Yet Another Related Posts Plugin Review

When someone visits your website, you don’t want them to leave after reading just one page. YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin) uses an ingenious algorithm to determine which posts and pages are the most relevant to the current post. By giving your visitors the opportunity to easily read related content on your website, you can increase your visitors’ time on your website, and thus improve the chances of a purchase or the visitor contacting you. With YARPP, you don’t have to figure out which posts and pages are the most relevant – you can just let the plugin do it automatically.

Furthermore, the internal links generated by YARPP help your site’s SEO. By linking your posts to related content, you’re essentially “voting” for that content, and helping those posts and pages rank for their respective keywords. [Read more...]

Best Practices for Business Blogs

These days, it’s fairly common to see a blog on a business website. But if you aren’t blogging already, you may wonder why and how you should start.

  • Blogging is a friendly way to engage with your customers, prospective customers, and industry peers.
  • Blogging is generally great for SEO. Whenever you publish new content, you’re driving new search engine traffic to your site. [Read more...]

Akismet Plugin Review

If you allow your visitors to post comments on your WordPress website, you should be using Akismet. This plugin identifies spam comments with remarkable accuracy, much like a junk mail filter for your email. Don’t think you’re going to get much spam on your website? You’re in for a big surprise. Unless you’re blocking the search engines from finding your website, you will get a lot of seemingly random traffic and spam comments, the vast majority of which come from automated programs. Over time, you will get more and more of it. But if you’re using Akismet, you won’t have to waste much time sorting through spam comments. [Read more...]

WordPress SEO Basics: On-Page Optimization

Search engine optimization is generally easy with WordPress, once you understand the basic principles. You don’t have to configure any special settings to get your website crawled by Google. And from a technical standpoint, WordPress is a very search engine friendly solution. The Genesis themes, which we use at Efficient Websites, give you some advanced SEO functionality beyond what most WordPress themes offer.

Of course, search engine rankings are far from guaranteed, and the more SEO work you put in, the better the results. [Read more...]

Automate Your Social Media

The main constraint of social media marketing is the time investment. You may have set up Facebook and Twitter pages for your business, but rarely update them. If so, there is not much point in having them at all. But if you already publish blog posts on your business website, you can update services like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn with the same information, without adding much more work. [Read more...]

Why We Use WordPress

If you want to build a website, there are many ways to do it. You can manually write HTML code to create each page, but this is extremely limiting and time consuming. You can use desktop software programs such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage, which eliminate the need to know HTML. These will save you time, but they still limit you from using many features. You can create a website with Flash or other proprietary software, which lets you do much more than the previous options. But building and editing Flash websites is also extremely time consuming and requires an advanced set of skills.

Then, there is the modern solution: the website content management system. Typically, this software is installed on the web server and not your computer. You install and configure it on your hosting plan, and your website is up and running. You can then edit your website by logging in through a browser, which means you don’t have to have special software installed. Usually, you can make basic edits to your website without needing to know HTML or another programming language. There are some proprietary (paid) content management systems, but the free, open source alternatives are much more popular. [Read more...]