Is Your Blog Ready for Your Social Media Marketing Strategies?

… Blogs are an integral part of social media marketing. They can (and should) be the “hub” of your network online — the place where you help build online credibility, expert status, and provide a great, search-engine liked presence online. But is your blog ready for your social media marketing strategies? Are you shooting yourself in the foot because its not quite ready?

As you know, we absolutely recommend and prefer Wordpress for your blogging software. Wordpress is user-friendly, easily manageable, and set-up to be optimized for search engines and social media marketing. Here are just some of the components you must include in your Wordpress blog set up to ensure you take advantage of all the online marketing benefits your blog can provide to you.

Wordpress uses “plugins” to add these necessary components to your blog. The use of “plugins” allows you to easily integrate a tool or feature into your blog. You can mix and match “plugins” to ensure your blog works best for your online marketing plan.

Here are just some of the key “plugins” that we use to ensure our blog is social media marketing:

Related Posts Plugin:

The Related Posts Plugin allows your readers to dig deeper into a topic of interest with ease. Simply clicking one link, takes them to all your related blog posts to a certain topic. Not to mention, this allows search engines to dig deeper into your posts related to that topic - typically helping improve rankings.

WWW Redirect Plugin

Yep. Its a little technical, but simply - its a plugin that makes sure your site only points to one format of your domain. Without this plugin, people will be able to find your blog at http://blog.com or http://www.blog.com. Okay, not such a big deal right? Wrong. If your users can find it this way, so can search engines and that represents a problem in duplicate Page Ranks and content.

Permalink Redirect Plugin

Again, you want to make your blog clean and structured. This makes it easier for you tech-savvy social media users who will find you and search engines who will crawl you. In the same way the WWW Redirect plugin helps with this, adding the Permalink Redirect Plugin helps you make sure there is only one active link per blog post and they are all connected in a clean and structured manner.

Social Media Marketing Plugins

Wordpress and its plugin creator community is always on top of the latest trends and changes in online marketing. The advancement of social media marketing is no exceptions. To date, there are ten’s of plugins that will help exponentially in making sure your blog is ready for the social media marketing traffic you will get when implementing those strategies. As well, sites like Digg, Stumble Upon, Twitter and more have plugins available that are also great.

My point is, if your implementing social media marketing strategies, your not creating them in a black hole, isolated from your other online efforts. Every component of your online marketing needs to work together - your results will be exponentially better if you do so.

To Your Success,

Maria Reyes-McDavis

My shameless plug? We offer Blog Make-Over services that can help you make sure your blog is ready for all that cool traffic your going to get!

Related Diva Posts:

• You Don’t “Do Follow” on your blog … That’s just wrong!
• Cross Blog Conversations are a big key to Blog Marketing!
• Common Blog Marketing Mistakes Solopreneurs Make… Stop It!
• Blog Layout and Design - Keep It Simple!
• Bloggers, Get Into the Social Media Conversation… Carefully.

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