celled organisms to exist a number of cells must work together to make something bigger. When individual cellular components work together multi-celled organisms evolve and these can evolve into complex life forms over time. A branch of these complex life-forms evolved and eventually became humans. Human civilization has in turn evolved to where we are now because we have mastered the art of continually grouping together into teams, tribes, cities, and nation states to create something that is bigger than the sum of its parts.

Networking and collaboration is fundamental to what it means to be human. In our bodies are atoms working together to create cells and cells working together to create our organs. In our brains neurons work together to create our thoughts, feelings and language. In your company people are working together – to create something bigger and more exciting than the sum of its parts. We can take this thinking and look at the development of the personal computer and see a very similar pattern emerging.

Before anyone had a computer or a smart phone, everything was a social event. Meetings were face-to-face, or over the phone at least, and communication in general was human to human based. In the last 30 years things have changed. Initially, the personal computer made everything a private and secluded affair. Games, for example, could be played without the help of another human and work could happen sitting in front of a screen. The advent of the early Internet showed how powerful many computers networked together could be, but from a personal perspective ‘computing’ was an insular activity.

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