It has many features including a plugin architecture and a templating system – used by over 2% of the top 10,000 most popular websites in the word. If you want something implemented to your site, there is a good chance you will find a WordPress plugin to suit your needs.

There are plugins for web advertising, flickr, twitter, e-commerce, newsletters, weather, RSS, SEO, Analytics and just about anything else you can think of. Many of these are developed as “widgets” that can easily be added to your site using the WordPress management system. And we can all grow tired of our website designs over time, but changing the design has always been such a hassle — until now. With WordPress themes you can instantly activate a new web design while still retaining all of the content within the site. There’s no hassle of copying and re-sending all of your content to a new web designer or developer, or wasting time migrating files.

Currently, WordPress is the most popular publishing software on the internet, and for good reason. Anyone (even a beginner) can begin using it to great effect. Within minutes you can create a beautiful looking blog or website and have ALL of your content indexed by the search engines, literally over night. If you can send an e-mail, use Microsoft Word or set up a Facebook account, then you can use WordPress. It’s website creation for non-techies.

These are all reasons why Smart Media Innovations Pty Ltd has been using WordPress as our main publishing platform for developing hundreds of sites over the years, and why we recommend it to our clients.

To help you get started with WordPress (and to ensure that your content is being indexed by the search engines) we have listed two top resources for installing wordpress and included our top 7 SEO plugins (plus a few others) to help you get off on the right foot. We also know it isn’t always easy sorting through the thousands of seo plugins available – so here are 7 good ones to get you going.

Step 1) Install WordPress

>> Click Here for Detailed Instructions

>> Click Here for Video Instructions

Step 2) Install our Top 7 SEO Plugins

1. >> Onlywire Multi Poster – FREE – syndicates your posts to Web 2.0 sites automatically
2. >> MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer – FREE – excellent pinging tool
3. >> Twitme – FREE – automatically posts to twitter for more backlinks
4. >> All in one SEO pack – FREE – optimizes your WordPress content for the Search Engines
5. >> Google XML Sitemaps Generator - FREE – this plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog or website.
6. >> SEO Tag Cloud Widget – FREE – Love ‘em or hate ‘em, a lot of people use tag clouds on their blogs, however since their inception they have been fairly unreadable by search engines, until now. With this plugin your tag cloud will be converted into an SEO-friendly HTML markup that can be indexed.
7. >> Dagon Design Sitemap Generator – FREE – this plugin creates a sitemap for your WordPress powered site. It’s important that the search engines can easily navigate your site.

In conclusion, WordPress empowers you to do just about anything that your imagination can conjure up – without costing you an arm and a leg. With developers constantly working on applications, plugins, and themes all around the world – you will never have a need to look at another publishing platform again.

Get started today!

Please comment: If you have anything to add, or know of any great SEO plugins for wordpress that we might have missed here, please comment below.

As always, for further information (or assistance) on any of the above, please feel free to contact us and we will be happy to assist you as best we can.

*UPDATED: Optional Plugins and Applications - to give you several ideas of the type of things you can do with WordPress!

These are ALL brilliant applications that can be easily implemented at the click of a button, and will certainly add to your bottom line. Well worth a look.

>> Market Me Tweet

Market Me Tweet is the only Twitter Application that allows you to Brand, Market, and Manage your twitter profiles and tweets, all in one! Click here to find out how we use it to drive a lot of traffic to your sites.

>> Ninja Affiliate

Ninja Affiliate is a unique WordPress plugin designed to effortlessly embed affiliate links into your WordPress blog and instantly double (or triple) your affiliate marketing commissions. A great way to instantly add an additional revenue stream to your blog or wordpress site.

>> Wishlist Member

Wishlist Member allows you to create a powerful and fully customizable membership platform on any WordPress powered website. Fast, simple and very effective! Perfect for anyone looking to include paid subscription, paid content models.

>> Job Press

JobPress is a WordPress theme that turns your website / blog into a fully functional Job Board. Its easy to use and install, plus you can monetize your job board effortlessly with just a few clicks.

>> Email Marketing – Aweber

Aweber is the Mercedes Benz of email marketing. Quickly create and run your email campaigns cheaply with this powerful, easy-to-use email marketing platform. We personally use Aweber and if you haven’t already done so, we HIGHLY recommend that you sign up and start building a mailing list today. It’s a must that you constantly follow up and communicate with your customers. Aweber helps you do this properly.

>> Squeeze Theme

Grow your email list and expand your profits with Squeeze Theme. Setting up effective squeeze pages has never been so easy and with jst a few clicks, you can completely change the look and feel of your site using Squeeze Theme! Combine this with Aweber and you will be quickly on your way to building an ever lasting asset that will pay you for years to come.

When you think of a link wheel, try to picture an old-fashioned wooden wheel with spokes. At the center of the wheel is the article or webpage that you want to move up in the search engine results. At the outside end of each spoke is another article or page that you control. Each of these outside articles links to the center article or page. They also link to the next article on the outside of the circle. In this way, you will connect the dots with links to draw a wheel around your main page.

