It’s no use putting on a friendly face, and hoping that your visitors will be happy – you have to work to keep them happy.

Visitor satisfaction must run through all aspects of your website. Much is commonsense:

• Encourage customer feedback
• Prompt response to feedback
• Clear site policies
• Consistent navigation

Most of all, you have to overdeliver in every department. There are a couple of essential tools which I have added to my WordPress Installation pack.

Getting Visitors

I’ve mentioned TailHitter before. With a few server moves and reconfigurations coming up, I’ve gone ahead and installed it today. Very simple, and the HitTail code works fine. One thing to watch – WP-Cache will still be holding pages without the HitTail code. Normally this will not matter, but if you want to test the search results on HitTail, disable the cache first – or at least view the source before you test to make sure the HitTail code is at the bottom of the page.

Obviously the TailHitter plugin is not absolutely vital, as you can easily paste the code into your footer.php. But then you run the risk of losing HitTail when you change themes. And HitTail certainly is essential, especially as part of my marketing tool trio.

Keeping Visitors

When you’ve gone to all that trouble to attract visitors, what is the point of being rude to them? One bad feature of WordPress is the way it adds the nofollow tag to links in comments. I won’t bore you by discussing the pros and cons of no follow, chiefly because their are no pros.

Suffice to say, that DoFollow is an essential part of your visitor management system. Let the good guys have their say and recognize their contribution with a fair link that search engines will follow. You can easily blacklist the bad guys with Akismet, and help us all in the process.

Today I found a better forms handler, reminded myself about the importance of backups, and found a potential method for making plug-in management much easier.

Contact Pages are important for any web site, but crucial for a credible web business site. My current method works fine on standard contact forms, but to build a business web site, you also need surveys, polls, and all manner of related feedback mechanisms.

I ran into some problems with the plug-in I described in my post about implementing my email policy. Try as I might, I could not configure a check-box group that looked right, or even readable. I had used an extremely good survey tool on another site, so I tried that. SurveyGizmo describes itself as More than “Just” a Survey Tool, and I can certainly endorse that.

SurveyGizmo offers a very powerful free survey tool, with plenty of features that allow polls, quizzes and landing pages amongst many other things. There are a whole host of extra options in the paid-for versions. For some reason, I could not get the survey form to display on my website, so I moved on. In hindsight, this could have been a mistake, as I think the problem might have been a temporary overload on this server. However, I had moved on by that time, but I will come back to SurveyGizmo later to see if the problem is repeatable.

I’m actually pleased to have had this problem, as I found another really good forms plugin. cforms II has loads of features, which I will explore and report on later. For now, I have used it for my First Time Visitor Survey. This type of page is crucial for any web business. I have recently developed a range of standard pages that should be a part of any business web site. Some are not really useful until the site gets busy, but it is best to get them built early on, to save time when you are busy with visitors, and the pages become essential. I describe my standard opening pages in my web business management website, and I include customizable versions of all these pages in my WordPress installation wizard.

Other Business Web Site Essentials

When you build a business web site, as well as visitor optimization, you need to construct a technical toolkit of plug-ins that add security and help efficiency.

Managing these plugins can become arduous, but I found a plug-in that helps you manage plug-ins – PlugInstaller.

Installation is very straightforward – a standard plug-in install, because the tool is obviously unavailable before it is installed. I’m hoping that future plug-in installs will be much easier. The first signs are hopeful – a simple click of the Check for updated plugins button and after a couple of minutes, PlugInstaller’s list shows 4 updates, 2 of which I knew about, but had forgotten. A slight problem, due to my server setup I think is an inability to run programs, so it means I have to activate plugins manually after updating – I can live with that for now.

One reason why I wanted to start using PlugInstaller now, is to install more plug-ins, especially a backup plug-in. Recent problems with the hosting provider of another of my sites, and one of my clients, have reminded me of the need for regular backups. WordPress Database Backup is recognized as being the best.

Hoping for a simple install, I realized that the activation warning I got from PlugInstaller is more serious than I thought. The plug-in is still excellent for checking for updates, but will not install them on my server. I will spend some time on server configuration later, but for now, I have a workround in the form of another plug-in manager – OneClick.

OneClick handles the transfer to your plug-in folder in a different way, and even has a Firefox extension to install direct from a website. Works well with PlugInstaller, so I will probably keep them both. OneClick adds a tab on the WordPress Dashboard, and all you need to do is put the url for that page in your Firefox extension (through Tools – Add-ons).

Installation of WordPress Database Backup was a cinch. Right-click on the file link, send it direct to the plug-ins folder, then activate it in PlugInstaller. All that remains is to goto Manage tab and select Database. With a daily backup automated to my admin email address, I am hoping that I have achieved set and forget security in less than a minute.

Whilst covering plug-ins, I must finally mention one that is indispensable whenever I build a business web site. aLinks is an easy way to establish a database of common links. It can also be used to help manage internal links, but I use it mainly to manage external ones. All I have to do, is type the name, e.g. aLinks, and it automatically converts that into an external link, with optional open in new window and graphic. It has a lot more, including statistics tracking which links are clicked. I am sure I will be mentioning this again – I use it everyday.

I discuss the merits, or otherwise, of SEO on my web business site. Keywords for SEO are generally recognized as being unimportant, to the extent that free WordPress.com sites do not have them. However, there is an alternative, as I describe in my free WordPress.com tag feed page. I think tagging is still important.

Tagging serves a number of purposes, definitely in order of importance:

1. Helps visitors find related content.
2. Makes me focus on what is important in the post or page.
3. Tells search engines what the article is about.

example upgrade-wordpress
All aspects of WordPress can be upgraded by tweaking the code. This is not a significant part of this site about business web hosting, but it is an important one. I try to find ready made extras for my WordPress Hosting setup, but if they do not quite do what I want, I am happy to apply one or two code tweaks to upgrade them.

WordPress upgrades are not important enough to warrant a category, but they are quite closely related to business web hosting. They will crop up across categories, and I might even do a post that is focused just on upgrading WordPress. My answer is to tag them.

The secret to choosing good tags is to focus on what visitors are looking for. They should complement and not duplicate categories. I’ll write more on technical tools to help choosing tags later, to link in to the advice on my web business management site.

My chosen WordPress plug-in for managing tags is UTW. I use it in conjunction with some other plug-ins to help focus every article on being accessible to visitors – a process I’ve heard referred to as Visitor Optimization. I call it looking after your customers – a maxim that’s served many a shrewd business owner for centuries.

The related plug-ins are:

Google Sitemap Generator

Not directly related to WordPress tags, but very important for building sitemaps (and not just for Google). I use the extra features of version 3 with no problems, despite it being beta software. Included here as it links with…

Tag Warrior – Sitemap link

… this plug-in which adds tags index pages to your sitemap.

All in One SEO Pack

A new one for me, recommended by many. It should link titles and UTW, but that means, it aint all in one.

SEO Title Tag

Now this takes me back to a pre-WordPress life. Good page titles to get attention separate from good article headlines to maintain interest. I often tried to get round this with a headline starting the post, but this is better. My only beef is the confusion with the tag word. I keep tags for in-article keywords, usually duplicated in meta-keywords. Meta-titles and meta-descriptions adequately describe the header parts of an html page.

I’ll write more in-depth articles on each of these in future. The technical part of this is quite simple, but I think it warrants further explanation.

One final point that relates strongly to tags, and is vital to every website. You need HitTail. The HitTail code can go anywhere in the body – I put it in footer.php just before </body>. There is also a plugin on the HitTail site and one called TailHitter – I’ll try this soon to avoid problems when changing themes.