The second reason is because of a subject area that must be given careful thought to when developing a landing page: Search Engine Optimization (SEO). To put it more directly, an effective landing page must be intertwined with a seamlessly executed SEO strategy.  With so many websites selling probably the same or very similar goods or services as your website, one of the things that can give you that competitive edge online is having your website being one of the most visible to search engines when it comes to searches related to your business niche. This is because search engines are, on average, the source of the majority of any website’s new visitors. Developing and executing an appropriate SEO strategy ensures that your landing page (and thus website) ranks high among the search results whenever a potential client searches for a keyword that your website has been optimized for.

That is why, as we will see from the following points on how to develop and maintain an effective landing page, a lot of SEO techniques must be put into consideration.

• Search Engine Registration – One of the first things you must do in putting your landing page and website ‘out there’ is to register it with major search engines to make sure that you are ‘known’. Fortunately, many professional web developers or web hosts will be able to do this on behalf of the website’s owner.
• Keywords and Phrases – Make sure your landing page is optimized with the keywords and key phrases that relate to your particular products and services. This is because internet search engines make use of ‘spiders’ that crawl the Web collecting data from websites. They will recognize keywords and phrases on each page they come across and then match that to requests that search engine users will key in when doing a search. Websites will then be given a page rank depending on their relevance to the keywords used by the search engine user. Appropriate use of the keywords on your landing page will help push your website higher up in terms of page rank.
• Relevance - Have you ever searched for something on the Internet only to find that the page you landed on does not have anything of what you needed but just a misleading title or page header? Even though you might not employ such brazenly unethical tactics, this portrays an important aspect one can learn from as far as ecommerce is concerned. That is, that there would be no benefit in creating a landing page rich with keywords to attract search engines if when the consumer does get to the site, they cannot quickly and clearly see the details of the actual product or service that drew them to your page.
• Good Content – As the old adage goes, and probably even more appropriately when it comes to the Internet, ‘Content is King’. The content on the landing page should be an easy read and not have awkward sentences only geared towards keyword optimization for search engines. Nobody would be willing to buy a product that the seller seems to have difficulty explaining clearly.
• Fresh Content – Having good content on a website is great. Having fresh content is even better. When people realize that when they come to your website, they will always learn something new, they will most probably be back in addition to referring your site to other people.
• Be Original - Finally, be original. Your landing page should represent the persona of your website, your business, your brand. Remember, the copy of anything can never be as good as the original.

A great way to instill a sense of community is to encourage interactivity by allowing user posts and user comments.  If you can get your visitors participating, you can grow your site exponentially.  Encourage your users to comment regularly.  Encourage them to share posts.  You may even want to encourage a select few to become guest contributors for regular posts or columns.  Follow these 5 tips for getting your visitors commenting on your WordPress site:

1. Use your regular posts to encourage comments and opinions from your visitors.  At the end of a blog post you create ask some pointed questions that you want your visitors to answer pertaining to your post.  Specifically ask your visitors to post their comments, suggestions and feedback.  Simply asking for comments will encourage them.  Also, make sure you feature some of the top rated comments as well as top rated posts on your front page.  When you have particularly interesting posts and comments on your front page new visitors will be enticed to read and participate.
2. Display comments for others to see.  Just looking at your words will likely get the comments starting but when visitors see others’ posts and comments that ill get everyone talking and participating as well.  You will have plenty of users commenting back and forth to one another as well as interacting with you.  Also, if you have an easy to use way for sharing posts and comments you can use your visitors to advertise for you.  Encourage post sharing at social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.
3. Come up with fun polls and encourage discussion of the results.  Polls are a fun, quick and entertaining way to get your visitors interacting with the community.  You can see poll results and discuss whether or not the results were expected or not and what the outcome means.  Use your front page to feature poll results that can be clicked on to see the results and encourage commenting.
4. Don’t be afraid of controversy.  The more enticing the subject, the more people will be apt to comment on the subject.  Boring topics will evoke boring comments or worse yet, none at all.  However, if you have controversial, poignant, interesting or recent news items you will have a lot of people who want to get their opinion out to the public as well.  You may find that a particular topic draws a lot of attention and see a spike in visitors as people share your topic elsewhere.
5. Pick out a few regular posters who seem to have a following and ask them to contribute weekly topics and posts themselves.  You can make them featured writers and give them a forum for their work.  You can even get creative with contests to encourage additional participation and even a bit of competition.

