We’ve just stumbled across a great site that allows you to get lots of free traffic by being a member (which is free) and we wanted to share it with you our clients and readers. It’s ideal for all of you who have articles, e-books or video courses online as it will help sales no end.

It’s called TrafficSwarm and is a clever service that unites webmasters with sources of traffic via their member scheme. For more info, click here.

The system creates and provides links to your site which other users have the chance to click on and explore, driving more and more people to your site which in turn improves your rating with the likes of Google and the search engines.

Check it out to see how it works. Enjoy!

This plugin was a recent discovery for me but it’s now something that I add as standard to all the sites I design.

SEO – as I mentioned in a previous issue of this WordPress series – stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is basically the science of putting words and links into your website that get you listed higher up the organic search engine rankings.

Smart Links are a clever little idea whereby a program checks your site and links all the appropriate words to other parts of the site. For example, if your site has a page titled ‘Weddings’, every time the program finds the word ‘weddings’ in text on other pages, it will link those words to the page titled ‘Weddings’. This means that your site is more dynamic and user friendly and also more popular with Google, as the entire site will contain more links (the currency of search engines).

The program I use is called SEO Smart Links and it’s a plugin for the WordPress blogsites I create. To install it, you can go to the plugin site or simply go to ‘Plugins’ on your WordPress Dashboard and click ‘Add New’. Then type in ‘SEO Smart Links’ and click ‘Install’ next to the SEO Smart Links plugin.

Once installed, you’ll see the settings for it under the heading ‘Settings’ (surprisingly) which are fairly self-explanatory.

If you pair this plugin with other SEO plugins like the All-in-One SEO Pack, you’ll see your site start to climb the Google rankings pretty quickly. Good luck and as always, if you need any help or advice, get in touch with us.

This is a brilliant plugin for WordPress which enables those of us who don’t have the time and/or knowledge to get ourselves as high up Google as possible.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and it’s the curious science of optimising your website so that the ’spider’ programmes that search engines like Google use, in order to determine who goes on which search page. The better optimised your site, the higher up Google you will be for your business terms. For example, if you’re a hairdresser in London, you’ll want to be on the first page of results when someone types in the words ‘hairdresser London’ and ‘hair and beauty London’ to Google. This plugin is one of the ways to make that possibility happen.

The plugin works by adding all the words you choose to your pages and blog posts. So, using our hairdresser example, you can add as many variations on ‘hair and beauty’ and ‘hairdresser’ as you wish. You could add ‘Hair and beauty London’, ‘hair & beauty London’, ‘hairdresser London’, ‘hair stylist London’ etcetera etcetera… This means that no matter what related terms your potential clients type in, they are more likely to find you instead of your competitors.

Simply type in your words into the box that appears at the bottom of all the posts and pages in your WordPress dashboard. You can repeat the keywords across as many pages as you like. Ideally the main words should be on all the pages to give you a better chance of rising up the Google rankings. So, to the installation…

As usual, to add it to your WordPress blog, simply log in to your blog’s dashboard and click Plugins. Click Add New and in the search bar near the top, type in ‘All in One SEO’. The first result should be ‘TweetMeme Button’. Click Install on the far side of the screen. Once installed, click Activate Plugin.

Once activated, you can configure it by clicking the All in One SEO tab which appears in the left hand column of your dashboard below the Settings tab.

As many of you know, here at ProSmart we specialise in creating WordPress blogs that give our clients the maximum control (partly because we host them instead of WordPress doing it – we just use their software). As part of a way of helping both our clients and our followers on Twitter, we wanted to give you some tools that will help you connect and integrate your blog more easily. To that end, here’s the first handy little utility:

The TweetMeme Button

We’ve just found this thanks to social networking wizard Ian McKendrick. This Twitter plugin for WordPress enables you to place a button into your posts and onto your static pages so that your visitors can tweet about the articles you’ve written. It also displays a counter for your visitors to show how many times that article has been ‘tweeted’ by your visitors.

Behind the scenes on your WordPress dashboard, it also tracks the statistics so you can see how many clicks the button has had and consequently, how many times that article has been tweeted.

Better still, the TweetMeme site displays all the tweets that have been clicked in order to spread the word to a wider audience. The site lists the tweets according to keywords so that you can search under the terms you’re most interested in.

To add it to your WordPress blog, simply log in to your blog’s dashboard and click Plugins. Click Add New and in the search bar near the top, type in ‘TweetMeme’. The first result should be ‘TweetMeme Button’. Click Install on the far side of the screen. Once installed, click Activate Plugin.

Once activated, you can configure it and add your Twitter username to it by clicking the TweetMeme tab which appears in the left hand column of your dashboard below the Settings tab.

To find out more about the service, check out the TweetMeme website.

To add the button to your HTML website, your e-mail or your RSS feed, go to the TweetMeme Button page.

Having already been designing sites for a few months now, we’ve decided to hoist things up a few notches and start doing commissions. ProSmart Design is born!

We’ll be updating the pages over the next few days and weeks to include a portfolio of our previous work and lots of free info to help you build and improve both your site and your internet presence.

In the meantime, if you’d like to talk to us about your requirements, simply call us or send us an e-mail via our Contact page.