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The most popular content management systems have their passionate advocates, reminiscent of the Quark versus InDesign battles between art directors. Below, Joe Bachana, president and founder of technology agency DPCI, offers his three top choices in Web CMS for publishers who don’t want to go the enterprise route. “I did not include proprietary Web CMS software in my top-3 pick since I don’t think that small publishers can afford these solutions, certainly not in this economy,” says Bachana.

1. Drupal. “Hands down one of the best open-source initiatives for WCMS in history—the core codebase was built lean and the intent was to encourage enhancement by 3rd parties. What Dries Buytaert started 10 years ago is perhaps one of the most successful movements with thousands of developers worldwide contributing modules free of charge. This is by far the best solution for small publishers and the fastest growing WCMS platform today.

2. WordPress. “For rapid deployment of a blog-like site with some CMS capabilities, WordPress is the way to go. I also like that Matt Mullenweg is to WordPress as Dries Buytaert is to Drupal.”

3. Clickability. “Not so much for its functionality/feature set as the fact that small publishers that can’t afford to implement their own WCMS platform will need to go to a hosted solution. We’ve seen a number of small publishers get stuck with smaller SaaS providers that didn’t have a robust infrastructure or a rich enough feature set to assist the publisher with its business. I think Clickability is right in there for hosted WCMS

Top 3 Social Media Platforms

When picking a social media platform that is hosted, make sure you have a legal agreement that ensures you retain ownership and control over the content you upload as well as the user generated content, according to Bachana. “This way, if you decide to port over that content to a different system (internal or hosted), you will have legal rights to that content.”

1. Kickapps. “Comprehensive functionality, good video handling capabilities too so the publisher doesn’t need to integrate with other 3rd party video distribution platforms. Pricing seems to be reasonable for the small publisher and the product already has connectors with some popular WCM solutions such as Drupal.”

2. Lithium. “Similar kind of product and company to Kickapps, we had some good experience working with that solution at an implementation last year.”

3. Drupal Organic Groups module. “Drupal has a number of modules that can make implementation of a social media platform attainable. That in addition to video handling modules make this worth looking at should the small
publisher want to spend a little more money up front to get their own application.”
 

original: here

One of the most important things to change on your blog for seach engine optimisation or SEO is your slug.

Just in case you have been living under a stone like our erstwhile friend the slug and do not kjnow what SEO is, then a quick definition is in order.  Search engine optimisation is the the process of making your blog or website as attrative to Google and it’s chums yahoo and MSN so that when someone type in a phrase, for example wordpress coaching (give it a go and see who is there) you come out on the first page near the top.

What is A Slug

The slug is the bit that follows your domain name and points to your post, for example:

wpdude.com/this-is-a-slug

By default on a WordPress blog, the slug looks something like this:

wpdude.com/?p=22

As far as a search engine is concerned this is not a very useful, it says nothing about the post, there are none of the key phrases people would type in to identify the post, in short, you are going to have a very hard job to drag people in from Google with a slug like that.

Changing Your Slug To Something Useful

All is not lost, you can change the default slug to something far more useful.  From your WordPress blogs’ admin console, scroll down to settings and  click on permalinks.

From there select a custom permalink structure and set it to be /%postname%

What this does is to change the default slug configuration to be the title of your post, for example this post would have the slug:

how-to-change-your-slug-for-seo

The search engine has been fed much more information about what my post is about.

Removing Useless Words

There is a school of thought in SEO circles that you should remove all useless words from your slug and leave only hardcore keywords.  The things to remove are “a, the, it, then” etc etc.

There is a plugin to do this for you, imaginatively called Seo Slugs, download it and activate the plugin.  From that point forward your slugs will be trimmmed down by default. My new slug for this post now becomes:

change-slug-seo

The superflous words are cut down and hopefully Gooogle juice will flow in plenty.

Quick Get The Table Salt It’s Eatin’ The Lettuces

Don’t pour salt on your slug and kill it off, treat is nicely and you will be rewarded with organic search traffic from Google.

Get creative, think what people will type into google to find a post like yours, and match this to your slug.

Original : here

Two reasons.

