Jun
09
Filed Under (Wordpress) by Mani Karthik on 09-06-2008

Buddypress is the single window custom CMS solution for wordpress lovers. It’s like the extended, super flexible, omni potential CMS on the wordpress platform. It had albums, extended profiles, groups, personal blogs for each member, status updates, private messaging and all of that. Seamless integration with wordpress is the best thing about buddypress.

Features on Buddypress

  • Personal blogs
  • Friends
  • Private Messaging
  • Picture albums
  • Friends
  • Groups
  • Extended profiles
SEO Blog-buddypress

Buddypress is essentially a complete seamless integration of many plugins on a single backbone. This ensures zero breakdowns and flexibility. You can make the homepage a single page, or a wordpress article showoff or a combined assimilation of all the members activity just like a true CMS. It does excellent job rendering the functions and is the best of it’s kind. However, do not compare it with the social networks around. It is your best buddy if you have a community to take care of providing it with the best features to interact, socialize and…well give a complete CMS solution.

Download BuddyPress / Installing instructions

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May
17
Filed Under (Wordpress) by Mani Karthik on 17-05-2008

Forms were always the same on wordpress. While the rest of the world had all sorts of fancy ones with immediate response alerts and immediate database checks, wordpress users were all stuck up with the traditional form with a captcha that throws up errors galore !

Well, to break out of this, here’s a brand new form available for wordpress, which is a clean lite weight, ajax powered one that’s slick and cool. It performs quick checks and throws up error messages if the form is not rightly filled, as and when it is being filled. Yes, no annoying re filling.

Check the plugin here. It’s worth a change from the traditional forms. Demo of the form is here.

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Apr
01
Filed Under (Wordpress) by Mani Karthik on 01-04-2008

Why should you save bandwidth? You’ve got enough of it haven’t you?
You should ask that question to someone who gets lot of traffic, especially from Digg/ SU etc. They’d immediately gulp down anything you suggest to save the bandwidth.

Recently, there have been server breakdowns with many bloggers because of the social media outburst. Many of them did nothing wrong but some ardent reader of their’s picked up one of the stories and submitted to Digg. The story went viral and made it to the top of the Digg’s most dugg pages. Unfortunately the blogger was running on a shared hosting platform and the server could not stand the immediate traffic burst that was created from Digg making it to go crash. The site went offline soon after the story was popular resulting in some bad reputation too.

Now this would happen only if you make it to the top of Digg, anyways it makes sense to save some bandwidth with some common, unharming tips right?
One of the things that eat up your bandwidth is images - when you upload images in wordpress it goes to the default directory - wp-admin/uploads
Now, when ever a story is accessed with the picture on it, file is being accessed and it doubles your bandwidth usage.

What you can do in this case is upload the images to flickr or any other image upload utility so that the image gets accessed from there and not your server.

Now, I know how hard it is to upload image to flickr while you are writing a post, it takes another 10 minutes of your time (unless you are using the upload function from the Flock browser).

So here is a wordpress plugin that will help you upload images to flickr just the way you do it on wordpress. Yes, while you are writing the post with no extra time lost.
Download the plugin here.

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Mar
21
Filed Under (Wordpress) by Mani Karthik on 21-03-2008

Hey, did you see the SEO Green theme released lately? There were some errors reported from users that made me (well, pushed me) to do the corrections and release a stable version. So here we are. The SEO Green theme has a updated version now.

Here are the issues that were reported.

  • The meta info weren’t getting inserted properly on some sites on installing the headspace plugin - SORTED, We have contacted the plugin developer and fixed the problem. Now, the theme is completely ready for the HeadSpace plugin and it’s advanced features.
  • The Google Analytics tracking code could not be inserted and tracked - SORTED once and for all.
  • The pages links did not update - SORTED once and for all.

If you recall, I insisted that you use the Headspace plugin, and though some users complained about not being able to use it easily, I stand by my word. Please make yourself comfortable with the plugin it will help you a lot.

