Link Building: Best Practices and Ethical Methods

Link-building remains one of the most important aspects of SEO, and something that all SEOs, SEMs and marketers focus most of their efforts on. Here are some rock-solid – and ethical – ways of building links in the post-Penguin era:

1. Guest Blogging

Easily one of the best, safest ways of link-building, post-Penguin. A lot of authority and high-PR blogs encourage guest blogging and ask for guest posts, which presents every blogger out there with an excellent opportunity to build backlinks, get exposure, get the word out and get traffic and visitors from a high-PR source.

A few things to consider when it comes to guest blogging:

(a) Make sure that you choose a blog that is established, has a high PR, and generally has a high level activity on the blog; high traffic and a rather large amount of feedback and comments. Make sure that the blog you choose is related to your niche, as well as your own blog.

(b) Get in touch with the blog owner via email, or via the contact form on their website. Be polite, courteous, and professional when writing the email. Here are some general tips to follow when doing this.

(c) Make sure that you include all your credentials and your portfolio in the email, as this helps establish your credibility in the eyes of the blog owner.

(d) Remember that the post needs to be top-notch, the absolute best that you do! Choose an excellent topic, and run it by the blog owner as well. Write the post like you would write for your own blog, of the best quality. Don’t forget to include a backlink to your own blog – either within the write-up, or in the signature/author profile part.

(e) Getting the headline right is crucial, as it will help drive more traffic to the post.

Nail this part and you’ll get tons of traffic to your post, traffic to your own blog as well as help establish you as a guest blogger, paving the way for more guest-blogging opportunities!

I recommend reading up on this KISSMetrics article to read about guest blogging and it’s various do’s and don’ts in great detail.

2. Producing Great Content

Yes, this works, every single time!

Write an amazing post on your blog; spend your Sunday writing a long, detailed and a well-written quality post. Spend your time to market and spread that post as much as you can. Trust me, a well-written post is the best way of building backlinks, because a well-written post will automatically encourage people to share it (especially on social mediums), as well as link back to it (earning you valuable backlinks).

Write quality, and be consistent about it. Don’t however expect to get tons of backlinks immediately, it usually takes time.

3. Trackbacks

Rather surprisingly, a very small number of people speak about this.

Trackbacks are backlinks that you get one someone’s blog, when you link to them. For instance if you link to someone’s blog, a link (trackback) will also appear on their blog, pointing to your post. This enables the author to know and keep a track of the websites which are linking back to their blog and posts.

Trackbacks are pretty useful for you for a number of reasons. It puts a permanent link to your blog (or one of its posts) on another blog, which could potentially get you traffic from that blog. Secondly, linking to other blogs is good for your SEO health; search engines in particular will like the fact that you’re doing this and it will help build a certain amount of credibility and trustworthiness for your blog.

It could also allow you to build a relationship with other bloggers in your niche, and they may even end up linking back to one of your posts, or maybe even get in touch with you for a guest blogging opportunity.

4. Videos

Pretty self-explanatory. Make a video, any kind of a video that you think would be appropriate to your niche, such as a video-review. Search engines tend to give priority to videos in search results, and videos are hence usually ranked higher than other text-based resources for the same keywords.

Videos will therefore be great for SERPs, and if yours ends up on the first page, even a single link in the description of the video has the potential to be seen by hundreds of thousands of people.

Besides, people will also tend to link to videos more often, meaning even more exposure!

Videos can also be uploaded to several streaming websites (Youtube of course being the biggest, but also includes the likes of Metacafe, DailyMotion, Vimeo, etc.), which means that you can virtually have an unlimited number of backlinks from the same amount of sources.

5. Press Release

Press releases and PR submissions allow you to get backlinks from high-PR sources that get a ton of traffic on a daily basis! Write a Press Release and submit it to any of the various press release distributors/distribution websites out there. 

Bear in mind that a press release has to be well-written, and focused on what you’re trying to promote (whatever that may be). Also take a moment to go over and follow the guidelines of any PR submission services that you might be using.

Do this right, and you will be able to build high-PR backlinks to your blog, and of course, drive traffic in from these sources.

6. Infographics

Pretty similar to videos; make infographics (plenty of services such as Infogr.am out there that allow you to do this) in order to drive traffic into your blog. Infographics have the power to be shared and go viral very quickly, allowing you to reach out to thousands of people within a short span of time. Add a link to your infographic and you’ll be able to build a massive amount of backlinks and get a large number of inbound traffic, especially if your infographic goes viral!

