Design, Coding, SEO and Social Media Marketing, WordPress & FacebookLINKS: WordPress | HyperArts

How to Add Facebook’s XFBML Like Button & Social Plugins to Your Web Pages & WordPress Posts

timware — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 23:24:46 +0000

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….

Adding the Facebook Social Plugins to your Web Page or Blog — XFBML or iFrame?

Facebook offers two methods to add their social plugins to your Web page or blog posts:

A simple iframe which can be easily dropped into the Web page code;
The XFBML tag, which requires that your page/post make a call to the JavaScript SDK and that your page be set up as a Facebook application (quite easy).

I decided to go the XFBML route which, although a bit more complicated, is more feature rich than the iframe method. For example, after clicking on your Like/Recommend button, the user can add a comment to the profile post. With the XFBML Like button, the post on the user’s personal profile looks like this (if, and only if, they add a comment):

With the iFrame Like button (or if the user doesn’t add a comment with your XFBML version), the post on a user’s profile shows up like this:

New WordPress Plugins for Facebook Social Plugins

If you’d be happy with the simpler iframe method, there are already several WordPress plugins to add the Like button. And here’s a good post on adding the iframe Like button. But, remember, with the iframe method you can’t use the extended features such as the user being able to add a comment when “liking” your post or blog. There is also a WordPress plugin that will add the XFBML social plugins to your blog, by Otto.

Create an Application – Tell Facebook Your Website, Web Page or Post is an Application

The Web page or blog post to which you will add Facebook’s social plugins or other features that interact with Facebook’s Graph API will be viewed by Facebook as an “application,” which allows the page or post to use the JavaScript SDK. Here is the drill:

While logged in to Facebook, go to Create an Application page. You will see this:

Enter the “Site name” value — it will be the name of the application. Just give it a short descriptive title (I used “HyperArts Blog”);
Under the “Connect” tab in your new application, enter the full URL to the website or Web page (I used “http://www.hyperarts.com/blog/” – but individual posts will have a specific URL directly to the post via some PHP code in the Like button code, as described below.)
NOTE: Make sure the Connect URL exactly matches your site URL
Select the appropriate locale;
Enter the CAPTCHA characters, and click through, and viola! There’s your application.

The “Application ID” value is the one you’ll want for our purposes in this post. You can always access this “application” by going to the Developer Dashboard:

With your Web page or blog set up as an application with an app ID, you can now use the JavaScript SDK. There are many other things you can do with your application via the Facebook Graph API, but this is outside the scope of this post.

Add Meta Tags to your WordPress Blog Header File

You’ll need to add the meta tags to your “header.php” file located in your theme’s folder (wp-content > themes > [your theme] > header.php).

You’ll need to add a couple new values to the tag of your header:

xmlns:og="http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/" xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml" >

And then add the following meta tags (taken from our blog) to your header.php:

?> } else { ?> } ?> echo ''; else echo ''; ?>

fb:admins

Replace YOUR-ADMIN-ID with your Facebook User ID. To easily get your Facebook User ID, you can use another aspect of the social graph: http://graph.facebook.com/timware (substitute your username for “timware”). This will pull up the information that is publicly available for that user. You’ll want the “id” value for our purposes here.

fb:app_id

Replace YOUR-APP-ID with the Application ID assigned to your website when you set it up on Facebook, as described above.

og:title

For the “og:title” attribute, you’ll want this to return the title for your blog post. As you can see from the above example, this simply involves a bit of PHP code that pulls in the post’s title.

og:type

As you see above, I utilized a PHP conditional statement in header.php to have the tag for the home page and the for individual posts. This comes by way of Otto who has an excellent blog on WordPress, as well as a Facebook Connect plugin for WordPress. And this approach is also supported in this GitHub post.

As for the implications, in terms of Insights and the display of Pages in your “Home > Ads and Pages” section of your personal profile, we’ll have to wait and see.