1. As long as search engines are concerned, on most blogs category pages will carry irrelevant information since category names are likely to be too general to rank for (like my categories WordPress, SEO etc.)
2. Category pages are source of duplicate content

As I already stated before, tags are the real deal for any blog.

I also decided to call upon my plugin skills again and came up with a plugin that will do all this for you automatically.

As an added bonus I included nofollow_the_author_posts_link function, which you can use to replace your the_author_posts_link in theme templates, adding nofollow to author pages.

Download WP-Nofollow-Categories.

original :here

You might have noticed that throughout this series on WordPress SEO, I’ve been doing something rather peculiar.  I’ve been linking to my own content far more than I’ve been linking out.  Now, this isn’t because I’m a stingy linker.  I just happen to have a goal in the methodology I’m using in this series with links.  That strategy is called deep linking, and it is one of the best ways to not only increase SEO, but also drive visitors deeper into your blog or website.

Deep linking is the art of linking relevant keywords to related content within your own site. Essentially, you are leveraging your own site’s equity for gain.  What gain? In order to understand what is to be gained, one must first understand how links affect SEO.

Links and SEO

As I mentioned in my previous post regarding keyword density, SEO is so much more than just optimizing important segments of your website structure.  It has to do with calculations based on several different variables.  That doesn’t mean to ignore structural SEO, it just meanst that your job isn’t finished.

Included in those variables is the number of links your site, page, or post has pointing to it.

So, if I were to link out to a post written by my friend Ian Stewart on WordPress Child Themes, the next time Google crawls my site, it’s going to register that link as a “vote”, for lack of a better word, for his post, and associate that post with the keywords I used in the link.  So, in essence, I just voted that his post should rank high for the keyphrase “WordPress Child Themes”.

Make sense?

Deep Links and SEO

I’ll freely admit that self-referential links probably don’t count nearly as much as incoming, external links.  But they do help.

So, what do you need to do? Here’s what I do:

When I write a post, I don’t do any links at first.  I just write.  I find the external links that I want to use and keep them open in separate tabs.  Then, once I’m done writing and proofreading, I start filling in external links wherever I find it beneficial. Linking out is always a good practice, and doing 100% deep links could hurt you.

Then, I read over my post one more time, this time keeping an eye out for words or phrases that may be related to content I’ve written in the past.  For instance, if I mention the word “homepage”, I might link to the post I did called “3 Ways to Optimize Your Blog Homepage”.  Sometimes, I may even reword my sentence to get that link to fit with a more relevant (and more desirable) keyword or keyphrase.  So I may modify my sentence to include the words “homepage design” or “homepage optimization”.

For me, I want this series’ opening post (with links to all the posts in the series) to rank well for the search term “WordPress SEO”.  This is actually pretty difficult, given that there are much older, established sites out there with many, many incoming links that I have to compete with.  So obviously, good SEO and deep linking won’t be enough to put me at the top of the list.  As it currently stands, I’m ranked at the top of the third page for that search term. It won’t bring in thousands of visitors a day, but it will net me long-tail benefits.

And for less competitive search terms like “WordPress theme search engine optimization”, I just so happen to be #2 in the search results.  That’s not bad at all, given I’ve got very few quality links back to that article.  I achieved that ranking nearly 100% through good SEO and deep linking.

Don’t Overdo it

When most people discover deep linking, they tend to go crazy with deep linking in posts.  Let me encourage you not to do that.

Deep linking is great, but use it in moderation.  Here are some quick tips for deciding when to deep link:

1. Only Deep link if the URL is relevant to the phrase. Don’t force it!
2. Keep deep links to around 5 per post. Posts that are littered with links tend to look spammy.
3. Deep link, and link out to others at an even ratio. Look for ways to link to other bloggers.
4. Remember that deep linking isn’t just for SEO. It can drive deep traffic too.
5. Keep links short. Don’t link entire sentences.

Remember, this is about gaining strategic advantages, not huge leaps ahead.  Deep linking won’t work overnight, and it won’t land you on the front page for competitive keywords.  But it is just one more tool you can use to give yourself the upper hand in the SEO battle

Search Engines love blogs. And we all know it well, which is the reason why we have blogs either on blogger.com or on self hosted WordPress. But when everyone had a new blog, then wouldn’t the advantages be cancelled out equally ? Probably yes. Only blogs that have managed to gather up some moss..err..the authority would have a clear advantage over others. Stories these blogs publish would most definitely be on the first page, even if they have a not-so-good onsite optimization. This is most likely due to the enviable amount of backlinks they have gathered.