In order to do so quickly and easily, though, there are several plugins available to help with incorporating WordPress with Twitter. The top 6 are:

1. TweetSuite gives you several options to add Twitter to your blog. You can Re-tweet, use tweet-backs and automatically tweet on particular posts. If you have a new blog post you can set it up to automatically post to your Twitter account, expanding your viewers from those on your site alone to those following you on Twitter also.
2. TweetThis is a simple tool but one that is extremely handy. This adds a “Tweet this” icon to every post. Visitors to your WordPress blog can see content they want to share with their own network and can click on the link to automatically tweet about the post. Making the sharing of posts very easy for visitors encourages them to help market your site all for free.
3. Twitter Badge will add an icon to your posts that you decide to Tweet or share on your Twitter account. This way people can see which posts are popular on Twitter and can help a post continue to get exposure or help out a new post by tweeting about that one.
4. Twitter Sharts allows you to incorporate your Twitter status anywhere in your WordPress blog. This is a fun and interesting way to make your site more personable and interactive.
5. Wickett Twitter Widget is a plugin you can add to your WordPress blog to display Twitter posts or tweets on your side bar. This will help add to your relevant content increasing your SEO. Plus it will help add interest to your WordPress blog allowing viewers to see additional information. It may even spark some ideas for expanded posts on your blog.
6. WP Twitip ID allows you to incorporate your users’ Twitter ID’s to their blog posts and comments. You can increase your Twitter following by adding all the users on your site to your Twitter account and encourage cross promotion of your site via Twitter and post tweets.

Nowadays almost everyone has a Twitter account. Making it easy and quick for users to help promote your site by tweeting on your WordPress blog posts is a must. Using Twitter and WordPress as compatible and related formats to cross promote your site is a great way to attract more visitors and expose your message to more people. Use the top six Twitter and WordPress plugins to accomplish this goal easily.

Facebook is the most popular social networking site today. As most people are aware social networking is a highly valuable tool to use in marketing. Whether to garner additional exposure for your site or to utilize for additional search engine optimization or SEO, Facebook is a site that should be used to help promote your blog. It is no wonder that there are many plugins to help WordPress users more easily incorporate Facebook into their posts. The top 10 are listed and reviewed below:

