Download Wordpress, SEO, Script, Codex, Plugin, Template

All in One SEO Pack

2009-09-13T22:11:00.000-07:00

Author: hallsofmontezuma

Optimizes your Wordpress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

Download now!

If upgrading, please back up your database first!

Some features:

Canonical URLs
Fine tune Page Navigational Links
Built-in API so other plugins/themes can access and extend functionality
Provides SEO Integration for WP e-Commerce sites
Nonce Security
Support for CMS-style WordPress installations
Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
Generates META tags automatically
Avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs
For beginners, you don't even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
For advanced users, you can fine-tune everything
You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.

Be sure to check out: WP Security Scan and SMS Text Message

Follow me on Twitter to keep up with the latest updates Michael Torbert

Tags: search engine optimization, plugin, posts, title, meta description, meta keywords, meta, seo, google, Post

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

2009-09-12T23:26:00.000-07:00

SEO is an acronym for "search engine optimization" or "search engine optimizer." Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site. Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including:

Review of your site content or structure
Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
Content development
Management of online business development campaigns
Keyword research
SEO training
Expertise in specific markets and geographies.

Keep in mind that the Google search results page includes organic search results and often paid advertisement (denoted by the heading "Sponsored Links") as well. Advertising with Google won't have any effect on your site's presence in our search results. Google never accepts money to include or rank sites in our search results, and it costs nothing to appear in our organic search results. Free resources such as Webmaster Tools, the official Webmaster Central blog, and our discussion forum can provide you with a great deal of information about how to optimize your site for organic search. Many of these free sources, as well as information on paid search, can be found on Google Webmaster Central.

Before beginning your search for an SEO, it's a great idea to become an educated consumer and get familiar with how search engines work. We recommend starting here:

If you're thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better. A great time to hire is when you're considering a site redesign, or planning to launch a new site. That way, you and your SEO can ensure that your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up. However, a good SEO can also help improve an existing site.

Some useful questions to ask an SEO include:

Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?
What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?
What's your experience in my industry?
What's your experience in my country/city?
What's your experience developing international sites?
What are your most important SEO techniques?
How long have you been in business?
How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?

While SEOs can provide clients with valuable services, some unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to manipulate search engine results in unfair ways. Practices that violate our guidelines may result in a negative adjustment of your site's presence in Google, or even the removal of your site from our index. Here are some things to consider:

Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue.
Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:

"Dear google.com,
I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories..."

Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for "burn fat at night" diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.
No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.
Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google, or advertise a "priority submit" to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.
Be careful if a company is secretive or won't clearly explain what they intend to do.
Ask for explanations if something is unclear. If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or "throwaway" domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google's index. Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it's best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to "help" you.
You should never have to link to an SEO.
Avoid SEOs that talk about the power of "free-for-all" links, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines. These are typically useless exercises that don't affect your ranking in the results of the major search engines -- at least, not in a way you would likely consider to be positive.
Choose wisely.
While you consider whether to go with an SEO, you may want to do some research on the industry. Google is one way to do that, of course. You might also seek out a few of the cautionary tales that have appeared in the press, including this article on one particularly aggressive SEO: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002002970_nwbizbriefs12.html. While Google doesn't comment on specific companies, we've encountered firms calling themselves SEOs who follow practices that are clearly beyond the pale of accepted business behavior. Be careful.
Be sure to understand where the money goes.
While Google never sells better ranking in our search results, several other search engines combine pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular web search results. Some SEOs will promise to rank you highly in search engines, but place you in the advertising section rather than in the search results. A few SEOs will even change their bid prices in real time to create the illusion that they "control" other search engines and can place themselves in the slot of their choice. This scam doesn't work with Google because our advertising is clearly labeled and separated from our search results, but be sure to ask any SEO you're considering which fees go toward permanent inclusion and which apply toward temporary advertising.
What are the most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter?

One common scam is the creation of "shadow" domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client's behalf. However, if the relationship sours, the SEO may point the domain to a different site, or even to a competitor's domain. If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO.

Another illicit practice is to place "doorway" pages loaded with keywords on the client's site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO's other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.

What are some other things to look out for?

