For the past week I’ve had the opportunity to try out a new SEO service called ScribeSEO, a web-based SEO service from a team which includes Brian Clark (known in the WordPress community for CopyBlogger and the Thesis theme). ScribeSEO offers a web-based SEO software service, a WordPress plugin, and now also offers Joomla and Drupal integration. As most of my websites use WordPress in some way, I’ve primarily focused my attention on trying out the WordPress plugin. Here is what I’ve found:
Once installed, the ScribeSEO WordPress plugin adds a window to your post pages called the Scribe Content Optimizer. Here you can run an evaluation prior to publishing your post which will tell you how to best optimize your post!
In order to test out the plugin I decided to try it out on this post. After my initial evaluation, I was given the following feedback:
As you can see from the screen shot above the initial draft of this post received a 68%. Recommended improvements include to move primary keywords towards the front of the meta description, to increase the word count to above 300 words, and to add a few hyperlinks towards the beginning of the post.
At the top of the evaluation there is also a menu with additional analysis available. When switching to the keyword analysis tab I was greeted with the following:
This shows that after analyzing my post the search engines will think this post is primarily about the keyword “wordpress plugin”, then “SEO”, etc. You’ll even get keyword density percentages!
Next, I went to the Alternate Keywords tab to get an idea of keyword suggestions based upon relative search frequency:
This is a great way for you to find high traffic search terms that you may have forgotten in your initial draft.
Lastly, under the Tags tab, you’ll see a list of keywords found within your post which are recommended to be used as tags for your post.
After gathering all the feedback provided and updating my posts I was able to improve my posts score all the way to 99%:
If you run a professional revenue generating blog or build a lot of niche websites, I think that ScribeSEO is a perfect fit and well worth the price.
If you’d like to learn more about ScribeSEO or get a copy for yourself you can find everything you need here!
You are reading Maximize WordPress SEO with ScribeSEO © 2010 | WordPress Hacks | WordPress Directory | WordPress Forums | WordPress eBook
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I’ve been coding with WordPress for a long time now. All the way back to when there was a my-hacks.php file. Shortly thereafter WordPress introduced plugins and widgets. Over all these years I find myself going back to a few key WordPress concepts that make blogs really functional.
- Popularity of Posts – The plugin I use, and hack often, is Alex King’s popularity plugin. If you download it from wordpress.org, it works great, but if you really want to make some cool features, you are going to have to hack it.The popularity plugin displays the most popular posts based on time frame, or category in a list (<li>)by default. I’ve hacked it to get the the raw posts, so I can do my own formatting. You can see an example in my “hot list”.
- Related Content – Notice how I didn’t say related posts. Finding related content goes much deeper then posts or pages.Related content is a must to build loyal readers (repeat visitors). You have to guide your readers and help them find content THEY are interested in. Remember, most people will find your content from Google, so feed them some related content and grow your user base. Related posts are easy to get, you simple have to a fulltext index to your database. You can then match terms to keywords.
- Categories – WordPress is nothing more then a way to organize your content, hence the term CMS (Content Management System). 80% of my traffic from Google comes from a relation to WordPress categories. Either trying to display top level categories without children, or trying to build a top menu/submenu navigation menu.Working with categories in WordPress can be pretty frustrating. I wish there was better information. Luckily there are a lot of help from the WordPress Community.
- Images – Magazine themes are the most popular style of theme on the Internet. It’s all about the cool graphics and images to get reader to click on posts. Content sliders and featured content sections with large graphics can be a pain to manually update, which is why you need to learn how to manipulate the images from your posts.
There you have it. If you want to be a WordPress hacker and make killer websites, you gotta have a good working knowledge of those four topics. Thanks for reading my post, and as always, don’t be scared to ask me for help.