1. Add to Facebook is a plugin that allows users of your site to easily share a post or comment with their network of friends on their account. Instead of having to manually log in to their Facebook account and update their status or add a link, this plugin allows them to do it automatically. There is a link at the bottom of the post with the Facebook logo or a text link encouraging sharing the post. The visitor can simply click on this icon and the post will be automatically added to their live news feed for all their friends to see. This is a great way to garner additional exposure to your site by allowing your interactive community to help spread the word.
2. Facebook Comments is a great way to use your Facebook account to add content to your WordPress blog. As your friends and extended network post comments to your Facebook account you can incorporate them automatically onto your blog as well. This gives you additional content that is regularly updated, something that will be interesting to visitors but also beneficial from an SEO standpoint.
3. Wassup is a Facebook application that can be used in conjunction with your WordPress blog. It gives details of your visitors to your blog in real time that can be used to see where your users are coming from. This is a great tool for internal tracking purposes but also an interesting application to encourage additional participation from people in similar areas.
4. Facebook Dashboard Widget is a fun way to incorporate your Facebook dashboard onto your WordPress blog. Latest news and status updates from your friends can be shown in real time on your blog as a new post. This can add a bit of personality to your blog and encourage cross promotion between your blog and your Facebook account.
5. Fotobook allows you to use your photo albums from your Facebook account into your blog. This will help with SEO as images are valuable assets when it comes to increasing SEO. It will also help make your site more interesting to visitors and encourage additional interactivity.
6. WordBook allows you to add a box to your Facebook where your network of friends can look to see your blog post updates in real time. You can incorporate links so Facebook friends can directly visit and comment on your blog or they can simply view the material presented. This has the potential to increase SEO, increase traffic to your site and potentially increase sales or participation in your blog.
7. StatusPress is a tool that will allow you to update your WordPress blog automatically every time your Facebook status changes. This is a fun way to let your interactive community on your WordPress blog know what you are thinking and give a more personal view to your site.
8. WP-FB Connect allows you to input your Facebook data one time and your settings will be saved. The live news feeds will be automatically displayed when updated and the Facebook avatars will also be used adding an interesting and fun element to your WordPress blog.
9. Gigya is a plugin that can be used not only with Facebook but with other popular social networking sites also. It offers users a secure area where they can sign in. You can easily update your status across multiple sites and invite your network of friends and family to your WordPress blog.
10. Sociable allows you to see your latest visitors, add comments and invite your Facebook friends to your blog easily. You can log into your blog via your Facebook account and easily administer the results. You can cross promote your blog to your Facebook network.

Social networking sites are a valuable marketing tool and one that is used more now than ever. With the top ten Facebook plugins for WordPress you can easily use Facebook to your advantage with your blog. You can cross promote between your WordPress blog and your Facebook account expanding your network in both areas and increasing your page ranking for your website by optimizing your page.

Below are the top 6 wildest uses for WordPress sites:

1. Some have used a plugin such as BuddyPress to use their WordPress blog similarly to a social networking site. Turning your blog into the latest MySpace, Facebook or Twitter may seem a bit extreme but why not be ambitious? This fun plugin allows chat, status updates, group creation and friend linking just like some of the most popular social networking sites.
2. Newsletter software is abundant on the Internet but some sites skip the custom designed newsletter software and instead use WordPress. They can manage subscriptions and give snippets of upcoming news items. Adding social networking site sharing to this will also increase users and help share the information.
3. Collaboration software can get expensive and some of the free sites are cumbersome. So, there are some companies that use WordPress as a collaboration tool. They can post their letter, document, proposal or story on the WordPress blog. They can get revisions or get comments to their work right there on their site before finalizing it. With login tools you can even make areas completely private, limiting access to only certain users.
4. In addition to collaboration on documents you can also use WordPress to assign tasks to various people and keep everything organized and up to date. You can even go so far as to use it as a complete project management tool. While you may not want to have this on a public domain, this is a great way to use it for internal communication and organization.
5. Some online businesses use WordPress as a mechanism for communication among employees. Themes such as Prologue allow a Twitter-like interface where employees can post status messages. This can be used as a great organizational tool showing when someone is or is not available but can also be used as a morale booster for a more casual environment where people can post motivational or funny quips.
6. Wiki uses abound with WordPress. While not a lot of people have a need for their own personal Wiki, it is a fun way to create a niche and use the posts and categories to create wiki like contributions. Or, if you want a more simplified version, try a FAQ site using WordPress to expand on frequently asked questions to your website or company.

The uses for WordPress are limited only by your imagination. While blogging is the most often reason to install and use WordPress, the ability to easily customize the application lends itself to some unique uses. Because it is so robust and has so many different options you can use it internally, for the public or a combination of both. You can restrict access to certain groups or create various areas with different levels of accessibility.

With WordPress, there have been cited cases of many unique and wild uses. However, they all serve a purpose and are useful to the owner. Consider what needs you may be able to use WordPress for. When using this software platform think outside the box. If you can imagine it, WordPress likely has a way to achieve it.

