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9 Essential WordPress SEO Plugins – A SPN Exclusive Article

By Cathy Henry in Featured

WordPress is one of the most powerful web design tools anyone can use when building their websites. No longer just a blogging platform, it has been developed into a fully functional CMS that is far more flexible, user-friendly than most other Content Management Systems.

The reason I love WordPress so much is because it is highly customizable. There are hundreds of thousands of plugins and themes available that allow me to create a website with any features I could ever want. Through the use of plugins and themes I cannot only build simple blogs, I can also develop fully functional websites with shopping carts to sell products and services or even create membership sites and community portals.

The biggest advantage to using WordPress is being able to automate almost all of the on-page SEO tasks and even some of the off-page tasks. Through the use of plugins, I am able to get my websites indexed in Google quickly, often within minutes.

Because most of the SEO process is set up to run automatically, every page of my websites are fully optimized to get the best possible placements in the search engines. No other CMS makes it this easy.

The Ins and Outs of a Website Gallery

By Jack Collins in Featured

” So my company needs an image gallery of our products. They need to upload a lot of images and arrange them into categories in an efficient way. They also need the front end to be really flashy. Is this possible on a budget??”

In short: Yes!

Galleries are a very useful feature for any type of website. Exposing as many of your visitors senses to your ideas, services or products can only help facilitate the love. Your professionally shot product images, the awe inspired landscapes surrounding your bed & breakfast, or the action shots from your daughter’s last soccer game all deserve proper attention on your website.

Caveat: Keep it relevant

As long as the imagery is appropriate for your site’s voice, then a gallery is a great element to have. People are on your website trying to make up their minds about whether or not your particular brand of awesomeness is worth the quality-driven price tag you’ve put on it. In other words: Save them from seeing your phones photos from your last outing – or last night out on the town with the boys.

You have to remember what you’re really hoping the user will get out of your online photo display:

-Is your Gallery keeping in line with the website goals?

-Are the images on your site of professional quality?

-Do those particular shots have the potential to side track people from the “buy now” button?

-Are your photos as honest as your words?

Well done image galleries can greatly help in keeping the users interest. It lets them put some imagery to that beautiful product copy they were just reading.

It’s GO time: build it, and say cheese

Now that we’ve decided that a gallery will greatly add value to the theoretical website project in question, I need to pull this off gracefully and beautifully. After a metric ton of research and testing, I settled on using a plugin for WordPress called NextGen as the foundation for the gallery. (WordPress and I are like this, if you haven’t figured that out already.

NextGen would more than cover the basic requirements of administering the gallery:

-Easily manage multiple Galleries and albums? Check

-Assign titles, descriptions, tags etc? Check

-Batch upload of photos via admin or ftp? Check

-Nice, easy to understand, admin with a ton of control? Check

And, the best part? It’s extensible. NextGen by itself is very powerful, but the front end, although not horrible, does not have the “wow” factor we hoped for. This particular setup has a couple of different viewing choices for people by way of either clicking on the thumbnails to see a fancy Ajax image view or viewing it via the even fancier “view with picLens” link.

A quick Google for “NextGen” results in a long list of extra add-ons for the plugin that extend its functionality. With these add-ons you have many many different ways to show off your images on the front end of the website. In addition, there are plugins for showcasing your galleries, featured images or categories in your website’s sidebar and even adding a search that relates to your imagery.

There are various options for controlling the NextGen Smooth Gallery. Multiple image transitions, the time delay, and how to show the miscellaneous user interface features of the gallery are just a few.

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Visit www.connectivewebdesign.com to learn more about affordable web design and website development services.

Top 10 WordPress Terms You Should Know

By Philip Light in Featured

My new WordPress clients are often confused about some of the terminology of WordPress. This makes it more difficult to communicate effectively with them about what they want from their WordPress sites and blog. So, I’ve decided to list the top 10 WordPress related terms everyone who uses WordPress should know.

