BuyHTTP Company Blog

So you’ve decided you want to make a site with WordPress, that’s the easy part. How do you get traffic to it? The most obvious answers are SEO and link building, but both of those require lots of time to produce and visible results. The easy way is to let your visitors do the promotion for you by leveraging social networking and bookmarking.

Social Networking

Users of social networks like Facebook and Twitter are very curious and love to click links making them sources for driving huge amounts of traffic. There are several plugins available for adding Facebook links to your blog posts automatically. One of the most downloaded and, in our opinion, better plugins is Add To Facebook. Twitter traffic is even more powerful. Two plugins that we recommend are TwitThis and TweetMeme.

Social Bookmarking

Allowing your users to easily add bookmarks to sites like StumbleUpon and del.icio.us can also be helpful in building traffic to your site. The well recognized king in this area is the Sociable plugin.

What We Use

Instead of cluttering the page with several plugins linking to all of these services we use ShareThis. You can customize the feel a little bit and it allows both Facebook and Twitter posting as well as social bookmarking.

Shortcodes allow you to show data simply by adding [shortcode] to your WordPress site. This article includes 9 very cool shortcodes you can add (it also shows the format for creating any of your own) and a list of already included shortcodes.

SEO is a critical part of getting people to your site and these WordPress plugins help you acheive your goals quickly and easily.

HeadSpace2

The most important on page factor in SEO today appears to be your title tag. HeadSpace2 allows you to easily control the layout of all title tags on your WordPress blog. Along with title tag management you can control all of your description tags which, while not very important in SEO, can be very important in attracting people to click your site in the SERPs.

Redirection

What happens when you change a post’s URL? Do you know when your visitors are getting 404 errors? With Redirection you get everything you need to easily redirect posts and log any 404 errors.

Meta Robots

Until Meta Robots there hasn’t been an easy way to keep WordPress from allowing the indexing of certain pages on your blog. Now you can easily prevent the indexing of any pages/posts on your blog.

SEO Slugs

Including works like “in” and “the” in your post slugs doesn’t really do your SEO any good. SEO Slugs automatically removes all of these types of words from your slugs.

We get asked regularly how to add Google Analytics tracking to WordPress sites. A quick search of the WordPress plugins directory shows about 60 results for “Google Analytics” so there are no shortage of ways to add it. The plugin we prefer to use is WP Google Analytics. With WP Google Analytics you can not only add your tracking code easily you can choose to log 404 errors, searches and outgoing link clicks as well as disable tracking for any role you want, like administrators, editors, etc.

To install WP Google Analytics you just need to download the .zip file from the plugins directory, go to your WordPress admin dashboard and navigate to Plugins > New > Upload. Upload the .zip file and activate the plugin. You can then change the settings and insert your tracking code.

WordPress on it’s own can get pretty resource intensive when you start getting traffic. Fortunately there are a couple of easy ways to vastly improve the speed of the site and reduce the resource needs. This is good for you, good for us and good for everyone you might share a server with.

Read more »

WordPress has released updates to both the 2.1 and 2.0 branches. These releases fix XSS and XML-RPC errors and are highly recommended.

If you upgraded to WordPress 2.1.1 you need to upgrade immediately to 2.1.2.

From the WordPress notification:

Longer explanation: This morning we received a note to our security mailing address about unusual and highly exploitable code in WordPress. The issue was investigated, and it appeared that the 2.1.1 download had been modified from its original code. We took the website down immediately to investigate what happened.

It was determined that a cracker had gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers wordpress.org, and had used that access to modify the download file. We have locked down that server for further forensics, but at this time it appears that the 2.1.1 download was the only thing touched by the attack. They modified two files in WP to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution.

You can download WordPress here.

We have created a new Firefox toolbar to help you navigate BuyHTTP and our system. The toolbar features one-click access to the Account Manager, Affiliate system and more. Click the button to install the toolbar.

WordPress has also released version 2.1. There are over 500 bugfixes available, so it is highly recommended to upgrade. You can download the release here.