Archive for December, 2007

Using Excerpts on Index Pages of Your Wordpress Theme to Improve Pagerank

December 15th, 2007, Posted in Wordpress Tips
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As many of you may already know, having site pages with duplicate content can hurt your search engine rankings. One way to avoid duplicate content penalization is to use ‘noindex’ and ‘noarchive’ tags on all but the main, full content pages.

Another tool for fighting duplicate content penalization is to use <?php the_excerpt();?> rather than <?php the_content();?> in all the index files of your theme.

You would make this replacement in index.php, as well as any additional index templates your theme may contain, such as category.php, search.php, archive etc.

What this does is shorten the content on index pages to minimize duplicate content.

Even better

When using <?php the_excerpt();?> in your index theme files, you can wipe out duplicate content altogether by filling in the ‘optional excerpt’ field when you write/edit a post.

If left empty the first portion of the content will appear wherever you’ve placed <?php the_excerpt();?>, but if you use the ‘Optional Excerpt’ field, the text entered there will appear instead. The nice thing about this, besides avoiding duplicate content, is that you can control exactly how long the ‘excerpt’ is, as ALL text in ‘Optional Excerpt’ will be displayed.

Configuring Your Theme’s Meta Tags to Avoid Duplicate Content Penalization with Search Engines

December 13th, 2007, Posted in Wordpress Tips
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To give your Wordpress driven site the best possible chances of reaching top page rank, it’s important to avoid duplicate content from being indexed by Google and the other search engines.

Most Wordpress themes list either the excerpt or the full content of posts on index pages, this includes category index pages. What this does is display the same content on more than one page.

One way to avoid this is to provide ‘nofollow’ and ‘noindex’ instructions to the search engines on all pages that are not home and not full content pages. This can best be done with the help of conditional tags.

In the following example the home page, single post pages and Wordpress ‘Pages’ will tell the search engines to index and archive, while all other pages will tell them NOT to:

<?php if (is_home() || is_page() || is_single()) {?><meta name="robots" content="index,follow,archive" /><meta name="googlebot" content="archive" /><?php } else { ?><meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow,noarchive" /><meta name="googlebot" content="noarchive" /><?php } ?>
Make sure this goes within the <head> section of the header.php file of your theme. As long as it is placed before </head> it will work as it should.

Feel free to experiment with the conditional tags to include/exclude other page types.

More Effective Ad Placement using the Wordpress Plugin ‘CG-InBetween’

December 12th, 2007, Posted in Wordpress Plugins
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Sure, sticking your adsense ads in the sidebar of your theme is one way to go… and certainly a start. Yet, ads placed nearer or inside of your main body of content offers much better results in most cases. So how do you go about getting ads into these prime real estate areas without digging into the code?

How to get ads (or anything else, for that matter) to show up inside or between your Wordpress posts within the next 10 minutes

You can use the very popular Adsense Deluxe plugin to manually place ads into articles as you write or edit them, but this can become rather tedious. …And does nothing for those of you who want to display ads between, say every 2 posts. Luckily there’s a great plugin ready to help you out on your quest for better ad placement (and even the serving of more relevant ads).

Follow along and find out how to utilize the very versatile Wordpress plugin ‘CG-InBetween’. Though this plugin has not yet made it onto the official Plugin Compatibility list for Wordpress 2.3 generation, I have tested it on 2.3 and 2.3.1 and find the plugin to work as great as it always has. (I Promise I will do my little part and add it to the list as soon as I remember what my password is for the WP site, scout’s honor)

  1. Download and install the CG-InBetween plugin.For those needing more explicit instructions, this means uploading the plugin files to your ../wp-content/plugins directory. Then go to the ‘Plugins’ tab of your Wordpress admin panel and click ‘Activate’ next to the CG-InBetween plugin.Now there will be a new admin panel tab called ‘InBetween’.
  2. Insert your ad code in the ‘InBetween’ page of your Wordpress admin panel.inbetween.jpg

    Pretty straightforward, simply paste your ad code into the field labeled ‘echo’. In the first field, ‘between’, you can either tell the plugin to insert after the nth post, or after every n posts. If you only want your ad to show up once after the third post, you’d enter ‘3′. ‘All’ places the ad after every post and ‘last’ places it after -you guessed it, the last post on the page.

    Let’s say you want to have ads after every 2 posts. Just create 3 different ‘InBetweens’, one with ‘2′, one with ‘4′ and one with ‘6′ as the ‘between’ values.

