Wordpress4Dummies, wordpress blog ,SEO, Articles, Templates, Plugin, Skin, Download, pdf

The Wordpress.org plugin directory contains 6,889 plugins as of today, October 13, 2009. Nearly 55 million plugin downloads have gone through the Wordpress system. With that many choices available, how is one to know which are the best for their blog, and which are beat? Everyone wants plugins that will help boost their blog in the search engines, plugins that will allow visitors to easily share the information on the site, and plugins that will make blog navigation and permalinks easy and efficient.

Well, Dandy Randy, you’re in luck. Today I’ve put together a list of some of the most popular and most effective plugins for SEO and Networking that will help you get your blog rocking. Of course, the most important part of a blog is the content – but the right content paired with the right tools can be explosive.

1. All in One SEO Pack

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

The most downloaded plugin available for Wordpress, this little gadget allows you to specify a name, description and exact keywords for every post and page you publish. It is very effective and automatically appends the information to the proper places to get your words spidered. It’s arguably the most important plugin you can have on your Wordpress blog, and if you only use one plugin, it should be this one. A few of the others on this list will duplicate features of this plugin but operate stand-alone – this one encompasses a variety of necessities for any blog.

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2. Google XML Sitemaps

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

Those new to the blogging arena might not be aware of the importance of sitemaps. Using Google Webmaster tools, you can create a sitemap to basically tell Google exactly where every page of your site is located, allowing it to efficiently spider your pages and get them into search listings. Webmaster Tools will then present you with information about how your site ranks in the listings, what people are using to find your site and more.

Or, you can use the Google XML Sitemaps plugin to have this happen automatically every time you post, updating your sitemap and sending the information to Google, Ask, MSN and Yahoo. It even has a ton of options on calculating priority, which it can do based on comments, views, or user-defined criteria. Hardcore.

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3. ShareThis

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/share-this/

ShareThis is a plugin you’ve likely seen all over the place. It’s a one-stop shop for posting a blog entry to dozens of social sites like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Digg, or e-mailing it to a friend. There couldn’t be a simpler way to offer your readers a mode of sharing on their favorite service.

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4. Ultimate Google Analytics

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ultimate-google-analytics/

If you use Google Analytics as your means of collecting demographic information, like most people do,Ultimate GA is a great plugin. Simply tell it your UA# and it’ll throw the appropriate code into every post you make, allowing you to automatically track the stats on everything you do. It’s all about automation, son.

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5. SEO Smart Links

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-automatic-links/

Do you ever feel the need to link people from one post to another? Sure you do. SEO Smart Links will help do that for you. If you type a certain key term from one blog post within the text of another blog post, SEO Smart Links will automatically make it a link for you. You can also designate a list of specific terms with specific targets, so any time you type those words it’ll become a link. Settings allow you to control the number of automatic links per post and more. It’s a dandy little tool, I do say. A dandy little tool.

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6. Twitter For Wordpress

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-for-wordpress/

Those who use Twitter know that with a solid number of followers, there is often no quicker way to get a bunch of traffic instantly to your blog. A number of Twitter plugins exist for Wordpress, but the simply named Twitter For Wordpress is the most effective one I’ve tried. It’ll automatically create a Tweet when you post, and even has plugin-plugins that will auto-create bit.ly links and do other fancy things. There is also widget support to display your recent public tweets on your blog’s sidebar, though the brand new Twitter Goodies is better for that, with its auto-refreshing widget.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitter-goodies/

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7. WP-DB-Backup

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-db-backup/

I do some web maintenance for a guy who’s Wordpress-based site gets thousands of hits a month. I recently discovered he was never backing up his site, and didn’t know how to go about doing so. If you find yourself fitting that description, whether your site is as heavily trafficked or not, you should be backing up your goods. A hack or server crash that destroys your blog will set you back hours, days, or weeks – and replacing the content can often be impossible. WP-DB-Backup offers a one-click backup that can be stored on your server, downloaded to your machine or emailed to you. Scheduled backups are also possible on a multitude of frequencies so you don’t have to do it yourself. It’s just plain smart to do.

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8. WP-Email, WP-Print, WP-PostRatings, WP-PostViews, WP-UserOnline

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-email/ – search the rest yourself, lazy bum.

These plugins are all by the same developer and add a level of interactivity to your blog. If you get a lot of traffic, why not show it off? People like to be in groups, and WP-UserOnline will show them how many other people are at the site. WP-PostViews and PostRatings will allow community members to see others’ feelings about a post, and which posts are most popular. Print and Email do what you’d imagine, and make easy to access printer-friendly versions of your posts available for those wishing to share them with others via digital or hard copy.

