So here we are in week four of this series, and I’ve got another handful of plugins to share. This week I’m introducing tools to help with Web site analytics.

A crucial aspect of Web site management is tracking performance and observing visitor behaviour. This process provides valuable insights that can be used to improve a Web site, create happy, loyal customers and make an online business more successful. This post talks about three plugins that make this process easier on your WordPress site.

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So here’s the third installment in the series. This week I have a handful of plugins to help in the area of SEO.

From its solid foundations WordPress is very ‘search engine friendly’ out of the box. Its default themes and template system are built on modern Web standards and the clean, valid code makes it easy for search engines to find, understand and index content. However, that doesn’t mean there is no room for improvement for those wanting to take every possible advantage when creating exposure for their products or services.

The plugins I have selected today enable little tweaks and techniques to make your site play nice with search engines – and ultimately help them help people find their way to you.

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Following on from last week’s post that kicked this series off, here’s three recommended plugins for maintaining a WordPress site.

WordPress is renowned for its ease of use and its extensive features for keeping a site running smoothly. The comment moderation is first-class, the user management is a breeze, and with the help of the security plugins I recommended last week it’s simple to keep your installation safe. So what other areas of site management are there to improve?

Three areas we like to have covered, on our own sites and client sites, are backing up the data WordPress holds, a user-friendly way of managing site updates and rooting out broken links from site content. (Broken links are also a big issue in the world of SEO, but I wanted to include them this week because of their impact on user experience).

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We at Tactic Group are big WordPress fans. For any project requiring a blog/news based site it is our platform of choice. We’ve installed and maintained a number of sites on WordPress and I would like to share our list of essential plugins to make it fly.

There are over 8,000 plugins available for WordPress. I’m not claiming these are the only plugins you’ll ever need. The plugins I’m listing here are those we’ve used time and time again for specific tasks. Each of them does their job very well, and as a result we’ve grown to love them.

We’ve identified four areas of WordPress that can be beefed-up for easier management and better business: Security, Maintenance, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Analytics. It’s quite a long list so I’m going to break it up into four weekly posts. This week I’ll look at Security and reinforcing your WordPress site, keeping any vulnerabilities to a minimum.

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It’s been a while since our last Tactical Thinking post hasn’t it? One of the draw backs of being a small company, something has to go on the back-burner when you get too busy.

Well, we’re back on the business blogging buzz with some new thoughts and ideas to share with you. Our latest project, amphitheatre, has provided us with some amazing insights into the world of large-scale, multi-author blogging. First on the agenda; how to increase user interactivity through voting polls.

Some call it link-baiting. I think of it as improving a site’s user-interactivity to increase the number of return visitors.

First, let’s just clarify why one would want to increase their web site’s user-interactiveness. If a web site truly engages it’s users there is a greater chance of those users coming back to the site, improving the number of repeat visits as well as visitor loyalty. Think about some of the web sites that you visit on a regular basis. I think you’ll find that many of them encourage your involvement in one aspect or another.

Polls and surveys are a strong method to encourage this user-interactivity.
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A few days back I wrote a post about brand monitoring and how negative customer comments posted on social media platforms are not always a bad thing.

Yesterday, I spotted this post from Darren Rowse (producing the goods again and again) reviewing a new reputation management tool called Trackur. Here’s a snippet of what Darren has to say about it:

“Trackur is an online reputation monitoring tool that has been developed for companies and individuals wanting to take a serious look at what is being said about them in the blogosphere. I can also see the possibilities for using this tool for higher end bloggers who want to track what’s being written about them and/or their niche topic.”

Whilst this may well be too heavy for many of our readers, I think you may find it interesting that such tools even exist. A much lighter alternative is Google Alerts – worth a look if you’re concerned with what’s being said about you across the all-mighty vortex of the World Wide Web.