You are reading All Killer WordPress Websites are Built Around These Concepts © 2010 | WordPress Hacks | WordPress Directory | WordPress Forums | WordPress eBook
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The premium themes market has had an overwhelming focus on CMS Themes since its inception back in late 2007, but I’ve always felt that there should also be a variety of blog designs available for all of the WordPress users which actually *gasp* want a nice blog design to use with their blogging software. After all, despite being an extremely flexible piece of software, the core function of WordPress is blogging, right?
That leads me to believe that there is a large market of buyers looking for a nice blog design which includes a flexible feature set and is also available at a lower price point than the more advanced CMS themes currently available. The new WellBlog theme by ColorLabs Project is one of those blogging templates which does a pretty good job of achieving the goals I have for a solid premium blog theme.
To start, here is an example of the design and control panel which is included with the WellBlog theme.
WellBlog Theme Homepage
WellBlog Theme Internal Pages
WellBlog Theme Control Panel
If you’d like to test it out, you can check out the live demo of the black version of the WellBlog theme here.
The WellBlog theme also includes a number of features in addition to the 3 built-in skins to choose from. Probably my favorite unique feature is the scrolling “Most Commented” section at the top of the sidebar. Here are a few of the other more notable features:
- Supports WordPress Threaded Comments
- Built-in Gravatar Support
- After-Sales Support and Upgrade
- Cross-Browser Compatible
- Advertisement Banner Management
- Theme Administration Control Panel
If you are interested in learning more about the WellBlog theme, or are interested in purchasing a license for your WordPress blog, it is currently available for $50.00 (single-website license), or $200.00 (developer’s license for unlimited websites). WPHacks.com readers can use coupon code 94F4D as well to get an additional 30% off your purchase!
If WellBlog isn’t for you, you can also view all of the themes available from ColorLabs Project here.
You are reading WellBlog: A Premium Blogging Theme © 2010 | WordPress Hacks | WordPress Directory | WordPress Forums | WordPress eBook
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Over the last couple weeks I’ve been focusing on traffic building, link building and SEO on my WordPress blog. All three of these website strategies go hand in hand and all build on each other. In this post I will discussing how to make sure your WordPress blog is running efficiently.
WordPress does a lot of cool things in the background to make your website run smoothly. Have you ever noticed that when you change a blog post from one category to another, somehow, someway, you always arrive at the new location? That’s WordPress doing it’s magic! Unfortunately, Humans interact with a blog differently than search engine spiders, so while your permalinks might look nice and organized, the search engine spiders might see problems.
The best place to start is with a blog audit. If your WordPress blog is not using Google Webmaster Tools, this is a great place to start. Google Webmaster tools will not only show you how Google sees your website, but also recommend tips to improve the crawling of your site.
I just did a blog audit and found a couple problems. My sitemap was not getting generated anymore due to permission problems. Even worse the old sitemap had many bad links. Using webmaster tools I could see that Google received 80 posts from me, but only indexed 4. OUCH! Of course I have many more links in Google from other websites. The sitemap is only a recommendation to Google, but I highly recommend keeping up to date. I used the the Google XML Sitemap plugin.
I also had a duplicate content problem. To me, this is really frustrating, because again, as a human, I see my blog a certain way and it looks fine. Then looking at my website from the search engine spider’s point of view, I see many of my posts repeated as many as 5 times.
You might think that is great… 1 post, 5 entries in Google. Well, it’s not because instead of having one powerful link to your website, you have 5 at 20% power. Try cooking a potato at 20% power, it’s a waste of time.
How does this happen? I was using All-in-One SEO plugin and that is suppose to have canonical links, but I still have duplicate content.
So like any hacker, I built a simple Googlebot tracker to see how Google spiders my site… Wow, not what I expected. There is so much I’m learning from the Googlebot tracker, I will have many posts on this little bot, but for now let’s just say, I bet you are wasting Google’s time with your WordPress blog!
The Googlebot doesn’t just come into your website and spider all your content. In my case it comes and grabs one page and leaves. It’s doing this every couple minutes for a total of about 200-300 per day. Webmaster tools will show you how many times you get spidered, but will not show you what pages get indexed.
