As you might know WordPress is an open source blog publishing application powered by PHP and MySQL which can also be used as a content management system – and now becoming a very popular platform for developing almost any type of community or website that your heart desires.

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.

Social media is a concept that bubbled up through the masses starting, roughly speaking, around 2005. While social media sites like MySpace and Facebook began as ways for primarily young people to find each other and keep in touch, corporations soon saw how these sites could be used to improve customer relations. By 2009 social media begun to revolutionize the way corporations managed customer relations.

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.

Most people know that one of the keys to utilizing SEO and ranking your website in the search engines is the use of keywords. Still, there are many factors you must consider when using keywords if you want to see success. One of the elements that some people get focused is how many keywords they should target on one webpage.

One of the overlooked factors that people don’t give much attention to is how many keywords you should target on a single web page. The truth is that many people want to do too much when they work with SEO. It’s easy to get ahead of yourself and try to cram tons of keywords on one page, assuming that the more you use the better. However, that’s not really the way that it works.

There was a time over a decade or more ago when the use of keywords was first gaining importance where the more you used, the more you ranked for. At this time nobody really knew anything about SEO and how it really worked, and the search engines themselves were still developing their formulas for how to produce high quality rankings.

However, this kind of strategy is no longer effective, and most people try to go after too many keywords on a single page of their website. If you have a huge list of keywords, it’s not smart to try to rank for each of them on every page of your site. You’re only thinning out your association with each individual keyword and wasting your time and effort. Additionally, your content will up looking spammy to both visitors and search engines that see all of those keywords on one page.

However, in actuality the opposite is true. More is less when it comes to SEO and the number of keywords you are trying to target. By targeting too many on a single web page, you aren’t doing anything but thinning out your focus. You’ll also likely be including so many keywords that your content will come across as spam to both the search engines and your visitors.

Now that you know that less is more, what’s the answer for how many keywords should be on a single page for maximum SEO success? There is no guaranteed answer that is going to ensure you a perfect mix, however targeting 2 or 3 keywords on a single web page is usually the best idea. For pages with less content you’ll want to reduce that to 1-2 keywords, and for pages with a great deal of content you can target a few more.

When you break up your site and individual pages like this you will be able to target a complete list of keywords effectively. Each page will have a few keywords that they can rank for and you’ll avoid using anything excessively. It’s the best way to use keywords across your entire site and it will produce great results for you in the search engines.

Of course, use your good judgment when you determine how many keywords you want to target on each individual web page. Think about factors such as what the page deals with and how much content it has. But remember, when in doubt a smart guideline is not to target more than 2 or 3 different keywords per each page of your site.