You’ll also need to add the XFBML to your index.php file for your theme, as well as the call to the JavaScript SDK. I added it as the first content after the “main-content” DIV. You will then see the Admin Page option next to the Like button.

og:url

I used some PHP to set the URL for our blog’s landing page to the blog URL set in the application (YOUR-APP-URL). On the individual pages or posts, it will fill in the Permalink for the page/post. In “single.php” (for individual blog posts) and “page.php” (for pages), we omit the “href” value in the “Like” button code (fb:like).

og:description

The “og:description” meta tag: If you omit this meta tag, the value will be the “description” meta tag for the post, and that is what will show up as the description on a user’s Facebook profile when they “Recommend” or “Like” your post. (We use the WordPress SEO plugin Headspace which gives you the ability to create custom title and meta tags for each post. Highly recommended!)

og:image

This is simply the full/absolute URL to the image you want to have appear when someone “Likes” your page and it’s added to their personal profile stream. We omit this meta tag so that it uses the lead image from the blog post.

The below image is from my profile after I “Recommended” a blog post:

The green logo is the logo pulled in with the “og:image” meta tag (make sure you make this value the FULL URL to the image!).

The title of the post is linked in blue, and the description meta tag content is the description below the title. The “SEO for 2010 – Easier & Harder!” is the comment I added when I used the “Recommend” link on the post. The commenting feature can be used only if you use XFBML instead of iframes for the Like button, as mentioned earlier in this post.

And that takes care of the meta tags. There are a number of additional social graph meta tags you might want to check out.

Adding the Like Button to your Individual WordPress Posts

The below code includes the call to the JavaScript SDK mentioned earlier and the Like button XFBML code. To add the Like button to each post, you will need to edit the single.php file (wp-content > themes > YOUR THEME > single.php). For our blog’s theme, I put the following code just before the closing tag of the

…



	

	
	layout='standard' show_faces='true' width='500'/>

Adding the Like Button to your Individual WordPress Pages

For WordPress Pages, the only difference from the above code is the URL in the tag. Add the Like button to Pages by adding the above code for Posts — but with the below code for tag where the only difference is the PHP code for the “href” value — to the page.php file (wp-content > themes > YOUR THEME > page.php). For our blog’s theme, I put the code just before the closing tag of the

…

layout='standard' show_faces='true' width='500'/>

The only thing you need to change in the above code for both posts and pages is YOUR APP ID, to the value you get from your application’s page on the Facebook Developer dashboard, as described earlier.

After saving your changes to the “single.php” file, you should be ready to go.

“Like” or “Recommend”?

For our blog, which contains more how-tos and tutorials than editorial content, I changed the “Like” button to be a “Recommend” button, simply by changing the “action” attribute in the tag from “like” to “recommend”. “Recommend” is also more appropriate when someone wants to share a page on, say an environmental disaster, and clicking “Like” isn’t really appropriate.

I then added, via an iframe, the “Recommendations” social plugin which shows our blog posts that people have recommended via the button, and how many times each post was recommended.

Finally, I added the “Like Box” social plugin which displays a box that displays Fan Page data to select from, including connections (with pictures) and the stream. I just opted for the connections.

If anyone has any more insight into this, please comment….

Facebook Social Plugins Resources

Importing Your Blogger or WordPress.com Blog into WordPress

timware — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 05:48:30 +0000

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.

Can You Export / Import Images with the Tools Provided?

The bad news is that whether you use the “tool” in your local WordPress installation to import your external blog or use the export tool in Blogger or WordPress.com to export your blog, it seems you can’t import or export the images. Blogger offers no way to do this, and even though WordPress has an option, when importing a blog, to include images (“Download and import file attachments”), for me this has thrown an error regarding the images and the images in your new blog are still pointing to the WordPress.com URLs (username.files.wordpress.com/…).

Importing Your Blogger Blog to Your WordPress Blog

You can either export your Blogger blog from within the application (See these instructions for exporting your Blogger blog), or do it within WordPress which makes it very easy to import your Blogger posts, comments and users. Here’s the drill:

Log in as admin to your installed WordPress account
In the left column, click on “Tools”
Select “Blogger” — the system from which to import:
Click “Blogger” and, on the next screen, click the “Authorize” button and you’ll be asked to provide the login credentials in order to import the blog posts, comments.
After providing your credentials, your blog will be imported.

