Online Marketing

Tools To Improve Your Dirt Cheap Website And WordPress Blog

Congratulations for those who took the initiative to setup their winning website. Teaching you how to have a dirt cheap website was one of my objectives, but lets make it better. The original article is posted under How To Setup irt Cheap Real Estate Website.

If you have opted to use WordPress for your website and blog, then you should consider running the following plugins. Relax, they are FREE!

Akismet
This plugin tracks spam and quarantines them for you to delete or restore. I receive comment spam  every time I post an article advertising other sites and some shady activities. 

All In One SEO Package
This plugin allows you to make your website Search Engines compliant by allowing you to add the meta data search engines look for. You provide the content on each page/post when you create it.

Google sitemap Generator
This plugin generates a sitemap XML file for search engines to read. When search engines come to your site to index it, they look for your sitemap.xml file to find all links. This helps improve the indexing of your site.

Google Analyticator
 This control allows you to embed Google Analytics code into your webpages to track the traffic to your website.

Besides the plugins, WordPress sends a ping to multiple sites notifying them of a change in your content so they could update their pages by revisiting your website. This helps improve your Search engine ranking. Of course, this assumes you are going to post content regularly. To take advantage of this feature, replace your current list of ping servers with the following list:

Copy this list and paste it under Administrator’s Settings->Writing tab to wards the bottom of the page:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc/
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.fakapster.com/rpc
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://pinger.blogflux.com/rpc
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.tailrank.com/feedburner/RPC2
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.britblog.com
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.wpkeys.com
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

As far as the general look and feel of your webiste, there are hundreds of themes that you could use for your website. This being Real Estate specific website, I highly recommend the commercially available Real Estate Theme by Revolution Themes since it allows you to maintain listings and provides you with out of the box Real Estate website.

When picking a theme, make sure it is a clean theme, not a busy theme. Avoid using the fancy yet useless features such as the Calendar and Clouds. When prospects visit your website, they don’t really care what you posted on a certain date, they want content. That is why on this website you do not see a calendar.

Clouds are another "neat" yet useless plugin or functionality. It displays your Tags or Categories in different font sizes to give a cloud look and feel, but it is not really readable or appealing to the eye.

Your website should only include what improves your business and not for entertainment.

© 2008 Fadi Zeidan’s Articles.