So for comparatively new blogs , what are the chances of ranking high for freshly published stories ? Do they stand a chance to compete against the big boys ?

I’m happy to say that the answer is yes.

With the search engine love and the technical excellence of blogs, its quite possible to get a first page rank on fresh stories no matter what your competition is.

1. Write stories with lot of text and optimize it well

I’ve found that stories that have lot of text with optimized content do well on the SERPS, even when the stories are published minutes earlier. The possible reason is that such articles give search engines a lot to chew on and make out as to what “topic” the article is about. An adequate amount of text would be around 300-500 words in my opinion. However when the competition is tougher, writing even more lengthy stories with headings, titles, images and all possible on site optimization weapons do help.

2. Leverage on the title space

You have around 50 characters. Use that space to write the best titles that are relevant as well as attractive. Most of the times, the title relevancy to the keyword search is a huge factor in getting a top rank. so use it well.

3. If possible get some link backs from the social media

Its probably unfair to say that you need backlinks on a fresh story. Its not a necessary, however if you can manage to get a few, that would be great. And I’m not talking about the regular link back from a normal site, but some high-traffic social media sites. A dofollow is awesome, but even if its a nofollow but on a highly accessed page – great. Don’t ever spam for backlinks please, your story has to be equally interesting, worthy enough for good traffic.

4. Check what’s already there on the SERPS

A good strategy would be to find out if the story you are going to publish has competition already on the SERPS. Try searching for possible related searches on Google. Find out the age of the post, and if the top ten results are saturated with relevant stories. If the stories around the 5-10 results are not directly targeted to the search term (possibly a content match) then you have a higher chance to win.

5.  Be clever, use the headers wisely

When writing quick posts, bloggers don’t really make use of the header tags, or that’s what I see. We have a whole range of them starting with H1. A simple H1 is good, but if you use the others, its still a lot of added weight. So use them properly and include your possible keywords in them. Again, no keyword stemming please, but use it a natural looking way.

Having said that, there is no guarantee to a first page rank and a lot depends on your blogs history and general SEO health. But a good research and proper content design will do half the job in getting there. There are lot of young blogs that enjoy a steady and healthy traffic from search engines, due to their consistency in posting well optimized articles. They have very few backlinks, page ranks not exceeding PR 2 and domain ages of around 1 year or so. But almost all their stories are on the front page if not Rank No.1 – which is a good achievement I’d say.

Though there are dozens of top lists of WordPressWordPress reviews themes available online, we never seem to get enough. So after scrolling through hundreds of themes across the Web, we decided to come up with another of our lists of top themes that are a class apart in terms of uniqueness in design and visual appeal.

This is a collection of our top 12 in no particular order. Check them out. While most are free, there are few that are not, though they are too good to miss. Tell us about your favorite WordPress themes in the comments.

Infinity

Infinity makes you think you are looking at ultimate creativity in WordPress theme design. This three column theme has been put together beautifully with thumbnails, header and footer graphics, and a picture scroll. The color play is impressive. A great theme for designers and photo bloggers.

Red Passion

Red Passion has exquisite red floral graphics in the header area and one more in the background, and the combination of the two makes this theme a treat for sore eyes. The search box is located just below the blog title and description. There is also an RSS icon in the header area next to the search box.

F8

F8 is a magazine-like theme for photo bloggers who wish to also have their pictures do the talking. The clean white background gels with the black lines and the picture grid that run across the homepage. The theme can double as a portfolio site for designers and multimedia professionals. Note: F8 is not a free theme.

WP Coda

WP Coda is one of the most professional-looking themes in this collection. The color combination is fantastic. One thing that differentiates the theme from the rest is the sliding posts. The author says he had made this theme by modifying lots of existing code and using them with his design. The theme mimics the functionality of the popular coda website. Worth a look.

TV.Elements

TV. Elements is a neat Wordpress theme for video bloggers. There is a main video display and series of video scrolls on the right hand side. On the left side, there are ShareThis, subscribe, and comment links. Below the video window, you can add your post. The dark background gives it a necessary mystic look. Like F8, TV.ELements is not a free theme.