There are a few warning signs that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO. It's far from a comprehensive list, so if you have any doubts, you should trust your instincts. By all means, feel free to walk away if the SEO:

owns shadow domains
puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
offers to sell keywords in the address bar
doesn't distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear on search results pages
guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
gets traffic from "fake" search engines, spyware, or scumware
has had domains removed from Google's index or is not itself listed in Google
requests your FTP account information or root access to your server

If you feel that you were deceived by an SEO in some way, you may want to report it.

In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) handles complaints about deceptive or unfair business practices. To file a complaint, visit: http://www.ftc.gov/ and click on "File a Complaint Online," call 1-877-FTC-HELP, or write to:

Federal Trade Commission
CRC-240
Washington, D.C. 20580

If your complaint is against a company in a country other than the United States, please file it at http://www.econsumer.gov/.

Blogspot SEO

2009-09-12T05:29:00.000-07:00

There are some tips to optimize your free blog hosted at Blogspot.com, you know as I know that a blog by Blogger.com is a very Good content generator that does very well with search engines especially with Google, Why Google? Because Blogspot.com is a daughter service provided by Google company. Here you go to SEO your Blogspot blog.

1. The title of your blog: You must make it only one word, yes this will help all your posts to avoid any conflicting between the post title and the main blog title. So, only one or approximately two words on the title.

2. External links: When you submit a new post, don't add an external link in the first paragraph, you can add that link after the third paragraph.

3. Write daily: Search engines like updatable blogs with daily fresh content, you can write a post per day for that issue.

4. Get links to your blog: This is the most important strategy for your blog, you should get high quality links to your blog from good websites. You can do it by submitting articles to EzineArticles and buzzle "My favorites".

5. Ping options: This service alert the internet users when you add more posts to your blog, just search for Blog Binging" in the Google search engines.

6. Feed Burner: You should also register with Feedburner.com to add a subscription function for your visitors to keep them in touch with your knowledge.

7. Blog archive: Don't use monthly or weekly archive, just use the drop-down archive to avoid indexing of any duplicated content.

Search Engine Optimization for WordPress

2009-09-11T11:33:00.000-07:00

WordPress, straight out of the box, comes ready to embrace search engines. Its features and functions guide a search engine through the posts, pages, and categories to help the search engine crawl your site and gather the information it needs to include your site within its database.

WordPress comes with several built in search optimization tools, including the ability to use .htaccess to create apparently static URLs called permalinks, blogrolling, and pinging. There are also a number of third party plugins and hacks which can be used for search engine optimization (SEO).

However, once you start using various WordPress Themes and customizing WordPress to meet your own needs, you may break some of those useful search engine friendly features. To maintain your WordPress site's optimal friendliness towards search engine spiders and crawlers, here are a few tips:

Good, Clean Code

Make sure your site's code validates. Errors in your code may prevent a search engine from moving through the site successfully.

Content Talks

Search engines can't "see" a site. They can only "read" a site. Pretty does not talk to a search engine. What "talks" to a search engine are the words, the content, the material in your site that explains, shares, informs, educates, and babbles. Make sure you have quality word content for a search engine to examine and compare with all the parts and pieces to give you a good "score".

Write Your Content with Searchers in Mind

How do you find information on the Internet? If you are writing something that you want to be "found" on the Internet, think about the words and phrases someone would use to find your information. Use them more than once as you write, but not in every sentence. Learn how search engines scan your content, evaluate it, and categorize it so you can help yourself get in good favor with search engines.

Content First

A search engine enters your site and, for the most part, ignores the styles and CSS. It just plows through the site gathering content and information. Most WordPress Themes are designed with the content as close to the top of the unstyled page as possible, keeping sidebars and footers towards the bottom. Few search engines scan more than the first third of the page before moving on. Make sure your Theme puts the content near the top.

Keywords, Links, and Titles Meet Content

Search engines do not evaluate your site on how pretty it is, but they do evaluate the words and put them through a sifter, giving credit to certain words and combinations of words. Words found within your meta tag keywords listings and within your document are compared to words found within your links and titles. The more that match, the better your "score."

Content in Links and Images

Your site may not have much text, mostly photographs and links, but you have places in which to add textual content. Search engines look for alt and title in link and image tags. While these have a bigger purpose of making your site more accessible, having good descriptions and words in these attributes helps provide more content for search engines to digest.