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9. SEO Slugs

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-slugs/

So you’ve got a great permalink structure figured out that shows the title of your post and category in the URL. You don’t want to ruin it by having the URL include silly little words like “a,” “and,” “it” and “the.” This plugin will make it so those words are ignored when creating your post’s URL, because quite frankly, search engines don’t like those little words. You can also create a list of other words you want ignored if you choose.

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10. Permalink Redirect

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/permalink-redirect/

If you haven’t set a custom permalink structure on your blog, you might want to. Creating a post with the title “Top 10 Chicken Restaurants” will normally create a post URL that simply ends with “/?p=124” or something uncreative like that. Put your URLs to work for you in the SEO department by having them pull in the words in your post title.

To do so, navigate to Permalinks in your Wordpress dashboard. On that page, select the “Custom Structure” option. In the box, type something like “/%category%/%postname%/” minus the quotes. This will use your category and name of the post for the URL instead of the default, which is simply the post number. Now when you post “Top 10 Chicken Restaurants” in category “Dining,” your url will be “/dining/top-10-chicken-restaurants/”

Before you click the save button, install the Permalink Redirect plugin. This plugin will reply a 301 permanent redirect if anything requests one of your old URLs, taking it to the new one, and ensures each URL remains unique. It also makes it so you can do this without editing your .htaccess file. This URL structure is much more SEO-friendly than jibberish.

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11. Robots Meta

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/robots-meta/

You don’t want search engines crawling every single page of your blog. There are a lot more pages than you think, and it’s not ideal to have every page crawled because it results in duplicate content being indexed. That’s a bad thing and can count against your search engine ranking. This plugin lets you specify which areas should be crawled and which shouldn’t, letting you choose the content that gets indexed. It’s literally the only easy way to add meta robots tags to Wordpress pages.

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12. Nofollow Case By Case

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nofollow-case-by-case/

You can add the “nofollow” command from your comments and apply it to particular comments, authors or strip trackbacks and pingbacks. You can also automatically set all links to open in a new window.

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13. SEO Friendly Images

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/seo-image/

With image searching constantly growing, more and more people make their way to blogs via the images. This allows you to easily add alt and title tags to your images and get them indexed properly by the search engines. It’s all about the indexing, Jeeves.

Use some of these plugins and your Wordpress blog will be all set to draw traffic and easily network your posts with others. Then it’s just up to you to write something worth reading.

Premium Directory WordPress theme is the perfect CMS solution be it for your video, music, photos, website or blog directory. Everything within this script is customizable to suit your needs, via widgets, custom color to header graphics. Also the theme is SEO friendly and the file-size is small, thus your site is ensure of a fast loading time.

Key Features
Last tested on v2.7.1.
Threaded Comments.
Widget & Gravatar ready.
Customizable & SEO Friendly.
Compliant & tested on all browsers.

Provided Plugins
Popular Post – Customizable popular post.
Post Ratings – Lets users to rate and vote.
Pagebar2 – Intuitive WordPress navigation.
Post Thumb – Auto generation of your photos.
Download Monitor – A downloads/counter database script.

AdSense Ready
160×90 Links
468×15 Links
728×90 Banner
300×250 Banner
336×280 Banner

Quote:

http://letitbit.net/download/6764.6d0486b5ec8e8412e31ca11b0/premium_directory.zip.html
http://up-file.com/download/7720.f7322be992caa026180fee39e
http://hotfile.com/dl/15110323/d0bce04/premium-directory.zip.html

Source

Blogs are an excellent tool for improving a site’s search engine optimization (SEO). For some excellent WordPress plugins that help set the stage, we refer you to our earlier post:

The best WordPress plugins for bloggers

However, using the wpSEO plugin will help you reach the next level. We explain our results and some other tricks we used on the way to improving our SEO benchmarks for this blog.

Step 1: Setting up wpSEO
We decided to give wpSEO a test drive – you can use it for free for ten days.

Yes, the plugin has a small price tag, but in return, after the initial learning curve of fine-tuning your work with it, time savings and more targeted traffic will come your way. This led us to conclude that the small cost was justified.

Download the wpSEO plugin here.

Tip 1:  Unless you are an SEO expert, start by using the options as described in these screenshots:
basic set-up steps. You can also download and install options on your blog (see above image).

Step 2: Title – a good one helps
Doing SEO is important, but it does not diminish the importance of a good title. An interesting title makes your target audience curious and tempts them to read the post. Because Google does not like titles beyond 65 characters (it cuts them off), you should limit your titles to around five to eight words.

Tip 2: Try to limit title length to 60 characters – 5 to 8  words.

Bonus tip: Make sure you use the right permalink set-up to further help with SEO.

Step 3: WordPress excerpt – enticing people to read
WordPress offers the use of a short description through the WordPress Excerpt Summary option. Google Alerts, for example, uses this summary.

