Archive for category LINKS: WordPress
How to Add Facebook’s XFBML Like Button & Social Plugins to Your Web Pages & WordPress Posts
Posted by timware in LINKS: WordPress, Social Media / Inbound Marketing, Static FBML & FBML, Web Coding on April 24th, 2010
Facebook’s new Open Graph protocol is now official, having been announced and launched this past Wednesday at the Facebook f8 Conference. It is the successor to Facebook Connect which will be slowly phased out, and it is a big improvement, making it much easier to “socialize” your Web pages into Facebook’s hyper-expanding social network.
I must admit it was hard to sit still at the f8 conference after Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement in his keynote address and I attended a couple sessions that delved deeper into the Social Plugins and the Open Graph protocol. As soon as possible, which happens to be today, I decided to start experimenting by adding some social plugins to my WordPress blog.
I decided I could save others a lot of time if I wrote up a tutorial. So here it is….
Importing Your Blogger or WordPress.com Blog into WordPress
Posted by timware in LINKS: WordPress, SEO - Google on April 21st, 2010
In a previous post, I discussed the SEO implications of choosing where to host your blog — in a subdomain, separate domain, external blog service or subdirectory. My conclusion, was that hosting your blog in a subdirectory of your primary domain provided the best SEO benefits.
Moving Your Blog to WordPress
So you’ve installed WordPress in a subdirectory of your primary domain. However, you already have an established blog on an external service such as Blogger or WordPress.com, with many posts and many images. What is the easiest way to move that blog to your new self-hosted WordPress blog? Both of the aforementioned services offer the ability to export your blog posts and comments, and your installed copy of WordPress has a “tool” for importing an external blog.
Blog Hosting for Best SEO: External, Subdomain, Subdirectory?
Posted by timware in LINKS: WordPress, SEO - Google, Social Media / Inbound Marketing 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.
Read the rest of this entry »
Best WordPress Plugin for Blackberry, iPhone, iTouch, PDA Display
Posted by timware in LINKS: 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.
Contact Form Plugin for WordPress – cforms
Posted by timware in LINKS: WordPress on August 22nd, 2009
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.
WordPress Blogroll Ordering – My Link Order Patch for 2.8
Posted by admin in LINKS: WordPress on August 4th, 2009
In my post about the plugin “My Link Order” for ordering your blogroll links, I talked about what a great plugin it is. Then WordPress 2.8 came out and it caused My Link Order not to work. The patch/fix for this is not very intuitive, so I’m laying it out below:
- Log in to your WordPress as admin;
- Click on the “Links” link in the left navigation;
- Click on “My Link Order” in the list that is displayed;
- On the “My Link Order” page are the instructions for patching /wp-includes/taxonomy.php so that My Link Order works in WordPress 2.8.
- At line 683, after this code:
elseif ( empty($_orderby) || ‘id’ == $_orderby )
$orderby = ‘t.term_id’;you paste the following code:
else if ( ‘order’ == $_orderby )
$orderby = ‘t.term_order’;
and then your blogroll shows up again!
WordPress Plugin to Order Your Blogroll Links & Categories
Posted by timware in LINKS: WordPress on May 20th, 2009
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.
Maximizing WordPress Blog SEO + General Tips for Efficient Blogging
Posted by timware in LINKS: WordPress, SEO - Google, Social Media / Inbound Marketing on May 4th, 2009
Having set up various clients with WordPress, clients who were interested in search engine rankings and ways to optimize their blog and posts for the search engines, I thought I’d layout some basics for setting up your WordPress blog for ultimate SEO bang.
Also included here are some other WordPress plug-ins & tips we’ve found indispensable for setting up maximum-efficiency blogs.
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