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.

Linking your site with analytics and testing tools

There are numerous plugins that offer analytics reports on what users are doing when they visit your WordPress site, but we much prefer to use Google Analytics for this task. It offers many controls, features and useful tools that really can’t be matched by any single plugin. My first recommendation both integrates your site with Google Analytics and extends its capabilities at the same time.

Google Analytics for WordPress

First and foremost, this plugin makes it easy to add the Google Analytics tracking code to your pages. Rather than adding the code to your footer template and uploading it via FTP, you simply paste your account ID into this plugin’s settings page and it does the rest.

The second benefit on offer is the ability to track outgoing links and file downloads. Google Analytics for WordPress automatically tags any links that lead out of your site. This lets you see the most common exit points and how much traffic you are sending to sites you link to. It is handy to watch out for any unexpected patterns.

Google Website Optimizer for WordPress

Website Optimiser, is a free website testing and optimisation tool from Google. It is built to enable experiments to test the performance of different page designs (commonly called A/B tests, or multivariate tests – this video shows a good example).

This simple plugin lets you optimize your landing pages (as posts or pages) using the Google Website Optimizer without needing to edit the HTML code of the theme. It adds extra input boxes to the ‘Edit page’ or ‘Edit post’ pages to enter the Google Website Optimizer scripts setting your page up as part of a GWO experiment.

Blog Metrics

This plugin is one of the few available to offer statistics and measurements specifically for blogs (rather than for traditional Web sites). It shows a simple snapsnot of activity on your blog, based around author contributions (average posts per month and average words per post), and reader responses (average comments per post and average words per comment). These metrics go beyond the traditional measures of visits, page views or clickthroughs and show levels of engagement with an audience. After all, that is what any good blog should have as its main aim.

Note: For more more ideas on these types of metrics read the original post by Avinash Kaushik which inspired this plugin.

Well that’s it for now. A dozen plugins we at Tactic Group use as standard to make a great publishing platform even better. I hope it’s been a useful series, and look out for more WordPress related posts on this blog in the future.

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.

Making your site search engine friendly

Google XML Sitemaps

XML sitemaps are a tool webmasters can use to make it easier for search engines to understand the structure of their site and index pages more accurately. This plugin automates the process of building and updating a sitemap and runs quietly in the background. When you first fire it up, you’ll be prompted to build a sitemap manually. Following that, every time you publish a page or post the sitemap will be updated automatically.

Many standalone, 3rd party tools are available for creating sitemaps quickly. However the ability to automatically update your sitemap every time you post, and check search engines picked it up in-tact, saves a lot of time and keeps things neat and tidy.

KB Robots.txt

Another handy Webmaster tool is the robots.txt file. This is a simple text file that sits on your server waiting to instruct search engine spiders on which pages and directories they should and shouldn’t add to their indexes. For example, on our corporate site we have a testing directory where we try new things and show clients work in progress for their feedback. We don’t want these test pages to accidentally show up in search results so we don’t allow any search engines to index them.

Robots.txt files are easy to write but, like a lot of my recommendations in this series, having a WordPress setting page to manage it is very handy and keeps things neat. This plugin does exactly that. Once installed it offers a simple textbox for editing your robots.txt, then when you save the changes it will create or update the file right away.

All-in-one SEO Pack

Last, and by no means least, we have what is arguably one of the most valuable plugins available for WordPress. As its name suggests this plugin is like a Swiss Army knife for managing important aspects of your site’s SEO.

Most of its features give you more control over your metadata (extra information embedded in a Web page to describe its contents). Including your keywords in these metadata elements makes your site more findable for potential customers who are searching for products or services like yours.

The crucial areas of metadata for SEO are page titles and meta-descriptions. Search engines heavily rely on these to understand what your site is about, and commonly use them to make up the snippet shown when your site appears in search results. All-In-One SEO Pack lets you edit these elements on a page-by-page basis, and if you know how to use them it can make a huge difference to your rankings and click-through rate.

Something Google et al frown upon is duplicate content. With blogs this can be a hard thing to avoid (mainly due to category, tag and archive pages being very similar and numerous). All-In-One SEO Pack lets you instruct search engines not to index these navigation pages and concentrate on your destination pages (i.e. the valuable stuff). Another time-saving feature of this plugin is automatically generating canonical URLs. I would be going way off-topic if I described those here, but for anyone who is interested, this post from SEOmoz explains what they are very well.

Note: I have also heard good things about a similar plugin called Headspace 2, but I haven’t studied it in detail yet.

So I hope your WordPress plugin fix has been satisfied for another week. Next week will see the final part of the series (well, maybe the final part. There could be more), where I’ll share some recommendations for analytics plugins and cool tools to track visitor behaviour on your WordPress blog.

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).

Making your site easy to maintain

WP DB Backup

It is always a good idea to back up your data. Even if you’re new to managing a Web site I’m sure you’ve felt the frustration of your computer crashing and losing hours of work because you hadn’t saved it. Magnify that a few times and add the horrors of lost revenue to it. Not the stuff pleasant Friday afternoons are made of.

If the worst happens – your site gets hacked or a server dies – it is relatively easy to reinstall WordPress and start from scratch, but what happens to all your settings and content? This plugin offers quick and simple ways to back up your database with peace-of-mind as a welcome side-effect. It includes options for scheduling regular backups and manual ‘backup and download’ features.

