WordPress Web 2.0 Spot-Er

 Updated on 04.10.2008

Since publishing my quick story How To Build Web 2.0 Site Using Wordpress, which received close to 3k views (much appreciated) and quite a few email with requests for additional and perhaps more detailed information. So here we go …

The every first step you will have to take is an obvious – get yourself a domain and a hosting account. If you are an advanced user I highly recommend using separate services for this, for example I use NameSecure.com for all my domain name registration and host my sites on different hosts. If I need to switch a host in a hurry it is a simple matter of moving site backup to new host and then changing DNS servers in NameSecure account administration to point to new host. But I can get complex and if you are a new to all this I can recommend couple options that allow you to register both domain name and get hosting account and have proven to be reliable for me:

• Hosting Option: Hostgator.com is one I most recommend to anyone, no matter technical expertise and previous knowledge. While they are slightly more expensive the Site5.com it’s only by about a $1 a month and in exchange you get instant technical support plus phone support 24/7. Best deal all around when it comes to price, quality and support and I highly recommend them.

Host I recommend above provide a simple way to install WordPress via Fantastico script installation panel. All it takes is to fill the fields in their Wizard and your blog installed in minutes. Updating your installation is also possible via same panel. If you use one of my recommended hosts - step 1 in following guide can be easily ignored

10 Steps Guide For Turning WordPress Blog Into Ultimate Web 2.0 Portal

Step 1: Install WordPress Blog Software

Download and install latest version of Wordpress (Version 2.5 at the time of writing). Use installation instructions available here – no need to duplicate the efforts on my end, when original documentation is very well written.

Step 2: Download and Install WordPress Theme That Is Web 2.0 Ready

[tag-tec]Wordpress[/tag-tec] has perhaps some of the biggest number of themes available to its users but our goal here is to choose one that will become the backbone of our web 2.0 portal. I know there are lots of opinions when it comes to this topic but I will base it on my own experience as Webmaster and end user. So in choosing a theme I recommend to follow a few simple guidelines, whether you do or not is your choice. I will list parameters as required for Web 2.0 portal and optional.

1. Widgets Ready – required. This one is a must. Widgets add so many options to make your portal truly interactive that choosing a theme that don’t support it is simply foolish, unless you can modify the theme and make it widgets ready yourself.
2. Right Sidebar – optional. I prefer right sidebar mainly due to [tag-tec]SEO[/tag-tec] considerations. Search engine bots don’t read page same way as we do and simply see text. What kind of text they see first is going to greatly impact how well your page will rank in search results. Right Sidebar themes tend to place actual content of your posts and pages BEFORE any navigation links, external links in widgets, etc and as such are a better choice.
3. 3 Columns – optional. I personally prefer this type of layout as it allows you to provide as much interactivity and monetization options as possible without creating a clatter on your site.
4. AdSense Ready – absolutely optional. And the only reason I mention this option is due to so many bloggers relying on [tag-tec]AdSense[/tag-tec] as source of income. If you do decide to go with this option – I have an article that covers my research in this area right here. You can also see review of 17 AdSense Ready Themes for Wordpress here.

Later in this article I will discuss a plugin that easily replaces this functionality and gives you more options when choosing your theme.

You can find plenty of different themes at the official Wordpress theme viewer site. You can preview each one and see if it’s pleasing your sense of what your site should look like. Use the search options based on my guidelines and your preferences.

Now we will install couple plugins to improve navigation of your blog and general user experience during visit to your site.

• WP-PageNavi – Adds more advanced page navigation to your blog.
• WP-Print – Displays a printable version of your page. Get both of them here.

Step 3: Get Your WordPress Blog Optimized For Search Engines

Search engines are madly in love with blogs and I have had some of my articles rank in first 10 results for competitive keywords within couple days of posting. But as any technology – it needs help from you – a little prep work to help them better read your pages and place them appropriately high in search results. You know you DESERVE It! Good thing Wordpress has plenty of plugins to automate the tedious process.

• Google XML Sitemaps - This generator will create a sitemaps.org compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog, which is supported By Google, MSN Search and YAHOO. Make absolutely sure to enable Update Notifications after install and DO Not skip Yahoo notification. You can get the key within couple minutes and this will ensure a good positioning of your pages in Yahoo search results.

