Category Archives: Tools - Page 2

10 WordPress Plugins for Bloggers Making Money (Part 1)

Posted by on May 15, 2013 Comments Off on 10 WordPress Plugins for Bloggers Making Money (Part 1)

There are at least two elements that make WordPress become the most popular content management system: themes and plugins. With the vast selection of available themes to install, you can build your WordPress website almost instantly with professional outlooks. Once your WordPress website is set up, you can further enhance the functionality of your website by installing different plugins. You can turn your WordPress website to a personal blog, e-commerce online store, online portfolio, etc by installing different plugins.

Many online individuals use WordPress to create their blogs and make considerable profits. For example, there are many “mommy bloggers” who share their tips on babysitting and frugal living styles, technology savvy putting up their products reviews on the latest gadgets, and travel bloggers posting their memorable pictures for their trips. These kinds of blogs often record massive traffic records. Hence, many related businesses (e.g. supermarkets, tech companies, travel agencies, etc.) approach them to place advertisements or promotion campaigns through their websites. With different plugins, WordPress owners can easily customize their website for different functions.

Although you have a wide selection of plugins to choose from, choosing the right ones is definitely a difficult task. That’s why we would like to highlight 10 plugins can help WordPress bloggers to turn their websites into a “profit-seeking” blog. In this article, we are going to share the first five. These five plugins are mainly for security, traffic and website performances.

Security

CAPTCHA – this plugin significantly reduce the chances of spammers attacking your website by asking a math question when submitting a request to your website (e.g. visitors are asked “what’s the answer for 2+3” when leaving comment). The plugin can work on comment section as well as the login page.

WP-CopyProtect  – this plugin protects your blog posts by preventing others copy your content. What that means is if your visitor tries to select the texts on your website, right click the mouse button, and try to copy the words, the plugin will block the “right-click-copy” function.

Traffic and Website Performances

Google Analytics – this plugin is pretty much self-explanatory. Google Analytics is a website traffic statistic tool that tells you where your visitors come from and how they interact with your website. To track your website traffic, all you need to do is to sign up at account on Google Analytics, install this plugin, enter your Google Analytics ID on your WordPress dashboard. Without the plugin, you would have to copy and paste the Google Analytics tracking code into each of your website pages.

WassUp Real Time Stat – this plugin is an alternative of Google Analytics. With this plugin you can see a full stats traffic report on the WordPress dashboard and even the real-time visitor activity.

WP-Optimize – this plugin helps you optimize your WordPress databases by reducing the overhead of spams, drafts, tablet, etc. An optimized WordPress website gives you a faster load time, which is benefitial to SEO performance as well as enhancing user experiences.

We will cover 5 plugins in the next article. To give you a headsup, these 5 plugins are mainly for website promotion as well as helping you earning revenue by placing ad banner and PayPal Donation button. Please stay tuned for details.

 

 

SEO Tips for Your WordPress Blog

Posted by on April 23, 2013 Comments Off on SEO Tips for Your WordPress Blog

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Here are some SEO tips for your WordPress blog:

1. Alter the Permalink structure

Set your permalinks optimally for SEO. The permalink of your WordPress blog, by default, looks like http://yourdomain.com/?p=N, where N is the Post ID number. While it works on all server environments, it is not SEO-optimal.

You can easily change your permalink structure by clicking on the “Settings” tab and then “Permalinks” menu on the dashboard of WordPress. You can choose from the “common” structures provided or you can enter your own in the “Custom Structure” field using the structure tags. Make sure your do not put your domain URL in the permalinks field. You must use structure tags.

Structure tags:

  • %year% – displays the 4-digit post year in the link (ie. 2013)
  • %monthnum% – displays the 2-digit post month in the link (ie. 05)
  • %day% – displays the day of the post in the link
  • %postname% – displays the post name in the link
  • %category% – displays the category of the post in the link
  • %author% – displays the author name in the link

For example, if you want to display the post’s category and the title in the permalink, you will need to enter the following in the Custom Structure field: /%category%/%postname%/

2. Add a comprehensive SEO Pack

You can install the All in One SEO Pack plug-in. The plug-in allows you to optimize meta tags, keyword tags, description and add a custom title for your blog.

3. Optimize the home page and site title of your blog site

Use a keyword research tool to find good keyword phrases for your home page. Include the keyword phrases in the meta description, title tags and the content of your home page.

Also, the title of your site is one of the single most important factors in terms ranking in the search results. This article provides useful tips on how to write a good title for your page and post. Check this out.

To change your WordPress blog title, go to Settings and click “General”. Quick and easy.