However, search engines truncate your summary after 160 characters using an ellipsis (…) for the rest of the text. This could decrease a blog’s click-through rate (CTR). A compelling excerpt of 160 characters not only entices readers, but can also be used as a meta description with wpSEO (see image below).

Tip 3: Write a compelling WordPress excerpt of 160 characters that you can also use for the post’s meta description.

Bonus tip: Explaining meta tags versus meta description.

Step 4: Meta keywords
Yahoo! uses meta keywords for the description displayed in search results. While some may suggest five to eight keywords that match both content of and target for a blog post, others suggest limiting it to around 200 characters, since most databases have a default maximum size for certain fields of 255 characters. Hence, those search engines that see keyword meta keywords look at the first 255 characters. Google does not use meta keywords but Yahoo! and other smaller search engines do.

Tip 4: Choose about eight keywords and make sure you don’t exceed 200 characters.

The image to the right shows the fields that should show if you have activated the wpSEO options, including the choices we made (download pdf below).

Bonus tip: Download screenshots of how we set up wpSEO to get more bang for our buck(pdf file).

Step 5: Test the set-up
At this point, it is a good idea to see if it works the way you want it to. The link below allows you to enter any URL and test it (we recommend that you test posts, pages and categories) to see what works and what needs changing in the wpSEO options or the data you entered directly to get a more optimized solution (see above image).

Tip 5: After setting up, check if the blog post, page or category description settings work as intended.

Bonus tip: Test your site’s crawl-ability by search engine with the Search Engine Robot Simulator.

We love the wpSEO plugin and have paid for it because, after extensive testing, we believe it is worth every penny. Nevertheless, there are one or two things that could be improved a bit:

- Why defaults? The documentation is excellent – if you are a geek. Unfortunately, the explanation provided about the default chosen to optimize SEO when uploading the file (see screenshot top left of this post) is missing. For many people this might not matter, but understanding the logic behind a configuration, especially SEO-related, allows one to learn.

- Categories: When you go tohttp://YourBlog.com/wp-admin/categories.php, you enter the description (no brackets or anything needed) and wpSEO gets it. It would be great if keywords for post categories could also be entered using the same approach (see image at right). Currently, keywords can only be taken from titles or tags of posts. This does not allow a true fine-tuning, which would be more effective.

- Great stuff: Allowing the importing of preset options (see image top left), saving the xml file with currently set options, and a well thought-out user-interface make working with wpSEO easy. They also help provide a great user experience and make increasing targeted traffic simple.

Bottom line
WordPress does a great job of SEO out of the box. This post shows how you can improve this even further with a few tricks and thewpSEO plugin. The latter does what All in One SEO Pack does, and then some.

Above we outlined five tips that should help get your SEO work off to a great start. Sure, it takes time and effort for your work in SEO to show up. Nevertheless, once optimization is finished, maintaining SEO performance requires less time and effort. Most importantly, the Return on Investment (ROI) is substantial.

“Business Theme” wordpress as a CMS Template is great theme for web-designer whose handle a Corporate and portfolio websites project. You will love to see the featured content slider show different move for the image and content description.

Template Features

Auto thumbnail resize
Dropdown menu for categories and pages
Well commented code for all pages.
Well documention for speed and easing options customization for Featured Projects Slider
Valid XHTML and CSS
Layered PSD files for background images, Logo and arrow buttons customization.
Designed with “960 GRID ” System
Read me file included for easy customization.
Free Font used for logo, download link provided in readme file.

Written by Allan Bisset

WordPress is the world’s favourite CMS for blogging.  To date, over 6 million downloads of version 2.8 have been made from the WordPress site and it’s easy to understand why.  It’s open source, free and pretty easy to use – if you can master MS Word, you can handle WordPress.  Here at Fresh Egg we’re big fans of Business Blogging.  A Blog can build links, add content on a constant basis, create power and give you authority, but most importantly, a Blog allows you a platform on which to engage with consumers at their level.  Our preferred tool is WordPress, which is easy to administer and use once set up on your site.

We’re also fortunate in having aboard Jerome Degl’innocenti.  Jerome is a web designer who has been working here for the past three years.  Before that, almost incredibly, he was a maître d’ in an up-market US dining establishment, getting into all things web in his spare time.  Jerome has a passion for web design and all things computer related and has been using WordPress virtually since the day it launched.

What Jerome doesn’t know about the intricacies, capabilities and limitations of WordPress isn’t worth knowing, and since he began using the tool he’s kept a repository of all his experiences, tips and hints for users on his own Pimp My WordPress site.   Over the years, Jerome has added other information and education resources about WordPress to the site  so that it is now a vast library of useful background, tutorials, hints and tips, fixes and patches – in fact everything you ever wanted to make WordPress an even more effective and reliable tool.

