WordPress Plugins – Making Your Website Do More
Although WordPress comes complete with the most commonly used tools and widgets that you will need, you can easily add new features using plugins. Plugins are installed through the WordPress interface, using the Plugins menu in your control panel.
There are plugins available for just about any task, most of which are available free. At the time of writing, the WordPress Plugins database features 21,500 plugins, all of which are searchable by category, rating and name.
Here are just three must-have plugins for any work-from-home website.
1. Use Akismet To Stop Spam
WordPress supports user comments right out of the box, and your visitors will be able to post their thoughts on the content that you publish. For your blog posts in particular, this is a great way to build a community around your business, improve your visibility on the web, and improve your search engine rank.
Unfortunately, as you begin to attract attention from visitors and potential customers, you will also attract attention from spammers that will fill your comments section with rubbish. Spam comments are easy to spot, but time-consuming to remove one by one.
Akismet is by far the most popular and most effective anti-spam plugin for WordPress. Akismet automatically detects the signs of spam comments, including lots of links to other websites and content that does not make sense. When Akismet finds a spam comment, it quarantines it and prevents it from cluttering up your website. Akismet is available free of charge for personal blogs, or at a low cost for business use.
2. Automate Search Engine Optimization with WordPress
Once your website is up and running, the hard work really begins. Now it is time to get some visitors! Search engines are a great source of traffic, but only if you manage to achieve a good search engine rank. Simply put, the nearer the top of the results you are, the more likely that somebody will click through to your site. Search engine optimization (SEO) is optimizing your website so that it is easily understood and preferentially indexed by search engines. A good WordPress SEO plugin can provide you with everything that you need to optimize your site.
One great SEO plugin is Yoast WordPress SEO. This multi-featured plugin carries out a number of automatic tasks to help improve your position, including internal links and suggesting the most appropriate keywords for you to target on each page.
3. Find The Plugin That Suits Your Website Content
As well as adding new functionality to your existing types of content, some WordPress plugins are designed to suit specific types of website. The Plugin search tool that is built into WordPress is very effective, and a good tip is to simply type in the kind of content that you want to add to your website.
You may want to add a portfolio to your website, showcasing the work that you have done to date. If so, a search for ‘portfolio’ brings up a plugin that is called, unsurprisingly, Portfolio. Portfolio gives WordPress the ability to run a portfolio section of your website, with images of projects and descriptions of what was involved. Whatever kind of content you have in mind for your website, you’ll find a plugin to help you create it.
Are You Taking Advantage Of The Permalinks Settings?
By now, your work-from-home website is taking shape. You’ve started to write pages of content, perhaps got the blog started with a few posts, and added the right functionality for your specific goals. All of this is great for search engine optimization and attracting new visitors, but there is a specific setting that can be used to help search engines find their way around.
When you create a blog post, it is added to your main ‘blog’ page, and also published as an individual page. This page is known as the Permalink page, because it is located at an address that will always point directly to the specific post in question.
Confusing Permalink addresses can cause search engine crawlers to miss great content on your site. Fortunately, you can customize your Permalinks to make them both search engine and visitor-friendly.
Under the Settings menu, select the Permalinks option. You will see that, by default, each page that you create is given a unique number. As you reach your hundredth or thousandth post, keeping track of these numbers is difficult!
There are a few different alternatives that WordPress can implement automatically – simply pick the one that you prefer. Ideally, choose a Permalink setting that includes the title of your post. This means that you will always recognize what the link is pointing to, and search engines will value the inclusion of keywords in your web addresses.
