WordPress Plugins

Readers who share your posts can bring you a whole lot of traffic to your website.

This WordPress Plugin, called “AddThis” allows your visitors to easily bookmark or share your posts with a variety of social websites, by email and even allows them to easily print your post. Perhaps more importantly, you get the ability to track the stats, or analytics, of those who not only share your posts but stats of how many clicks are made from that sharing. To do this, you’ll have to install the plugin and set up the analytics you want to track by setting up a free AddThis account.

With the AddThis plugin, you can add social bookmarking/sharing options, choosing from a variety of looks and positions on your WordPress blog. AddThis code can also be inserted to any HTML page, so is very versatile.

The image to the left gives you a peek at some custom widgets you can use on your website. There is also a library of custom icons made by 3rd party designers. You just have to check the terms of use before you use them on your site.

However even straight out of the box, you can add buttons to your site without any customization skills.

Below, are a few examples of how the widget can look straight out of the box:

AddThis also comes with in-depth stats that shows you shares over a time period you specify:

You’ll also have the ability to view your most popular posts and find out what is popular among your readers. This will help you to decide what kind of topics your readers want so you can offer more posts of a similar nature.

…and the most popular services that people share to.

Other stats available to you include your audience profile, top keywords and countries.

Like I always tell my clients, “if you can’t track it, it’s probably not worth spending time on.” This WordPress plugin will help your readers be able to share your posts with their own audience and will allow you to see what’s working best for you in your own business.

Happy Blogging,

Best WordPress Plugins | Broken Link Checker

Avoiding a 404 error Page not found A link that doesn’t work anymore is called a broken link, a dead link or a dangling link.

Sometimes, links get broken. A page is deleted, a subdirectory forgotten, a site moved to a different domain. Most likely many of your blog posts contain links. It is almost inevitable that over time some of them will lead to a “404 Not Found” error page. Obviously you don’t want your readers to be annoyed by clicking a link that leads nowhere. You can check the links yourself but that might be quite a task if you have a lot of posts. You could use your webserver’s stats but that only works for local links.

A link may become broken for several reasons: The most common result of a dead link is the reader getting a 404 error which indicates that the web server responded and worked properly, but the specific page could not be found at the provided link.

Wikipedia notes that some news sites contribute to the link rot problem by keeping only recent news articles online where they are freely accessible at their original URLs, then removing them or moving them to a paid subscription area. This causes a heavy loss of supporting links in sites discussing and reporting newsworthy events and using news sites as references to their content.

Other reason for broken links is when the server that hosts the page the blogger is pointing to stops working or relocates to a new domain name. In this case, the reader will get aDNS error or, it may display a site completely unrelated to the intended link. This is a common problem when a domain names expires and is bought by another website owner.

There are numerous other reasons why a link might be broken and I won’t go in to all of them here however I want to share with you a way to know when this happens on your own website so that you can either correct the problem or unlink the text you have linked to.

The WordPress plugin I like best for this is called “Broken Link Checker.” This WordPress plugin locates broken links, missing images, deleted YouTube videos and more on your website. It periodically checks older content and always checks new or edited content. It also gives you a list of all your links that you can search and filter.

You can find Broken Link Checker here and the following tutural will show you how to set it up.

Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, you can find it under “Tools” in your WordPress dashboard. It lists your broken links:

broken links list