Top 10 SEO Tips For WordPress: Ways to Improve Your Traffic
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is imperative when trying to be successful in any kind of website. The more important web traffic is to growing your website, the more time you should devote to SEO(what site doesn’t need more visitors?!). Web crawlers such as Google, Bing, or Yahoo, wont rank you high on their SERP or Search Engine Results Page, if SEO is ancillary to you. It used to be you could just post great content and eventually you would rank well, but when your competitors are doing this AND more, it is crucial to keep up with them.
#10 Link related posts to Each Other
If you link your articles on your blog to each other they will form a synergy amongst each other that will be easier to navigate for users and search engines alike. Linking directly in the body of your article would be ideal, since that would be the most intuitive way to get someone to expand on something specific that you’re already talking about in your initial article. To add a link, highlight a word with your mouse, and go up to the blog toolbar and click the link button (it’s the one that looks like a chain). Then you can click “link to existing content” and select which article you would like to link to.
A great way to do this without seeming too spammy or forced, is to write a very long post and have it spread out through multiple days or weeks. i.e. ‘Why the KFC double-down will kill you – Part 1′, ‘Why the KFC double-down will kill you – Part 2′.
#9 Website Speed
The speed of your website can actually somewhat influence your rankings in Google. For example, if two websites have similar ranking factors then Google could use website speed to determine which site has the higher ranking. It also allows for a better user experience, allowing your visitors to browse through your site quicker.
A great plugin to increase the performance of your WordPress blog is the WP Super Cache plugin. It caches all of your pages and speeds your site up, as well as saving bandwidth usage and server resources in-case you receive a spike in traffic.
If you have FireFox, you can download firebug along with the YSlow plugin, which will analyze your website and give you tips on what you can improve upon.
#8 Coding Your Website Properly Through HTML for Validation
Allow me to preface this tip by saying that it’s for more of and advanced user, someone who has the know-how to code web pages(or the money to pay someone who does!). Yet it is important nonetheless. Making sure that your website is coded properly, and that you’re receiving validation from W3C Validator. If you don’t know how to code but would still like to utilize this tip, you can pay someone to do this for your blog for you at Elance or a similar freelancing site. At this point instead of using one of the free wordpress themes, you could have them design and code your own theme with speed, SEO and w3c validation in mind.
Duplicate content is a big no-no, so if you are using a freely available theme with thousands of other sites, it could be hurting you, and definitely isn’t helping you.
You also want to make sure that you are using the proper page title length, meta description, and a ton of other variables. A great tool for this that I highly recommend is SEOMoz Pro – it will crawl your site weekly and let you know what needs to be fixed in a well organized, beautiful looking chart.
#7 Optimizing Your Post’s Slug(Page URL)
The slug is what you see after the last slash in the url of the blog. So http://www.yourdomain.com/”slug”/. You can edit this by pushing the edit button just below the title of the post, next to ‘Permalink’. You’re going to want to fill it with a shortened version of your title, that contains keywords that are related to what the blog post is about. Make sure not to use any spaces, but rather separating the words with a hyphen “-”. Personally, when I write blog posts I always try to use a title that other people are searching for in Google. Though, of course, that is not always possible to do.
#6 Create a Sitemap for Your Website
Search engines and users alike, like it when you have an easy to read summary of your entire website. An extremely easy way of going about this would be to install a WordPress plugin called Google XML Sitemaps. This plugin does all the heavy lifting for you, and will automatically update anytime new content is added.
#5 Optimizing Your Permalinks
This is a matter of making your url go from looking like this http://www.yourdomain.com/?page_id=1 to http://www.yourdomain.com/(whatever title or keyword you want). This is different from slugs, because this can effect what comes after the slash for any of the URLs that pertain to your site. For instance if you had an about page, or a bibliography page, you would want to use this. To utilize this, go to settings on the left, and click Permalinks. Then click custom structure and type in whatever you would like it to show. You can even have it include the date that it was made if you like, using one of the pre-made structures. It is much friendlier for both users and search engines.
#4 Improving Your Images
Having pictures in your posts can be a great way to further illustrate what you are talking about. Search engines are not smart like people and can’t tell the difference between a picture of a lady bug, and the Eiffel tower. It is this reason that it is important to use keyword rich image titles and alt text to label your picture so that a search engine knows what the picture is. It also can help with searches in ‘Google Images’.