Wood World

Wood World is a neatly designed theme. I like how every post has been separated from each other. Each and every part of the theme, including a scrapedRSS icon and a search box with a wooden-look background, has been given detailed attention.

Notepad Chaos

Notepad Chaos is a vibrant, colorful, and floral theme with one of the most intricate designs. The sidebar elements have been done up with different post-it note designs, while the main posts are nestled in a white notepad design. The theme also has a handwritten search box, navigational links in the header, and sidebar headlines.

Agregado

Agregado is a another radical take on how a WordPress theme can be constructed. This theme suits your normal blogging requirements, as well as your lifestreaming requirements, served in a sidebar capsule. It has the snippet of the latest post shown on the home page, along with just the headlines of the older posts. The subcategories, pages, archives, search, etc. are tucked away so that the reader focuses on the latest content.

Intrablog

Intrablog is a theme with a very clean and fresh look. This is a result of the white and silver colors in the post and sidebar areas. It’s another unique take on WordPress theme design and suitable for personal blogs.

Hot Orange

Hot Orange has a red header with a neat floral design, a post area with a black background, and a silver color area that bridges the header and post area. Another good color combination and unique design.

Rainbow Feather

Rainbow Feather has shades of sky blue, yellow, blue, and pink colors joined together in horizontal blocks to form the header navigation area, main header, post area, and footer. This is one of the most striking themes that we have come across.

Motion

Motion is for those who are daring and can opt for a one column theme. There are three blocks of content that expand on a single click and contract when another is opened. There is a link to the older entries below these content blocks. The color combination of orange, silver, and black is attractive.

WordPress 2.7 completely overhauled the admin area of your blog, so isn’t it time you treated yourself with an overhaul of the front end also?

Why not pick something radically different than the usual blog look? Not only can you have a blog that stands out, you can completely change the function of WordPressWordPress reviews to be a photoblog or a CMS, the possibilities are pretty much limitless with this powerful program. Here are 10 of the best themes to choose from.

What are some of your favorite non-traditional themes?

Album

Album - The perfect theme for any artist, photographer or designer that wants to display their work.  Has seven different color schemes to better match your work.  Cost for an individual license is $59.95.

Blue Grace

Blue Grace - A 3-column theme that has the unusual distinction of not making you feel crowded as you read it.  Colors can be customized by playing around with a PSD file, and it is released under the GPL license.

Celebrity Gossip

Celebrity Gossip - Despite the name, Celebrity Gossip can be used for just about anything.  Thumbnails of images are auto generated from the first image in a post, but you can also override the selection manually.  Has 3 different color styles, widgets, 125×125 ads and more.  Cost for an individual license is $35.00.

Google Chrome

Google ChromeGoogle Chrome reviews - Can’t get enough of Google Chrome?  Well, you can now carry it over to your blog in a surprisingly effective translation.  Very open and clean, but we would warn to be wary of adding too many widgets as they would be very noticeable.  Released under the GPL license.

iQ2

iQ2 - A photoblog theme built around the PhotoQ Photoblog Plugin which gives you choice of colors for the theme, the ability to batch upload photos and a whole lot more.  No license is listed on the page, but seeing as there is an easy download link handy and donate button, one assumes it is free.

Over Easy

Over Easy - A CMS theme that features lots of highlighting for various articles with a really interesting sliding header to feature multiple pages.  Also has a blog hidden away in it so you can do normal blogging if you choose.  Cost for an individual license is $70.00.

THiCK

THiCK - A highly customizable theme built with the social media minded individual in mind.  Shows your latest Tweets, your social profiles, a LifeStream section for all of your latest activities, and has over 20 styles and colors available.  Cost for an individual license is $70.00.

TimesCafe News

TimeCafe News - This mixture of magazine style and CMS comes in three colors and caters heavily to those that use a lot of pages on their site.  Has lots of ad slots, video coding ready, FeedBurner options and more.  Cost for an individual license is $79.95.

Vigilance

Vigilance - A highly customizable theme that allows you to make all sorts of changes to the top image. Highlight box in posts, Google Analytics ready, multiple sidebar configurations and numerous changes allowed to the design.  Best of all it’s small in size and free to use.