Anyhow, I understand that the plugin itself is a bit tricky to use for the first time, so here are some tutorials for beginners. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll find how useful it is.

Step 1
Install the plugin and go to the Options > HeadSpace > Page Settings and click on Global Settings.
Enter the blog description and page title here (Leave the tags/keywords column free, we’ll do it later). This is actually the global settings of the meta tags, which will be repeated on every page unless otherwise the individual page has a different setting(info on how to do that …down the page).

Headspace

Step 2
Click on the fifth setting “Posts & Pages”. Enter in the page title and the description.This is the setting that would appear for each pages and individual articles, unless otherwise specified.

Headspace

Step 3
Now go to Modules menu. This is an important option. This menu basically lets you decide what are the options you want to access from the dashboard while writing a post. For instance, when you create a new post, if you have installed All in SEO plugin, you’d get two extra columns beneath that asks you the meta information. Similarly, in headspace you can decide what are the modules that need to appear in the “write post” page.

By default, the modules available are Page Titla, Page Description and Tags (Seen in the green box left). Now you can see a set of disabled modules to the right (in the grey section). Pull and place the modules that you think you need in the writing page. Ex: No Index/ NoFollow will give you two checker boxes in the write page, asking you whether to include the “No Index/ No Follow” info in the meta tag of that particular article. This is extrememly useful if you want certain pages/article not to be indexed by google (to reduce duplicate content/avoid content issues). There are some cool options available there like page specific themes/ page specific plugins, Google Analytics tracking etc. None of them have SEO effect, so I’m not going to tell about them, you may want to tinker and find out. Make sure you save the module order after re aranging them so that they appear on the write page.

Headspace

Step 4
Now go to Manage > Metadata menu.
This is the best part. From this menu you can list out upto 250 of your recent posts. And from the drop down menu on the top, select either the Page description/ Page Title/ Site Decription/ Tags and Keywords of the posts to be displayed.
We are interested only in the page title, site description and the tags. So let’s do it one by one.
Click on any one of the criteria and click the green “refresh” button suggested against each post. Within seconds the page description/tags/title will be auto generated.
Unless you are specific on any article, you can pretty well generate the meta information (tags, description and title) for all the article on your blog in a jiffy. Save the info.

Headspace

Step 5
Now, that’s pretty much about it. All you need to do is to make sure while you write a post, you give a unique page title, description and select the keywords from the ones suggested for each article.

So there you are, install the SEO Green theme and forget about SEOing your blog.

I want to thank Moon Blogger, w3Mixx who helped me with the feedback on using the theme.

And these are the improvements we’ve made in the new version of the SEO Green theme.

  • Added more onsite optimization elements that will make your articles/posts SEO friendly by default. You don’t have to muck around with the codes to tweak them. Leave it to us.
  • Cleaned up the footer to a more cool design.

Download the updated theme here SEO Green V 1.01. Live Demo

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Mar
19
Filed Under (New, SEO Misc, Wordpress) by Mani Karthik on 19-03-2008

Here are the twenty four kickass plugins that are used on DailySEOblog. Some are active and some are not. Marked against each is the reason why it’s cool and what it won’t do.

24 Killer plugins for wordpresAkismet
The must have spam catcher. It’s already present in your default wordpress installation, if you haven’t activated it, please do it before those spams accumulate.

