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.

To succeed online you must focus on effective keyword research. By choosing the right keywords you can succeed at the SEO game. I have personally worked with hundreds of clients seeking number one rankings but who have given adequate focus on keyword research. This is incredibly important when your site is competing against well ranked sites that have been in the top ranking for some time.

The first step is finding a keyword that isn’t all that competitive. Once you do, the next step is to make sure that the keyword you have selected gets enough traffic. Don’t overlook this important aspect of keyword research. I worked with a company that was proud of their number one rankings. When I did some research to discover the type of traffic they could expect, I found less than one hundred searches each month on the keyword they selected. Even with top rankings, they would never see the traffic they expected.

Assuming that you have been able to find a keyword phrase that doesn’t have a great deal of competition and generates enough traffic, it’s time to look at your competition. You are competing against other web sites who currently rank in the top few positions for your chosen keyword. Research each of these top ranked sites to determine their Google page rank, age, and the number of sites linking to them. The more inbound links they have the more difficult they will be to outrank.

Once you’ve conducted your keyword research and decided which keyword phrase you are going to optimize for, it’s time to focus on optimizing your web pages. This can be done by focusing on on-page optimization techniques and off-page optimization techniques. Start with a well formatted web site that includes keyword phrases in meta tags, page titles, and so on. Then turn your attention to off page optimization which includes building links and getting your site listed in major directories and social media profiles. Add additional link building techniques like bookmarking to enhance the quality of your web pages and web sites.

Your plan should include daily, weekly and monthly tasks that can attract links from authority websites consistently over time. Your goal should not be to generate thousands of inbound links quickly because Google will penalize your website. Rather, focus on steady link building. If you want to enhance your organic search engine ranking, begin with keyword research. By selecting the right keywords, you’ll be able to optimize your website faster than your competitors. After choosing the right keywords, focus on integrating your chosen keywords into your web site. Then you’re ready for link building and other off page optimization tactics that significantly improve rankings.

One way to help boost your results in the search engines for a specific keyword is to build a link wheel around the webpage you want to give a boost. You do this by writing six articles that you can position on social media and other websites and link back to your page and one of the other six articles inside of each of them.

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.

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.

Press releases have been a great way to bring traffic to a business, and of course advertise. It doesn’t matter whether they want to tell the public about a new product or just talk about the company-press releases have always been the way to do it. Over the years though, press releases have changed quite a bit, and the way they’re used has changed too.

In the past, a press release was used solely as a way to promote a product, company, service or event through the media. Perhaps you released a brand new product with some fantastic features that customers have been looking for. Your company writes up a press release, sends it out to all of the major news providers in your area and hopes that it sparks their interest.

One of the ways that a press release could get out, is when a journalist catches wind of it and believes it is good story material. They will write an article on it or feature it in their news program. Your company will suddenly get free advertisement, and the media got a new story. This was a win win situation for everyone involved.

The entire game has changed now. Press releases still exist, and they are still being used in the mainstream media, but now there is a new type of press release out there, which is an internet press release. Online press releases are sent to online press release sites instead of real life media outlets. Do these help bring traffic to your business? Yes of course they do.

The online press release is beneficial to all parties involved. Your goal is to create back links that will take customers directly to you. Press release sites are usually sitting high on the search engine lists, and you’ll find that posting with them will get you all the traffic you need.

If you want yet another benefit to an online press release, then just look to Search Engine Optimization or SEO. You can actually put back links into your website AND include keywords that are highly searched for in different search engines. Once you know how to take advantage of it, you’ll get all the hits you’ve wanted, and you’ll get a steady string of income, as well as reputation.

Basically when an individual chooses to search, and then see your press release, they are probably going to click on it. Through this you will get tons of traffic. If you remember to use your SEO, then the amount of traffic definitely will not be small.

It doesn’t matter what your product is. It could be a women’s clothing line, and when people search, they’ll use certain search terms. If your press release contains those terms, then they will be directed to your press release. If they find it to be interesting, then they will probably head over to your website to see what you have.

Keep in mind that when you use an online press release, there’s still a chance that you will get regular media attention. Even though you are going for SEO, you may still get noticed, after all, it’s very important for the media to find stories. Basically if you have a good SEO’d press release online, you might still receive the benefits of regular media coverage. You never know!

As with every other area of marketing, advertising and promotion, the realm of press releases has changed and evolved over the last decade. While traditional press releases are still powerful, online press releases are quickly growing in importance. You can increase your presence, improve your ranking in the search engines and send high quality traffic to your website.

Kevin Thomas is a 21 year entrepreneur network marketing coach and SuperGuide who is teaching people how to use low cost social media marketing for online business success learn more at The Carbon Copy Pro Times

Creating links to your website is one of the best ways to generate more unique visitors to your site. Links are placed on other websites and are hyperlink directly to yours. This means that should a visitor click on one of these links to your website they will be directed there. There are 4 major advantages to link building that you should know, which are:

Firstly, you will find that the level of traffic which is flowing to your website will go up. To further increase the level of traffic make sure that you place links on websites which are highly trusted. Doing this will ensure that you get quality traffic from quality sites every single day.

By achieving excellent one-way links page ranking that your website achieves will increase. The aim of every website is to be ranked on the first page of search engines. Getting this much sought after place will mean that the traffic to your website will increase as people only tend to click on page rank 1 websites.

If you have many one-way links to your website it shows that your site contains excellent information. This is known as creating trust and it is one of the things that the indexing bots from search engines take into account. Whilst reciprocal links will not ultimately harm your website, having too many of them will not increase your websites trust. However having many one-way links to your website from others will increase trust and your traffic.

Link building can also help to increase the revenue of a website quite dramatically. After all the more visitors that click on to a site the more potential that website has to sell goods or services. Even if visitors do not make a purchase on their first visit they will remember the site and possibly buy from it in the future. Failing to see the relevance of link building can ultimately cost a website owner a lot of potential revenue. So make sure that you recognise this and start creating links.

If link building is something that you are interested in it is worth spending in mind that it should not cost you any money. Simply get in touch with owners of websites and ask them to place links back to your site. If they feel that they would like to link to your website they will do so for free. You should not be paying anyone to place links to your site from theirs.

By spending time creating links from other websites to your own you will see the ways in which can benefit you. You will find that the trust that search engines have your website will increase, so will the traffic and the page rank will also go up.

Having the 4 major advantages to link building revealed should help you to see why it is so vital for the success of a website. Spending a little time creating one-way links to your site can make all the difference to the fortunes of your site. Do it now and you will not be disappointed.

Dhruv Patel is a happy DreamHost customer. He has a web site to promote DreamHost. Use the dreamhost coupon to get a discount at DreamHost sign up.You will also find the information about dreamhost ioncube there.

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.

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.