Now we believe that a Business Blog can become the means of creating a network hub that you own and can therefore influence both the medium and the message.  Regular blogging massively increases the presence that your business site is likely to have in each Search Engine index.  Each Blog posting, given cogent content and contextual links on the page and through navigation, will help to push the entire site higher in the Search Engine rankings.

So if you want to find out how to expand, use, improve or trouble shoot your WordPress blog, just go to one of the best information resources online that you’ll find.  In one place, Jerome has pulled together an array of text and video content using external resources and his own considerable experience to present what we think is an excellent library for any WordPress blogger.

I started writing my beginner’s guide to WordPress SEO a while back, and have since done a load of posts on the subject, an article in the Search Marketing Standard, newsletters, and presentations. It’s time to let all the info of all these different articles fall into one big piece: the final guide to WordPress SEO.

If you’re more of a visual type, try this WordPress SEO video. It’s an hour long presentation I gave at A4UExpo London, that covers most of what’s in here too.

As search, SEO, and the Wordpress platform evolve I will keep this article up to date with best practices. If you don’t have the time to do this kind of optimization yourself, consider hiring us to do it, check out our WordPress consulting services.

As I take quite a holistic view on SEO, this guide will cover quite a lot, here’s the contents:

1. The basic technical optimization: simplest stuff, highest rewards
   1. Permalinks
   2. Optimize your Titles for SEO
   3. Optimize your Descriptions
   4. Optimize the More text
   5. Image Optimization
2. Template optimization
   1. Breadcrumbs
   2. Headings
   3. Clean up your code
   4. Aim for speed
   5. Rethink that Sidebar
3. Advanced technical optimization: preventing duplicate content
   1. Noindex, follow archive pages
   2. Disable unnecessary archives
   3. Pagination
   4. Nofollowing unnecessary links
4. Altering your blog’s structure for high rankings
   1. Pages instead of posts
   2. New wine in an old bottle: use well ranking-posts to rank even better
   3. Linking to related posts
5. Conversion optimization: get those readers to subscribe!
6. Comment optimization: get those readers involved
   1. How should you get people to comment
   2. Bond with your commenters
   3. Keeping people in the conversation
7. Off site blog SEO
   1. Follow your commenters
   2. Use Twitter
   3. Find related blogs, and work them
8. Conclusion

1. Basic technical optimization

Out of the box, WordPress is a pretty well optimized system, and does a far better job at allowing every single page to be indexed than every other CMS I have used. But there’s a few things you should do to make it a lot easier still to work with.

1.1. Permalinks

The first thing to change is your permalink structure. In WordPress 2.5, you’ll find this page under Settings -> Permalinks. The default permalink is
?p=<postid>, but I prefer to use either /post-name/ or /category/post-name/. For the first option, you change the “custom” setting into /%postname%/:

To include the category, you change it to /%category%/%postname%/.

Once you’ve done that, you’ll want to install the Redirection plugin, and make sure that under Manage -> Redirection -> Options, making sure both URL Monitoring select boxes are set to “Modified posts”. Now you can change those permalinks to perfectly SEO‘d permalinks without having to do anything else, or worry about the search engine consequences.

WWW vs non-WWW
Another good thing to configure now you’re on that screen anyway is the Root domain: Add WWW / Strip WWW one. Make a choice, and set it here, don’t enable both, some search engines still can’t handle that. And enable the redirect index.php/index.html one too, it won’t hurt you, and might even do your WordPress SEO some good.

URL stopwords
The last thing you’ll want to do about your permalinks to increase your WordPress SEO, is install the SEO Slugs plugin, this will automatically remove stop words from your slugs once you save a post, so you won’t get those ugly long URL’s when you do a sentence style post title.

1.2. Optimize your Titles for SEO

By default, the title for your blog posts is “Blog title » Blog Archive » Keyword rich post title”. For your WordPress blog to get the traffic it deserves, this should be the other way around, for two reasons:

• Search engines put more weight on the early words, so if your keywords are near the start of the page title you are more likely to rank well.
• People scanning result pages see the early words first. If your keywords are at the start of your listing your page is more likely to get clicked on.

For more info on how to craft good titles for your posts, see this excellent article and video by Aaron Wall: Google & SEO Friendly Page Titles. I prefer to do this withHeadSpace, as that makes it very very easy. You should check your header.php though, and make sure that the code for wp_title(); contains two quotes, so it looks like this:wp_title('');. This makes sure you have absolute control over the title and don’t have any annoying separator in there.

