SEO Tools Of The Trade

Archive for the ‘Wordpress’ Category

Here’s a list of 20 services that provide Photoshop PSD conversion to WordPress themes.

http://www.bestpsdtohtml.com/20-best-psd-to-wordpress-service-providers/

If you ever need to move your WordPress installation to another directory, then here are the instructions on how to do it:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress

A nice list of multimedia related plugins for WordPress.

http://mashable.com/2007/07/27/50-wordpress-plugins-for-multimedia/

A lot of WP themes are now “widget-ized.” This makes it very easy to customize the navigation areas that normally house components such as Categories, Meta, Archives, Search, Calendar, etc.

When a theme is widgetized, you can simple drag and drop the widgets into the widget editor without having to tweak the theme code directly.

However, one problem is adding Adsense code to a Text Widget. You want to do this because typically you want to a 120×600 tower adsense in that narrow navigation area in the left or right nav bar.

The standard Text Widget, though, strips out the script code of the Adsense block. So to fix this you need to tweak the widget.php code, which you can find in wp-includes directory.

Change this line:

if ( current_user_can(‘unfiltered_html’) )
$text = stripslashes( $widget_text['text'] );
else
$text = stripslashes(wp_filter_post_kses( $widget_text['text']

To this line:

if ( current_user_can(‘edit_themes’) )
$text = stripslashes( $widget_text['text'] );
else
$text = stripslashes(wp_filter_post_kses( $widget_text['text']

This allows the Text Widget to display script code from your Adsense block.

For more details check out this link:

http://www.thainy.com/2007/05/how-to-use-html-tag-and-script-in-wpmu-text-widget/

This really isn’t a hard SEO tool suggestion. Just a note for people like me who use a lot of WordPress blogs.

I created a WP blog and wanted to set up a separate “members only” section where I could post FAQs, tips, suggestions, etc. So my main blog was at www.mainblog.com and my members-only blog would be installed at www.mainblog.com/members.

Sounds easy enough — just do another WordPress install in the /members directory.

To make life easy, I thought I would just use the cPanel directory password feature. Now here’s the problem. When I did a cPanel directory protect, and then tried to access www.mainblog.com/members, it redirected me to my 404 page!

After a lot of searching I found this posting: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/111914

Basically the fix is to put these two lines at the top of the .htaccess file.

ErrorDocument 401 /members/index.php
ErrorDocument 403 /members/index.php

I think it might work with just the 401 line but someone suggested trying both. Apparently when you password protect a directory it kicks out either a 401 or 403 error. If you don’t put in the above code WordPress eventually treats it as a 404 error and redirects you to that page.

A nice trick and my members section blog is now password protected!

P.S. Don’t forget to remove the members directory from being spidered in your robots.txt file.

If you’re doing WordPress or have a need for a CSS template then here a great site filled with free css templates.

http://www.freecsstemplates.org/

Here’s another good site for free css templates. Mostly for non-WordPress sites.
http://www.oswd.org/

I’ve become a big advocate of using WordPress to quickly create sites that are easy to modify and maintain. What I like about WordPress is that I can add content and grow the site from anywhere I have internet access.

I don’t need to be carrying around a laptop with all my website tools like XsitePro, Frontpage, etc. I don’t even need to have an FTP account to upload the new content. If I’m travelling I can simply go to the nearest internet cafe and just type in the latest page of information.

Search engines love finding new content and that helps with getting more traffic. And more traffic means it is easier to monetize the site.

That said, there are a lot of other things that can be done to a WordPress site to make it even more search engine friendly.

Here is a great site http://www.marketingop.us/2006/06/13/steps-wordpress-seo/ that has a nice summary of plugins and tips to make your WordPress site more SEO friendly.

The 4 plugins mentioned on this site are:

1. Ultimate Tag Warrior 3.

2. Google Sitemaps.

3. Related Posts.

4. WordPress SEO plugin from Marketingop.us

Here’s another good link on SEO tips, although his suggestions may already be implemented in some of the above plugins. I need to check it out more…
http://www.dech.co.uk/2005/11/ultimate-WordPress-seo-tips/

Yet another good site explaining tags for SEO.

http://seo.blorc.com/seo/wordpress-seo-first-steps/

In addition to installing the Ultimate Tag Warrior this site suggests installing the plugin Tags In The Head as well.