4. Optimize your blog’s images

You can optimize your images by using keywords in the “Alt” attribute and the names of the images. Also, include an image description in the image title tag.

Images with huge file sizes will cause slow load time. Please remember that load time is one of the factors that determine your search rank. Check out this article about the 10 tips to speed up your WordPress load time.

5. Freshness

Have you ever asked yourself this question: “Why do I need to spend so much effort on SEO?” Well, it’s a pretty obvious answer: To Get More Visitors! So, here comes the million-dollar question: What is THE MOST important factor that can attract more visitors to your website? A beautiful website layout? Photo albums with clear description and “alt tag”? Certainly, these are important, but definitely not THE MOST important reasons.

Content is the king.

Your website content is the most influential factor that drives traffic (and search engine robots) to visit your website. If you want your visitors to come to your website on a regular basis, you will have to provide content on a regular basis, too. But, quantity will only get you so far. You have to make sure that your content is in good quality (e.g. How reliable is your source of the content? Does your content provide a valid argument? etc.).

A website with high quality content that is updated regularly can create visitor loyalty. Returning visitors can then bring in more new visitors by sharing your blog post on their social media channels and their blogs. The more readers that post your website on their personal blogs, the more backlinks you will get, which as a result, can further enhance your SEO performance.

We hope these 5 useful tips can help you achieve better SEO performances. If you have any comments and thoughts on SEO techniques, please feel free to drop by the SEO section on our Forums and share your ideas there.

Why should you install your scripts through Softaculous?

Posted by on April 10, 2013 Comments Off on Why should you install your scripts through Softaculous?

At Doteasy, we often recommend clients installing scripts through Softaculous. Softaculous is an auto-installer with a library of hundreds of scripts for customers to install. With over 25 categories featuring over 250 scripts such as blog, CMS, forums, etc., you can create your website for almost any functionality you want. To learn the full features of Softaculous in details, please read this article in our Scripts Library.

There are many reasons why you should install your scripts using Softaculous. We’ve highlighted a few:

Ease of use

Softaculous Dashboard features an app-icon-driven interface which provides better navigation experiences (see the image below). Once you click the icon, you can choose to read the user reviews for that particular script, or check out the demo site built with the particular script. The demo websites also give you admin access so that you can view the website in both end-users and admin point of views.

dashboard

Quick Installation and Uninstallation

Typically, this is how you need to install a script without a script auto-installer: find the installation file online first; download the file and unzip it; upload it through FTP program; and manually create a database if it’s required. However, with script auto-installer like Softaculous, all you need is to login to cPanel and give Softaculous-icon a click. Then, navigate within the dashboard and choose the script you want. Click the icon and you are all set to go. No FTP uploading or manual database installation required! With Softaculous, the installation steps can be done within a minute.

What if the script you’ve installed does not quite suite your needs? No worries! There is an icon called “All Installations” in the Softaculous dashboard. Click on it and hit the remove button. The script and the corresponding database files will be removed instantly.

Softaculous is designed to simplify the sophisticated script installation process which creates a “Smartphone-App-Installation” experience to novice webmasters!

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All about Updates

One of the biggest drawbacks of using script auto-installer is that the installed scripts are often outdated. On the other hand, Softaculous manages to keep the scripts in their latest versions. Once there are new updates released for your installed scripts, you will receive email notifications from Softaculous. Plus, if you sign in to the cPanel and Softaculous dashboard, you will see the update icons on these two places as well. This feature is extremely handy for those who have installed multiple scripts on their websites while keeping all these scripts in the most recent versions.

If you would like to try out some of the great features of Softaculous, please visit our Softaculous Demo site.

Softaculous is included with our Unlimited Hosting plan. For those of you who are interested in subscribing to our Unlimited Hosting plan, please click here to sign up. Or, if you need further assistance, shoot us an email or submit a support ticket by visiting our Contact Us page.

Optimizing Website Load Time in cPanel

Posted by on March 5, 2013 Comments Off on Optimizing Website Load Time in cPanel

Here are a few reasons why you want your website to load FAST!

– Nobody likes slow websites
– Readers will leave your site when it doesn’t load fast
– Search engines don’t like slow websites

There are numerous ways to enhance the load times of your website. One of the quickest and easiest ways to improve the load times is to make use of the “Optimize Website” function” in the cPanel.

To do that, simply login to your cPanel. Under “Software/Services”, look for an icon called “Optimize Website”

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Once you click the icon, you will be redirected to a new page. Select “Compress all content” and then hit “Update Settings”

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By enabling the “Optimize Website” function, the files on your site will be compressed before being sent to the viewers automatically. Hence, the load time for your website will be enhanced.

