Weekly Links Roundup – CRO, Traffic, 504 Errors, Tag Clouds

This week’s WordPress and web marketing links.

CRO (conversion rate optimization) is something I’m always trying to increase for my design clients. Here’s a great post showing how a few key small changes in design can have a huge impact on CRO – in this case increasing conversions by over 35%! Now, at the beginning of the year, is a great time to take a hard look at your own WordPress site to see how you can improve, too. If you need help, just get in touch.

A great resolution for January (or really anytime) is ‘drive more traffic to my blog.’ Here’s a quick list of 9 ways to get more traffic, and many are simple and straightforward to put into practice. Giving people convenient ways of following your blog is important; this could be an RSS feed or a digest that’s sent to their email inbox when you publish a new post.

When your website is down and you don’t know why, that’s scary – and sometimes infuriating, confusing, and various other emotions. If you don’t have IT help to turn to and aren’t using a service like WP Minder, you can try to step back, take a deep breath and try to fix it on your own. One common error you might see is the 504 error page. What does it mean? What caused it? Learn how to troubleshoot a 504 error.

Finally… tag clouds are fun. If you have lots of blog posts and tags, they’re a neat way to navigate through your archives. Here’s a collection of tag cloud widgets for your enjoyment. One of my favorites is Cool Tag Cloud which you can see in action here.