Here are 9 Powerful Free Infographic Tools, courtesy InfographicsArchive.com.

7. Comments

Pretty similar in nature to guest blogging, except for the fact that posting comments is much simpler in the sense that there are a lot less number of steps involved!

Simply find a good, active (and preferably a high-PR) blog in your niche – one that is relevant to the content and theme of your own blog – and post a comment or two on it on a regular basis.

Some ground rules to follow: make sure it’s a relevant blog, make sure that you fill out all the fields in the comments section (especially the website URL field), and of course, refrain from spamming the blog or the comments section. Only post relevant comments, that add something to the conversation and are constructive and thought-provoking.

Pro-tip: I personally suggest finding blogs that offer a do-follow link to your blog, such as the ones using the infamous CommentLuv plugin.

8. Social Media

Social mediums such as Twitter, G+ and of course Facebook remain an excellent way of getting valuable backlinks for yourself. These social websites will get you a large amount of traffic, provided the size of your reach, and also make it easy for your followers and fans to share the links with their contacts, circles and people in their networks. 

The 7-Step Process of Creating an Excellent Blog

One of the most fundamental reasons why people blog is because they want traffic, a ton of visitors and be the proud owners of the most popular blog out there.

Of course, setting up such a blog is easier said than done.

But nonetheless, it’s all extremely doable. Here’s how:

1. Domain

First things first, start off with a short, relevant and memorable domain name for your blog – a domain name that is easy-to-remember and easy-to-pronounce as well. Complicated names (such as those with long words separate by multiple hyphens) remain one of the biggest reasons why people don’t return to a website or visit it again; if it’s hard to pronounce, it will be hard to memorize.

A list of DO’s when it comes to domain names: Short, precise, to-the-point and reflect the content of the blog easily. E.g. Twitter.com, Gmail.com, Soccernet.com. The domain name should be relevant to your blog, as well as memorable, and should always include your relevant keywords. 

A list of DON’Ts when it comes to domain names: It is inadvisable to choose domain names that are very long (over 10 characters, for instance), complicated, contain too many words, or are simply too hard to pronounce.

Example of a bad domain name: www.lose-your-weight-in-10-simple-steps.com

Example of a good domain name: www.loseweight.com

2. Hosting

If you’re planning on going for a Wordpress.com blog (or planning on going for a hosted solution such as Blogger, Tumblr, etc.) this shouldn’t be a consideration at all.

If however you’re choosing a Choosing the right hosting service will undoubtedly be one of the most important things when setting up the blog, if not the most important!

Going for a reliable webhost is essential, as it provides a strong foundation for your blog to be built upon.

Choose a well-known and a well-reputed webhost. Look for read up on extensive reviews online, and make your decision accordingly. But above all, never settle for webhosts offering ultra-cheap packages, you’ll certainly regret it at a later stage.

Some of the more well-known hosting services include:

• Bluehost
• Host Gator
• Dreamhost
• iPage
• Just Host

You can read a full list of the best webhosts on Top10Reviews and Lifehacker.

A few considerations when it comes to choosing a webhost: it is preferable (although not mandatory) to choose a package which allows you to host a multiple number of domains (websites), unlimited (or a large) amount of bandwidth, and an unlimited (or a large) amount of webhosting space.

3. Choosing a CMS

If you’re going the self-hosted route, choose a good content management system (CMS). While there’s a lot to choose from when it comes to good CMS, my recommendation would be Wordpress, hands down.

Wordpress is extremely easy to use, easy to install, and easy to get your hands around. It features a strong, stable back-end, including a powerful dashboard, and a fully-customizable and flexible front-end with the option to choose from a ginormous library of themes, plugins, addons as well as other enhancements.

In fact, if you look at the competition, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t go for Wordpress as your CMS-of-choice!

4. Choosing a Theme

If you’re going with Wordpress (which you should – I hope I’ve made a strong enough case for it!), you have plenty of options here. You can choose from a wide range of free themes available out there, or one of the many premium ones (more on this in a bit).

But first, what makes/defines a good theme?

It’s a combination of many different things – a theme that is customizable, attractive and beautiful to look at, can be read easily, is browser-friendly, features a good color combination and a readable font, has text that can read easily, and of course, provides options to customize and change all these aspects through the dashboard.