After that, go into the HeadSpace settings, and make them look something like this for your posts and pages:

For the other pages, I have the following settings:

• Posts / Pages: %%title%% - Blog Title
• Categories: %%category%% Archives %%page%% - Blog Title
• Tags: %%tag%% Archives %%page%% - Blog Title
• Archives: Blog Archives %%page%% - Blog Title

With HeadSpace, you can also write optimized titles for each post specifically, overriding the settings here. This way you have absolute control over your titles, and can make sure your WordPress titles are actually helping your SEO.

1.3. Optimize your Descriptions

Give each category a decent description, and use HeadSpace to add that description to the meta description, by adding %%category_description%% in the Description field. After that, write a description for each post or page that you actually want to rank with. The descriptions has one very important function: enticing people to click, so make sure it states what’s in the page they’re clicking towards, and that it gets their attention.

Automated descriptions
In my opinion, auto generating descriptions is a load of bull, most plugins pick the first sentence, which might be an introductory sentence which has hardly anything to do with the subject, or another sentence with a keyword in it, which might be completely wrong to pick as description. Thus, the only well written description is a hand written one, and if you’re thinking of auto generating the meta description, you might as well not do anything and let the search engine control the snippet… If you don’t use the meta description, the search engine will find the keyword searched for in your document, and automatically pick a string around that, which gives you a bolded word or two in the results page.

Auto generating a snippet is a “shortcut”, and there are no real shortcuts in (WordPress)SEO (none that work anyway).

1.4. Optimize the More text

Another neat featuer of HeadSpace is that you can use it to optimize the more text, so if you use a more tag on the frontpage, you can replace the default “Read more” link with something meaningful for every post. It’s small things like that that make your WordPress SEO the best.

1.5. Image Optimization

An often overlooked part of WordPress SEO is how you handle your images. By doing stuff like writing good alt tags for images and thinking of how you name the files, you can get yourself a bit of extra traffic from the different image search engines. Next to that, you’re helping out your lesser able readers who check out your site in a screen reader, to make sense of what’s otherwise hidden to them.

You should of course be writing good titles and alt tags for each and every image, however, if you don’t have the time for that, there is a plugin that can help you. The plugin is called SEO Friendly Images, and it can automatically add the title of the post and or the image name to the image’s alt and title tag:
SEO Friendly Images settings example” src=”http://netdna.yoast.com/uploads/2008/04/seo-friendly-images.png” alt=”SEOFriendly Images settings example” />

2. Template Optimization

2.1. Breadcrumbs

You’ll want to add breadcrumbs to your single posts and pages. Breadcrumbs are the links, usually above the title post, that look like “Home > Articles > WordPress SEO“. They are good for two things:

• They allow your users to easily navigate your site.
• They allow search engines to determine the structure of your site more easily.

These breadcrumbs should link back to the homepage, and the category the post is in. If the post is in multiple categories it should pick one. For that to work, adapt single.phpand page.php in your theme, and use my breadcrumb plugin.

2.2. Headings

Although most themes for WordPress get this right, make sure your post title is an <h1>, and nothing else. Your blog’s name should only be an <h1> on your frontpage, and on single, post, and category pages, it should be no more than an <h3>.

These are easy to edit in the post.php and page.php templates. To learn more about why proper headings are important read this article on Semantic HTML and SEO.

2.3. Clean up your code

All that javascript and CSS you might have in your template files, move that to external javascripts and css files, and keep your templates clean, as they’re not doing your WordPress SEO any good. This makes sure your users can cache those files on first load, and search engines don’t have to download them most of the time.

2.4. Aim for speed

A very important factor in how many pages a search engine will spider on your blog each day, is how speedy your blog loads. You can do two things to increase the speed of your WordPress.

1. Optimize the template to do as small an amount of database calls as necessary. I’ve highlighted how to do this in my post about speeding up WordPress.
2. Install a caching plugin. I highly recommend WP-Super-Cache, which is a bit of work to set up, but that should make your blog an awful lot faster.

Also, be aware that underpaying for hosting, is not wise. If you actually want to succeed with your link-bait actions, and want your blog to sustain high loads, go for a good hosting package. I’ve recently switched to WestHost myself, and they’ve proven to be better than anything I’ve ever seen in hosting.

2.5. Rethink that Sidebar

Do you really need to link out to all your buddies in your blogroll site wide? Or is it perhaps wiser to just do that on your front page? Google and other search engines these days heavily discount site wide links, so you’re not really doing your friends any more favor by giving them that site wide link, nor are you helping yourself: you’re allowing your visitors to get out of your site everywhere, when you actually want them to browse around a bit.

The same goes for the search engines: on single post pages, these links aren’t necessarily related to the topic at hand, and thus aren’t helping you at all. Thus: get rid of them. There are probably more widgets like these that only make sense on the homepage, and others that you’d only want on sub pages.