#3 Use keywords in your title
Don’t make your title just some crazy amalgamation of keywords that pertain to your site. That would be bad and is frowned upon by Google, but if you can include a key word or two and it will make your title look good and above all make sense, then go for it.
#2 Create Great Content and Link to Great Content
Bottom line, people wont want to visit your website if your content is garbage, regardless of how much time you invest in SEO. Make sure you have integrity, take your time creating really good well-crafted content. Also if you link to other websites or blog posts that pertain to what you’re talking about, people will be more likely to respect you and possibly the webmasters you’re linking to will return the favor, which will give your site more authority.
#1 Build Back Links to Your Site
Whenever possible, you should be doing this. Anytime you post on a forum, or another blog somewhere, included in your signature or profile should be a link to your site.
You can even contact other websites that have some renown to them, and simply ask if they will create a link to you. A great way to do this is to first publish something with a link to them, and then mention that you have linked to their site and would appreciate a follow-up response or a mention with a link back to your site. Anytime you have an opportunity to plug your site make sure you take it.
With all this preaching, it would be wrong for us not to do it ourselves 
…
I’m now going to take my own advice and plug eLief. If you like what you’ve read please give us a mention or link back to this post. If you’re a current eLief customer you can always put a link back to us on your site or forum signature, showing off to the world how much you love your web hosting company:
Proudly hosted by eLief <a href="http://www.elief.com/web-hosting.php">Web Hosting Services</a>
After all the html code is processed, it will look like this:
Proudly hosted by eLief Web Hosting Services
Hopefully these tips have helped you out, make sure to comment if you have any questions or anything to add!
Instantly Speed Up Magento Commerce
This is a great way to improve the performance of your Magento hosting account and website, some users will immediately notice over a 5x speed increase! As some of you may or may not know, Magento has visitor logging and various other logs enabled by default. Eventually these logs will grow to a massive size and cause your website and the server to slow down.
Most web hosts include something like AWStats or you can use Google Analytics for advanced visitor tracking, so the logging Magento provides isn’t needed and isn’t very useful.
Why the Magento developers don’t have this disabled by default or cleared out regularly by default is way beyond me. I wish the Magento developers would realize how big of a performance factor this is and focus on increasing performance for us Magento users rather than continue to add more features and slow down the stores.
/end rant.
Enough Already - Just tell me how to do this!
1.) Download the file cleanup.php and upload it to your main Magento folder. Please note the file you are downloading is zipped so you will need to extract the file before uploading it. You only need to upload cleanup.php.
2.) Next you will need to login to your cPanel to setup a Cron Job. To do this just click on the ‘Cron Jobs’ icon under the Advanced tab in your cPanel account.
3.) Under the ‘Add New Cron Job‘ section select ‘Once a day‘ under the Common Settings drop down. After you have done that copy the following into the Command box:
curl -s -o /dev/null http://www.yourdomain.com/cleanup.php?clean=log
Make sure to change the bolded section of the code to where you uploaded the cleanup.php file to.
After doing so, click the Add New Cron Job button, and your done!
4.) If you would like to go a step further to increase your performance, while still in the cron job section you can add a new cron job to clean your var folder out.
Under Common Settings this time you can select 1st and 15th.
Add the following code to the command line:
curl -s -o /dev/null http://www.yourdomain.com/cleanup.php?clean=var
Again making sure to change the bolded selection to where the cleanup file is located, click Add New Cron Job, and again that cron will be saved and will run every 2 weeks. This one we extended a little farther apart since it doesn’t need to be ran as often.
If you have any questions or comments feel free to let us know under our blog comments section.
5 Easy Tips to Free Up Disk Space on Your Server
From time to time we need to clear up disk space on our servers, whether it is to just reduce disk space to help minimize the costs and usage of backup servers, or if it’s to clean up the server and help with performance.
Here are 5 easy ways you can instantly clear up hard drive space and reduce the number of inodes on your server:
1.) Remove User Generated cPanel Backups
Many times cPanel users aren’t aware that they should delete a cPanel backup before performing another cPanel backup. Essentially they are taking backups of backups and this can quite easily add up to several gigabytes of space just for one account. A quick and easy way to remove these is to run the following command from root:
for user in `/bin/ls -A /var/cpanel/users` ; do rm -fv /home/$user/backup-*$user.tar.gz ; done
Make sure to copy the full command exactly how it is above. This will work for cPanel hosting servers only.