Term 1: Themes

A Theme is a collection of files that create the visual look of your WordPress website or blog. Themes are kinda like ‘skins’ that you can easily download, install and start using on your site. Themes also can include some custom features to give you greater control over the presentation and functionality of your site. In general, only one Theme can be used at a time.

Term 2: Templates

In WordPress, templates are one of several specific files that control how a particular page on your site is displayed. For instance, your theme may have multiple page layouts, perhaps one with a sidebar and one without. There are also templates that control the top of all your pages including navigation, called a “header”, the bottom of all your pages, called a “footer”, and “sidebars” (see below). Templates can also be created for a specific page or post, category, and much more.

Term 3: Plugins

Plugins are a collection of files that you can download and install to add some certain functionality to your site. For instance, there are plugins for e-commerce, Search Engine Optimization, to create specific features like a calendar, or to modify how you control and operate your website. There are 1,000′s of plugins, most of which are free.

Term 4: Sidebar

A sidebar is a section of your website that generally displays the along the left or right side of your pages, but can also appear in other places, such as the footer. You can also have multiple sidebars in your site based on the templates you have.

Term 5: Widgets

Widgets are the individual blocks of content that go into a sidebar. You can easily add, delete or rearrange Widgets in your sidebars by dragging and dropping in the WordPress admin center. Many Widgets can also be edited to give you extra control over how the Widgets appear on your site. Some common examples of Widgets are simple text, recent posts, advertising such as AdSense, etc.

Term 6: Pages & Posts

Pages vs. Posts are a bit confusing and could have its own article. In general though, you want to use Pages for any single pages of content that remain in the same place on your site. Pages generally have their own navigation in WordPress and are good for pages like ‘About Us’, ‘Contact Us’, etc. You can easily select different templates for pages and they are not categorized.

Posts on the other hand are used when you will be creating multiple entries about a particular topic. You can put Posts into various Categories. WordPress will then automatically handle creating various Category pages, which will list all of the Posts in that Category, generally showing only an Excerpt of the Post and putting the Posts in chronological order. For instance, if you had a blog on Hollywood happenings, you would use Posts each time you write a new entry about some celebrity doing something stupid.

Term 7: Admin Center

The Admin Center is where you control everything about your WordPress site. To access the Admin Center you will go to a specific URL on the internet and enter your username and password. From there, you will be able to add/edit/delete Pages and Posts, control Plugins and Widgets, manage your users, and much more.

Term 8: Permalinks

How your URL’s are formed is very important to Search Engine Optimization and making your pages more memorable and understandable to your visitors. In WordPress, you can easily create Permalinks, which are a particular structure to your site. Instead of using meaningless URL’s like yourdomain.com/?p=8, you could have yourdomain.com/my-page/. You can control the permalinks for each Page and Post in WordPress.

Term 9: Tags

Tags are similar to Categories, only they are less structured. For instance, you may have a Post about your favorite Football team, which perhaps you are putting in a “Sports” category. You could also use some tags like ‘Football’, ‘Cincinnati Bengals’, and ‘Carson Palmer’. Using the tags makes it possible to have a list of Tags in your sidebar where people can click the different Tags to bring up all the Pages and Posts that have those particular tags. If you have a Search box, then the Tags are also used to retrieve results for the users specific search.

Term 10: Custom Fields

WordPress includes a way to create custom values that you assign to a particular Page or Post. Your Theme, or WordPress developer can then use those fields and values to create custom functionality on your site. For instance, you may want to be able to have a rating system for whatever you are writing about. A developer could set-up a custom field where you just enter your rating and then the system takes that information and makes a pretty display feature based on the rating you assigned. The possibilities are endless with Custom Fields and are a powerful feature of WordPress.

I hope these terms help you to better understand WordPress and how it operates. Even if you have a professional helping you with your WordPress site, you’ll be better off understanding some of the basic principles so you can be on the same page when communicating with your developer.

Best of luck!

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Philip Light is the founder of the WordPress WebKit – which provides Professional WordPress Services and Educational Materials including Video Tutorials, Guides, and Resources. It’s a one-stop place for everything you need to have a great WordPress website or blog.