Some day you will probably be able to change this from inside WordPress, right now it forces you to either use two sidebars, one on the homepage and one on sub pages, or write specific plugins.

3. Advanced WordPress SEO and Duplicate Content

Once you’ve done all the basic stuff, you’ll find that the rest of the problems amount to one simple thing: duplicate content. Loads of it in fact. Out of the box, WordPress comes with a few different types of taxonomy:

1. date based
2. category based
3. tag based

Next to that, it seems to think you actually need to be able to click on from page to page starting at the frontpage, way back to the first post you ever did. Last but not least, each author has his own archive too, under /author/<author-name>/, resulting in completely duplicate content on single author blogs.

In essence that means that, worst case scenario, a post is available on 5 pages outsideof the single page where it should be available. We’re going to get rid of all those duplicate content pools, by still allowing them to be spidered, but not indexed, and fixing the pagination issues that come with these things.

3.1. Noindex, follow archive pages

Install my robots meta plugin, and make sure the settings prevent indexing of all archive pages, like this:
SEO” />

Now the search engine will follow all the links on these archive pages, but it won’t show those pages in the index. Not everybody will agree on this policy, and others will tell you to just show a snippet of each post on the archive page. That’ll also work, but in my opinion completely throwing them out is better.

3.2. Disable unnecessary archives

If your blog is a one author blog, or you don’t think you need author archives, use the robots-meta plugin to disable the author archives. Also, if you don’t think you need a date based archive: disable it. Even if you’re not using these archives in your template, someone might link to them and thus break your WordPress SEO…

3.3. Pagination

Thirdly, you’ll want to make sure that if a bot goes to a category page, it can reach all underlying pages without any trouble. Otherwise, if you have a lot of posts in a category, a bot might have to go back 10 pages before being able to find the link to one of your awesome earlier posts…

There’s an easy fix. Jaimie Sirovich wrote Pagerfix, a plugin that helps you make your pagination look like this:
SEO” src=”http://netdna.yoast.com/uploads/2008/04/pagination.png” alt=”Better Pagination to increase your WordPress SEO” />

To reach that, install that plugin, and change this section in f.i. your index.php:

<div class="navigation">
  <div class="alignleft">
    <?php next_posts_link('« Older Entries') ?>
  </div>
  <div class="alignright">
    <?php previous_posts_link('Newer Entries »') ?>
  </div>
</div>

Into this:

<div class="navigation">
  <?php
    pager_fix(" "," "," ","« Previous page","Next Page »","strong");
  ?>
</div>

Do that in your index.php, your archives.php, and all other archive templates you might have.

3.4. Nofollowing unnecessary links

Another easy step to increase your WordPress SEO is to stop linking to your login and registration pages from each and every page on your blog. The same goes for your RSS feeds, your subscribe by e-mail link, etc. Robots Meta has an option to nofollow all your login and registration links. You’ll probably have to go into your RSS links and nofollow those by hand. If you’re using the meta widget, you might want to enable the option in robots meta to replace that with one that has nofollowed links.

4. Altering your blog’s structure for high rankings

Blogs are spidered so easily due to their structure of categories, tags etc.: all articles are well linked, and usually the markup is nice and clean. However, all this comes at a price: your ranking strength is diluted. They’re diluted by one simple thing: comments.

4.1. Pages instead of posts

You’ve probably noticed by now, or you’re seeing now, that this WordPress SEO post is actually… not a post. It’s a page. Why? Well for several reasons. First of all, this article needed to be a “daughter”-page of my WordPress page, to be in the correct place on this blog. Secondly, to rank for the term [WordPress SEO], this article has to have the right keyword density. And that’s where things go wrong. Comments destroy your carefully constructed keyword density.

That’s why I decided to make my most important articles into pages. That way, you can easily update them and do a new post about what you’ve changed.

4.2. New wine in an old bottle

If a post on your blog becomes incredibly popular and starts to rank for a nice keyword, like mine did for WordPress SEO, you could do the following:

• create a new page with updated and improved content
• change the slug of the old post to post-name-original
• publish the new page under the old post’s URL, or redirect the old post’s URL to the new URL
• send an e-mail to everyone who linked to your old post that you’ve updated and improved on your old post
• wait for the links to come in, again;
• rank even higher for your desired term as you’ve now got:
  • more control over the keyword density
  • even more links pointing at the article
  • the ability to keep updating the article as you see fit to improve on it’s content and ranking

Some among you will say: I could have 301 redirected the old post to the new one with the same effect. True. Except: you’d lose the comments on the old post, which is in my opinion a sign of disrespect to people who took the time to comment, and 301 redirects take quite a bit of time sometimes. Of course you should treat this technique with care, and not abuse it to rank other products, but I think it can be done in everyone’s benefit. For instance this article: if you came here through a social media site like Sphinn, expecting an article about WordPress SEO, that’s exactly what you got!