Importing your WordPress.com blog into WordPress

In order to import your WordPress.com blog into your new WordPress installation, you will first need to log in to your WordPress.com account and export your blog’s posts and comments.

Exporting from WordPress.com

You will be exporting all your posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags as an xml file. WordPress refers to this file as a “WXR” (“WordPress eXtended RSS”) file.

Log in to your WordPress.com account
In the left column, click “Tools”

and then click “Export.”
Click “Download Export File”

Once you have downloaded the .xml file, you then need to import this file into your WordPress installation.

Log in as Admin to your WordPress installation
In the left column, click “Tools”
Click “Import”
Click “WordPress” (last option in list)
Click the “Browse” button to locate the .xml file you exported from your WordPress.com account, double-click the file or select it and click “Open”
Click “Upload file and import”
Select the user options and make sure you tick the “Download and import file attachments” option which should result in the images in your WordPress.com blog being imported along with the posts and comments. But I’ve seen many reports of errors “Remote file error: Remote file is incorrect size” and I’m not sure what the fix is for this. Your mileage may vary.
Click the “Submit” button, and you’ll be redirected to a “success” page. Hopefully, your images will be imported along with everything else.

Exporting and/or Importing the Blog Images

My own testing resulted in the “Remote file error: Remote file is incorrect size” message when trying to get the images along with the posts and comments. Hopefully this is something WordPress will address and fix.

If you get the above error, you may have to just grab the images from your blog one at a time, right-clicking them and saving them to your computer and then importing them to your new blog. If anyone has found a workaround for this issue, please let me know via the Comments here.

Other Resources

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

timware — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:50:36 +0000

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.

I called HubSpot to have them explain how they integrate a customer’s blog into the customer’s domain (the examples on their site are all customers who opted for the full website+blog hosting, not just the blog package). They explained that they have the customer create a subdomain for their domain (eg hubspotblog.mydomain.com) and, via a CNAME record, the subdomain points to a HubSpot URL. The subdomain is where the blog is installed.

Because my client was going to use HubSpot only for their blog and not their entire website (another tier of service HubSpot offers), having the blog on a subdomain is the only way to have the blog’s URL under the primary domain in any sense.

Blog Hosting: Subdomain or Subdirectory

But is using a subdomain for your blog the most effective hosting solution, from an SEO standpoint? For their customers who opt for the entire package (website & blog hosting), HubSpot installs the blog in a keyword-rich subdirectory — which tells me that even HubSpot believes this to be the preferable choice between subdomain and subdirectory.

So what is the consensus among respected SEOs around this issue of subdomain v. subdirectory?

Google’s Subdomain/Primary Domain Algorithm

In the past, Google viewed subdomains as completely separate entities from the primary domain. Because Google uses what it calls “host crowding” to return up to two results from a single domain on a search engine results page (SERP) (with the second one indented), with subdomains treated as totally separate, a single domain could get more than two listings on a Google SERP, through its subdomains. Because Google prefers to offer their users a varied selection of search results rather than multiple results from a single entity, they made a change in December 2007, announcing that subdomains would be more closely associated with the primary domain — not to the point of being viewed as a subdirectory, but not so completely separate — and Matt Cutts wrote about this on his blog.

Although Google now more closely associates subdomains and primary domains, it still views them as separate entities. Thus, when another site links to your blog or individual posts, that “link love” flows back to the subdomain rather than to your primary domain.

If your blog tends to have content similar to that on your main website — and content relevant to your core offering — then having your blog in subdirectory of your primary domain creates a larger website with more related content. And any external linking credits to your blog flow back to your primary domain. The content of your primary domain is associated by Google with the content of your blog. If the blog is in a subdomain, although there apparently is some association, it appears that it’s not nearly as strong as having the blog content in your primary domain.

