1. WordPress Chapter 12: Attracting a Crowd BTM 395: Internet Programming WordPress: The Missing ManualWordPress: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald. 1 st edition (2012) published by O’Reilly Media. ISBN-13: 978-1449309848

2. Encouraging your readers to share Sharing buttons (e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) make it easier for visitors to share your pages If you have a Facebook page (not to be confused with a Facebook profile), you can add a Facebook Like widget to your site You can use a plugin to let users rate or “like” individual posts

3. Informing readers and potential readers about site updates You can let people who leave comments subscribe to follow-up comments for that post You can let people who leave comments subscribe to any new updates on the site Plugins are available to let visitors receive notifications for any new posts You can connect your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media accounts to automatically create a message whenever you publish a new post With a plugin, you can display your live Twitter feed in a sidebar

4. Set up news feeds RSS is an informal web standard for automatically announcing new posts on a website WordPress automatically supports feeds for: –The entire site: http://mydomain.ca/feed –A specific category: http://mydomain.ca/category/category-name/feed –A specific tag: http://mydomain.ca/tag/tag-name/feed –A specific author: http://mydomain.ca/author/author-user-name/feed –All comments on a post: http://mydomain.ca/full-post-url/feed Feeds are on by default. You need to install a plugin to disable them.

5. Search engine optimization (SEO) SEO is all about increasing your findability when people search for related topics on the Web PageRank: Google's 1-10 ranking score (10 is best) Lots of online PageRank checkers exist (e.g. http://www.prchecker.info) http://www.prchecker.info SEO is a major science in web development—it is very involved Easiest WordPress option: Use a plugin that takes care of many things for you

6. Site statistics Jetpack includes a basic but functional tool; more advanced options exist Four site stats most helpful for improving your site: 1.Which posts get the most views? 2.Who are your top referrers? 3.Which search engine keywords lead to your site? 4.Who leaves the most comments?