WP Remix

WP Remix - A theme built around the idea of your WordPress site being used as a CMS, WP Remix comes bundled with 50 different page layouts allowing you to quickly change the look of your site, or even of a single page.  They also offer a magazine module separately.  Cost for an individual license is $75.00.

With more than 120 million blogs in existence, how do people find YOUR content on the Internet? The key starts with great search engine optimization (SEO), which is an art and a science that helps search engines discover your content and understand how relevant it is to specific search queries.

You can blog your heart out, but if you don’t have good SEO, then odds are you won’t have many readers.  Luckily, the WordPressWordPress reviews plugin community values SEO and has developed a number of plugins to help. Here are 20 of the best SEO plugins to help you choose the right tags, tell search robots what to work on, optimize your post titles and more.

Have another SEO plugin to recommend? Tell us more about it in the comments.

All in One SEO Pack - One of the most popular plugins ever for WordPress, this plugin does a bit of everything for you from helping choose the best post title and keywords, to helping you avoid duplicate content and more.

Automatic SEO Links - Automatic SEO Links allows you to choose a word or phrase for automatic linking, both internal and external, set anchor text, choose if it should be “nofollow” or not, and more.  One of the best features of this plugin is that it will only do this for the first occurrence of a word in a post so you don’t have to worry about spamming your post with numerous links to the same thing.

Google XML Sitemaps - An essential tool in any blogger’s armory of SEO tools.  While the name only mentions “GoogleGoogle reviews,” this plugin creates an XML-sitemap that can be read by Ask, MSN and Yahoo also.

HeadSpace2 - This plugin allows you to install all sorts of meta-data, add specific JavaScript and CSS to pages, suggests tags for your posts and a whole lot more.

Meta Robots WordPress plugin - An easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page you choose on your blog.  You can use it to make your front page links into “nofollows,” prevent indexing of search pages, disable author and date-based archives, prevent indexing of your login page and numerous other features.

Nofollow Case by Case - This plugin allows you to strip the “nofollow” command from your comments, and then you can apply it to only the comments you don’t wish to support.

Platinum SEO Plugin - The Platinum SEO Plugin offers you such features as automatic 301 redirects for permalink changes, auto-generation of META tags, post slug optimization, help in avoiding duplicate content and a host of other features.

Redirection - For any number of reasons you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, but then you risk losing that page’s status in search results.  Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more.

SEO Blogroll - Do you worry that the people you link to in your blogroll are feeding off of your PageRank?  With SEO Blogroll you can make separate sections for various groupings of links, with an unlimited number in each, and all of them will receive the “nofollow” attribute.

SEO for Paged Comments - With the introduction of paged comments in WordPress 2.7, there was a potential problem with search engines thinking you had duplicate content as the post would appear on each page.  This plugin aims to take care of this issue for you until the folks at WordPress change things up.

SEO friendly and HTML valid subheadings - Some themes for WordPress will confuse your sub-header tags based on the page they are to be displayed on, but this plugin will automatically reset them to make them more SEO friendly by moving them down one spot in the hierarchical tree.  In other words, h2 becomes h3, h3 becomes h4 and so on.

SEO Friendly Images - Images can be a great source of traffic as people search for images of various subjects, and this plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.

SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin - If you must have duplicate content on your site for whatever reason, SEO No Duplicate will allow you to state which version of the post search engines should index while ignoring the others.

SEO Post Link - The post slug is the blog title you see in a browser’s URL bar, and if it’s too long, search engines won’t take a liking to it.  SEO Post Link comes with an already populated list of words to cut from a title when it turns into a URL to make your post addresses that much friendlier.  You can set it so that it’s limited to a certain number of characters, cut short words, cut unnecessary words and more.

SEO Smart Links - Interlinking your blog can be the key to getting more people to read more of your posts, but it is time consuming and tedious to do it by hand.  SEO Smart Links does this for you automatically when you tell it what words to link to what URLs, and it also allows you to set “nofollow” and “open in window” comands for the links.

SEO Tag Cloud Widget - Love ‘em or hate ‘em, a lot of people use tag clouds on their blogs.  Since their inception they have been fairly unreadable by search engines, but with this plugin they will be converted to an SEO-friendly HTML markup that can be indexed.

