WordPress Chapter 12:Attracting a Crowd

BTM 395: Internet Programming

WordPress: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald. 1st edition (2012) published by O’Reilly Media. ISBN-13: 978-1449309848

Encouraging your readers to share

• Sharing buttons (e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) make it easier for visitors to share your pages

• If you have a Facebook page (not to be confused with a Facebook profile), you can add a Facebook Like widget to your site

• You can use a plugin to let users rate or “like” individual posts

Informing readers and potential readers about site updates

• You can let people who leave comments subscribe to follow-up comments for that post

• You can let people who leave comments subscribe to any new updates on the site

• Plugins are available to let visitors receive notifications for any new posts

• You can connect your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media accounts to automatically create a message whenever you publish a new post

• With a plugin, you can display your live Twitter feed in a sidebar

Set up news feeds

• RSS is an informal web standard for automatically announcing new posts on a website

• WordPress automatically supports feeds for:– The entire site: http://mydomain.ca/feed– A specific category: http://mydomain.ca/category/category-

name/feed– A specific tag: http://mydomain.ca/tag/tag-name/feed– A specific author:

http://mydomain.ca/author/author-user-name/feed– All comments on a post: http://mydomain.ca/full-post-url/feed

• Feeds are on by default. You need to install a plugin to disable them.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

• SEO is all about increasing your findability when people search for related topics on the Web

• PageRank: Google's 1-10 ranking score (10 is best)

• Lots of online PageRank checkers exist (e.g. http://www.prchecker.info)

• SEO is a major science in web development—it is very involved

• Easiest WordPress option: Use a plugin that takes care of many things for you

Site statistics

• Jetpack includes a basic but functional tool; more advanced options exist

• Four site stats most helpful for improving your site:1. Which posts get the most views?2. Who are your top referrers?3. Which search engine keywords lead to your

site?4. Who leaves the most comments?