• All in One SEO Pack – search engine optimization is a must for your blog. This plugin takes care of some of the most daunting tasks associated with this effort and gives you freedom to do what you do best – write great content. I have included this one as it easily replaces Optimal Title and Meta Tags plugins I have recommended previously and takes away all the pain of editing theme.

• Dagon Design Sitemap Generator - This plugin creates a sitemap for your WordPress powered site. This is not just another XML sitemap plugin, but rather a true sitemap generator, which is highly customizable from its own options page in the WordPress admin panel. Some of its features include: support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more. Creates inner links for your site in one central location.
• Simple Tags - enhances the default tag management in WordPress 2.3 plus and provides you with a lot more but for SEO purposes most important to us is ability to Add Related Posts, providing an easy way to interlink the content within your blog. Extended Tagging for WordPress 2.3 plus with Autocompletion, Suggested Tags, Tag Cloud Widgets, Related Posts, Mass edit tags. A must have to take full advantage of all the new options available in WordPress and to improve tag management

Step 4: Make Your WordPress Blog Ready For Social Networks Bookmarking

[tag-tec]Web 2.0[/tag-tec] is all about social networks, content shared by users and content submitted by users – you need to be sure to take advantage of it! I have enjoyed most of my traffic from social networks and started seeing as much as 200 plus unique visitors form day one of posting my article on social networks. Read my article “Web 2.0 – Social Networks As Targeted Traffic Source” to learn some details on using social networks to drive laser-targeted traffic to your blog.

• Share This - This plugin will allow your visitors to share your content via social bookmarking sites and/or e-mailing the post to a friend. Plugin supports the Share Icon project. You can see it in action on my blog. An awesome plugin that don’t take much space on your blog and yet proved to be invaluable source of traffic for me.

• Tagalize It - Create tagged text by enclosing the text to be tagged in one of the following. [TAG-Tec] [Tag-Ice] and [Tag-self] also alternate tags can be inserted into the [Tag-tec “new tag”] By Todd Sieland-Peterson. Works flawlessly with UTW and makes creating tags within your post a breeze.

• WP-Email - Allows people to recommend/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend. I personally like the option to add icon that people are so used to for sharing your posts. Install according to author’s instructions. This one is optional if you want to rely on functions provided by Share This plugin.

Step 5: Make Subscription To Your Content And Comments Easy And Trackable

RSS is gaining popularity and more and more people using it. I personally prefer scan my subscriptions for blogs I like as opposed to visiting each site individually and more people are doing same thing. Your Wordpress default installation provides plenty of options but it is not very friendly when it comes to tracking success of your RSS feed.

If you are really serious about your blog – you owe it to yourself to get free account with Feedburner. It provides you with so many options for tracking, email subscription to your feed, multimedia, analysis and optimization that I highly recommend getting it. You can see it in action on my site and while you are at it – feel free to subscribe (a shameless plug but hey, it’s my page)

• Feedburner FeedSmith– this plugin highly recommended (read required) if you will be using Feedburner to manage your subscriptions. Forwards all feed traffic to Feedburner while letting through some important User-Agents.

• What Would Seth Godin Do – an excellent plugin that will greatly increase number of your RSS subscribers. Highly customizable it does one thing very well – when your visitors arrive to your site they are presented with an option to subscribe to your feed, auto inserted into posts and pages. Number of visits required for this message to disappear easily set through options in admin panel to prevent annoying your frequent readers.

• Subscribe To Comments - Allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry. It is very common option when you topic becomes viral (you lucky dog!)
• Comment Relish - Increases your readership and RSS subscription rate by simply sending a short ‘thank you’ relishing type message to users when they first comment on your weblog

Step 6: Improve Commenting System On Your Blog And Protect Yourself From Spam

In this section I will describe plugins as well as widgets you can use in your sidebar. Only widgets will be identified as such and while they are optional I highly recommend installing and integrating them.

• Get Recent Comments - Display the most recent comments or trackbacks with your own formatting in the sidebar. Visit Options/Recent Comments after activation of the plugin for configuration details.