SEO Title Tag - Your tags are an important part of your site for making sure that search engines know where to place your posts, and SEO Title Tag focuses exclusively on this.  Unlike some other plugins, and WordPress itself, this extension will allow you to add tags to your pages, your main page and even any URL anywhere on your site.

Simple Tags - An extremely popular plugin that focuses on helping you choose the best tags for your posts by offering suggestions, auto-completion of tags as you type, an AJAX admin interface, mass tag editing and a whole lot more.

Sitemap Generator - This is a more customizable sitemap generator than most with options to support multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, permalink support, choices on what to display, options to show number of comments and more.

TGFI.net SEO Wordpress Plugin - This particular plugin will do most of the usual SEO work of optimizing titles and keywords, but it adds a unique twist as it is mainly directed at people who use WordPress as a CMS.

WordPress is a great blogging platform, one of the reasons being the immense community support. It is this community that develops plugins and hacks for WordPress and makes life easier for everyone. In this post, I have compiled 10 of my favorite WordPress hacks. Some of these posts linked to have multiple hacks available, so make sure to check out the other hacks in the page too.

And while you’re at it, please stumble or float this to let more bloggers and designers know about these hacks.

Split category list

BlogohBlog’s post has, among others, a hack to split category list. This is useful when the list is displayed in a sidebar (and you want to save space).

Also see the hack to show your most commented posts in sidebar.

Author bio

Multi-author blogs will find the author bio hack useful. Once the basic code is in place, you can use CSS to style it up.

Exclude ads on specific posts

Many ad management plugins offer this functionality, but if you have hardcoded ads into your theme, you can use the “Hiding ads in posts” hack (instead of switching to a plugin just for this functionality.

Membership directory

WPDesigner has a useful tutorial on creating a few theme files and using plugins to turn WP into a membership directory.

FLIR plugin

23Systems’ free FLIR plugin replaces headings with custom fonts using FLIR technique.

Breadcrumbs plugin

mTekk has a WordPress plugin for breadcrumb navigation.

FeedBurner feedcount PHP code

Hongkiat has the updated PHP code required to display Feedburner feedcount in text (works for any system using PHP). If you have been frustrated by problems with Feedcount plugin, this is a worthy alternative. Note that it requires PHP 5.

Login form overlay

Pro Blog Design features a tutorial on making a login form overlay using a mod of Lightbox.

Automatic Stats plugin

Automatic Blog Stats is a WordPress plugin that gives you shortcodes to embed anywhere in your post and display stats. Most of the common stats like FeedBurner feedcount, post and comment stats, Alexa, Pagerank, Technorati authority and Google/Yahoo/Delicious backlinks count are available.

Twitter bar, random stats

Paul Stamatiou has code snippets required to pull in Twitter status to, and list random stats on your blog, and.

Of course, this is just the tip of the ice berg - there are lots of other useful hacks. Suggest your favorites in comments.

Since I launched this blog I’ve been searching the web for a decent WordPress mailing list plugin and I think I may have found a solution.

I am currently using WP Opt-in, which allows users to sign-up to my newsletter and receive an automated response.

Unfortunately, it does not have all the features I would like in a mailing list plugin.

Firstly, you can’t send custom emails to the users subscribed to your list via an admin interface from within WordPress, although you can copy and paste a BCC friendly list of subscribers in to a bulk email program if you have one.

Secondly, I had to spend quite a bit of time customising the code for the plugin in order for me to get it to display correctly and validate to current XHTML 1.0 Transitional standards.

But I think I may have found a better solution.

Today I stumbled across MailPress. This plugin seems to have everything I need and it is compatible with WordPress 2.7.

It also comes packaged with several great looking add-on components that will allow you to perform certain tasks from within the back-end of the plugin.

Unfortunately, MailPress requires MySQL version 5 to be installed on your server in order for it to activate and function correctly.

Currently, I have version 4 installed. I have contacted my host and requested I be transferred to a server with MySQL version 5 and they have kindly agreed to transfer me.

The transfer will take a couple of days to complete, at which point I will install and activate MailPress. As soon as I have it set-up I’ll post a quick review here.