A good theme also features a strong navigation mechanism – which is visitor-friendly (allows your visitors to easily browse your website), as well as search-engine-friendly (allows search engines to navigate and index different parts of your website).

Examples of good themes include the Elegant Themes (which is actually a theme pack, that includes a whole host of different themes or skins), and good theme ‘frameworks’ include the Genesis Framework and the Thesis Framework on Wordpress, both of which provide plenty of customization options. Apart from these, you can also check some of the themes on Themeforest.

A good theme will allow you to customize every single detail – small and big – of your interface, make your website more search-engine-friendly, and allow you to make HTML and CSS changes to your blog as well.

With Wordpress, you have the option of choosing from a large pool of themes, which means you can go for a theme best suited for the kind of blog you’re starting.

Side note: personally, I always recommend opting for a premium theme instead of a free one.

5. Content

Content is, by far and wide, one of the single-most important thing about your blog. To create an all-round excellent blog, you’ll need to be able to put fresh, unique, interesting and compelling content on your blog, and keep it updated with such content constantly and consistently.

Strive to provide excellent, high-quality content to your visitors, make this your top-most priority.

DO’s: Your content should aim to solve problems, per se. It should be useful. It should be tailored according to the requirements of your potential visitors/niche. It should be easily-digestible. It should aim to fulfill the requirements of your audience. It should be able to attract them to your blog. And yes, it should be search-engine optimized, by including all relevant keywords/terms/phrases.

DON’TS: Avoid – for understandable reasons – providing your audience with low-quality, spun, plagiarized or copied content. Trust me, no one wants to read a rehashed version of something that is easily accessible elsewhere (and something that they’ve probably already read).

Develop a content-creation strategy for your blog. Do different sorts of posts – interviews, Q&A posts, video-based posts, and the like. Invite guest posters so that your blog gets a regular influx of quality content and from a varied and different perspective.

Your content should be so good, it should, in itself, encourage people to share it over social media, and link to it. Creating great content becomes the single-best link-building strategy available to you. Spend a significant chunk of your time and energy into developing your content, as I firmly believe that your content is the thing that will ultimately make or break your blog.

6. SEO

The field of SEO is extremely vast; so vast in fact that one could write a book on it! However as a blog owner, it is important to educate yourself with the basics of SEO, particularly certain on-page and off-site SEO factors - even if you’re totally SEO-averse or unaware of how websites are optimized.

For starters, I recommend reading up on websites such as ProBlogger to learn about some of the SEO best-practices and how you can implement these in your blog. However it might also be a good idea to outsource your website’s SEO to a consultant, a freelancer or a company specializing in providing SEO services.

Try your hand at reading up on the internet. Learn about ways with which you can improve certain metrics of your website – such as how to keep visitors on your blog for a longer period of time, how to decrease your bounce rate, have an improved CTA, and the like.

Link-building is an important aspect of SEO. You can read more about it here.

7. Keep Visitors, Make Repeat Customers + Misc Stuff

Just like any business out there, it is important for your blog to make and keep repeat customers. This can be done through various avenues, such as (a) email subscriptions, (b) RSS subscriptions, (c) social media.

Make a page for your blog on Facebook, and allow your visitors to ‘like’ the page so that they can learn about updates to your blog (such as when a new article goes up) through Facebook. Put up social sharing buttons and a Facebook-box on your website as well.

Try optimizing your website for speed, your website should ideally load up quickly, and should not make visitors wait for it to load up: anything more than 10 seconds of loading time and you’ll certainly start losing visitors. You could use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for this purpose.

Use Google Analytics to measure various aspects of your blog. It is a free tool that provides a large number of different data and various sorts of information regarding the health of your website. An absolute must-have!

Try your hand at posting (constructive, valuable) comments on other blogs in your niche. This is a good way to build linkages with other (authority) bloggers, and can also be a great link-building strategy.

Finally, invite bloggers to post guest-posts on your blog, but perhaps most importantly (as a new blog-owner), try your hand at doing a guest post on an authority blog, and ask if you can include a link back to your own blog in your write-up.

Feel free to post a comment if you have any questions!

Titles and Headlines: Why They Matter and How to Write Good Headlines

Why Writing Good Headlines is Important

The importance of writing a good, strong headline often goes amiss with many bloggers out there. Writing a strong headline is an important part of SEO, for many reasons – just about as important as the write-up itself!