Link Popularity

It is not how good your site is, it is how good the sites are that link to you. This still holds weight with search engine favoritism. It's about who links to you. Blogrolls, pingbacks, and trackbacks are all built into WordPress. These help you link to other people, which gives them credit, but it also helps them link to you, connecting the "links." The number of incoming links your site has that have been recognized by Google can be checked by typing link:www.yoursite.com into Google (other search engines have similar functions). Other ways to generate incomming links to your site include:

Add your site's url to your signature on forum posts on other sites.
Submit your site to directories (see below).
Note: Leaving comments on blogs will not help with this, since all modern blogging tools use the rel="nofollow" attribute. Don't be a comment spammer.

Good Navigation Links: A search engine crawls through your site, moving from page to page. Good navigational links to the categories, archives, and various pages on your site will invite a search engine to move gracefully from one page to another, following the connecting links and visiting most of your site.

Search Engine Site Submissions

There are many resources that will "help" you submit your site to search engines. Some are free, some for a fee. Or you can manually submit your site to search engines yourself. Whatever method you choose to use, once your site has been checked for errors and is ready to go, search engines will welcome your WordPress site.

Here are some tips for successful site submissions:

Make sure you have content for search engines to scan. In general, have more than 10 posts on your site to give the search engines something to examine and evaluate.
Do not submit your site to the same search engine more than once a month or longer, depending upon their criteria, not your anxiousness to be listed.
Have ready to type, or copy and paste, a description of your site that is less than 200 words long, the title of the site, and the categories your site may belong to in a search engine directory.
Have a list of your website's various "addresses/URLs" ready. You can submit your root directory as well as specific categories and feeds to search engines, expanding your search engine coverage.
Keep a list of the various search engines and directories you submit to so you do not accidentally resubmit too soon, and you can keep track of how they include you among their pages and results.

Directory Sites

It is also useful for traffic generation and search optimization purposes to submit your site to directories. Both comprehensive directory sites and those specific to the subject or localisation of your site can be used.

DMOZ.org this is the most important directory - it's content is licensed in an open fashion allowing it to be syndicated through out the web -- its content is also used directly in some fashion by almost all of the major search engines.

Search Engine Optimization Resources

While WordPress comes ready for search engines, the following are more resources and information you may want to know about preparing and maintaining your site for search engines' robots and crawlers.

Meta Tags

Meta Tags contain information that describes your site's purpose, description, and keywords used within your site. The meta tags are stored within the head of your header.php template file. By default, they are not included in WordPress, but you can manually include them and the article on Meta Tags in WordPress takes you through the process of adding meta tags to your WordPress site.

The WordPress Custom Fields option can also be used to include keywords and descriptions for posts and Pages. There are also several WordPress Plugins that can also help you to add meta tags and keyword descriptions to your site found within the Official WordPress Plugin Directory.

Robots.txt Optimization

Search Engines read a yourserver.com/robots.txt file to get information on what they should and shouldn't be looking for, and where.

Specifying where search engines should look for content in high-quality directories or files you can increase the ranking of your site, and is recommended by Google and all the search engines.

An example WordPress robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
Disallow: /wp-content/cache
Disallow: /wp-content/themes
Disallow: /trackback
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /comments
Disallow: /category/*/*
Disallow: */trackback
Disallow: */feed
Disallow: */comments
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /*?
Allow: /wp-content/uploads

# Google Image
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow:
Allow: /*

# Google AdSense
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:
Allow: /*

# Internet Archiver Wayback Machine
User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

# digg mirror
User-agent: duggmirror
Disallow: /

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

SEO Title Tag 2.3.3

2009-09-11T11:27:00.000-07:00

by Stephan Spencer

Note: SEO Title Tag 2.3.3 adds compatibility with WordPress 2.7!

*** With SEO Title Tag version 2.3.0 we have dropped support of versions of WordPress prior to 2.3 if you are still using an older version of WordPress you should be able to continue using legacy version 2.2.1.

