Archive for the ‘Creativity’ Category
WordPress Plugins for SEO, Rank & Traffic..eventually.
- Image via CrunchBase
If you’ve followed this blog long you know my preference for WordPress as the platform of choice for blogging and site building especially for creative people showcasing their work. It’s not terribly difficult to use and its functionality can be expanded using plugins that are typically, similarly easy to use.
Not long after anyone puts their first site on their server they realize the real issue they must confront is getting anyone to take a look at what they’ve put up. The technical side of how search engines find and rate how relevant your content is is often more arcane than many people can deal with.
To address this the following is a short list of some plugins I’ve found particularly effective in improving your site’s visibility to search engines.
The following ARE NOT specifically relevant to web sites of artists, performers, film producers or other creative people. They’re just the basics of what’s necessary to begin to technically make any web site friendly to the search engines.
- All in One SEO Pack
- All in One Webmaster
- Google XML Sitemaps
- Karailiev’s sitemap
- WP tags to Technorati
The above automatically add code to your pages to help the various engines find and index your site as well as making ‘tags’ available on the post pages. Some require you to get some account IDs from the various search engine services to add to their config screens, but they include the links for where to get those.
A few more useful plugins that aren’t specifically relevant to SEO or search engines are:
- Smart 404 – When content cannot be found, Smart 404 will use the current URL to attempt to find matching content, and redirect to it automatically.
- Sociable – Automatically add links on your posts, pages and RSS feed to your favorite social bookmarking sites.
- Ultimate Google Analytics – Enable Google Analytics on your blog. Has options to also track external links, mailto links and links to downloads on your own site.
Most of the above can be added from within your WordPress admin area or found on WordPress.org. If you can’t find some try a Google search.
I hope you find this useful. This list is only a short list of some of my preferences. Please feel free to add any you’ve found effective in the comments.
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Need Arts employment? Need a Creative Job?
Here’s a brilliant way to take advantage of what most of us do at some point which is Google yourself. You think a potential employer doesn’t do this?
Placing a Google Adwords ad asking for a job and using the name of the person you’re trying to get attention from for your keywords almost guarantees your ad will appear in the paid ad space at the very top of the results page if that person Googles their own name! It only costs you if it works and then it costs pennies…and because there is not likely to be much competition for names it should cost very few pennies. If you wanted to cover your bases you could setup Yahoo/Bing ads too.
Sure, it’s obvious, but only if you know people in media and the arts are likely to be keeping tabs on their own social presence. The example is a copywriter, but couldn’t this work for gallery owners? production executives? music directors? We’ve all had jobs that had nothing to do with our goals…mind numbing, spirit killing work we’ve told ourselves was just to get us to where we needed to be. Maybe trying some simple ideas aimed specifically at what we want are worth trying!!!
Please add any non traditional methods you’ve used to get the attention of potential employers or those you needed to persuade in the commnets. (Keep it safe for work please. : ) )
Please consider posting this to your social accounts below. You never know if something might help a friend.