For those of you who used WordPress to build your site, we strongly recommend our previous article on “10 Ways to Speed up WordPress load times”. We provide in-depth tips on optimizing load times with various plugins and tools.

10 ways to speed up WordPress load times

Posted by on January 24, 2013 Comments Off on 10 ways to speed up WordPress load times

The reason why you choose WordPress to build your website is because it is easy to use and you do not need any HTML background knowledge to create your website. So, when your website is done and completed, you work very hard to create more posts and content everyday. Your website traffic picks up and it starts to grow. To enhance your readers browsing experiences, you start using more WordPress plugins so that your website can have a few extra features (i.e. Social Media Share button, different language translators, etc). However, you start to realize that the more plugins and posts you make, the longer load time your website experiences. What should you do now?

Nobody likes slow websites. Nobody likes to wait around for websites to load every minute. Your (potential) readers will leave your website when it does not load for 10 seconds which means it is very important to optimize the load time of your WordPress website. Therefore, we have prepared a list with 10 easy tips to speed up your website.

1. Caching Plugin

Caching plugin helps your website improve its load speed because the plugin caches every aspect of your website. As a result, this will significantly reduce the download time. Among the different caching plugins available online, we recommend W3 Total Cache because it is very simple to use (and it’s FREE)!

2. Optimizing Image

Image file sizes are much larger than text files. If your website is image-oriented, it will take a much longer time to load your website. There is a free plugin called WP-Smushlt which can automatically help you reduce the file sizes of your website but does not reduce the quality of the image. Definitely check this out!

3. Another Image-related plugin: LazyLoad

This plugin will not only speed up your website load time but will also help your website lower the bandwidth by loading less data for your viewers who do not scroll down your website. For example, if your website is vertically long and requires readers to scroll down in order to view your entire page, with LazyLoad, the images on the lower side on your website will NOT load until your readers scroll down.

4. Optimizing databases

There are three plugins that we would like to recommend for optimizing your WordPress databases. The first one is WP-Optimize. This plugin, as the name suggests, optimizes your database by reducing the overhead of spams, drafts, tables, etc. Second, you can also consider installing WP-DBManger to help you schedule dates for database optimization.

Last, Revision Control is another great tool that can help you optimize your database. This plugin enables you to set the numbers of revisions you make for each post. WordPress, by default, stores all of your drafts indefinitely. By installing this powerful plugin, your database will be very lightweight compared to other websites without this plugin.

5. Removing unused plugins

The title says it all. If there are plugins that you do not use, simply delete them. Give it a try! Your site will load faster for sure!

6. Optimizing your home page

Your home page is the most important part that requires a quick load speed among all of your other pages because this is where your readers normally enter first. Here are a few tips to optimize your home page

  • – Show excerpts of your posts.
  • – Set fewer number of posts displayed on your home page (we recommend 5 posts)
  • – Set the Social Media Share plugins to only display on the actual post page instead of the home page.

Remember the key: less is MORE!!

7. Enabling hotlink protection

Hotlinking happens when external websites direct a link to the images on your websites making your server load increase. In cPanel, there is a function called “HotLink Protection”. Once you enable the protection, you can eliminate this form of “bandwidth theft”.

8. cPanel “Optimize Website” Feature

Another great feature of cPanel! There is a feature under “Software/Services” in cPanel which is called “Optimize Website”. By enabling this feature, cPanel tweaks the way Apache will handle requests and will compress content before sending it to the visitor’s browsers.

9. Making use of Google PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights, developed by Google, is a tool that analyzes the content of a web page and provides suggestions to make that page load faster. Check out their official page for full details.

10. Good web hosting service company

A good web host can provide not only stable uptime and connection but also professional solutions and support when needed. At Doteasy, our in-house Customer Support agents are resourceful web technicians and experts. We can provide speedy solutions for WordPress and other website builder programs. It’s our goal to keep our customers up-to-date with the latest web hosting trends through our blog, our Scripts Library, and our how-to video tutorials on the YouTube channel.

Lack of time to complete all these tips?

It takes a great amount of time to secure a website and maintain a quick load time. Therefore, we strongly recommend our customers to perform all of the above tips on your own. But, we understand that many of you do not have the time to do these tasks on your website. In this case, we can suggest to you our Managed Hosting plan which is an ideal solution for customers who need some extra help in maintaining their websites. Our Managed Hosting plan includes automated website backup as well as import, export, and optimization of your MySQL databases. To learn more, check out our Managed Hosting service feature page.