WP DB Backup also has a ‘backup and email’ feature to send the archive file to any address you specify. We currently advise setting up a dedicated email box and sending daily backups there. Simple, free and effective off-site backups. Very handy.

Maintenance Mode

From time to time you’ll need to update your theme or edit some templates. For scheduled maintenance and technical updates it’s useful to put a very clear and prominent message out for users so they understand why the site is down or not performing as it usually does. This plugin makes that very easy to do so from right inside the WordPress admin/authoring area.

When activated (with a simple on/off switch), it puts up a temporary splash page in place of your site, notifying visitors of ongoing maintenance and when to expect the site to return. You can edit the default holding page however you like to customise it for your site. This process is so much easier than uploading a temporary page via FTP each time to do the same job.

Maintenance Mode has the added benefit of only redirecting to the splash page users who are not currently logged in to the system. Those who have admin accounts, and are logged in, will see the site as normal. This is fantastically useful if you are discussing changes with colleagues or clients, for example.

Broken Link Checker

If you’ve been blogging for a while it’s easy to clock up dozens of outbound links. The speed at which things move on the Web makes it inevitable pages or even sites you link to will be moved, renamed or even disappear completely – leaving a less than perfect experience for your readers.

This plugin helps you keep track of those and offers a handy interface to update or remove broken links from your content (recommended to run it every couple of months). It checks through your posts, pages and blogroll for problem links and gives you a work queue to fix them.

There are many link checker tools out there offering the same features, but being able to do it all from inside WordPress is a big win.

So that’s it for this installment. Hopefully these will make your life easier when it comes to WordPress. If you have a recommendation I might have missed please leave a comment to let me know. Also check back next week for three more essential plugins – all focussed on making your site search engine friendly.

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.

Making your WordPress site more secure

Before addressing plugins, the critical point of securing WordPress is to make sure you upgrade to the latest version ASAP and keep all your plugins up to date. Assuming you’ve done that, here’s three plugins we use to harden WordPress:

WP Security Scan

This plugin “scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions”. It makes updates to your site (such as hiding the WordPress version number), which all make it harder for hackers to break in.

It’s best to run Security Scan soon after launching a new site, as a few of the fixes it advises are fiddly to do afterwards. Further to an initial scan when you first activate this plugin, it is definitely worth checking the settings and report after every upgrade you do.

Login Lockdown

This plugin protects you from brute force password discovery (i.e. a type of hack that systematically tries to login until it finds the right password).

Login LockDown works by recording the IP address and timestamp of every failed WordPress login attempt. If a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range. Administrators can see a list of banned IP addresses, and if someone gets locked out by accident administrators can manually grant them access.

Exploit Scanner

This plugin scans through the files in your WordPress installations and looks for potential traces of hacks or malware that might have made their way in. It does return a lot of results that turn out to be false alarms but it’s worth wading through these to look for anything unusual or unexplained.

We advise running this plugin every couple of weeks or so, or any time you hear about a new security threat doing the rounds.

So that’s this week’s installment. While Login Lockdown can just run in the background, Security Scan and Exploit Scanner do involve a bit of regular time and effort to prove their worth. That said, when it comes to security it pays to be paranoid and costs to be complacent. Anyone who has had their site hacked will tell you that!

Look out for part two where I’ll introduce a handful of plugins to make maintaining a WordPress site easier.

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.

Why run a poll on your site

Polls and surveys not only provide opportunity to interact with a web site but they give visitors the opportunity to voice an opinion and even see the results of a topic that interests them. But that’s not all…

• They start discussions, which in turn increases repeat visits.
• They can provide you with valuable research statistics for your product or business.
• They can increase the number of incoming links as people frequently send the URL on to others.
• And, probably most importantly, they demonstrate that your web site is alive and kicking!

How to set up a poll

Adding a poll or survey to your web site is not as difficult as you might think. There’s a variety of freely available resources on the net that can make the process super-simple. Check out PollDaddy and Quiz-o-Matic ‘76 for some examples. However, there’s a little more to it than just installing and creating a new poll – think strategy! Here’s an excellent ‘how to’ article on different polling techniques.

At Tactic Group we run many of our sites and blogs (including this one) on the Wordpress platform. There’s a fantastic plugin available on Wordpress, called WP-Polls that we use frequently. We’ve even got some examples for you…

A few months back we decided to run a photo competition on our amphitheatre blog. Whilst we didn’t receive as many photographic entries as we would have liked, when it came to voting time our traffic increased by about 1000% over the space of two days. We were quite astounded at this dramatic increase.

Granted, we had some nice prizes up for grabs and there was definitely some underlying motivations (as the public decided who the winners were), but what a great way to increase traffic and encourage user-interaction on a web site!

We’ve since been embracing polls in a variety of forms; the latest one being a new survey at the same site, designed more for research purposes than increasing traffic. We’ll be following this survey with another poll very soon, delving a little deeper into the habits, needs and wants of the amphitheatre readers.

Share your polling ideas right here

We’d love to hear about your ideas for polls and surveys. We may even be able to help evolve an idea into a viable solution. Please, we encourage you to comment below with any thoughts you have on the matter. Thanks.

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.