Title tags are arguably the most important of the on-page factors for search engine optimization (”SEO”). It blows my mind how post titles are also used as title tags by WordPress, considering that post titles should be catchy, pithy, and short-and-sweet; whereas title tags should incorporate synonyms and alternate phrases to capture additional search visibility.

Now, thankfully, there is a solution, allowing you to decouple post titles from title tags. Introducing… the SEO Title Tag 2.3.3 WordPress plugin.

SEO Title Tag makes is dead-easy to optimize the title tags across your WordPress-powered blog or website. Not just your posts, not just your home page, but any and every title tag on your site! If this plugin, along with a few hours of keyword research and copywriting of optimized titles, doesn’t make a significant impact on your search traffic, you’re doing something wrong!

SEO Title Tag is authored by SEO specialist web agency Netconcepts. Version 1.0 was by Netconcepts’ president Stephan Spencer. Version 2.0 was a collaborative effort — Stephan did the concept development and Netconcepts’ code jockeys Oliver Kastler, Mike Harding and Elton Fry did all the heavy lifting. Since version 2.1 Andrew Shell has taken over development responsibilities. It is completely free and has been released as “open source” under the GPL license. So enjoy!

Features include:

* Allows you to override a page’s or a post’s title tag with a custom one.
* New for v2.0 A Title Tag input box in the Edit Post and Write Post forms. (Previously in version 1.0 you had to use the Custom Field box.)
* New for v2.0 Mass editing of title tags for all posts, static pages, category pages, tag pages, tag conjunction pages, archive by month pages, — indeed, any URL — all in one go.
* Define a custom title tag for your home page (or, more accurately, your Posts page, if you have chosen a static Front Page set under Options -> Reading), through the Options -> SEO Title Tag page in the WordPress admin.
* New for v2.0 Define the title tag of 404 error pages, also through Options -> SEO Title Tag.
* New for v2.0 Handles internal search result pages too.
* New for v2.0 Title tags of category pages can optionally be set to the category description. If you use a Meta Tag plugin like Add Meta Tags, then you should not use this feature and instead let the Meta Tag plugin use the category description for the meta description on category pages.
* If you choose to keep the blog name in your title tags (not recommended!), the order of the blog name and the title are automatically reversed, giving more keyword prominence to the title instead of the blog name. Note there is also an option to replace your blog name with a shorter blog nickname.

And best of all, the plugin is FREE!

Suitably convinced? Then Download the plugin!

NEW: Rate this plugin at WordPress.org
Screenshots

Mass edit title tags of static pages
Mass edit title tags of posts
Mass edit title tags of category pages
Mass edit title tags by URL
Mass edit title tags of UTW tag pages
Installation instructions

1. (If upgrading from a prior version of SEO Title Tag, be sure to deactivate the old version beforehand.)
2. Upload the seo-title-tag directory and the files within it to your wp-content/plugins directory.
3. Activate the plugin.
4. Under Presentation -> Theme Editor in the WordPress admin, select “Header” from the list and replace:

<?php bloginfo('name'); wp_title(); ?>

(or whatever you have in your container with: <br /> <br /> <title><?php if (function_exists('seo_title_tag')) { seo_title_tag(); } else { bloginfo('name'); wp_title();} ?>
5. Configure the settings under Options -> SEO Title Tag. You’ll want specify a title tag for your home page which will override your blog name as the home page’s title tag, specify a title tag for 404 error pages. You can also configure here whether you want all the rest of your site’s title tags to have your blog name, or a shortened version of your blog name, or neither, appended to the end. IMPORTANT: You must save the settings, even if you haven’t changed them from their defaults, in order to ensure that the title tags for Posts and for Pages works properly.
6. For those of you with a static Front Page chosen under Options -> Reading, the “home page” described in the point above is actually the Posts page, and as such, the SEO Title Tag options page will actually will say “Posts Page” instead of “Home Page” — because it detects that you have selected a static Front Page. In such a scenario, in order to also customize the Front Page’s title tag, specify a Title Tag on that page’s Edit Page form, or within Manage -> Title Tags -> Pages.
7. Define custom title tags for your existing posts, static pages, category pages and tag pages in the admin under Manage -> Title Tags.
8. When writing a new post/page, define a title tag by typing something into the “Title Tag (optional)” field. If you’re happy to use the post title as the title tag, then you can leave it blank.
9. Note: If upgrading to WordPress 2.3 from a prior version where you used the SEO-Title-Tag plugin with Ultimate Tag Warrior (UTW) in order to migrate your old tag page titles you need to first import your UTW tags into the new native tagging structure. You can do this in your WordPress admin by clicking on Manage > Import > Ultimate Tag Warrior. Once you have these imported just deactivate and reactivate SEO-Title-Tags and your old title tags will be able to be used.