For starters, a headline is the first thing a potential visitor reads; which means that the headline is the thing that ultimately compels or convinces him/her to read the article, or completely ignore it. It is hence, the biggest tool in your arsenal to actually ‘sell’ the idea that your article is worth a read, your website is worth the visit or the product/service that you’re trying to sell is worth the money.

Write a compelling headline, and you’ll basically guarantee that your article gets a ton of views – this is a proven strategy that many newspapers, publications and tabloid have successfully used to sell papers.

The title also shows up as the clickable hyperlink in Google’s search results. Whenever someone looks something up or searches for something on Google, and your website shows up in the results, the blue hyperlink is the headline. Nail this, and you’ll get a ton of visitors and traffic on your articles from search engines, etc.

And of course, the title or header (H1) of your article allows search engines to know what the article is about, and rank and index it in a better manner. If your header contains the right (relevant) keywords (more on this in a bit), it allows crawlers to know what your article (and your website in general) is about, since the H1 headers are the most important of all the header tags, and are given the maximum amount of priority by search engines as well.

General Tips and Trick to Write Compelling Headlines

Here are a few general tips and tricks you can use to write compelling headlines and titles for your articles:

1. Interesting – ask yourself this, if you were to stumble upon this article on the internet, would the headline compel or force you to read the rest of the article? Is the headline/title catchy, interesting, intriguing and attractive? Would you, as a visitor looking for information on the internet, be actually compelled or forced to click on it?

Example A: Write Compelling Headlines

Example B: How to Write Compelling and Catchy Headlines That Will Help You Increase Traffic

2. Relevant – having a catchy and attractive headline is great, but it should also be relevant to (a) the write-up/post/page and (b) to the content and the subject matter of your blog. It should accurately reflect the content of the blog, and immediately and instantly let potential visitors as well as search engine crawlers know what the accompanied post or page is about. Headlines should never be misleading, in the sense that the accompanied article fails to match what the headline promised to deliver.

3. Targeted – Your headline should be targeted in the best possible manner for your target audience, and people in your niche. It should be able to get the attention of people in your industry and in your niche, people who will be the most interested in your content. For this purpose, identify your industry/niche, as well as your potential visitors and customers, and try coming up with headlines tailored specifically for these people and their interests.

4. Keywords – It is extremely important to use relevant keywords in your titles/headlines. Keywords that are: (a) relevant to the article, and (b) relevant to the theme of your website. Avoid (at all costs!) stuffing your titles with keywords; instead, be as natural when writing your titles as you possibly can. After Penguin, keyword stuffing in any part of your website puts you at risk of getting banned from Google. And of course the fact that doing so wouldn’t look very good from a visitor’s perspective either.

5. Benefit – Use your headline to communicate a benefit to the potential reader. This can perhaps be best demonstrated with the help of an example:

Headline A: Best Wordpress Plugins

Headline B: Best Wordpress Plugins that will Make Blogging Easier and More Effective

Similarly,

Headline A: Tips for Losing Weight

Headline B: Pro Tips for Losing Weight Easily within 60 Days in 10 Simple Steps

In both cases, the second headline is obviously a much better choice, and does a good job of communicating the benefit to the user.

6. Numbers – Use numbers in your headlines to convey a numerical advantage that readers will get if they read your post. This is a very effective way of getting more readers and more traffic, as it instantly lets your visitors know – in clear, numeric terms – what benefit or advantage they would get if they read your article. It reflects the value of your write-up in numbers. For instance:

Example A: Tips for Getting More Visitors on your Blog.

Example B: 20 Excellent Tips to Instantly Boost Your Traffic.

7. Different – Try something different with your headline. Think outside the box. Do a headline that is completely different from the ones that you usually do. Be creative with this. Chances are that it might work out for you very well. 

How to Find Motivation and the Creative Spark When Writing for a Blog

Blogging, and in particular writing and producing content on a fairly consistent and regular basis is not an easy gig.

In fact it can be mentally straining, and downright exhausting.

Therefore, bloggers and writers need to find new sources of inspiration, keep themselves motivated and focused in order to produce quality content regularly.

Here’s a list of things you can do to find blogging motivation to produce great content:

1. Keep abreast of news and the happenings in your industry. If you do, you’ll always have something to write on and write about. Use social media, your RSS feed and Google Alerts to instantly know what’s happening in your niche, and choose any story, news item or a blog post as the source for your next post.

2. Read other blogs in your niche/industry. It’s a great way of not only knowing about the things happening in your industry, such blogs can also be a great way of getting inspiration from. Read up a few posts on such blogs and you’ll certainly find something you might want to write on yourself!