How To Automatically Install WordPress Plugins

By Philip Light in Featured

WordPress plugins give you an amazing ability to extend the power of WordPress. You can easily install and start using any of the thousands of plugins to bring a wide assortment of functionality to your website. There are plugins for e-commerce, SEO, banner ads, Analytics, managing your users, integrating with email lists, showing galleries of images, embedding audio or video, and on and on and on.

Check out the repository of free WordPress Plugins at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/. There are also a number of premium (paid-for) plugins that you can by searching Google for “WordPress plugin” plus a keyword describing what you are looking for.

But they don’t do you any good if you aren’t using them! The good news is that finding and installing WordPress Plugins couldn’t be easier. In this How-To article, we’re going to take a step-by-step look at how you can find and automatically install plugins directly from within WordPress. Let’s get started.

Step 1: Log Into WordPress

Go to your WordPress Admin Center just like you would if you were going to add a new page or post and login as an administrator.

Step 2: Go To the Plugins Tab

This will bring up a list of all the plugins that are already installed. You may find a couple in there called ‘Hello Dolly’ and ‘Askimet’ even if you never downloaded a plugin before, those come pre-installed with WordPress. At the top of this page you will find a “Add New” button that you can click to start searching for the plugin you want to include.

Step 3: Find Your Plugin

If you are looking for a specific plugin, then you can just search for the name of the plugin. You can also search more general terms to try to find a plugin for a particular need you have on your site. For example, let’s look at the Exclude Pages plugin. This simple, but endless useful, plugin lets you create pages that do not appear in your typical navigation. This is great for creating pages such as a Thank You page (for after someone submits a contact form for instance) where it doesn’t make sense to have visitors navigating directly to. To find this plugin, just search for “Exlude Pages” and you it should be at the top of the list.

Step 4: Install the Plugin – Automatically!

Under the “Actions” column you will find a link called “Install”. Click that link to see more information about that plugin and to install it. You’ll want to make sure that the plugin is compatible with your version of WordPress, though plugins will generally work fine for later versions as well. You’ll also want to check that the Average Rating is pretty decent, that the plugin has been downloaded a significant amount of times, and that they plugin author updates the plugin somewhat regularly. These are all good signs that the plugin is still actively maintained and should work without any problems.

When you are ready to install the plugin simply click the Install Update Now button. This will automatically start the process of downloading and installing the plugin into your WordPress. You just need to click the “Activate Plugin” link to start using the plugin.

Step 5: Use the Plugin

Different plugins are controlled in different ways. Most of them will create a new option under Tools or Settings to control the plugin options, others will create their own tab in the Admin Center, and some just add a new option somewhere within the Admin Center. In our example using the Exclude Pages plugin, we can navigate to a page via Posts > Edit (or Add New) and see the new Panel called ‘Exclude Pages’ where you can click the checkbox to either include or exclude that page from the general navigation. Simple!

It’s that easy. You can now search through the thousands of available plugins to add all kinds of functionality to your WordPress site. Did in and have fun!

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Philip Light is the founder of the WordPress WebKit. We’re here when you need help with WordPress. Learn from our WordPress Video Tutorials, Guides and Resources or use our Professional Services when you need a helping hand from a WordPress Professional.

3 Superb SEO Plugins for Your WordPress Blog

By Stacey Zimmerman in Featured

Search engine helps you to generate traffic, but consequently Search Engine Optimization is very complicated, which beginners and expert bloggers dismay in joining such a strategy for achieving traffic. Starting a wordpress by default is pretty suitable at letting search engines see what’s happening. Fortunately, there are wide varieties of plugins accessible to keep you attain a good ranking for your blog, lessen that the stress of typing the code of your blog to obtain results of the search engines.

Here are some very beneficial SEO plugins to help you build a better wordpress blog.

Redirection

In improving our wordpress blogs, we cannot avoid our permalinks to be broken. This happens when you make changes to an old post, or maybe in upgrading or improving your wordpress blog also when you make changes on your permalinks. These changes can break up your entire wordpress blog.