To learn more about search engine optimizing your WordPress blog, you’ll probably want to read Stephan Spencer’s 10 tip series on Blog SEO.
To-do

* support mass editing of meta descriptions?
* import titles by uploading a file in CSV format
* possibly rename custom option fields and table name
* add some more text to the titles of tag pages globally. They are using the same divider as used for posts, and really there should be an option to add something like “Tag | Posts Related to Tag | Blog Name”
* create all needed values on activation so that you no longer have to save the settings in the SEO Title Tag Options before the plugin will work properly

WordPress SEO

2009-09-10T13:34:00.000-07:00

WordPress SEO

The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For Your Blog

I started writing my beginner's guide to WordPress SEO a while back, and have since done a load of posts on the subject, an article in the Search Marketing Standard, newsletters, and presentations. It's time to let all the info of all these different articles fall into one big piece: the final guide to WordPress SEO.

If you're more of a visual type, try this WordPress SEO video. It's an hour long presentation I gave at A4UExpo London, that covers most of what's in here too.

As search, SEO, and the Wordpress platform evolve I will keep this article up to date with best practices. If you don't have the time to do this kind of optimization yourself, consider hiring us to do it, check out our WordPress consulting services.

As I take quite a holistic view on SEO, this guide will cover quite a lot, here's the contents:

The basic technical optimization: simplest stuff, highest rewards
1. Permalinks
2. Optimize your Titles for SEO
3. Optimize your Descriptions
4. Optimize the More text
5. Image Optimization
Template optimization
1. Breadcrumbs
2. Headings
3. Clean up your code
4. Aim for speed
5. Rethink that Sidebar
Advanced technical optimization: preventing duplicate content
1. Noindex, follow archive pages
2. Disable unnecessary archives
3. Pagination
4. Nofollowing unnecessary links
Altering your blog's structure for high rankings
1. Pages instead of posts
2. New wine in an old bottle: use well ranking-posts to rank even better
3. Linking to related posts
Conversion optimization: get those readers to subscribe!
Comment optimization: get those readers involved
1. How should you get people to comment
2. Bond with your commenters
3. Keeping people in the conversation
Off site blog SEO
1. Follow your commenters
2. Use Twitter
3. Find related blogs, and work them
Conclusion

1. Basic technical optimization

Out of the box, WordPress is a pretty well optimized system, and does a far better job at allowing every single page to be indexed than every other CMS I have used. But there's a few things you should do to make it a lot easier still to work with.

1.1. Permalinks

The first thing to change is your permalink structure. In WordPress 2.5, you'll find this page under Settings -> Permalinks. The default permalink is
?p=, but I prefer to use either /post-name/ or /category/post-name/. For the first option, you change the "custom" setting into /%postname%/:

To include the category, you change it to /%category%/%postname%/.

Once you've done that, you'll want to install the Redirection plugin, and make sure that under Manage -> Redirection -> Options, making sure both URL Monitoring select boxes are set to "Modified posts". Now you can change those permalinks to perfectly SEO'd permalinks without having to do anything else, or worry about the search engine consequences.

WWW vs non-WWW
Another good thing to configure now you're on that screen anyway is the Root domain: Add WWW / Strip WWW one. Make a choice, and set it here, don't enable both, some search engines still can't handle that. And enable the redirect index.php/index.html one too, it won't hurt you, and might even do your WordPress SEO some good.

URL stopwords
The last thing you'll want to do about your permalinks to increase your WordPress SEO, is install the SEO Slugs plugin, this will automatically remove stop words from your slugs once you save a post, so you won't get those ugly long URL's when you do a sentence style post title.