  • All in one SEO pack
    (Inactive)This is an great plugin that will help you manage the meta tags for articles enabling them with unique meta and titles.I use an even better plugin now (Headspace2), which is AllinSEO x 10 times. So this one is inactive. You may want to use it if you are looking for a hassle free and easy meta tag management.
  • Feed copyrighter plugin
    This one is reposible for throwing up those copyright statement at the end of the feeds in RSS readers. It is one way of fighting the scrappers, not sure how effective it is, but it is indeed one weapon we hve right now.Bad thing - The credit link will appear on all RSS footers.
  • Better comments manager
    This is one of the best plugins I’ve always cherished using. It enables easy management of comments, lets you reply to them easily, mass edit/approve them. And yes, this is from Keith and team. His plugins have exceptional quality after all.
  • Comment Luv
    This plugin is responsible for placing the link to your latest posts on comments. Nice plugin, it crawls your site (from the info you submit while commenting), and get’s the latest URL, parse it as HTML beneath your name.Bad thing - To tweak the text that appears with it, there are no options menu, and you have to edit the code. Not too many are comfortable doing it.
  • Duplicate sidebar widgets
    This plugin helps you to duplicate the widgets modules to drag and drop on the sidebar. Ex: If you want two instances of the random posts widget, this one replicates it.
  • Enhanced Contact form
    This plugin is responsible for all those contact forms appearing in the pages.
  • Feed footer
    Adds anything in HTML to feeds appearing in RSS reader. 10 spots available, suitable for advertising and throwing up messages.
  • Google AdWrap
    You know about Googles section targeting right?This plugin adds the “sections” to be targeted to comments and content area thereby the ads that appear on Google AdSense will be heavily contextual to the information in these sections.Bad thing - You can’t manually add te google_ad_section code to any other place on the blog.
  • Google XML sitemaps
    Must have for all blogs. Generates an XML sitemap making the contents visible for search spiders.Bad thing - If you enable the robots.txt rewriting, everything you set manually on robots.txt is rewritten.
  • HeadSpace2
    The best meta tag management plugin I’ve seen in the recent times. No words to describe - killer plugin!Bad thing - Initially, difficult to understand how it functions and yo use.
  • Homepage Excerpts
    Adds a “more” link cutting posts on the main homepage within certain limit of characters. Good for curbing duplicate content on wordpress.
  • I love social bookmarking
    (Inactive)Great plugin that displays a pull down menu for social bookmarking on all the top social media websites.Bad thing - Serious alignment issues.
  • KB Linker
    Great plugin to increase the number of links within your site. It enables you to select a keyword for which you can set a link. Where ever this keyword appears, it would make it a link.Bad thing - It injects the link code even to links and in between html codes ! And you get html errors sometimes.
  • Random posts widget
    Throws up a set of random posts on the sidebar. Good options available.
  • Search Meter
    Gives me access from the dashboard to search phrases on DailySEOblog search box. And also shows if the person who searched the phrase got the info he wanted or not. Good plugin to get an idea of topics to blog.
  • SEO for Wordpress
    A little outdated plugin, it says is reduces instances of duplicate content. But it doesn’t show us how and where. Otherwise a good concept.
  • Shylock AdSense
    The killer plugin that allows you to inject adsense codes anywhere on the post, and decide which ads to go where.
  • Ultimate Google Analytics
    Great plugin that will manage Google Analytics code injection and tracking a breeze. You could very well do it manually, but this one is a laymans friend.
  • WP- Stats
    Displays the wordpress blog stats from the dashboard. A better stats if you wat uptodate results. Analytics is a day and some hours late.
  • WP-Cache
    Makes wordpress faster and quick loading.
  • WP- category posts
    Includes a widget that will display posts from a particular category in the sidebar. Neat and clean code. Serves the purpose with no glitch.
  • Yet Another threaded comments plugin
    (Inactive)This comment allows to have newly created comments relate to existing comments, so you can comment on a comment. This information allows to display the Comments in a hierarchical fashion (e.g. a Tree).This is an alternative to te Brian’s threaded comments plugin that’s got some issues while installing and working.This plugin adds a pull down menu while you comment listing you the names on the previously commented guys name. You can select the guy you wanted to reply and comment.Works on many sites but not mine, hence inactive.
  • Who Sees Ads
    Another Killer plugin from OZH. You can decide whether your AdSense ads should be displayed to a search engine visitor or not, or a regular direct hit reader or not etc. Great in incresing the CTR and revenue of Google Ads.Bad thing - Can’t really track as to how the ads are performing and how they gave you improved revenues.
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    Mar
    18
    Filed Under (Wordpress) by Mani Karthik on 18-03-2008

