Last Tuesday morning I had the opportunity to attend Social Media Breakfast Chicago. Lucky, because apparently the always-free event “sold” out in about 20 minutes!
This was the first SMBChicago that I had attended. There were four workshops to choose from, with topics including SEO, web video, and social media website integration.
The workshop I participated in was called “Taking Over the World with WordPress,” and was moderated by Matt Cheuvront. Matt blogs at Life Without Pants and also does social media consulting and other stuff at MattChevy.com. Basically the same stuff I’d like to do, so I was really pumped to take part in the workshop.
I was shocked when I got there and there were only 7 of us at the table. Awesome.
Here are a couple of things I learned:
- One of the most important things on your home page is a Call to Action. Make it blatantly obvious what you want someone to do when they visit your blog. Subscribe to RSS, sign up for your newsletter, download your free ebook. It should be the first thing that catches their eye when they click over to your blog. Great example on Life Without Pants.
- Interlinking is more valuable than linking to external sites for SEO. Interlink the crap out of your blog posts. The more links the search engines see pointing at your site, even within your own site, the better off you are.
- More SEO – tag your pictures (and your posts) like a madman. Tags are just one more thing the search engines look through. Apparently image tags are killer for SEO as well. I don’t think I’ve tagged a single image on this site, so I’m working through that now. Luckily I found got that info only 2 months into blogging…
- The Thesis Theme rocks. But I already knew that. Worth mentioning though because version 1.7 just came out with a bunch of awesome new features.
- Backing up your site is ridiculously easy (and ridiculously important). Just click on tools, then click on export in the left sidebar within the wordpress interface. I (now) keep my backup saved on my Dropbox – free cloud storage.
He also provided a list of some great wordpress plugins worth checking out – just go to plugins in the wordpress interface, click add new, and search for them:
- Comment Redirect – Takes first time commenters to a page of your choice, usually a special welcome/thank you landing page
- Sexy Bookmarks – Don’t let the name scare you away! Check out the social bookmarking links at the bottom of this post. Your choice of something like 50 sites.
- Subscribe to Comments – Let’s people, you know, subscribe to comments. Good if you’re not using Disqus (which you should be using…).
- Lijit Search – Provides a custom search for your site that will put results from your site before external results.
- Login Lockdown – Limits the number of attempts to login to your blog, then locks out the ip address (and nearby addresses) that is trying to access your blog. A must for blog security.
So there ya go. Be sure to check out Matt’s stuff. As for me, I’ll be waiting patiently for the next SMBChicago event, refreshing the page non-stop until registration opens.