SEO means that you make your site more easily indexed by search engines so that when someone searches for particular keywords that relate to your site, your site will come up within the first few results. There are many ways you can optimize your site so that this works best for you. WordPress has multiple plugins available to help you. Choose from the top 10:

1. All in One SEO is a WordPress Plugin that does what its name implies: just about everything. This is the perfect plugin for those who do not want to install multiple applications but still want the versatility to do a lot of SEO functions. What this plugin will accomplish is SEO for titles, descriptions, keywords, no index of duplicate content, per post and per page modifications of default data to be more SEO friendly.
2. Platinum SEO is another all inclusive plugin designed to make SEO options quick and easy without having to install multiple applications. This is perfect for the beginner WordPress user who wants to ensure good SEO without a lot of hassle. Titles, meta tags, duplicate content settings, permalink settings, indexing, archiving, following, post and page settings are all addressed in one easy to use plugin.
3. Redirection is perfect for any time you need to change your links on your WordPress blog. When this occurs you run the risk of losing any search engine indexing that has already occurred. However, with this plugin you can manage your redirects so you do not lose any indexing plus get a listing of any 404 page errors so hey can be fixed as soon as possible. This plugin is available in over 10 languages.
4. No Follow Case by Case is a plugin that allows you to tell search engine bots whether or not to index or follow a particular link on your site. This way, you can have relevant links indexed appropriately without giving benefit to others’ sites who post links to help promote their own blogs. You can choose to have a search engine follow those you wish to support and not to follow others on a case by case basis.
5. SEO for Paged Comments is especially handy for busy interactive sites. If you have an interactive community where you have a lot of people commenting on your posts you run the risk of having multiple pages for comments. This alone is not a bad thing; a busy blog is great. However, if you have multiple pages of comments the original post will appear on each page and each page is its own link. The problem occurs with search engines that may penalize you for duplicate content. This plugin eliminates this by posting an excerpt with a link as opposed to the entire text.
6. If you do need to have duplicate content for some reason you will need to address this for SEO purposes and SEO No Duplicate plugin will take care of that for you. It allows you to have duplicate content on your site for visitors to see but you can identify the parent post that you want to get indexed and followed and any additional versions that you want ignored. This will ensure you do not get penalized for duplicate content while allowing it to be seen.
7. SEO Friendly Images is a plugin that makes creating “ALT” tags easier and ensures your embedded images help your SEO. Because images are a valuable tool in assisting with your page ranking, it is important to optimize them as much as possible and this tool makes it easy and quick.
8. Google Sitemap Generator is a great tool for SEO to create a sitemap for use in indexing. However, even though it was designed specifically for Google, the most popular search engine, many others use this format as well. So, if you want to get high placement on Yahoo, MSN and Google, this is a great place to start to automatically generate the sitemap without needing any coding knowledge.
9. Tag Cloud Widget is a plugin that allows you to use tag clouds without having the indexing problems normally associated with their use. While attractive, they are typically not readable by indexing bots and therefore do not get the benefit of SEO. With this widget it converts the tags to HTML so they can be read easily.
10. Related Entries is a helpful plugin that allows you to take full advantage of SEO possibilities using internal links. This plugin finds other posts within your site that are related to the original one and links to it. This way viewers can browse easily to additional content within your site while allowing you the benefit of increased SEO all at once.

With the inclusion of some of these handy SEO plugins you can optimize your site quickly and easily without needing to learn any extensive SEO tricks or hire a coder. The top ten SEO plugins for WordPress will take care of a lot of the necessary activity for you quickly and easily. You can increase exposure to your site via better search engine placement and increase your SEO with very little effort when you use these handy tools.

The first thing you need to create a theme in Wordpress is to understand how templates are put together otherwise you are going to be working in the dark. Another useful reading resource to help you with this can be found within the manual under ‘Stepping in to templates’.  If you are sure all this makes sense then you are ready to start creating templates for Wordpress.

Wordpress Theme Tutorials

There are many resources available online that can help you develop a Wordpress theme. The following is a list of tutorials. Tutorials will guide you through the process of developing a Wordpress theme using a step-by-step process. This is by no means a comprehensive listing, however I have tried to include a variety so you can look through them and determine which tutorial you find easy to follow.