Ill explain what really happens behind these changes, each post has its own URL this is what we call permalinks. When it is broken, those visitors won’t find your blog post. The redirection plugin helps you to redirect the visitors to follow the new permalink. So that your traffic will work efficiently.

features include by John Godley:

• 404 error monitoring – captures a log of 404 errors and allows you to easily map these to 301 redirects
• Custom ‘pass-through’ redirections allowing you to pass a URL through to another page, file, or website.
• Full logs for all redirected URLs
• All URLs can be redirected, not just ones that don’t exist
• Redirection methods – redirect based upon login status, redirect to random pages, redirect based upon the referrer!

Existing features include:

• Automatically add a 301 redirection when a post’s URL changes
• Manually add 301, 302, and 307 redirections for a WordPress post, or for any other file
• Full regular expression support
• Apache .htaccess is not required – works entirely inside WordPress
• Strip or add www to all your WordPress pages * Redirect index.php, index.html, and index.htm access
• Redirection statistics telling you how many times a redirection has occurred, when it last happened, who tried to do it, and where they found your URL
• Fully localized

Robots Meta

Robots Meta plugin allows you to point specifically to the search engines which sections of your blog to crawl. This means that you’ll gain more respect from search engines, and likewise more traffic.

This plugin by Joost De Valk makes it possible to:

• Prevent indexing of your search result pages, while still allowing the search engines to follow the links on them, by adding noindex, follow robots meta tags.
• Disallow indexing of subpages to your homepage, category pages, author pages and tag pages, to prevent duplicate content.
• Prevent indexing of your login, register and admin pages by adding noindex robots meta tags.
• Add noodp an noydir meta robots tags, allowing you to opt out of DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory descriptions.
• Prevent Yahoo! and Google from indexing your feeds by adding a meta tag to their head-section.
• Prevent indexing of just your comment feeds.
• Disable author and date-based archives.
• Prevent attachment pages from ranking in the search results over your articles.
• Enforce a trailing slash on archives.
• Edit your .htaccess and your robots.txt from within WordPress.
• Assign robots meta tags to individual posts & pages.
• Verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Tools.
• Add noarchive tags to your blog.

SEO Smart Links

Internal linking structure is the prime subject of SEO. If you have more links it just convey how well your website structure is. The problem with this is that if you had to manually go and create links to relevant and important posts you’ll spend hours and hours doing it.

Here are some advantages by Vladimir Prelovac:

• SEO Smart links allows you to specify a word, like ‘SEO’ and then link it to a post on your site. Then each time the word SEO appears on your site, it’s automatically turned into a link you specified.
• SEO Smart Links provides automatic SEO benefits for your site in addition to custom keyword lists, nofollow and much more.
• SEO Smart Links can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.
• Further SEO Smart links allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs. Finally SEO Smart links allows you to set nofollow attribute and open links in new window.
• It is a perfect solution to get your blog posts interlinked or add affiliate links to other sites.
• Everything happens completely transparent, and you can edit the options from the administration settings panel.

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Stace Zimmerman is an Internet Marketer who owns & maintains many websites online. Please visit this site for wordpress themes and other blogging information. He also runs a hoodia information site.

6 Useful WordPress Plugins to Prevent Spam

By Stacey Zimmerman in Featured

In starting your wordpress, there’s a great possibility to receive spams. Receiving comment spam when first starting a blog can gain such traffic that could be alarming for beginners. For this reasons we don’t have the access to prevent spammers to read our blogs. In just a minute your blog can be spammed by thousands of comments. This article introduces 6 proven useful plugins that is available in wordpress to help you fight and eradicate spam.

yaCAPTCHA

It is a CAPTCHA plugin designed for WordPress, it helps you block comment spam from automated bots. So if you post comments, users have to write down the characters of an image provided. It is planned for automated programs to find it hard figuring out those characters, a great help in preventing comment spam.

Blogs, WordPress and Google

By Scott Van Achte in Featured

It’s no secret that a continually updated website with new content being added regularly stands a good chance of doing well in Google. One of the long standing methods to regularly expand a site’s content is through the use of a blog.

