When you are ready to start your own blog, use the powerful publishing platform that Wordpress offers and you are sure to be impressed with its many user-friendly features. Just because a blog platform is simple to use, doesn’t mean that it can’t produce the most effective, professional, and widely visited blogs on the web. Learn how these ten features make Wordpress a truly outstanding content management system.

1. Design Customization Options

Wordpress allows users to easily apply existing themes or add their own. Many themes are free and others are available for purchase. Wordpress also utilizes templates to produce blog pages and then the user is able to use an editor function as well as template tags to make the design process even more simple and dynamic. Multiple plugins make this publishing platform highly extensible. They broaden the functionality and can essentially make a blog do anything the user desires.

2. Management and Administrative Control

Wordpress is locally installed so you, the user, will have total control over the weblog. It also has a portable core that allows for more directory options. It offers Universal Coordinated Time so you can easily organize comments. User levels are feasible with this publishing platform and it is also possible to create user profiles. It is very easy to install and upgrade too. The pages are generated so there is no need to rebuild them when you update your blog. It even offers users the ability to offer their blog in any locale in any language.

3. Many Blogroll Management Abilities

While the Links Manager lets the user add and organize links easily, bookmarklets, categorization tools, importing and exporting ability, as well as blogroll display options help to manage the blogs that you read often.

4. SEO Optimization

Wordpress is search engine friendly right out of the box. It is optimized to rank well because it comes with many features built right in to make it even better such as customizable permalinks, RSS feeds and pinging search engines with updates.

5. Archive and Search Choices

As your blog progresses, you will no doubt find the organizational tools that Wordpress offers to be invaluable. Additionally, those visiting your site will have the freedom to search for terms in your blog that are of interest to them. They can then be directed to the pages in the blog that are the most relevant and therefore encourage them to return again and again.

6. Publicity & Interactivity

Increase your readership with the publicity options that Wordpress offers. Readers can subscribe to your feed that can include anything you choose. Lastly, it can handle pinkbacks and trackbacks right out of the box. Being a blog, your readers can easily interact with you and leave their feedback and thoughts through their comments.

7. Community Moderation Options

Wordpress will help you to keep in close touch with your readership and build relationships. It also allows the user to moderate comments, screen out comments based on selected words that you don‘t want posted, screen out comments by anyone that you designate by IP address, as well as screen out comments with too many links in them. Wordpress will also notify you by email whenever a comment is posted on your blog.

8. Content Creation Flexibility

Wordpress is a very user friendly publishing platform that can be used to blog news and updates or create static content such as about and contact pages or even pages about the services you offer.

9. Many Project Options

With Wordpress, you can do a lot more than blogging. You can hack Wordpress to become anything from a portfolio site for your design business, a web directory and even a fully functional e-commerce store that takes orders online and processes orders.

10. Affordability

There is no cost to use Wordpress! What price is better than free?

Flexibility, top of the line features, and a price that everyone can afford makes Wordpress the content management system of choice for many successful bloggers. Create an appealing blog and even more with this specialized publishing platform that is sure to make an impression on your readership. Maintain the utmost control over your content and publicize your blog in the most effective and professional way possible with Wordpress.

This guest post was written by Tom Walker, a UK based designer and blogger who works with a supplier of Canon Pixma printer cartridges, toners and paper. For more of his writing on advertising, design and media, click here.

Keywords are probably the most important factor that drives traffic to any website or blog. So it is very important to choose the right keywords and to make a good shot. Even if your blog is not so popular and has no page rank, or page rank is very low, keywords and keyword phrases can get you even more visitors than you think.

To choose the right keyword try Google Keyword tool. With this tool you can find out which keywords and keyword phrases are the most popular and can give you a benefit. It will give you many ideas. All keywords may be sorted in the “most popular” order so you can choose any keyword you want. You may also try your own phrases and not identically the same. Try to think like a reader who puts a keyword or a phrase in a search box.

Let say you try to sell something on your website. It is very important to use several keywords and/or phrases that are related to your goods. On the other hand unique and a little bit different keywords may get you traffic as well. Readers may be interested in something new that is not outmoded. But remember not to deviate from the real keywords and phrases otherwise you will get no benefit from it. Do not forget to read about similar keywords in my previous post.

I hope this will help you to make your website or blog more visible among other similar websites.