• Live Comment Preview – a very nice plugin that provides a preview of comments as people type them. Quite frankly I can’t believe so many blogs are not using it. Test it by leaving comment to this page!

• Recent Comments Widget - This plugin will add a list of the most frequent comments posted to your blog. They are gathered in descending order (newest at the top), but then group them together by post title, so that comments from the same post are listed together. The list items will be links to the comments, and will contain the name of the commenter. Derived from the “Top/Recent Commenters” plugin by Scott Reilly

• Dagon Design Form Mailer - This plugin has a wide range of features including: Support for multiple instances, an easy to use dynamic form generation system (any number of fields, in any order), multiple recipients, multiple file attachments, optional auto reply feature, an image verification system, numerous security features (including protection against email header injection), a message template system, multiple languages, and too many other things to list. This plugin was designed to be easy to use, while still being extremely flexible. If you just want a simple contact form, you can set one up with just a few clicks. For those of you who need something a bit more advanced, you can completely customize the plugin to fit your needs - whether it is 5 fields or 500. I use it as contact form on my blog and no spam got through yet. I know there are other plugins and options but this one worked with latest version of WordPress right after install unlike couple other recommended and used by many people.
• CommentLuv - Plugin to show a link to the last post from the commenters blog in their comment. Just activate and it’s ready. Currently works with wordpress, blogspot, typepad and blogs that have a feedburner feed link somewhere on their page.
• Chunk URLs in WordPress - This plugin shorten urls in comments so that they won’t break your site.
• Lucia Linky Love - very configurable plugin that allows you to remove “NOFOLLOW” from comments based on many configurable options. Flexible admin menu allows you to specify who get’s the Link Love and who doesn’t while protecting yourself from Comment Spam!
• Math Comment Spam Protection - a MUST have plugin if you are using Akismet for SPAM protection and not Spam Karma 2 as provided above. Greatly reduces comments spam by removing automated coments submissions by Spam Bots
• KeywordLuv - great new plugin that give you an option to reward commenters with backlink using their chosen keywords and yet use their own name! Must have as I see it at this moment.

Step 7: Add Interactivity To Your WordPress Blog And Improve Visitors Experience

Web 2.0 is all about interaction – how people can interact with your comment, create their own or influence what is read on your page. Creating this experience is easy with a load of plugins available and I will simply list here some that I personally use and found most beneficial to my site.

A Set of plugins I have found on GaMerZ blog. Their excellent quality, ease of integration and great documentation made it to the top of my list. Visit this page to download them and for install and integration instructions.

• WP-Polls - Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can also easily add a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page. You can create unlimited number of polls and view their statistics in admin interface.
• WP-Polls Widgets – comes with polls plugin. Adds a Sidebar Widget To Display Poll From WP-Polls Plugin. You Need To Activate WP-Polls First.
• WP-PostRatings - Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.
• WP-Post Views - Enables you to display how many times a post had been viewed. It will not count registered member views, but that can be changed easily.
• WP-UserOnline - Enable you to display how many users are online on your Wordpress blog with detailed statistics of where they are and who there are(Members/Guests/Search Bots).
• WP-UserOnline Widget – comes with UserOnline plugin. Adds a UserOnline Widget To Display Users Online From WP-UserOnline Plugin. Please Activate WP-UserOnline First.

And some additional plugins from multiple programmers that I found to be well supported, easily implemented and add great value to your blog.

• Most Viewed Widget - Adds a Wordpress Widget to display most viewed. This widget requires WP-PostViews plugin be installed. Great widget that displays posts most viewed on your site.

• podPress - The podPress plugin gives you everything you need in one easy plugin to use WordPress for Podcasting. If you ever thought about running podcasts on your blog – this one is for you. Superb quality and highly customizable plugin. Although I had to disable stats to make large podcasts work on my site. You can see example of my podcast here.

• Top Commenters Widget - This plugin will add a list of the most frequent commenters (in descending order) to your blog. The list items will be links (if the commenters supplied a URL with their comments), and will indicate the number of comments they’ve posted to your blog. Feel free to test it by commenting on my blog - Top 5 commenters with Live and SE enabled links to their blogs will be displayed.