To help you understand better, you can try drawing a picture of the wheel. Write the name of your target article or page in the center. Now draw six lines reaching out from the center article. Make these into arrows pointing back toward the center to represent the links. Now you need to complete the wheel by making lines in between each article on the outer edge. Make these lines into arrows as well. All of the arrows should go in one direction, either clockwise or counterclockwise. This shows which articles will link to each other.

Next, you need to know what pages to put the links on. You can use pages on a number of different sites to make your wheel. Any service that allows you to publish a webpage or article containing at least two links will work. Some examples include Squidoo, Hubpages, Blogger and Ezine Articles. Just pick six of these types of sites to use to build your link wheel.

You don’t need unique content for each of these pages. Only the main page at the center of the link wheel needs to be unique. The other articles can all be rewrites of the same article. You are not going to be promoting the outside articles to human visitors. Their only purpose is to provide backlinks for your main page.

However, the way you set up your links is important. When you create your links to the center page, make sure you use your targeted keyword as the text for your links. For example, if you want your webpage to rank well for “best way to make money online, ” you need to use “best way to make money online” as the text for your links.

Building a link wheel around a webpage or article can give you a huge boost in the search engine rankings, but the six-page wheel described in this article is just the beginning. If you really want to boost your rankings, you can build multiple wheels around a single article. You can also build secondary wheels around each of the pages in the original wheel. Just make sure you build your backlinks slowly and steadily so that your webpage doesn’t get sandboxed.

According to IT research and advisory company Gartner, by 2010 60% of Fortune 1000 companies will be using social media in some form as a way to improve customer relations. That’s the good news. Gartner also posits that over half of the companies using social media for this function will do it wrong and actually harm customer relations. Gartner suggests that companies focus their analysis on customer online buying in order to offer a direct calculation of return on investment in terms of sales and customer loyalty coming through social media sites.

Gartner says that there are four steps businesses need to pursue to successfully use social media to manage customer relations. The first step is clearly defining the purpose of the social media initiative. Second, they must be willing to give up some degree of control over the medium, because the public wants some degree of ownership of the relationship as a reward for participating.

Companies then have to reward those customers that participate socially. This may mean allowing them to vote on, or otherwise rate contributions and information on the site. Finally, companies must appoint someone in-house who has the skills to head up a social media customer relations initiative. Using social media for customer relations should never be an afterthought. In fact, it should probably have someone specifically devoted to it full time, with their own staff if necessary.

There is no question that social networking has changed the behavior of a critical mass of individuals as customers and prospects. According to Gartner, they can no longer be described adequately based on demographic information, which is the usual target for corporate customer relations efforts.

When it comes to your company, you’re not going to want to invest a lot of time or effort in such an undertaking without knowing if it will pay off in terms of driving quality traffic to your company’s website.

Non-linear Creations did a one-year study of the effects of five social media sites (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Stumbleupon) on their own home page. After a year, it was determined that social media sites drove about 18% of their site’s visitors from the referring sites in aggregate.

In the Case of Non-linear Creations, Linkedin and Facebook outperformed the other social media sites. That’s important, but it isn’t the whole story. What about conversion rates? Non-linear Creations measured conversion rates by whether visitors downloaded one of their white papers, subscribed to their blog or newsletter, or contacted them by phone or email. In this case – driving real prospects – Linkedin outperformed the other sites. Traffic from Linkedin was much more likely to convert than the average site visitor. Other social media sites actually underperformed the average.

There’s no guarantee that Linkedin will give your company the tangible results that Non-linear Creations got. It probably depends on what type of business you have. It is not quite understood what the less tangible benefits are of reaching customers online in a way that makes them feel as if the brand is listening and cares enough to interact in the way they desire. One of the things people dislike about customer support call centers is their anonymous feel. It keeps them from feeling a sense of relationship to the brand. So far no obvious downsides of using social media for customer service, so it would seem to be in any company’s best interests to use this form of outreach.

It certainly isn’t hard to create accounts on social media sites. The hard part is in actually interacting with customers on them, listening to them, and analyzing your online visitor numbers to see which social media sites give you the most return on investment in terms of online sales or some other metric. At that point you’ll have to determine how much effort to put into making under-performing social media referrers more effective.

Flickr is quickly becoming a popular online marketing tool for it allows creative agencies to market their products through a visually appealing medium. It can help you generate traffic to your website and ensure that your website ranks higher on the major search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing too. Consider this, according to Nielsen or NetRatings, Flickr is the fastest-growing photo sharing site on the web. It is the 7th most trafficked social media site overall.

Flickr is primarily a photo-sharing community, owned by Yahoo!. You can use your Yahoo! Login ID and password to log onto Flickr and use your account to tag your photographs, share them and participate in the community discussions as well. The photographs, which you post on Flickr, might leave a lasting impression in the minds of the millions of Flickr users and some of them might end up being your potential customers as well. By networking actively on the community forums, you can build your contacts and build greater awareness about your business and services as well. You could use the links from Flickr to further your link popularity too!