    Hereafter, I’d be doing a podcast every weekend on selected SEO tips. This is the first of the series where, I’m talking about “Duplicate content issues on Wordpress and how to curb it”. The quality isn’t awesome, but this would be taken care of in the next episodes as I’m getting into the groove slowly. Hope you’d like the episode and forgive the mistakes in it (Aw, this is a tedious job I tell you! ) :D.
    After all, it’s the information that matters. So here you go.

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    Mar
    05
    Filed Under (Wordpress) by Mani Karthik on 05-03-2008

    Twitter is gaining on…Chris loves it Darren loves it John TP loves it..so why should you wait? Hop in.

    wordpress-twitter-plugins

    There are a number of plugins available for twitter today, but out of them honestly only a few makes sense. Here’s a list of the best twitter plugins for wordpress.

    1. Alex Kings plugin or Twitter
      Undisputedly the number one twitter plugin for wordpress.
      What is remarkable about it
      Allows you to post your tweets as a new post each time you tweet, automatically on your blog.
      Great plugin, lot of functions, easy to handle.
    2. Twitter update plugin for Wordpress
      This is probably is the opposite of Alex’s plugin, this one lets you tweet out your latest posts on twitter, while a new article is being published.
      What is remarkable about it
      It takes the burden off your shoulders of self promotion to your followers.
      What could go wrong
      Your followers may not like you “only” self promoting your articles all the time.
    3. Twitter sidebar wordpress widget
      This one is for the ardent twitter fan who does not want to do self promotion but get alerts from people whom he is following while he is busy blogging. It adds a small widget to the sidebar of your wordpress blog that will display all your latest tweets and updates.
      What is remarkable about it
      You could stylize it however you want using CSS and make it not look like a widget at all.
    4. WordTwit Twitter plugin for Wordpress
      Pretty much a straight forward wordpress plugin that will display all your recent twitter tweets from friends on Wordpress.
    5. Eat It - Twitter plugin for Wordpress
      Twitterpress is a simple plugin to update your twitter account automatically whenever you publish a new post from your hosted wordpress blog. It’s not very layman friendly, but would be something geeks would like.
    6. Twitt-too wordpress twitter plugin
      This is a rich twitter plugin that will help you to integrate twitter to wordpress with ease. It allows you to update your twitter account with tweets directly from your blog. The display is cool it even has your avatar shown.
      What is remarkable about it
      It is completely AJAXified, making it a breeze to use it.

    Other great Twitter tools - For desktop, iphone, browsers etc.

    In case you are a die hard Twitter fan, you might enjoy this collection of Twitter tools.

    • Twitteroo - A desktop application for Windows that helps you to twitter right from your desktop without requiring to vist the twitter website and logging in.
    • Twitbin - A firefox extension that helps you to tweet right from your favorite browser.
    • Facebook Twitter plugin - A twitter plugin for facebook.
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    Jan
    08

    Today let’s review this theme from Headset Options, which is supposed to be a SEO friendly, AdSense ready wordpress theme.

    Like all other AdSense ready themes, this one too focuses on text and space compatibility for AdSense. The main reasons for it’s compatibility for AdSense is that the text of the articles are in type and size similar to that of AdSense text ads. It is spaced in such a away that if an AdSense ad is placed amidst the post, it would sit in perfect camouflage in the article.

    When you place the AdSense code, just make sure that the title links of the ads have the same colour as the links in the theme, and that’s light blue (#6699CC).

    How SEO friendly is this Wordpress theme?

    Considering the SEO factors that decide how it forms an SEO friendly theme, what stands out is the fact that it has a SEO friendly layout . If you take a look at the screenshot you’ll see that the layout of the theme is designed in such a way that the crawlers will have no trouble finding out what is the content on the site.

