WordPress Hosting: Tips and Tricks

While WordPress is a wonderful blogging tool “out of the box” so to say. There are many different ways to improve your website’s performance. Variety of different plugins are available to improve your SEO efforts along with improving overall look and feel of your site as well as spam prevention. Here are just few tips and plugins that may help you.

Spam Prevention

As you get more familiar with WordPress and discover the shear volume of plugins available to prevent spam posts on your website it can be difficult to decide which one is the best. You will find plugins that require users to answer all sorts of questions and even do some “math” in order to post on your site. While this may seem as a good idea at first, many users may be turn away from your site do to this questions. WordPress comes with already pre-installed plugin called Askimed. This is a community driven plug in that has helped to cut a lot of spam. Using that plugin will give you also an opportunity to contribute back. Since every time you will mark a post as a spam, Akismed registers your imput and other users begin to benefit from information you have provided. We use Akismed on our site and it catches about 100 spam comments a day.

SEO Efforts

Permalinks. After you have installed your WordPress, you can configure the permalinks setting for your website. By default, WordPress creates URLs that contain question marks and other funny characters in them. While search engines are indexing these kind of URLs, from SEO point of view your site may perform better if your URLs contain keywords in them. For example, this page that you are looking at right at this moment has following URL http://www.web-hostingreview.com/wordpress-hosting-tips-and-tricks/. If we were to use default permalinks setting this URL would look something like following http://www.web-hostingreview.com/?p=162.

Meta Tags.
Among the variety of meta tags plugins you will find plugins that automatically insert keywords and description meta tag into your website. You should be aware though that recently search engines give less value to “keywords” meta tags to prevent so called “keyword stuffing”. Some search engines instead of paying attention to your “description” tags, now use the content of your site while indexing and generally display in the search results excerpt from the first and the last paragraph from your page.
When it comes to title tags, their importance will still be relevant for some times therefore we highly recommend Optimal Title Plugin that allows you to customize your title meta tags.

Site Maps.

You may have recently heard that Yahoo and MSN are officially supporting Google Sitemap protocol. Google Sitemaps Plugin comes in very handy that respect, since you can use the sitemap that is generated by this plugin and submit it to Yahoo and MSN.