Few more widgets not mentioned here comes installed by default when you install widgets plugin and some others. Feel free to play around with them and see if they will fit your site.

Step 8: Simplify Administration And Add Statistics

• Popularity Contest - This will enable ranking of your posts by popularity; using the behavior of your visitors to determine each post’s popularity. You set a value (or use the default value) for every post view, comment, etc. and the popularity of your posts is calculated based on those values. Once you have activated the plugin, you can configure the Popularity Values and View Reports. You can also use the included Template Tags to display post popularity and lists of popular posts on your blog. Provides nice stats on back end and that is how I primarily use it.

• Ultimate Plugins Smart Update Pinger - Replaces the built-in ping/notify functionality. Pings only when publishing new or future posts, not when editing. The new post’s url is pinged, not the main url. Also includes reverse order logfile. This one works very nicely with WordPress 2.3.* and 2.5.
  

Here is my list:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://bblog.com/ping.php

I know it might seem small but it does the job VERY nicely and reduces load on your blog by removing redundancy! The list above is compiled by the author of UPSUP plugin mentioned right above the list.

• Better Comments Manager - Better Comments manager allows you to view your comments post wise, it also allows you to reply to your comments from within admin panel without you having to visit the site to respond to comments. Make my life so much simpler by providing central location for all comments related management functions.
• Maintenance Mode - Adds a splash page to your blog that lets visitors know your blog is down for maintenance. Logged in administrators get full access to the blog including the front-end. Must have for doing any upgrades or modifications to your blog.

Step 9: Monetize Your WordPress Web 2.0 Portal

There are many options to earn with your blog and I will simply list what I use or what I have tested and found reliable but decided not to use.

• aLinks - A WordPress plugin that automatically links keywords in your blog post. This one is my absolutely favorite and you would like to learn details on using this plugin read my post “Sure-Fire Way To Monetize Your Web 2.0 Wordpress Blog And Be Proud Of It

• AdSense-Deluxe WordPress Plugin - AdSense-Deluxe is an easy-to-use plugin for WordPress 1.5+ (including WP 2.0) for quickly inserting Google or Yahoo! ads into your blog posts, and managing when and where those ads are displayed. It was developed for my own use after an exhaustive search for a similar tool turned up nothing adequate.

Multiple banners and text add codes for ad networks can be added via Widgets but I’ll discuss it in next step …

Step 10: Customize Your Blog Via Text Widgets

While there are plenty widgets becoming available for Wordpress I have found myself in need of something simple and sometime a function that simply wasn’t available via regular widgets. This problem is easily solved as long as you have access to raw HTML of Java Script code that we can integrate into our custom widgets.

To create custom widgets login into your WP-Admin and click on Design –> Widgets. Scroll down to Text Widgets and set number to however many custom widgets you think you will need. You can create up to 9 of them. Click “Save” and now in Available Widgets you will see your newly created and not yet used Widgets.

WordPress 2.5 has introduced a new way to manage widgets and quite honestly - I hate it! So I will not be posting on it too much in hopes that 2.5.1 will get rid of the bad design.

Some Tips To Maximize Your Blog Visibility

I have learned these tips the hard way and wanted to share with you, so you could avoid them.

• When enabling WWSGD plugin – set it to display at the bottom of post/page. I have learned that when it shows at the top – all you pages in google displayed with default message from this plugin instead of your content and prevent you from ranking well.
• Adding any plugins such as ratings, email, print post and others that you will have to add by editing your theme – put them all AFTER post and for same reason as my tip above.
• For permalinks use this custom code: /%category%/%postname% it will also help you rank better in Search Engines and will prevent duplicate content penalty.
• Enabling popularity on your blog might look cool but unless you get thousands of visitors reading your blog – it will do nothing for visitors experience.
• If you will be adding any custom code for digg or any other rating networks – don’t do it until you star getting high number of visits and votes. It will make your posts look unpopular.

At this point you have a fully functional, SE Optimized, Super Interactive, Cash Sacking Web 2.0 portal build on Wordpress and without spending a dime! Enjoy and let me know what you think. Your comments are greatly appreciated.

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