This post entitled “21 Tactics to Increase Blog Traffic” from Rand Fishkin (aka randfish), CEO and founder of SEOmoz, a very authoritative and respected SEO blog, addresses this topic:

Hosting your blog on a different domain from your primary site is one of the worst mistakes you can make. A blog on your domain can attract links, attention, publicity, trust and search rankings — by keeping the blog on a separate domain, you shoot yourself in the foot. From worst to best, your options are — Hosted (on a solution like Blogspot or WordpPress), on a unique domain (at least you can 301 it in the future), on a subdomain (these can be treated as unique from the primary domain by the engines) and as a sub-section of the primary domain (in a subfolder or page – this is the best solution).

and in a separate post, Root Domains, Subdomains vs. Subfolders and The Microsite Debate, Rand states:

Starting a blog? I almost always recommend yoursite.com/blog over blog.yoursite.com. Want to launch a new section of content? Use yoursite.com/newstuff rather than newstuff.yoursite.com.

Mark Jackson, of Search Engine Watch, writes in his post about how to host your blog:

Many of my company’s clients need to add content to the root of their domain to build up the authority necessary to compete for keywords. So, more often than not, we recommend that our clients add their blog to a subdirectory.

[...]

Adding the blog to the subdirectory shows the search engines that you regularly add fresh content to the root of the Web site, and you can feed (via RSS) the most recent posts to the home page and then promote this content through StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx, Propeller, etc., and get folks to link (deep link) to the content, so long as you created linkable (i.e., quality) content.

Mark observes that most of the reasons you would want your blog under a subdomain of your website would be technical, eg your primary domain’s hosting environment isn’t friendly to the blogging platform you’d like to use (and Mark prefers WordPress, BTW…).

Conclusion

It appears that the overwhelming consensus among the experts in SEO is that to achieve the optimal SEO benefits from your blog, you should host it in a subdirectory rather than a subdomain.

So how did I advise my client? I told them that the HubSpot solution was a one-size-fits-all solution that wouldn’t provide them the bang for their SEO buck that hosting a WordPress blog in a subdirectory would. And I explained to them that HubSpot is a product that you pay for, like Microsoft Office. So you can’t add any features you hear about, or really much change the look and feel of it. All HubSpot customer blogs look pretty much the same, and rather plain and, um, “unbloglike.” WordPress is open-source and there are literally thousands of developers creating new plugins that expand the features and functionality of WordPress, and there are literally thousands of themes, free and commercial, available to give your blog a distinct appearance.

I’d be interested to hear what others have to say about this.

Other conversations around this topic:
ChrisG Blog

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

timware — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 22:42:26 +0000

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.

Simply download the zip file, expand it and upload it via FTP to your plugins directory, then activate the plugin via the admin panel.

However, one thing I loved about the FarFromFearless.com blog on the iPhone was the incorporation of design elements, i.e., graphics and color:

Perhaps there’s a WordPress plugin that incorporates more look and feel in the website, but if so, I’m not aware of it. And I’m sure that how your WordPress site displays on PDAs depends on what theme you are using. Our blog uses the WordPress Fusion theme. So your mileage may vary.

Contact Form Plugin for WordPress – cforms

timware — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 15:15:03 +0000

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.

Installing cforms

Just download the cforms plugin and, as with most WordPress plugins, unzip it and upload it into your WordPress plugins directory.

Important: Because cforms appears to assume your WordPress installation is in the document root of your website, instead of in a subdirectory, I recommend that before activating the plugin, you FTP into your server to:

wp-content > plugins > cforms > js

and open the file “cforms.js” with your text editor and make sure that, on line 19, the following variable is correct:

var sajax_uri = ‘/wp-content/plugins/cforms/lib_ajax.php’;

The above setting is correct if your blog is at the document root of your website. If your WordPress install is in a subdirectory, you need to modify this variable to:

var sajax_uri = ‘/name-of-subdirectory/wp-content/plugins/cforms/lib_ajax.php’;

After making any modifications, save the file.

You can now activate the plugin via your admin panel, in “Plugins” – and you shouldn’t get a warning about the path being incorrect.