While there are numerous platforms to choose from for managing a blog, few can compare with the immense flexibility offered with WordPress, and at a cost of free, the price can’t be beat either.

Google likes fresh new content, and setting up a blog on your site, assuming it is updated often with interesting and relevant material, can be one of the best things you can do to help out your search rankings. The beauty behind WordPress is that there is a wide array of totally free plug-ins you can easily install that will make your blog totally search engine friendly.

How To Start A Blog Using WordPress Blogging Software

By Cory Threlfall in Featured

I really enjoy blogging now that I have learned the essentials of how to start a blog and keeping it updated regularly. While you can’t learn all there is to know about starting a blog in 15 minutes, that is really all it takes to get one set up on the internet using the steps I’m about to share with you in this article.

If you want to reduce the risks involved with starting a blog then make a plan now to read this powerful information regarding it.

With that said are you ready to get started on setting up your first blog using WordPress, the most popular blogging software on the web today?

I’m sure you are because that’s why your here right now in the first place.

Enough said already. Lets move on to Step #1.

Step #1: Choose a niche your passionate about.

I was blow away by how powerful choosing the right niche really is. Here’s why? Why start something you have NO interest in. Remember, your going to be producing content about a topic and if you have no interest in it you’re setting yourself up for failure. By choosing a niche your passionate about you’ll love blogging about it every day or every other day.

Believe me, this is the most important step to understand so choose wisely.

Step #2: Register a domain name around your niche.

Now don’t let this next step scare you. It’s very easy to register a Domain Name. Here’s what you do.

Go to – www.domainsbot.com – and enter in one of your main keywords related to your niche. For example – self improvement. From there Domains Bot will search its database of all available domain names around your keyword phrase and present you with the results. It doesn’t get any easier then this.

Once that is done and you have found a domain name you like that is focused around your niche it’s time now to register it with one of the domain registry services Domains Bot has built in to its service. To do this simply click on the ‘Buy Now’ button. From there choose a domain register and set up an account, then proceed to follow the steps it guides you through.

Once you’ve finished that move on to Step #3.

Step #3: Get a web hosting account set up.

Setting up a hosting account is easy as well. Things that are new to us always seen difficult, just be patient and follow the steps each service has in place for you. So with that said it’s time now to set up your web hosting account.

First go to – www.bighosts.com. Here you’ll find web hosting reviews so you can make a sound decision on which web hosting service you want to use. Take your time and read through a few of the reviews.

Once you’ve selected a web hosting service and set up your web hosting account and have followed there emailed instructions for adding your new domain name to your web hosting account, proceed to Step #4.

Step #4: Install wordpress blogging software using Fantastico through your cpanel.

Assuming you are logged into your web hosting account and things are working smoothly with your new domain name it is now time to install WordPress using Fantastico. What you need to do now is login into your cpanel(Control Panel) using your login information you received from your web host and scroll down the page and locate the Fantastico icon.

Click on the icon and follow the instructions Fantastico guides you through. This only takes about 2 – 5 minutes. It’s very straight forward.

Once you’ve completed that and have everything installed you’ll be given an login admin URL along with your username and password you set up. Simply login into your new wordpress blog using your username and password.

That’s it. Your blog is up and live. Now all you have to do is choose your theme and plugins.

Here’s a few resources for you to get started with. For WordPress Themes go to – www.wpthemesfree.com – and for WordPress Plugins go to – www.wp-plugins.net/beta/.

Now this may take you a little more then 15 minutes the first time around but after you do this a few times your timing will increase.

Remember, these are just the basic steps to setting up your WordPress blog using Fantastico and getting it online, but is the easiest in the long run.

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Cory Threlfall – Looking to become an expert blogger in record time AND are serious about earning BIG money with blogging, then I highly recommend you check out my honest make money blogging product reviews. I’ve checked out all the top blogging products on the Internet and these are the ones that I think will benefit you most ==> How To Start A Blog

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