Spammers are everywhere. People spam because they want to get back links to make their website popular. They also try to advertise their products and everything that may help them earn money. Advertising takes time, costs money so spammers use software that does everything automatically.

Every day I log in my Wordpress account and see so many comments that Akismet has recognized as spam. I may exclude three types of spammers.

• Spammers who leave comment to show their website or blog. Usually they leave comment in many posts. This way Akismet recognizes it as spamming. They are regular people and that’s all.
• Spammers also use links when leave a comment. I don’t know how but Akismet recognizes a link as a spammy link. Everyone may leave an URL but Akismet recognizes which link is bad. If you leave a link in a comment area your comment will look like a spammy comment as well.
• And spammers who use software to leave their comments including links in it. Usually they advertise diet pills and so on.

I will show you several comments that Akismet has blocked. I reviewed about twenty comments and almost every one was about d1et pills, g@mbling, c@sino, shoes, even about Haiti. How could I forget v1agra pi77s? Well, I also found a comment about wallpapers, Adidas and many more. You can see that I use symbols in several words. That is because I don’t want my blog to be penalized and appear as a spammy blog. Fight spammers as Google offers to fight.

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of ArticlesZoom.org. All opinions are 100% mine.

There are many websites that allow you to submit articles to article directory and share them with the rest of the world. People like to share interesting and useful information but the advantage of the directory is that most bloggers can find all the newest and most rated articles in one e-library.

If you are creative and have something interesting to say that may be interesting and useful for other people you can submit your new posts and increase your blog’s traffic as well. There is nothing special and everything may be done easily but before submitting any article I offer you to read submission guidelines to avoid deletion of the article from the directory. As a blogger I can say that these requirements are not so strict so anyone can do it.

Articles Zoom is a free general article directory for readers and authors. Good news is that mobile phone users can browse the directory by phone wherever they are. So if you have the iPhone, Android, Nexus One or Nokia you can reach the directory easily. Your browser will be detected automatically.

You can also follow them on twitter because all the articles are promoted via twitter. I believe you will find a lot of interesting articles in the directory.

Sometimes it is useful to add Wordpress music or video player in your Wordpress blog. There are many different players but not all can be used in an article. Long time ago I wrote how to add music to Wordpress blog but this player can be used in your sidebar only so I will tell you about the player which may be used in the blog articles.

Let say you have written an article and decided to add a music track or a part of the speech in your article. WordTube will also help you to put music, videos even flash movies onto your Wordpress posts and pages. This is very useful plug-in for me so I hope it will help you too.

This plug-in is fully customizable. Skins can be used to change the look of the player. With this player you can also show your audio or video files in a playlist.

Many bloggers always ask about Page speed and relevancy. We know that page speed is a new ranking factor so there are many questions. Bloggers started to think that Page speed is much more important than relevancy.

With no doubt I can say that relevancy is the most important and I believe it will be for a long time. Let say we have two Websites that are equally relevant, same back links and everything else is the same so you would prefer a Website which is a little bit faster. That is why page speed may be a factor in ranking two relevant Websites.

Relevancy is primary component and there are over 200 scoring signals that try to return the most relevant, useful search results.

Google cares about relevancy and their philosophy is simple. Their aim is to return the best page to users, to give them information about what they typed in. However page speed is a ranking factor. It is not as important as relevancy but can help bloggers who care about page speed. Google wants to show that to users.

Most bloggers use Google Feedburner to share content with their readers, however, not every blogger set up their Feedburner account properly. Feedburner has many options that can help bloggers get more traffic and new RSS readers. Most of all we care about regular readers so I will tell you how to get more visitors and make them visit your blog on a regular basis.

Feedburner has a service called Headline animator. Well, Headline animator is a simple animated banner. It shows your five most recent articles. Usage is very simple. Just paste a HTML code whereever you can. I can suggest popular forums but this banner may be used in email signatures too. To find Headline animator log in your Feedburner account, click on Publicize and than click on Headline animator. You will see many options here. Do not be afraid to change these settings because you may use default settings but I offer you to make your banner as catchy as possible.

We are almost done. For example, I have chosen a banner for email signature. Now click activate button and choose where you want to add your code. And again I choose Email signature and click next. That is it, just copy the code and paste it where you want to see your banner. Steps to make a banner for blogs or forums are the same. I hope it will help bloggers get more readers.