Configuring cforms

Once the cformsII plugin is activated, you can now configure it.

In your admin panel you’ll see, after the “Settings” link, a “cformsII” link:

Click this link to see the various options for configuring cformsII:

Form Settings

I recommend leaving the “Ajax enabled” checkbox checked.

Give your form a name (I recommend not having spaces in the name, so something like “ContactForm” or whatever). This name will be used when we insert the form into a WordPress page.

To change the Field Name (this name is what will be displayed on your form), just click in the gray box and change what’s there to what you want.

To add a field, first select the position where it is to be added in the form, then click on the “** Add **” button.

You can then name the field and select what kind of field it is from the pulldown menu to the right of the Field Name.

As you can see from the above example, I added a CAPTCHA verification field.

To set which fields are required and how they function is a piece of cake:

cformII defaults are pretty much what you’ll want here, but you can make any field required. The “e-mail” option is just for fields with email addresses and it verifies that the email address entered conforms to email syntax (name@domain.com or .net etc.).

The “auto-clear” option, if checked, will render the Field Name in the text-entry field and, when the user clicks into that field to enter their name, the Field Name text will disappear.

Under “Admin Email Message Options” you select who receives the email generated by the form submission, and who the form is from.

If you want the “From” to be the user’s email address they entered, in the “From: email address” field, enter: {Email}

The “Subject admin email” is the Subject line for the email you’ll receive.

I unchecked “Enable HTML” as it made the email I received from the form submission a mess, with a bunch of code that didn’t render properly. Your mileage may vary, but I thought, Who needs this?

The many other options in the “Form Settings” screen can pretty much be left alone, unless you want to redirect the user to a “success” or “thanks” page after they submit the form. The default is a success message showing up above the form after it’s successfully sent. But you should review the various options to see what they are, as there are many powerful features in cformsII.

Global Settings
There are a number of options here, but the only one I worked with was the “CAPTCHA Image Settings” where you can set colors, how many characters are shown, etc.

Styling
Here you can pick from a number of options for how your form is rendered on your WordPress page.

You can audition the various styles by selecting a style from the pulldown list, then clicking “Select Style” – it will be rendered just to the right. I liked “minimal.css” the best. You can see our implementation on our Social Media Blog & Resource Center contact page.

To tweak the stylesheet for the style you have selected, click on “Styling” in the left cformsII navigation; click the “Basic CSS editor: [stylesheet-you-chose].css” and make edits. (Note: Back up the style sheet, which is located in “plugins > cforms > Styling > [stylesheet-you-chose].css” Click “Update Settings” when you’re done. The permissions on the stylesheet must be set to 777 to make changes through the admin panel.

NOTE: On one client’s blog, the CAPTCHA image and reset button wrapped below where the user enters the CAPTCHA characters. I had something to do with the theme for this WordPress blog, and I had to add the following CSS style to our theme style sheet (each theme’s style sheet is located at: wp-content/themes/name-of-theme/ and is usually called “style.css” – best practices dictate adding modifications to this style sheet after the default styles):

ol.cf-ol li#li–5 { margin:0; padding:0; width:410px !important; }
img.captcha { float:right !important;}
img.captcha-reset { float:right;}

Again, your mileage may vary, but I couldn’t see why the CAPTCHA was wrapping. Drove me crazy! The above CSS did, however, fix the display.

Adding the cforms Form to a WordPress Page

Just create your page in WordPress. After whatever other text you want to display on the page, just add this bit:

Change “name-of-form” to your form’s name.

Once you’ve done this, test it out to see if it’s working properly.

WordPress Blogroll Ordering – My Link Order Patch for 2.8

admin — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 15:21:54 +0000

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

timware — Wed, 20 May 2009 23:59:35 +0000

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:

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

timware — Tue, 05 May 2009 05:16:37 +0000

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.