1.2. Optimize your Titles for SEO

By default, the title for your blog posts is "Blog title » Blog Archive » Keyword rich post title". For your WordPress blog to get the traffic it deserves, this should be the other way around, for two reasons:

Search engines put more weight on the early words, so if your keywords are near the start of the page title you are more likely to rank well.
People scanning result pages see the early words first. If your keywords are at the start of your listing your page is more likely to get clicked on.

For more info on how to craft good titles for your posts, see this excellent article and video by Aaron Wall: Google & SEO Friendly Page Titles. I prefer to do this with HeadSpace, as that makes it very very easy. You should check your header.php though, and make sure that the code for wp_title(); contains two quotes, so it looks like this: wp_title('');. This makes sure you have absolute control over the title and don't have any annoying separator in there.

After that, go into the HeadSpace settings, and make them look something like this for your posts and pages:

For the other pages, I have the following settings:

Posts / Pages: %%title%% - Blog Title
Categories: %%category%% Archives %%page%% - Blog Title
Tags: %%tag%% Archives %%page%% - Blog Title
Archives: Blog Archives %%page%% - Blog Title

With HeadSpace, you can also write optimized titles for each post specifically, overriding the settings here. This way you have absolute control over your titles, and can make sure your WordPress titles are actually helping your SEO.

1.3. Optimize your Descriptions

Give each category a decent description, and use HeadSpace to add that description to the meta description, by adding %%category_description%% in the Description field. After that, write a description for each post or page that you actually want to rank with. The descriptions has one very important function: enticing people to click, so make sure it states what's in the page they're clicking towards, and that it gets their attention.

Automated descriptions
In my opinion, auto generating descriptions is a load of bull, most plugins pick the first sentence, which might be an introductory sentence which has hardly anything to do with the subject, or another sentence with a keyword in it, which might be completely wrong to pick as description. Thus, the only well written description is a hand written one, and if you're thinking of auto generating the meta description, you might as well not do anything and let the search engine control the snippet... If you don't use the meta description, the search engine will find the keyword searched for in your document, and automatically pick a string around that, which gives you a bolded word or two in the results page.

Auto generating a snippet is a "shortcut", and there are no real shortcuts in (WordPress) SEO (none that work anyway).

1.4. Optimize the More text

Another neat featuer of HeadSpace is that you can use it to optimize the more text, so if you use a more tag on the frontpage, you can replace the default "Read more" link with something meaningful for every post. It's small things like that that make your WordPress SEO the best.

1.5. Image Optimization

An often overlooked part of WordPress SEO is how you handle your images. By doing stuff like writing good alt tags for images and thinking of how you name the files, you can get yourself a bit of extra traffic from the different image search engines. Next to that, you're helping out your lesser able readers who check out your site in a screen reader, to make sense of what's otherwise hidden to them.

You should of course be writing good titles and alt tags for each and every image, however, if you don't have the time for that, there is a plugin that can help you. The plugin is called SEO Friendly Images, and it can automatically add the title of the post and or the image name to the image's alt and title tag:
SEO Friendly Images settings example" src="http://netdna.yoast.com/uploads/2008/04/seo-friendly-images.png" alt="SEO Friendly Images settings example" />

2. Template Optimization

2.1. Breadcrumbs

You'll want to add breadcrumbs to your single posts and pages. Breadcrumbs are the links, usually above the title post, that look like "Home > Articles > WordPress SEO". They are good for two things:

They allow your users to easily navigate your site.
They allow search engines to determine the structure of your site more easily.

These breadcrumbs should link back to the homepage, and the category the post is in. If the post is in multiple categories it should pick one. For that to work, adapt single.php and page.php in your theme, and use my breadcrumb plugin.

2.2. Headings

Although most themes for WordPress get this right, make sure your post title is an

, and nothing else. Your blog's name should only be an

on your frontpage, and on single, post, and category pages, it should be no more than an

.

These are easy to edit in the `post.php` and `page.php` templates. To learn more about why proper headings are important read this article on Semantic HTML and SEO.

2.3. Clean up your code

All that javascript and CSS you might have in your template files, move that to external javascripts and css files, and keep your templates clean, as they're not doing your WordPress SEO any good. This makes sure your users can cache those files on first load, and search engines don't have to download them most of the time.