3. Try something totally new and completely different from what you’ve been doing till now. Is there something that you would like to try out with your blog? Perhaps something that you’ve been thinking about doing for some time? Or doing a completely different type of a post than the ones you usually write. Right now would be the perfect time to do just that!

4. Revamp your blog. Give it a visual-overhaul. Change the interface completely and give it a new look. Try changing the colors (or the color scheme), or change the theme of the blog completely. Invest in a good theme, such as the theme pack from Elegant Themes. A new theme and/or a visual overhaul might just be the thing that reignites your creative spark.

5. Come up with a list of different kinds of posts that you can do on your blog (I’m certain there will be many different sorts of posts you can do, no matter which niche you might be in), and develop a schedule so that you can do one type of post every day. For instance if you come up with 4 or 5 different types of posts, you can do each one of them starting Monday.

6. Guest posts. Take guest posters on, and allow them to do posts on your blog periodically. Guest posting is a great way of link-building, and it also allows you, the blog owner, to get fresh, quality and at times, thought-provoking content on your blog. Guest posts might even get a great amount of traffic and comments, and might provide you with inspiration for a new post by building upon a guest post on your blog.

7. Take a break. Seriously, take some days off from blogging – take a blogging vacation. Travel, go ona road trip, visit people such as your friends and family, do something that you might’ve been planning to do for a while, or simply relax at home with your guitar. Do a post when you really want to do one. You’ll come back more motivated than ever!

8. Write as many posts as you can over the weekend, when you have free time or when you really feel like writing, and put them on schedule. This gives you a list of ‘buffer’ or reserve posts that you can use when you don’t feel like writing. You can then put these posts on schedule so that your blog remains updated with fresh content.

9. Set up blogging goals, and stick to them. Yes, it’s probably easier said than done. But give it a try. Write down your goals – they could be anything, such as writing at least 2 or 3 posts in the weekdays, and then doing one detailed, in-depth and thorough post on the weekend. Keep your goals to yourself, in order to avoid people talking you out of them.

10. Learn from some of the big bloggers out there. Follow some of the big bloggers in your industry/niche and observe how the blog owners keep their blogs fresh and updated. Try learning from them, and emulating and incorporating those best-practices yourself. A great way to connect and speak with these people is over Facebook and Twitter!

As a blogger or an online publisher, what do you do to keep yourself motivated, inspired, focused and driven? Let us know in the comments!

Essential List of Wordpress Plugins that Every Blogger Must Use

One of the best aspects of choosing Wordpress as your CMS-of-choice is the fact that there is a plugin for virtually everything on it!

Here is a comprehensive list of some of the best plugins on the Wordpress platform. (All links are direct, no affiliate links)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

1. Wordpress SEO by Yoast (Free): The complete SEO solution for Wordpress! Handles all aspects of your Wordpress blog’s SEO for you, allowing you to optimize the content and various parts of your blog for search engines – which means you improve your on-page SEO, and get more traffic and visitors to your blog. Super-easy to use and get the hang of, even if you’re relatively unfamiliar with search engine optimization. Should be one of the first plugins your install on your Wordpress blog.

2. Google XML Sitemaps (Free): Google’s XML sitemaps automatically generates a sitemap for your blog and submits it to Google as well. This allows search engine bots/crawlers to find your blog easily, and index all pages on it in a much better manner. In addition, the plugin also automatically informs search engines whenever new content is uploaded on your blog, saving you the hassle of doing this manually.

3. SEO Friendly Images (Free): Self-explanatory. The plugin optimizes any and all images on your website for search engines by automatically adding ALT and Title attributes to them. As you might or might not know, filling out both these fields is essential, as it allows search engines to ‘see’ and index your images, bringing you traffic from sources such as Google Images. The title tag also lets your visitors know what the image is about if they hover their mouse over it.

4. SEOPressor ($47, $97): A premium SEO plugin for Wordpress, SEOPressor claims it will ‘skyrocket your website’s search engine ranking (SERP)’ by automating the optimization process. It strengthens your on-page optimization factors such as <Header> tags, Keyword density and placement, images and links, ALT tag for images and the like, and then provides an SEO score for the page as well as suggestion on how to optimize and tweak your content even more. Their claim of the plugin being akin to an SEO expert optimizing your website isn’t far from the truth!