SEO for WordPress – Plug-ins and Features

The focus of good on-page SEO is conveying to the search-bots the subject matter of each page, from the directory and file names, to the title and meta tags, to the content. Google and the other search engines appear to parse these “signals,” noting the presence of keywords in all of the above when assessing what keywords are relevant to your post. Thus, being able to control these aspects of your blog posts is crucial in optimizing them for the search engines.

Using Permalinks for naming directories and posts
Permalinks allow you to control the name of directories and files of your posts. When logged in as an administrator, click on: Settings > Permalinks – and select “Custom Structure.” You want to customize this setting so that the value is:

/%postname%/

This setting will create the URL to your blog post to be:

/name-of-your-blog-post/

which is the human-readable URL for your post the title of the post with hyphens separating each word (minus any non-alpha-numeric characters).

You can also set the Permalink value to be:

/%category%/%postname%/

which will create a URL for the post where the category assigned to the post (or the first category assigned, if multiple categories) will be the directory name, and your post will be the title of the post formatted as described above.

Even better, you can tweak the Permalink in the “Permalink” field just below the blog post title, while you’re in the editing mode, so that it is more concise and keyword-rich. Just remember to use hyphens to separate each word, and don’t use any characters except alpha-numeric, hyphens or underscores. Hyphens are preferable to underscores when separating words.

The Permalinks feature offers almost complete control over the directory and file naming for each of your blog posts, giving them some extra juice in the rankings battle.

WordPress Plug-in for Controlling Title Tag and Description Meta Tag (SEO)
Headspace2 – Headspace2 is a great plug-in that lets you control the the title tag and the description meta tag for each blog post. As many know, these two tags are very important in how Google and other search engines assess a Web page’s ranking, so controlling these is a serious plus. Headspace2 allows you to configure meta data for:

Posts
Pages
Categories
Home page
Author pages
Search pages
404 page

The “keywords” meta tag is whatever tags you add to your post, so Headspace2 takes care of the other important meta data.

After installing and activating the plug-in, you will see Headspace text entry fields below the main blog-entry field, where you can add the title tag and description meta tag content. The title tag content you enter will be in addition to the title of your blog, appearing first.

Google Sitemap Generator
The Google Sitemap Generator plug-in creates a Google XML Sitemap of your WordPress blog. Just install the plug-in, activate it, and a “sitemap.xml” sitemap is auto-generated and updated with each blog post. You can then submit this sitemap using Google’s Webmaster Tools.

AddThis Social Media Sharing & Bookmarking Feature
AddThis has become a very popular widget to allow users to easily add your Web page or blog post to various social bookmarking and networking sites. The WordPress plug-in is very easy to install and configure.

Feedburner / Feedsmith Plug-in
The Feedburner / Feedsmith Plug-in, originally authored by Steve Smith, detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.

Other Tips to Improve Your WordPress Blogging Efficiency

Pasting Microsoft Word Content into Blog Posts
When pasting content into your blog from a MS Word document, you want to make sure you don’t include all the (hidden) formatting code MS Word embeds . WordPress has a built-in feature to strip out all the extraneous Word code *without* having to first paste the content into a simple text editor.

While in “Visual” editing mode, click the right-most icon in the WYSIWYG formatting tools above the text-entry field, called “Kitchen Sink.” This adds a new row of tools, one of which is a tool to strip out Word formatting when pasting from a Word document. It shows a clipboard and the “W”. Just click on this, paste in your Word content into the text-entry field, and click “Insert.” Your content is entered format-free!

Cool Tag Cloud – 3D with WP-Cumulus
The WP-Cumulus plug-in add the cool 3D moving tag cloud feature. Very easy to install and configure. This plug-in gives your tag cloud some serious coolness.

Spam Blocking Plug-in for WordPress
The Akismet plug-in pretty much eliminates spam for showing up in your blog comments. Questionable comments are held for approval. Akismet is very effective and highly recommended.

Public-Post Preview Plug-in – Link to Preview Post before Publishing
Public Post Preview plug-in provides a great way to share your blog post via hyperlink before publishing it. The preview link is provided below the text-entry field. Make sure you check the “Public Preview” box and then just send the URL out to friends or colleagues who you’d like to review your draft.