I was horrified to see that I was wasting Google juice on tags and categories. If Google is only going to hit your website 100 times a day, you better try to give Google 100 different blog posts. If you have 10 tags per post, you might be giving Google 1 blog post with 10 different links. Google then has to choose which page is the highest priority. You can see how 100 blog posts, can easily turn to 10 blog posts because we all love to tag our stuff.
How do you solve this. First of all it takes time. you have many links in Google and the Googlebot will continue to follow them, which isn’t bad… Don’t try to shut off the Googlebot, just make changes for the future of your website.
- Make sure you have canonical link set up. This tells Google where the main blog post, and that all the links from categories and tags really are just pointers to the main blog post.
- Make sure you nofollow internal links to categories, tags, archive, sitemap, etc… Your goal is to drive search engine spiders to your blog posts, not to a category page full of links. There are a few plugins that do this, but I manually did it to my menu and sidebar widgets.
- If you change you permalinks, make sure you provide Google with 301 redirect messages pointing to the new link. For this I use permalink redirect plugin.
- Make sure you sitemap is up-to-date. Not only does the Google XML sitemap plugin update your sitemap, but it also pings Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask every time you post.
- Audit your website often. Use Google Webmaster Tools to find mistakes and keep you blog running smoothly.
- Use analytic software to track visitors to your site. A free service like Google Analytics will do this well.
Please don’t just read this post as another SEO article. Put these tips into action and start with an SEO audit… If you see anything funny, post a comment below and we’ll see if we can help!
You are reading Is your WordPress Blog Wasting Google’s Time? © 2010 | WordPress Hacks | WordPress Directory | WordPress Forums | WordPress eBook
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When searching the web with Google, have you ever noticed that certain webpages with product reviews have a little star-rating and additional info that appears underneath the title?
For example…
Notice the additions under the hyperlinked title. These eye-catching additions are called “rich snippets.” Rich snippets give additional prominence to your review pages when they appear in search results and could help garner additional search engine traffic for your site.
You can ask Google to show this sort of data for your review posts by adding hReview code to your WordPress blog. This process has been covered in other tutorials before, but previous methods required you to edit your theme’s code and fiddle with custom fields to get it to work. Not anymore — here’s the easier, plugin-only method:
- Install the SEO Ultimate plugin. (You can download the zip file here or you can go to the SEO Ultimate homepage and enter your blog’s URL in the Auto Installer field.) Activate the plugin once it’s installed. SEO Ultimate has many other SEO features besides rich snippets, but if you just want to use the rich snippet functionality, you can disable everything else under the “Modules” section of the plugin’s “SEO” menu.
- In the WordPress administration interface, find a post that you’d like to mark as a review and open it in the WordPress editor.
- In the “SEO Settings” box under the content editor, select “Review” from the “Rich Snippet Type” drop-down. (If your post has a category or tag called “Review” or “Reviews,” SEO Ultimate will pre-select the “Review” option automatically.)
- If you gave a rating to the product you reviewed in your post, select the most-applicable star rating from the drop-down.
- Click “Save Changes” to save your post. All done! If you want, you can put your post URL through Google’s testing tool to see a preview of your new rich snippets.
Following these steps will tell SEO Ultimate to add the hReview code to your reviews. (Obviously, only add the code to posts in which you actually review something.)
Note that according to Google’s FAQ, adding the code by itself won’t guarantee that Google will show rich snippets for your site. However, you can request that Google display rich snippets for your site using this form. Even if Google doesn’t show your rich snippets right away, having the code on your site ahead of time will help ensure you’re ahead of the game if/when Google rolls out rich snippets on a wider scale.
Enjoy your rich snippets!