2.) Audit your MySQL Databases
Not only will this free up disk space but it can greatly help with increasing the performance on your server. Large MySQL databases on sites that are receiving a large amount of traffic can really slow down a server. Many times the tables that are using the most space in a database are simply from visitor logging or caching, things that can be freed up instantly be truncating the table.
Use the following command when logged in as root to show the highest usage databases on the server:
du -k --max-depth 1 /var/lib/mysql | sort -n
This will show a list of individual databases from lowest to highest. Databases larger than 500mb can be an issue with performance so it is worth it to investigate them.
Once you have the results from the command above, it is easy to go into phpMyAdmin and find the database. Once you have clicked on the database you should sort the table size by space, clicking it twice so that it shows the highest usage table on the top.
If the table is some type of visitor logging or tracking table, it generally is okay to truncate it. The same goes for caching. Make sure to backup the database just in-case before doing so, and it won’t hurt to do a quick google search to see if that table is okay to empty. Searching for the exact term/table name usually will bring up the results you are looking for.
This is a great way to free up disk space, RAM and help increase overall server performance.
3.) Remove Installatron and Fantastico Backups
If you are running Installatron or Fantastico on your server, it is easy for the backups for these files to use up a lot of inodes and space, taking up resources and slowing down performance. Usually once every few months we will remove these for that reason. You can do so by entering the following commands:
For Fantastico:
rm -rfv /home/*/fantastico_backups
For Installatron:
rm -rfv /home/*/.installatron/backups
These are the two software installers I am familiar with, if you are using another software installer the same can be done for it if you just insert the proper location where the backups are stored. Consult with the software developer to make sure it is okay to do so first.
4.) Get Rid of Cached Yum Files
Updates from Yum usually leave some unneeded files on the server. Do some Yum house cleaning:
yum clean all
5.) Delete Failed FTP Uploads
When users are uploading files via pure-ftp and the upload either fails or is interrupted it will leave a partial file on the server. You can quickly get rid of these to clean up some disk space:
locate .pureftpd-upload | xargs rm -fv
Using the above five ways we have sometimes cleared hundreds of Gigabytes of space and doing all of the above should take you less than an hour.
Let us know your results or if you have anything to add.
How to Install ocPortal
Installing ocPortal and other software on eLief is easy, we’ve included a short guide on how to do this below:
- The first step is to login to your cPanel account with us.
- Once you are logged into your cPanel account you will need to find the Software/Services section and click on “1-Click Applications Installer”.
- This will bring up a large list of applications, under the left hand side look for ‘Content Management Systems’, click ocPortal -> Install this Application.
- The on-screen instructions will guide you through the installation easily. It will automatically create your database and folders, download and update data and finalize the installation.
- Your ocPortal install is now ready! Use the password and username to login to ocPortal and start customizing your site.
We are the official ocPortal hosting partner and support all requirements. Our applications installer is available on all of our web hosting services and cPanel reseller hosting plans. The installer is also not limited to ocPortal and can install over 50+ applications, including our popular magento hosting plans.
20 Tips For Small Business Owners
Below are some very useful tips for aspiring entrepreneurs. I found this interesting and thought you could gain value from this as well:
1. Find a strength for your weakness.
2. Work with people that are just as passionate about the business. You have to be “all-in” and fully committed to the business.
3. Always think “how can I add more value to the end user?”
4. Murphy’s Law – Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
5. Realize that as an entrepreneur, you are innately optimistic. Try and step outside yourself, ask others, and try and be more realistic.
6. Networking is more important than you can even imagine. Never eat alone. Ask lots of questions to people who have been there and done that. Surround yourself with wise people. As Jim Rohn said “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”
7. Make mistakes; just don’t do it again. Embracing failure and learning from your mistakes is integral to growth.
8. Money is always a problem. Deal with it.
9. Continually innovate and think outside the box.
10. Never lose focus on your mission.
11. Customer service should always be a core value.
12. Write down and document everything. Be concise on all documents. The devil is in the details.
13. Don’t underestimate the power of social media.
14. Write a SWOT analysis of every one of your competitors.
15. Periodically revise your business plan to better organize your thoughts.
16. Communication is key.
17. Every single night write a to-do list for the next day and don’t go to bed until you complete the tasks.
18. Make sure to schedule in some personal time everyday.
19. Luck happens when hard work meets opportunity.
20. Nothing is a greater high than when people use your product and see value in it.
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Credit: StartUpNation.com