2.4. Aim for speed

A very important factor in how many pages a search engine will spider on your blog each day, is how speedy your blog loads. You can do two things to increase the speed of your WordPress.

Optimize the template to do as small an amount of database calls as necessary. I've highlighted how to do this in my post about speeding up WordPress.
Install a caching plugin. I highly recommend WP-Super-Cache, which is a bit of work to set up, but that should make your blog an awful lot faster.

Also, be aware that underpaying for hosting, is not wise. If you actually want to succeed with your link-bait actions, and want your blog to sustain high loads, go for a good hosting package. I've recently switched to WestHost myself, and they've proven to be better than anything I've ever seen in hosting.

2.5. Rethink that Sidebar

Do you really need to link out to all your buddies in your blogroll site wide? Or is it perhaps wiser to just do that on your front page? Google and other search engines these days heavily discount site wide links, so you're not really doing your friends any more favor by giving them that site wide link, nor are you helping yourself: you're allowing your visitors to get out of your site everywhere, when you actually want them to browse around a bit.

The same goes for the search engines: on single post pages, these links aren't necessarily related to the topic at hand, and thus aren't helping you at all. Thus: get rid of them. There are probably more widgets like these that only make sense on the homepage, and others that you'd only want on sub pages.

Some day you will probably be able to change this from inside WordPress, right now it forces you to either use two sidebars, one on the homepage and one on sub pages, or write specific plugins.

3. Advanced WordPress SEO and Duplicate Content

Once you've done all the basic stuff, you'll find that the rest of the problems amount to one simple thing: duplicate content. Loads of it in fact. Out of the box, WordPress comes with a few different types of taxonomy:

date based
category based
tag based

Next to that, it seems to think you actually need to be able to click on from page to page starting at the frontpage, way back to the first post you ever did. Last but not least, each author has his own archive too, under /author//, resulting in completely duplicate content on single author blogs.

In essence that means that, worst case scenario, a post is available on 5 pages outside of the single page where it should be available. We're going to get rid of all those duplicate content pools, by still allowing them to be spidered, but not indexed, and fixing the pagination issues that come with these things.

3.1. Noindex, follow archive pages

Install my robots meta plugin, and make sure the settings prevent indexing of all archive pages, like this:
SEO" />

Now the search engine will follow all the links on these archive pages, but it won't show those pages in the index. Not everybody will agree on this policy, and others will tell you to just show a snippet of each post on the archive page. That'll also work, but in my opinion completely throwing them out is better.

3.2. Disable unnecessary archives

If your blog is a one author blog, or you don't think you need author archives, use the robots-meta plugin to disable the author archives. Also, if you don't think you need a date based archive: disable it. Even if you're not using these archives in your template, someone might link to them and thus break your WordPress SEO...

3.3. Pagination

Thirdly, you'll want to make sure that if a bot goes to a category page, it can reach all underlying pages without any trouble. Otherwise, if you have a lot of posts in a category, a bot might have to go back 10 pages before being able to find the link to one of your awesome earlier posts...

There's an easy fix. Jaimie Sirovich wrote Pagerfix, a plugin that helps you make your pagination look like this:
SEO" src="http://netdna.yoast.com/uploads/2008/04/pagination.png" alt="Better Pagination to increase your WordPress SEO" />

To reach that, install that plugin, and change this section in f.i. your index.php:

Into this:

Do that in your index.php, your archives.php, and all other archive templates you might have.

3.4. Nofollowing unnecessary links

Another easy step to increase your WordPress SEO is to stop linking to your login and registration pages from each and every page on your blog. The same goes for your RSS feeds, your subscribe by e-mail link, etc. Robots Meta has an option to nofollow all your login and registration links. You'll probably have to go into your RSS links and nofollow those by hand. If you're using the meta widget, you might want to enable the option in robots meta to replace that with one that has nofollowed links.

4. Altering your blog's structure for high rankings

Blogs are spidered so easily due to their structure of categories, tags etc.: all articles are well linked, and usually the markup is nice and clean. However, all this comes at a price: your ranking strength is diluted. They're diluted by one simple thing: comments.