5. 404 Redirection (Free): An absolute life-saver! 404 Redirection lets you redirect all 404s (‘Page Not Found’) to your homepage. This improves your bounce-rate, among other SEO metrics. It redirects your visitors to your homepage instead of taking them to an erroneous page, it prevents your blog from losing its rankings in search engines, and most importantly, it prevents your blog from losing valuable link-juice and prevent you from losing your Page Rank.

Speed

1. W3 Total Cache (Free): Optimizes your Wordpress blog for speed and page-load times. Your Wordpress blog, and its pages load up super-fast, as this plugin improves server performance through (i) caching, and (ii) CDN integration. Needless to say, the difference in speed is pretty great, and certainly noticeable!

Social

1. Digg Digg (Free): Puts a floating bar (or a normal ‘fixed’ one at the top of the posts) – anywhere on your blog – with share buttons, similar to what websites such as Mashable have. The bar contains all popular social sharing buttons, such as for Facebook, Twitter, Digg, G+, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Buffer and a whole lot of others. This allows visitors on your website to easily ‘like’ your content, and be able to share it on their social media profiles with one click of the mouse. You can choose which social buttons you would like to have displayed on the bar, as well as in which order.

2. WP Tweet This Button (Free): The plugin does a good job of adding a ‘Tweet This’ button on every post on your blog, and/or the sidebar. You can choose from various button types and sizes.

3. Facebook Like Button (Free): Similar in function to the Tweet This plugin, The Facebook Like Button, as the name implies, puts up a Facebook ‘like’ button anywhere on your blog, allowing visitors to ‘like’ your posts and hence spreading the word about your blog. Once again, you can choose where to place it on your blog, as well as choose whether you would want to display a ‘like count’ with each button.

Backups:

1. WP-DBManager (Free): This will probably be one of those plugins that sits there and is rarely used, but once it is needed, it will be indispensable! WP-DBManager manages all aspects of your Wordpress database, allowing you to optimize, backup, repair and restore your database in case something goes wrong, you end up with a corrupt database and/or your database ends up gets wiped off. Make sure you schedule automatic backups for at least once-a-week.

2. Backup (Free): Another great Wordpress backup solution which allows you to make periodic backups of your (complete) Wordpress blog to Google Drive. You can choose to make a comprehensive backup of all the things in your blog, or a selective list of things.  

3. VaultPress ($15, $40, $350): A premium backup solution, VaultPress provides a slew of features in order to back up your blog, including real-time backups which backs up your database every time something changes (new post, comment, page/post updated, etc), and then allows you to choose from a list of backups and seamlessly restores those backups for you. A nice (added) feature of the plugin is its security suite, which safeguards your blogs by continuously monitoring security threats. Certainly worth the money!

4. Backup Buddy ($75, $100, $150): One of the most popular backup solutions for Wordpress, Backup Buddy does a brilliant job of backing up your entire Wordpress blog – including posts, pages, widgets, themes, plugins and the database, and then restore the backup to any service of your choice – Dropbox, Amazon S3, an FTP server, your email (time to put that massive amount of storage offered by Gmail to use!) or simply on your desktop. You can then of course, easily restore your backups. However one of the biggest advantages of Backup Buddy is the fact that it lets you flawlessly move (migrate) your Wordpress blog if you’re planning on switching hosting for instance – something which can turn out to be a lifesaver!

Analytics

1. Google Analytics for Wordpress by Yoast (Free): When it comes to monitoring various aspects of your website and its health – such as visitors, traffic sources, and other vital stats – Google Analytics is the undisputed king! The Analytics for WP allows you to easily add and integrate your Analytics suite with your Wordpress blog by allowing you to add the tracking code in the plugin. It also adds extra analytics data available for your blog in your Google Analytics dashboard.

Comments and Feedback

1. Disqus (Free): One of the best comment plugin on Wordpress. Disqus allows visitors to easily leave a comment or two on your blog, either as a guest, or through logging into any of their social media profiles. It arranges comments into threads, so if a comments gets replies, it will be displayed as a single, continuous thread of comments. And the plugin looks fantastic, and gives your comments system new life!

2. CommentLuv (Free, $67, $87, 97): CommentLuv actually encourages your visitors to leave a comment on your blog (and come back again) by giving them a free backlink to their blog, and at the same time, it also allows them to share your post on their social media profiles, which means more exposure for you; a win-win for all. The plugin offers a whole host of features (which you can read more about on their homepage). It’s a good alternative to Disqus.