    The titles of the posts are included in the H1 tags, and there is the proper use of other HTML tags as well making it standards compliant.

    During crawling, the site layout is designed in such a way that, the heading is crawled first, then the pages, then the content with proper markup, and then the sidebar content. This in fact is a good strategy to deliver the content by importance to the search engines. Many other wordpress themes, which claim to be SEO friendly, miss this very basic feature.

    One factor however, that I find missing is the <strong> attribute. If the strong attribute was CSS styled to not stand out bolded from the text, readers will not find it awkward, when you <strong> out the keywords. As of now, when you manually “strong” out the keywords, they stand apart as bolded text, so there is a limit to using keywords.

    The same problem goes with the heading and titles. Wish the strong attribute was also included with the titles. It looks very plain and flimsy as of now. But this is something you can easily add by tweaking with the CSS styling.

    But overall, it’s a very light weight, search engine friendly theme, that is put on steroids when using AdSense text ads. It’s so seo friendly that the only problem I see with it is that it misses the frills to impress the human eye. But if you want a theme to use for your website that is focused on making money from AdSense, targeting the search engine traffic, giving less importance to the human eye, then this is the theme for you.

    Rating scores
    AdSense compatibility - 8/10
    Search Engine Friendliness - 8/10

    Download the wordpress theme here .

    AdSense ready SEO friendly theme - Headset Options

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    Dec
    02
    Filed Under (Wordpress) by Mani Karthik on 02-12-2007

    There are some clients of mine who are very keen on using flash files in their sites. It often end up in a rough debate with me, and both parties got to take deviation. (If you didn’t know, I’m not a fan of using flash.)

    Most of the times, I allow them to use flash in a limited way throughout the site. If it’s a static page, we’ll go for small flash elements on each page and for wordpress users, I go for flash headers. Yea, it’s not a good idea actually, because it make you lose some valuable real estate for search engine optimization. But I’ve found a work around to this.

    Generally when you use a flash file, these are the problems that you come across.

    • Waste of real estate for SEO
    • Cross browser compatibility issues
    • Non indexability of text used in flash files
    • Unwanted code in the html

    But with the workaround you can actually, minimize the unwanted code in html, while the other issues will be there.
    Alternatively, you can specify your header text instead of the flash file.

    This work around should work for all wordpress themes, but I haven’t tested it on all themes, the Kubrik based themes with large headers seems to work.

    It’s a simple plugin that we can use to get this problem solved. This plugin helps you to use a flash file anywhere inside your theme, on your header, posts, sidebars anywhere! Pretty cool isn’t it?

    Download the plugin here. The credit goes to Michael Bester for developing this plugin.
    To use this plugin, upload it to your plugins directory and activate it from plugins menu. Then go to your header.php file in themes directory and replace the header code with the following code -

    [kml_flashembed movie="/path/to/your/movie.swf" height="value" width="value" /]

    Of course, replace the values with the actual height and width, and the path to the URL where you've saved the swf file.

    It works like charm and if you like it do drop a line to Michael.

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    Nov
    13
    Filed Under (Wordpress) by Mani Karthik on 13-11-2007

    Scrapers/ Sploggers and copy cats are the names you’d never want to hear these days. Simply because every blog has a splogger who’s scraping your content from the RSS feeds everyday.There are lot of tools available to fight scrapers, and here’s a brand new plugin for Wordpress that’ll help you to fight scrapers.

    It’s the categories Autolink plugin - which will help you to link automatically to your category whenever there’s a citation regarding the category in your articles.  

    How this helps fight scraping?
    This plugin will automatically link to your categories whenever there’s a mentiona bout the categories in your posts. Which means more interlinking of pages and categories. This is one excellent way to fight scrapers. When they scrape your content, the interlinks to your blog is also copied, which helps you to trace them out.

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