You are reading How To: Add Google Rich Snippets to WordPress (Without Editing Your Theme) © 2010 | WordPress Hacks | WordPress Directory | WordPress Forums | WordPress eBook
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WordPress 3.0 is a pretty significant update which includes the WordPressMU integration, 1,217 bug fixes and several important feature enhancements. Here is a video with additional information:
You are reading WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious” Now Available © 2010 | WordPress Hacks | WordPress Directory | WordPress Forums | WordPress eBook
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One of those up and coming designers who is trying to get noticed is Roy Guan. A few months ago Roy entered into the crowded premium themes community with the launching of his website, Theme Junkie. In order to grab a foothold within this very busy space, Roy has managed to find a niche within a niche, offering all of his premium designs for under $30.00. In only about six months time Theme Junkie has already made available a large selection of premium themes as well as two free themes.
Below I wanted to take a moment and feature a few of my favorite designs already available from Theme Junkie:
FreshLife Theme
NewsTube Theme
(...)
Read the rest of Theme Junkie: Affordable Premium WordPress Themes (186 words)
You are reading Theme Junkie: Affordable Premium WordPress Themes © 2010 | WordPress Hacks | WordPress Directory | WordPress Forums | WordPress eBook
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One design that recently caught my eye is the new TypeMagz theme by ColorLabs Project. This website has been around for years now thanks to the extremely popular Arthemia theme, but rather than going with a magazine format, this new design instead places a focus on gathering and presenting news on the homepage. Here is a sample of how one configuration of the homepage may look:
TypeMagz Homepage Design
For internal pages the website converts to a blog format which includes many of the standard blogging features you’ve come to expect from WordPress:
TypeMagz Blog Design
Although this theme isn’t for every type of website/blog, if you run a website which manages a ton of content, the TypeMagz theme may be just what you are looking for. Like any good news-styled template, this theme really excels by taking a bunch of information and displaying it in one easy and convenient page where you can point readers to.
As you’d expect in today’s market all these features aren’t free, but the template is definitely affordable when compared to the competition. The TypeMagz theme is available for $50.00 for a single-use license, or a developer’s license is also available for $200.00. If TypeMagz isn’t for you, you can view all of the themes available from ColorLabs Project here, including their other new design, the Wellblog theme.
You are reading TypeMagz: A Premium News WordPress Theme © 2010 | WordPress Hacks | WordPress Directory | WordPress Forums | WordPress eBook
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Rather than passing up all that potential traffic, I’ve found that offering a link somewhere within your post (optimally at the bottom of each post) is a great way to help your readers and incoming search engine traffic to promote your content for you. When people find great content they like to share it with others, so why not make it easy for them?
Not only is adding a “Tweet This!” link a great choice, but it is really easy to do. Chances are if you do a search on Google for code to use you’ll find something like the following:
<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Currently reading <?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="Click to send this page to Twitter!" target="_blank">Tweet This!</a>
This code works just fine, but is not the most optimal solution in my opinion. Depending on the permalink structure your WordPress blog uses, combined with the length of your domain name, it may be difficult to fit the link into a 140 character tweet. It also doesn’t leave room for the person to add their own comments to the tweet.
As a proposed solution, I recommend using some WordPress code like the following:
<a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=RT @HackWordPress <?php the_title ();?> <?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>/?p=<?php the_ID(); ?>">Tweet This</a>
This code will automatically insert the “RT” and your Twitter account name (the above example uses our Twitter account, @HackWordPress) then use the ID form of your post with the tweet. When people click the link in the tweet, they will then be redirected to the actual post using your blog’s selected permalink structure, making a convenient and typically short URL.
Have you integrated Twitter into your WordPress blog? Share your strategies in the comments!
You are reading How To: Add a Twitter Link to Your WordPress Blog © 2010 | WordPress Hacks | WordPress Directory | WordPress Forums | WordPress eBook
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Thanks to a generous offer from Nick Roach, the founder of Elegant Themes, I have been given three free memberships to give away to WordPress Hacks readers. Before I give the details of the giveaway, here are the three most recent premium WordPress themes released by Elegant Themes:
Lumin Theme