• http://themeshaper.com/wordpress-themes-templates-tutorial
• http://themetation.com/2008/07/14/how-to-create-wordpress-themes-from-scratch-part-1
• http://blog.themeforest.net/screencasts/new-wp-video-series-and-free-rockstar-book
• http://designreviver.com/inspiration/how-i-learned-to-build-wordpress-themes/
  XHTML/CSS resources

If you would like to obtain a good working knowledge of both of these, a great resource for those new to web programming or those moving over from older languages is www.w3schools.com. Here you can find hundreds of tutorials, scripts and quizzes to help you get your head around things, and working in conjunction with this you will need a text editor. Notepad++ is a popular choice, and we recommend the Firefox web developer toolbar so you can test and check your coding. It is brilliant when you are making live changes to your CSS.

Graphic design resources

You are going to find life so much easier if you have a decent graphics package on your computer. Photoshop and Fireworks are two of the best for the job, and this is where you will create your graphics.  The issues you need to consider for your Wordpress templates are things like color schemes, fonts and images.   For inspiration there are a number of resources. www.designmeltdown.com is a good site for ideas, as are the gallery pages of www.cssbeauty.com that have collected some of the most excellent examples of sites that look good.

You need to come up with a clear color scheme that presents the image you are seeking, and if these sites do not help inspire you enough, try checking out somewhere like beta.dailycolorscheme.com where you can see hundreds of schemes and download them too.  Finally some of the best inspiration for color schemes comes from life, so browsing through photographs on a site like Flickr can also prove invaluable.  Free fonts can be downloaded, or you can purchase professional ones from Linotype, and the same goes for images free stock that can be found at SXC, whereas paid for images are found at iStockPhoto.

Finally you need to have an understanding of plugins, and you need to learn how to install them and when you should be installing them. Some great plugins can be found at WP-Plugins.net. Overall the best tip we can offer you is to read plenty on the net about Wordpress and Wordpress templates – and above all enjoy!

On note of caution, don’t stuff your blog full of plugins. Carefully choose which plugin(s) you want based on the features. I also like to use plugins that seem to have a good support system. When I see a plugin support homepage that looks outdated or underused, that is a good sign to me that there will not be anyone to help me with this plugin if difficulties arise.

So, what are some good plugins that will increase you Wordpress rankings? This article will discuss some plugins that are useful when you are trying to get your Wordpress blog to rank well.

1. Broken Link Check 0.5: Often blog posts will have links to outside pages. When these pages are no longer active this becomes a broken link on your post and broken links are frowned upon by the search engines, therefore, it is important that you not have any broken links on your site. The Broken Link Check plugin will alert you to broken links so you can fix them. With this plugin you can:
   • Check your links in the blogroll
   • Receive broken link notification immediately
   • Have your links on one page so you can view, edit, remove links all from the same page
   • View broken link information in a dashboard widget
   • When you edit or delete a link, bookmarks, custom fields and posts will be updated automatically. Awesome!!
2. SEO Smart Links: Search engines love to see interlinking going on in your blog. This means that you will be linking to other pages/posts within your blog. SEO Smart Links connects keywords and keyword phrases contained in your posts and comments to your corresponding posts, categories, pages and tags that are on your posts. This is all done automatically after you have configured it in the admin panel. You have complete control over this entire process with options you may customize. With SEO Smart Links you can:
   • Link keywords and keyword phrases within your post to other posts, pages, and comments
   • Set up a list of keywords that you do not want to link to
   • Use customized keywords to control the external links
   • Enable caching to speed things up
   • Set up links to open in a new window
3. Google XML Sitemaps Generator: Submitting a XML sitemap to Google is like telling Google that you are on the web and what you have to offer. It’s like an invitation for the search engine spiders to come on over and check out your site. Although it is called Google XML Sitemaps Generator, the format works for Yahoo!, Bing (formerly MSN search) and Ask.com. This plugin also alerts the search engines to any changes in your blog. When this happens, the spiders come running back for another look to see what’s new. All this spider activity will help your Wordpress blog to rank better for your keywords and keyword phrases.
4. All in One SEO Pack: With this plugin you can customize post titles, descriptions and tags. When you do this customization, it helps you improve your search engine optimization. This is a fairly sophisticated plugin, but that should not intimidate you. It is designed to work upon installation with no programming, however, if you are an advanced WP user and feel confident in making adjustments to this plugin, there are plenty of things you will find that will make you happy such as:
   • Ability to fine tune your navigation links
   • Automatic search engine optimization of titles
   • Automatic generation of META tags
   • Ability to override titles so you can incorporate the META keywords and descriptions of your choice.
5. Alexa Rank or WP-Stats-Dashboard: As you are trying to improve your rankings, it is nice to know where you stand. Using one of these plugins will give you up to date information on where you rank in Google, on Alexa, Technorati rank, etc. Alexa Rank is more simplistic and will give your Alexa ranking information. WP-Stats-Dashboard is will give you information on Google PR, Technorati, Alexa, etc.

