I typically jump on the band wagon of disliking catch-phrases like the word “hacks.” Despite my usual disposition, I cannot help myself from enjoying this one. I like it when someone takes a negative idea and flips it around to mean something positive. I use this same mentality to study black hat tricks and turn those strategies against them. Here is a list of my favorite WordPress Hacks. Most of these tips can be set up in under 10 minutes. Have fun trying these out on your own sites.
#1 CRO For Free With Google Content Experiments
The entire marketing world is full of CRO articles. For that reason this is not a tip about what to test, but rather a tip about how to run tests. I like to take advantage of WordPress ability to quickly publish posts and pages. For that reason, I use Content Experiments to run free tests on my WP sites. Here is how you do it. First, install the Duplicate Post plugin. This will let you clone any page or post on your site to a new draft. After you have created a draft you can make changes to your page and publish it under an original URL. You should probably keep the URL similar to its counter-part. For example: domain.com/test and domain.com/test2. Secondly, you will need to take both URLs to Google’s content experiments and set up your test. This takes less than 5 minutes to do and should be really easy. That’s it! You can have an A/B test set up and ready to go in less time than it took me to write this article. I recommend you run these ALL THE TIME! There is nothing like the feeling of doubling your sales through a successful conversion rate test.
#2 Use Facebook To Hack Your Local SEO Strategy
If you are reading this post I am going to assume that you know the basics of Local SEO. But if you do not, check out this article about the topic. This hack is going to use Facebook’s social graph to add local citations to your Facebook shares. When you share a link on Facebook it will automatically pull in a summary of that page and Facebook graciously lets you control that summary. I recommend local businesses add their NAP (Name, Address and Phone Number) to their FB snippet. Here are two quick ways to set this up. If you know how to edit your theme files, you can use the Ginza Metrics tool to create a social graph code. Once you have the code, follow their instructions on pasting it into your site. If you are unfamiliar with code, you can use the plugin by Wonderm00n to accomplish this hack.
#3 Premise Landing Pages For Non-Coders
Premise is probably the easiest “non-developer” method of creating landing pages. This platform will let you set up a landing with built- in CRO and split testing. Premise was built for WordPress, so it is extremely easily to set up and start using. The best thing about Premise is the fact that the developers have literally thought of everything for you. This plugin has CRO, SEO and Content Strategy built in.
#4 Hack Your Link Building With 404 Pages
The first part of this hack is going to be a kick in the but! You need to go design a custom 404 page for your site. Here is an easy to use plugin for non-developers. Custom 404 pages are great for CRO as well because they will keep visitors engaged in your site, and they can direct them back to important pages. Ok, now that you are planning on building a pretty 404 page, you can read this hack. Use Google Webmaster Tools to find all the links that point to 404 pages in your site. Broken links are usually the result of someone mis-spelling one of your URLs. Once you have a list of those links you can create a 301 re-direct in your site to point them to a relevant page. If you are able to edit the .htacess file on your site, you can do this manually. If you prefer to use WP plugins, you can use a trusty WordPress plugin to accomplish this as well.
#5: The “Anti-Hack” Hack.
Did you know that having Malware on your site can effect your rankings? WordPress is great for a lot of reasons, but it sucks for security. If you have a WordPress site it will get targeted by hackers so you need to protect it. The Wordfence plugin is the best security plugin I have used. This has saved our sites on numerous occasions. Go get it, you will thank me for it!
#6 Hack Your Keyword Research
Did you know that people LOVE to search inside your site? People will tell you what they want, how they are “phrasing” their searches and what their intentions were for visiting your site. If you have a search bar on your site you need to capture those searches. Use the Search Meter plugin to find out what people are searching for, and use that information to produce content that will “fill the need.”
#7: Hack Your Guest Blogging
I am going to end on this hack because it is one of my favorites. Seer Interactive has built a plugin that makes link building outreach really easy. Use their comment plugin will scan all of the “URLS” in your blog comments and pull out their Moz ranks. The genius part of this strategy is the fact that you are going to find sites in your niche that are owned by people who already know you. You can use this plugin to build an outreach list of high-quality bloggers who already know about you, and who have a healthy Moz rank. That’s it! These are some of my best WP hacks. I hope they help all of you boost your inbound marketing efforts. If you can think of anything that I should have added in this list, please tell me about it in the comments below.
About the Author
Bryant owns marketing companies. In fact, he owns marketing companies to market his marketing companies. He even owns companies so his marketing companies can market them! 🙂 If you like the helpful and witty methods in which Bryant writes blog posts, you should follow him on Twitter @bryantjaquez. You can also read more of his content on the blogs of Noble Creative or BrewSEO.