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.

If you’re the owner of a small business or you have launched a new website, achieving better Google rankings through SEO has to be at the forefront of your mind. Many people however don’t actually know how to actually go about this, and what kinds of SEO tactics will produce real, tangible results. The truth is that there are actually several different kinds of SEO work that you’ll have to become familiar with.

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.

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a word that every website owner should be familiar with. SEO means that you have designed and written your website so that it shows up high in the search engine rankings for searches using the major engines like Yahoo and Google. Backlinks are of enormous importance in the ranking of your website. Backlinks are links from other sites to yours. While links that are “swapped” carry some weight in search engine rankings, one way backlinks from other sites to yours carry far more weight.

While there are services that will sell your links, and sites that allow you to swap large numbers of links with other users, these can be seriously detrimental to your search engine rankings. Major search engines are aware of this practice, and when they’re able to ferret it out, they penalize sites for doing so. It’s far better to get a dozen one-way backlinks over the course of a month than to purchase 1,000 paid links or make a quick 100 link trade. Fortunately there are many things you can do to organically develop backlinks to your site that will boost your search engine rankings significantly. Here are seven great ways to get high quality one way backlinks to your website.

1. Article Marketing. Suppose you have a website that sells leather cleaning and conditioning products. You want your site to be nice looking and easy to navigate, with a memorable domain name. How do you get traffic on your site without having a big advertising budget? A great way is through article marketing. There are a number of article sites that people use every day to learn about topics that interest them or to learn how to accomplish certain tasks.

Sites like eHow.com, goarticles.com, and ezinearticles.com are where millions of people go when they need to learn something. If you were to write an article about how to care for leather boots and handbags for one of these sites, you would have at the bottom of your article a “resource box” in which you tell a little about yourself and include links to your commercial website. Some of these sites allow links to your site embedded in the articles themselves, and these will also help drive traffic to your site, increasing the probability that you will get backlinks.

2. Video Marketing. If you’re using video marketing, you want the maximum number of people to watch your video. There are many ways to promote your video content and encourage backlinks to it. If you have an email newsletter, that’s a great way to get a link to your video content to a lot of people. Some forums and blogs allow links to your video as long as they are not obvious spam posts, and some even allow you to provide a link to your website in your forum “signature.” Read the FAQs on any forum you consider joining before posting links to your site.

Twitter is another great way to announce new video content. On Twitter you have 140 characters with which to convince people to click on a link to your site. This can be very effective because of the huge number of people who use Twitter to quickly search for information.

3. Social Bookmarking. You can encourage backlinks with Social Bookmarking sites like Digg.com, del.icio.us, and stumbleupon.com. With sites like these, you can submit a link to your website, and people visiting the site will see it when they look for new information related to your website. Not only can they easily visit and watch your video, they can “second” your submission by vouching for it as having good content. The more people who see and like your content, the more prominent the link to your video will become, and the more high quality backlinks you’ll earn.

4. Squidoo Lens. Squidoo is a site that is a little like the articles sites mentioned above, but it’s different in some ways. For example, rather than articles, Squidoo publishes what it calls “lenses.” The idea is that you’re an expert on something – everyone is – and that by using text, photos, and video, you can use your lens to focus on information and share it with a huge readership. You can write a lens about your business. Then perhaps you can write more lenses about individual items you sell. You can link all these lenses together to maximize the traffic you drive to your site and encourage backlinks.

5. Hubpages. Hubpages is similar to Squidoo in that you use it to make content-rich pages with text, videos, pictures, and links. You create an account, pick a title for your Hubpage, and add tags. Then you add content: photos, text, products, or comments. While you don’t “own” a topic on Hubpages, the more Hubpages you create, the higher your Hubpages ranking will be, and the more you’ll be seen as the expert on a given topic.

6. Directory Submission. Directory submission is an adjunct to search engine submission. Instead of just submitting your website to search engines, you should submit it to search engines and directories. Directory submission is different because editors review submissions for quality before accepting it into the directory. These editors have so many sites submitted to them that they can be selective about them. The main thing you should keep in mind when submitting your site to a directory is to follow that directory’s instructions exactly. If you don’t, you’re automatically out of the running, even if your site is brilliant. You must also submit it to the proper category and subcategory if applicable. Next to following submission instructions, this is the most important thing to remember with directory submissions.

7. Social Media Sites. These are the sites you always hear about, like Facebook, Twitter, DeviantArt, and MySpace. These sites allow the sharing of content as well as socializing. If your website or business doesn’t have a Facebook page, it should. Same thing with MySpace. But it is important to know that you need to keep your content on these social media sites up-to-date. A stale MySpace or Facebook page will rapidly disappear from the collective memory. If someone is a “fan” of your Facebook page, they’ll be notified when your page is updated. It is also important to know that even though some of these sites are especially popular among college students and even high school students, your business’s page should retain a degree of decorum. In other words, your page should be made for grown-ups.

These seven tips for generating one way backlinks, implemented consistently, will help your site gain many valuable one way backlinks. The more genuine backlinks your site has, the higher it will rise in search engine results. And that is the best way to drive traffic to your site and help your business grow.