  3. Insert the plugin code into your theme -Important!

    One more step is required to get your InBetweens to function. Insert this code: <?inbetweenPosts();?> into the theme file where you want your ads to appear. Usually this will be the index.php file. If you only want InBetweens to display on category pages, you’d edit the category.php file, for example.

    Open the index.php file of your current Wordpress theme and look for <?php endwhile; ?>

    This marks the end of ‘the loop’, meaning the end of the section of code that generates each post entry. Place the plugin code somewhere bewteen the beginning and end of the post loop like so:

    <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

    <?php inbetweenPosts();?>

    <?php endwhile; ?>

    There will be other code in your theme, but the important thing is that the plugin code goes after <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?> and before <?php endwhile; ?>

That’s it! You can create as many ‘InBetweens’ as you like. Experiment to find out what works best for you.

A Better Wordpress Admin Panel

December 8th, 2007, Posted in Wordpress Plugins
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There are so many options to browse through and configure in the typical Wordpress admin panel. Add a few plugins and the admin panel can become untidy and difficult to navigate quickly.

Make navigating your Wordpress admin panel a breeze by turning it into a drop-down menu using a plugin. Instead of clicking on the main sections and waiting for the admin pages to load, you can simply hover over a page title and all the sub-menu pages appear below.
drop-down-admin-menus.jpgAdmin Drop Down Menus is a plugin that transforms your Wordpress admin panel into a drop-down menu, making it easier to quickly navigate the WP admin panel without having to load the main admin panel pages as you go.

This plugin works as soon as it is activated in the plugins page. It is compatible with Wordpress versions 2.2 through 2.3.1.

If you are switching from a different Wordpress admin menu plugin you may have trouble with this plugin until you completely delete the other plugin files. If you run into trouble when activating this plugin simply delete the main Wordpress-admin-panel file. Once you’ve made the necessary changes, such as deleting conflicting admin menu plugins, you can upload the plugin and reactivate it.

COMPLETE Automated Wordpress Database Backups

December 6th, 2007, Posted in Wordpress Plugins
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Ok, so there are several decent Wordpress plugins for backing up the database, but most of the default plugins for this either do not include plugin database tables and/or do not allow setting up automatic database backups.

WP-Database Manager is a full featured Wordpress database management plugin. This plugin allows you to select which database tables to include in your backups. You can even drop or empty and restore individual tables. This is a great tool for backing up your entire Wordpress database.

WP-Database-ManagerOnce you have installed WP-Database Manager there will be a new tab called ‘Database‘. You probably won’t need to mess with the settings under ‘Database’ unless you’re getting error messages. It’s a good idea to check this tab to be sure that it displays your database information correctly.

‘Backup DB‘ lets you make a manual backup to the server. To allow this you must be sure that the ‘../wp-content/backup-db/’ directory is writable. These backups are stored and displayed in the ‘Manage Backup DB‘ page.

To configure automatic backups of your database go to the ‘DB Options‘ tab. Scroll down to ‘Automatic Scheduling’ and make your selections. Enter the email address to which these regular backups should be sent.

In restoring database tables you can use either PhpMyAdmin or the WP-DB-Manager interface to upload your backups. This is a very useful plugin for protecting your WP data and one of the best database plugins for Wordpress that I’ve used.

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Before Installing Wordpress Plugins…

December 4th, 2007, Posted in Wordpress Plugins
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wp-plugins.net

Before heading over to one of the popular plugin database sites like http://wp-plugins.net, it’s a good idea to check the Plugin Compatibility List for WP version 2.3.

This list is updated by Wordpress users as plugins are tested and verified to work on each version of WP.

WP 2.3 brought some big changes in terms of database tables. For example, the wp_categories table is not used at all any longer. Older plugins referring to this table will break (at best) and possible cripple (at worst) your site.

Though many plugins not listed on the official Plugin Compatibility page will work seamlessly with the latest version of Wordpress, choosing one that’s already been tested with your version of WP my just save you a little time, and possibly a lot of hassle.

Don’t take chances

Check the Plugin Compatibility List for sure-thing plugins. If you’re in the mood to take a little risk because you realllly want to test drive a plugin not on the list, be sure to back up your database beforehand!

If a plugin is not on the Plugin Compatibility List and deals directly with WP categories, chances are it will not work with WP 2.3+. If a plugin author has updated their plugin for WP version 2.3+ it will probably be on the Compatibility List, but you can always check the plugin homepage for notes about WP version compatibility.

If you find out a plugin is compatible with your version of Wordpress, by all means, add it to the list!