1. The first thing you should always do is backup your files so if something goes wrong you are not left in a bind.
2. You can do a search and replace with a WordPress plugin that is called, you guessed it, the Search and Replace plugin. This plugin is used with the WordPress Admin section (WP-Admin). Simply download and install the Search and Replace plugin and you will be able to search and replace in the following areas: content, titles, excerpts, comments content and comments author.

That’s it, pretty easy, right? Of course there are more difficult ways to accomplish if you want to get into the programming aspect of a WordPress blog, but it really is not necessary to make this too complicated.

1. Google Maps in Posts: We are going first to our friends over at WordPress.org, as we know they have a massive range of resources and guides for WordPress applications.  They offer the Google Maps plugin as a download in their download area and can be found here http://WordPress.org/extend/plugins/google-maps-in-posts/.  This means that posts relating to events can be mapped and specific locations shown, plus you can add a ‘home’ location for yourself should you need to. You need to be running WordPress 2.2 or higher for this plugin to work.
2. Calendar: We think you are going to see a lot of WordPress.org for these plugins; we go back to them now for their calendar plugin.  This is an excellent tool that means you can set up and manage your events calendar and share them with your users. It is simple to use. Have a look here at http://WordPress.org/extend/plugins/calendar/ for more information or to download it. It has all the usual calendar features, including a good range of viewing options from monthly view to viewing events by specific category.
3. WP Newsletter Plugin for WordPress: A proper plugin bundle here, if you want to be able to offer your users a newsletter and be able to handle email subscribers with opt in and opt out facilities then this could be for you. You can easily set up a newsletter then download your contact list and bulk mail the letter to them. For more information visit the lovely people at SendBlaster.com where you can download all you need to get started: http://www.sendblaster.com/WordPress-newsletter-double-optin-widget/
4. Business Directory Plugin: This really does what it says and provides you with a plugin that allows you to have a directory on your blog that you can either add to or invite your users to add their details to, depending on your business needs.  The site offers a good range of supporting documentation and help pages, and you can find all of this and download the plug in here: http://businessdirectory.squarecompass.com/
5. FAQ Builder: Another excellent business tool for your WordPress is a FAQ section meaning you can offer your clients important information that crops up regularly in a more sensibly structured way than a series of posts to the blog, which gets messy and isn’t very user friendly.  The FAQ builder from Square Compass is an excellent tool that isn’t hard to get to grips with and comes from the same people as the business directory people, so again you get a good level of supporting documentation and help pages. Download the FAQ Builder here: http://faqbuilder.squarecompass.com/

Hopefully you have found at least one plugin you can use that will enhance the usability of your WordPress blog. Presenting a professional image will tell your visitors that you are serious about your blog and that you want to give them a good experience while they are visiting your site.