4.3. Linking to related posts

One way of getting search engines to get to your older content a bit easier, thus increasing your WordPress SEO capabilites a LOT, is by using a related posts plugin. These plugins search through your posts database to find posts with the same subject, and add links to these posts.

There’s a load of these available, but I just use the one that comes with the Simple Tags plugin, as I’ve found that the easiest and best one so far.

5. Conversion optimization: get those readers to subscribe!

A lot of bloggers still think that because their blog is a blog, they don’t have to optimize anything. Wrong. To get people to link to you, they have to read your blog. And what do you think is easier: getting someone who is already visiting your blog to visit regularly and then link to your blog, or getting someone who visits your blog for the first time to link to your blog immediately? Right.

That’s why conversion optimization is so vitally important to bloggers as well: they need to learn how to test their call to actions on their blog so that more people will subscribe, either by e-mail or by RSS. (Ow btw, if you haven’t subscribed to this blog yet, do it now!)

One of the things I’ve found to be very important, and more bloggers seem to have found this, is that a BIG RSS subscribe button is very important, as is offering a way to subscribe by e-mail. I even offer daily and weekly e-mail subscribe options, using aweber(aff), and have found that people tend to really like those options too.

Another thing to be very aware of is when people might want to subscribe to your blog. If they’ve just finished reading an article of yours, and really liked it, that would be the ideal time to reach them, right? That’s why more and more people are adding lines like this to the end of their posts: “Liked this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!”

Another great time to get people to subscribe is when people have just commented on your blog for the first time, for which purpose I use the awesome comment relish plugin. Which leads me to the next major aspect of WordPress SEO:

6. Comment optimization: get those readers involved

Comments are one of the most important aspects of blogs. As Wikipedia states:

The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.

Comments are not only nice because people tell you how special you are, or that you made a mistake, or whatever else they have to tell you. Most of all they’re nice, because they show engagement. And engagement is one of the most important factors of getting people to link to you: they show you they care, and they open the conversation, now all you have to do is respond, and you’re building a relationship!

6.1. How should you get people to comment

The easiest way of getting people to do anything is: ask them to do it. Write in an engaging style, and then ask your blog’s readers for an opinion, their take on the story etc.

Another important things is your comment links. Is your comment link “No comments »”? Or is it “No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome »”? Feel the difference? You can change this by opening your index.php template, search for comments_popup_link() and changing the texts within that function.

6.2. Bond with your commenters

Another thing to do is thank people when they’ve commented on your weblog. Not every time, because that get’s annoying, but doing it the first time is a very good idea.

Justin Shattuck thought the same, and created the Comment Relish plugin, which I just mentiond, which sends an email after someone has made his first comment. This email is a message you can enter yourself, with for instance your feed URL, and in my case, a newsletter subscribe URL, etc.

Another option, which is a bit less obtrusive / spammy, is to install my comment redirectplugin. This plugin allows you to redirect people who have made their first comment to a specific “thank you” page.

6.3. Keeping people in the conversation

Now that people have joined the conversation on your blog, you should make sure theystay in the conversation. That’s why you should install the subscribe to comments plugin, that allows people to subscribe to a comment thread just like they would in a forum, and sends them an e-mail on each new comment. This way, you can keep the conversation going, and maybe your readers will be giving you new angles for new posts.

7. Off site blog SEO

If you’ve followed all of the above WordPress SEO advice, you’ve got a big chance of becoming successfull, both as a blogger and in the search engines. Now the last step sounds easy, but isn’t. Go out there, and talk to people online.

7.1 Follow your commenters

There’s been a movement on the web for a while now that’s called the “You comment - I follow“. They want you to remove the nofollow tag off of your comments to “reward” your visitors. Now I do agree, but… That get’s you a whole lot of spam once your WordPress blog turns into a well ranked blog… What I do advocate though, is that youactually follow your visitors! Go to their websites, and leave a comment on one of their articles, a good, insightful comment, so they respect you even more.

If you think that’s a lot of work, do realize that, on average, about 1% of your visitors will actually leave a comment. That’s a group of people you have to take care of!

7.2 Use Twitter

Twitter is a cool form of micro-blogging / chatting / whatever you want to call it. Almost all the “cool” people are on there, and they read their tweets more often than they read their e-mail, if you even knew how to reach them through e-mail.

To boot, if you use WordTwit or Twitter Tools, all of your posts can be announced on Twitter, which will usually get you quite a few early readers! People will feel even more happy to comment on Twitter, which might get you into an extra conversation or two.

