Day 4: Install widgets / plugins

Day 4 required a bit of web knowledge but don't be afraid because you don't need to be a web professional to complete this task.

Firstly, we added Social Bookmarking and Networking widgets to the blog. Social networking sites are one of the best ways to promote anything (in our case, blog/website) for free. According to comScore Segment Metrix, 71.5% of the total Internet audience in Australia (which is nearly 9 million users) visited social networking sites in June last year.

Next, we installed TweetMeme Plugin to our blog to maximise twitter effect. There are many twitter plugins for WordPress but we chose TweetMeme because not only does it provide a free plugin, it also has its own website that aggregates all the popular links on Twitter and categorises them into Categories, Subcategories and Channels. Here is a step-by-step instruction on how to install and configure the plugin for your WordPress blog.

1. Download the Plugin from WordPress Plugins site
2. Unzip and upload /tweetmeme folder to /wp-content/plugins folder of your website via FTP/SSH
3. Login to your blog's admin and activate the plugin from Manage Plugins page
4. Configure the plugin (The link to the plugin will be added automatically to Admin menu on the left after it's installed). Remember to change the Source (RT @) to your twitter username. The rest can stay as they are.
5. Go to your blog and test the widget

We have already got Add This (Social Bookmarking and Sharing Service) widget on individual blog posts but it was placed at the end of the post and is not very prominent so we changed the positioning of the widget. Add This wiget allows users to share a link to many popular services such as Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Delicious, Google, StumpleUpon and Yahoo! Buzz.

Secondly, we looked at SEO related plugins for WordPress. We installed Head META Description plugin which automatically inserts meta description to posts and pages on your blog. Many people would argue that meta description doesn't affect the search engine ranking of a page. Although this may be true, it should still be present to describe the content of the page. Moreover, the meta description is often used as the text snippet on search engine result pages (SERPs).

We also installed Sitemap Generator Plugin for WordPress. Installing this plugin is not hard, but there are some customisation involved, so be sure to read readme.txt file. The plugin automatically generates an XML sitemap which is used by major search engines such as Ask, Google, Microsoft Live Search and Yahoo!, enabling them to better index and crawl your blog. An XML Sitemap for this blog can be found at https://eisabainyo.net/weblog/sitemap.xml. Once the sitemap is created, remember to submit it to Google using Google webmaster tools.

Time spent: 2 hours

Read how it all started: 7 Days Traffic Building Exercise