Archive for category WordPress

Blog Hosting for Best SEO: External, Subdomain, Subdirectory?

Posted by timware in SEO - Google, Social Media / Inbound Marketing, WordPress on October 25th, 2009

Where and how you host your blog is as important to your search engine rankings as what plugins you use and how you optimize your blog posts. I have previously discussed the best WordPress SEO plugins, but here I want to discuss the importance of how you set up your blog’s hosting: 1) separate domain; 2) subdomain; 3) external hosted solution (WordPress.com, Typepad, Blogger); 4) subdirectory.

I won’t go into the separate-domain issue, but you can read Mark Jackson’s Search Engine Watch post about this option. Needless to say, the benefits to your primary domain in this case would be nil, except for backlinking from the new, blog domain to your primary domain. But because this blog domain will have likely been recently activated, you will have to wait at least a year before Google assigns it any meaningful TrustRank to the new domain.

As all SEOs know, a business should almost always host their blog under their own domain, rather than the other options mentioned above. When other websites link back to your posts or other pages of your blog, you want the backlinking credit to go to your domain, not to Blogger.com or Typepad.com.

Recently, a client asked us about setting up a blog for them and we told them what we tell all our clients:

Use WordPress as the blogging platform: We love the incredible number of plugins and themes that are developed by the very large and active WordPress community. And we really like WordPress as a blogging platform (and Dan Cederholm agrees!);
Install WordPress in a subdirectory: Install the blog under your own domain, in a subdirectory that has a keyword-rich name, eg /widget-sales-usa/) rather than “blog” (we actually use “blog”, but there’s a reason…) or “wordpress.”

HubSpot Business Blogging?

Not long after this conversation, our client informed us that they had purchased the HubSpot “Business Blogging” package, and they asked if this would be as beneficial to their SEO as having a WordPress blog. I decided to do some research.
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blog, blogging, business blogs, Google, seo

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Best WordPress Plugin for Blackberry, iPhone, iTouch, PDA Display

Posted by timware in WordPress on September 29th, 2009

After viewing our HyperArts blog on my iPhone, I realized that there must be a WordPress plugin to display WordPress sites in a PDA-friendly way.

One site I found that talked about PDA-friendly blogs, FarFromFearless.com, touted the plugin iWPhone Wordpress Plugin and Theme. However, when I tested it out on my iPhone my site displayed absolutely nothing. On the developer’s page, they only claim compatibility to v. 2.5 of WordPress, so apparently they’ve stopped developing this plugin.

After some searching on the WordPress Plugins site, I located the plugin WPtouch, and it works great.

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Contact Form Plugin for WordPress – cforms

Posted by timware in WordPress on August 22nd, 2009

cforms Recently, I wanted to add a contact form to our Social Media Blog & Resource Center which is built on WordPress (v 2.8.4, as of this post). I tested out a number of plugins and finally settled on cforms, and I’m very pleased with it. The latest version is cformsII which the developer, Delicious Days, describes as “ a powerful and feature rich form plugin for Wordpress, offering convenient deployment of multiple Ajax driven contact forms throughout your blog or even on the same page.”

I found this plugin to be quite easy to install and configure, and was impressed with all its features, especially the ability to add CAPTCHA or challenge questions to the form. It’s very easy to add form fields of all kinds and there are many different styling options which are available with a click.

Because the form submission is handled via Ajax, you don’t have to worry about SMTP server settings or anything. It’s really pretty much plug ‘n’ play.

This article will guide you through installation and configuration of cformsII.

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blog contact form, CAPTCHA, Wordpress Plugins

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Wordpress Plugin to Order Your Blogroll Links & Categories

Posted by timware in WordPress on May 20th, 2009

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NOTE: “My Link Order” requires a patch to work correctly in Wordpress 2.8. Read this post…

After experiencing a fair amount of frustration trying to order the blogroll links on our Social Media Resources website which is built on Wordpress, I googled around and found My Link Order. This plugin really does the trick, and plays nice with Wordpress v. 2.7.1. But it requires a patch to work in Wordpress v. 2.8.

If your theme uses widgets, they suggest that you replace the standard “Links” widget with the “My Link Order” widget. I found it doesn’t work if your theme uses widgets and you don’t use the “My Link Order” widget.

However, the theme our Social Media blog uses is “Modern,” designed by Ulf Pettersson, which doesn’t use widgets, and the My Link Order developer’s instructions form using their plugin with a non-widget theme aren’t accurate.

You need to do two things:

1) Make “/wp-includes/taxonomy.php” writeable (permissions: 666)

2) In “sidebar.php” replace the PHP code for pulling in the links with this code:
<?php wp_list_bookmarks(‘orderby=order&category_orderby=order’); ?>

Once you have installed the plugin and made the above modifications, ordering your blogroll links and categories is a piece of cake — just drag and drop them into the order in which you wish them to appear.

I find it odd that this feature isn’t built into Wordpress. Without the My Link Order plugin, ordering the links is very limited.

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