7.3 Find related blogs, and work them

If you want to rank for certain keywords, go into Google Blogsearch, and see which blogs rank in the top 10 for those keywords. Read those blogs, start posting insightful comments, follow up on their posts by doing a post on your own blog and link back to them: communicate! The only way to get the links you’ll need to rank is to be a part of the community.

8. Conclusion

This guide gives you a lot of stuff you can do on your blog. It goes from technical tips, to conversion tips, to content tips, to conversation tips, and a whole lot in between. There’s a catch though: if you want to rank for highly competitive terms, you’ll have to actually domost of it.

A WordPress theme that has a clean and simple look. The original PSD graphic file is provided, so you can modify anything, from the header to your own modifications. I’ve included recommended plugins in the instruction. It has many features from Gravatar enabled to threaded comments. Be sure to read readme.html before installing. Last tested on WordPress version 2.8.4.

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This is a guest post by Srikanth. If you want to guest post on this blog, check out the guidelines here.

Due to the advances in mobile technology, now a days almost all the mobile phones are equipped with Internet surfing capabilities. As a consequence, more and more people are accessing websites via their mobile phones every day, creating the need for webmasters to adapt their websites to these visitors.

Below we cover 10 mobile plugins for WordPress that can be used to make your website mobile friendly.

1. WordPress Mobile Edition

Developed by Crowd Favorite, this plugin has got a clean user interface that is designed for mobile devices. When a person visits your site from a mobile browser, it automatically detects the browser and loads the mobile version of your site. You can edit the list of mobile browsers in the settings page. This plugin enables particular theme to load on a specific mobile browser or device for example iPhone, Windows Mobile, Opera Mini web browser and other mobile web browsers.

2. WordPressMobile.mobi

One of the most popular mobile WordPress plugins, with thousands of downloads. This WordPress plugin makes your blog more mobile friendly, reducing the load time on mobile browsers and configuring your pages properly.

3. WordPress Mobile Pack

Another WordPress plugin for mobile browsers. It has got mobile recognition, device adaptation and it is widget ready. With the mobile recognition and device adaptation feature, it automatically re-sizes the images, split the articles or post into multiple pages such that your web page looks just fine on any of the mobile phones. It has a mobile admin panel so the admin of the site can easily manage it. Mobile ad widget allows mobile ads or mobile Adsense to be displayed on the mobile version of the web pages.

4. MobilePress

You can set this plugin to display a specific theme for a specific device model or mobile browsers like the iPhone, Opera Mini, etc., such that your blog displays according to the device capability. This plugin also allows the WordPress theme developers to develop their own mobile themes for WordPress blogs.

5. Mobile Admin

This WordPress plugin enables you to access admin user interface on mobile devices in a users friendly manner. This plugin is especially developed for the browsers on the iPhone and iPod Touch devices and it supports most of the other mobile browsers at basic level. Mobile Admin supports most of the basic WordPress admin features like editing posts with auto-save feature, tagging support, comment moderation, and more.

6. Mobilize

This WordPress plugin, once installed, will detect any mobiles phone having access to your site and it will redirect it to the Mippin server. Mippin will then rearrange your web page and its contents to suit the cell phone type. For example, if your website has images, then Mippin will re-size the images to fit the mobile screen and videos are converted to 3gp format such that users can have a comfortable and quick access to your site.

7. WPhone Admin Plug-in

This plugin will allow you to manage your WordPress install using a mobile browser. It has two mobile admin interfaces, one is for use on the iPhone/iPod Touch and other devices which supports full JavaScript and features CSS AJAX and sliding menus. And another is Lite version to use on phones that do not support JavaScript. It will automatically switch between the rich and lite versions based on the browser you use.

8. Mowser

Mowser is a service that lets your WordPress blog to be viewed more comfortably and quickly on a mobile browser or on any other mobile device. This plugin will automatically detect when a user is trying to access your WordPress based blog using a mobile phone and it will redirect to the optimized mobile version of your blog.

9. Wetomo WordPress to Mobile

Wetomo plugin will automatically detect when a user is trying to access your URL from a mobile phone. Wetomo will act as a proxy between you and the user, modifying your blog to suit the handset of the user such that your blog looks great on any of the mobile browsers.

10. WP viewMobile

This plugin is designed to make your WordPress blog mobile internet ready. It will detect when a user is accessing your blog via a mobile phone. It automatically sends a template which is optimized for mobile devices. It tries to re-size the images in your blog to suite the mobile phone or else it removes them completely if the mobile browser does not support images, such that your users can access your blog without any problem.

Srikanth is the author of the Tech Inspiration blog, where he writes about gadgets and technology tips.

A beautiful 3 columns wordpress theme Strawberry-MAG

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Compatible with wordpress 2.84V and previous versions