Video is for everyone too! As a member of Flickr, you can upload and share videos (business videos and presentations too!) just like you do with photos.

To avail the benefits of SEO through Flickr, you need inbound links, which you could obtain in the form of links from other blogs and websites. Ensure that the photo title matches the title tag or element. You are assured higher rankings for the phrase. Most importantly, you should only try to sell unique and noteworthy product or services-related photographs through Flickr.

Quick tips for marketing your business on Flickr:

* Use your business/website name as your Flickr display name.

* Use the best, relevant photographs to advertise your business.

* Actively participate in the Flickr community. Find groups relevant to your business and join them.

* Tag your photographs with terms that are relevant to your business or service. Provide a link to your Flickr account on your website.

However, don’t post advertising messages on the discussion forums or stuff keywords in your tags. You could end up turning “off” the community and users, and not being able to generate any interest in your photostream too. To top that, Flickr added “nofollow” tags to links placed within its website last year. Flickr implemented these tags for the same reason as a number of other social-media sites – to prevent misuse and spamming.

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The first is what most people already know, and that’s on-page SEO tactics. These include things like keyword inclusion and internal linking. The other half of SEO however may actually be even more important for your Google rankings. This is off-page SEO, and it incorporates all of the work that you do to help improve your search engine standings on other websites and through other sources and mediums throughout the web.

Below are 10 of the most important factors when it comes to off-page SEO and your Google rankings. By following this advice and incorporating these strategies into your SEO game plan you will be able to soar up the rankings.

1. Quantity of Incoming Links: One of the first off-page SEO factors for Google rankings is the quantity of incoming links that you have leading to your website. The quick story is that the more links you have leading to your website the better.

2. Quality of Incoming Links: However another important rule is that the quality of your incoming links is also important. That’s because every incoming link is like a vote towards your credibility. Therefore when that vote comes from a highly credible source, you get more credit. The best links are natural, one-way links from related sites that are themselves already highly credible.

3. Diversity of Incoming Links: Having incoming links from a variety of different sources will also help your SEO and Google rankings. For example if all of your links are from blog comments you may set off alarms, or fail to see true benefits from those links. But if you have links from forums, blogs, directories, related websites, articles, videos and more you are establishing a far reaching and legitimate presence.

4. Anchor Text of Incoming Links: The anchor text use in your incoming links is also extremely important. That’s because the anchor text is what actually tells the Google rankings what your page is about. Therefore the right anchor text can help you directly target certain topics or key phrases, enabling you to immediately boost your SEO.

5. Domain Name Age: Some people may consider this on-page SEO, but since it is largely out of your control and you can’t change anything on your page to affect this, it should be considered off-page SEO. The older your domain is, the more credible your website is viewed and the more potential you have for high Google rankings.

6. Community Building: Community building entails a presence on social networks, blogs and forums. These are important SEO tactics for Google rankings because they help to expand your overall reach and scope. You will add more incoming links to your site, build more direct traffic and grow more support. You’ll also get noticed by more blogs and other sites, which will add even more links and traffic to your growing numbers.

7. Visitor Trends: The way that visitors behave with your site is also extremely important for your Google rankings. For example if you apply some solid SEO tactics and gain more traffic, but all of your visits result in bounces, then clearly people aren’t finding what they are looking for from your website and you can end up being penalized. You are looking to achieve as low a bounce rate as possible, showing that you are a valued and related website.

8. Traffic Sources: The sources of your traffic can also end up affecting your Google rankings. There are “good” and “bad” sources of traffic on the Internet, and if you participate in linking schemes or traffic buying you can actually end up being penalized to some degrees. You want your traffic to come from credible referral sites that are related to your own website, natural searching and any legitimate PPC campaigns you may be running.

9. Previous History: The previous history of your website and the trends of popularity will factor into your long term Google rankings. What this means is that if your site suddenly spikes in traffic for some reason, or suddenly quadruples its content or shows up with 2,000 more incoming links, it will be looked at as suspicious at first. More successful is the gradual increase of content, and incoming links.

10. Directory Inclusion: One of the most important SEO tactics for your off-page SEO success is getting included in some of the major directories. Directories have been devalued by and large in the Google rankings, but some still carry a great deal of weight. For example, getting listed in Dmoz can provide a huge boost to your rankings that lasts for a very long time.

These are just a summation of some of the important off-page SEO tactics that you can use to help improve your Google rankings. These days you need far more than just optimized content in order to gain a foothold in the search engines. Many people view off-page SEO as the equal to on-page SEO, and many other people view link building and other off-page SEO tactics as even more important.

Therefore take the time it takes to familiarize yourself with the best practices of these SEO tactics. Build up a diverse collection of high quality links, provide content that people find relevant, gradually build your website and do everything you can off of your website to help increase your Google rankings.