Optimising your dental blog
WordPress plugins to boost your blogging efficiency
Whilst WordPress is arguably not the best tool for building admin-friendly dental websites, it is our tool of choice for building blogs.
WordPress was initially developed as a blogging platform and in the opinion of many, is still best suited for that purpose today. In fact for publishing blog articles simply and quickly, there is currently no better tool.
One of the strengths and weaknesses of WordPress is the huge range of “plugins” that are available to boost its functionality. Why strengths and weaknesses? Well, the core code which runs WordPress is updated very regularly, typically half a dozen times per year and more. Unfortunately this often means that popular plugins developed outside of the WordPress core become incompatible and can “break” the platform.
So on one hand you have a wide variety of tools available to enhance the core system; on the other, there can be fairly serious compatibility problems if you don’t choose plugins which are well-maintained and kept in step with updates to the main system.
So when using WordPress for dental practice blogging you have to exercise some caution when selecting plugins to enhance the core functionality. In this article we will take a quick look at some of the popular plugins that fit the bill and which shouldn’t cause any conflicts when the WordPress core is updated.
Useful, well-supported WordPress plugins
- Akismet – this is the de facto anti-spam system which ships with the WordPress core as standard. You need to enable it and register for a user code at the Akismet site but it’s well worth the effort to help prevent spam comments on your articles.
- Google XML Sitemaps – this automatically creates a sitemap of your entire blog in a Google friendly format. You can read more about sitemaps and why they are important here.
- Google Analytics for WordPress (Joost) – this includes your analytics code in your blog pages as well as lots of additional advanced features to allow you to track user activity on your dental blog.
- All In One SEO Pack – this is our preferred option for optimising your blog posts for SEO. It creates additional input fields for unique page titles, URLs, meta descriptions etc. There is another excellent SEO tool, created by the same guy who developed the analytics plugin mentioned above (Joost de Valk), but we prefer the simplicity and overall user control offered by All In One SEO Pack. Do check them both out though.
- Updraft Plus – database backup. This plugin will automatically back-up your WordPress installation and files and email them to you on a pre-determined schedule. This is a great back-up for your blog just in case your host messes up with their own back-up systems.
There are a couple more areas which you need to cover with suitable plugins where applicable. An obvious one is “social share” buttons and there are lots of well-supported options for this.
Another is newsletter integration, for example sign-up to MailChimp – again there are plugins for this which save you having to delve into the core WordPress code.
Finally you may wish to consider one of the numerous plugins which will post excerpts of your blog to your social media channels; Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc are all catered for depending on your needs.
Summary
Blogging is a “must have” tool for dental website owners who are keen to provide useful new content for their users and to help with SEO. WordPress is widely regarded as the best blogging platform available and comes with many plugins which help to improve the blogging process and increase efficiency. However, it is important to make sure that you select well-supported plugins and keep these up-to-date in line with the WordPress core.
At Dental Media we customise blogs for dentists and provide blog writing services. Each blog we build comes equipped with the latest plugins to help you blog effectively along with useful training documentation. We also provide cost-effective maintenance services to keep your WordPress blog up-to-date and secure without the need for expensive monthly service contracts. Please call us on 01332 672548 for a no-obligation discussion about our blogging services for dentists.