4.1. Pages instead of posts

You've probably noticed by now, or you're seeing now, that this WordPress SEO post is actually... not a post. It's a page. Why? Well for several reasons. First of all, this article needed to be a "daughter"-page of my WordPress page, to be in the correct place on this blog. Secondly, to rank for the term [WordPress SEO], this article has to have the right keyword density. And that's where things go wrong. Comments destroy your carefully constructed keyword density.

That's why I decided to make my most important articles into pages. That way, you can easily update them and do a new post about what you've changed.

4.2. New wine in an old bottle

If a post on your blog becomes incredibly popular and starts to rank for a nice keyword, like mine did for WordPress SEO, you could do the following:

create a new page with updated and improved content
change the slug of the old post to post-name-original
publish the new page under the old post's URL, or redirect the old post's URL to the new URL
send an e-mail to everyone who linked to your old post that you've updated and improved on your old post
wait for the links to come in, again;
rank even higher for your desired term as you've now got:
- more control over the keyword density
- even more links pointing at the article
- the ability to keep updating the article as you see fit to improve on it's content and ranking

Some among you will say: I could have 301 redirected the old post to the new one with the same effect. True. Except: you'd lose the comments on the old post, which is in my opinion a sign of disrespect to people who took the time to comment, and 301 redirects take quite a bit of time sometimes. Of course you should treat this technique with care, and not abuse it to rank other products, but I think it can be done in everyone's benefit. For instance this article: if you came here through a social media site like Sphinn, expecting an article about WordPress SEO, that's exactly what you got!

4.3. Linking to related posts

One way of getting search engines to get to your older content a bit easier, thus increasing your WordPress SEO capabilites a LOT, is by using a related posts plugin. These plugins search through your posts database to find posts with the same subject, and add links to these posts.

There's a load of these available, but I just use the one that comes with the Simple Tags plugin, as I've found that the easiest and best one so far.

5. Conversion optimization: get those readers to subscribe!

A lot of bloggers still think that because their blog is a blog, they don't have to optimize anything. Wrong. To get people to link to you, they have to read your blog. And what do you think is easier: getting someone who is already visiting your blog to visit regularly and then link to your blog, or getting someone who visits your blog for the first time to link to your blog immediately? Right.

That's why conversion optimization is so vitally important to bloggers as well: they need to learn how to test their call to actions on their blog so that more people will subscribe, either by e-mail or by RSS. (Ow btw, if you haven't subscribed to this blog yet, do it now!)

One of the things I've found to be very important, and more bloggers seem to have found this, is that a BIG RSS subscribe button is very important, as is offering a way to subscribe by e-mail. I even offer daily and weekly e-mail subscribe options, using aweber (aff), and have found that people tend to really like those options too.

Another thing to be very aware of is when people might want to subscribe to your blog. If they've just finished reading an article of yours, and really liked it, that would be the ideal time to reach them, right? That's why more and more people are adding lines like this to the end of their posts: "Liked this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!"

Another great time to get people to subscribe is when people have just commented on your blog for the first time, for which purpose I use the awesome comment relish plugin. Which leads me to the next major aspect of WordPress SEO:

6. Comment optimization: get those readers involved

Comments are one of the most important aspects of blogs. As Wikipedia states:

The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs.

Comments are not only nice because people tell you how special you are, or that you made a mistake, or whatever else they have to tell you. Most of all they're nice, because they show engagement. And engagement is one of the most important factors of getting people to link to you: they show you they care, and they open the conversation, now all you have to do is respond, and you're building a relationship!

6.1. How should you get people to comment

The easiest way of getting people to do anything is: ask them to do it. Write in an engaging style, and then ask your blog's readers for an opinion, their take on the story etc.

Another important things is your comment links. Is your comment link "No comments »"? Or is it "No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome »"? Feel the difference? You can change this by opening your index.php template, search for comments_popup_link() and changing the texts within that function.

6.2. Bond with your commenters

Another thing to do is thank people when they've commented on your weblog. Not every time, because that get's annoying, but doing it the first time is a very good idea.

Justin Shattuck thought the same, and created the Comment Relish plugin, which I just mentiond, which sends an email after someone has made his first comment. This email is a message you can enter yourself, with for instance your feed URL, and in my case, a newsletter subscribe URL, etc.

Another option, which is a bit less obtrusive / spammy, is to install my comment redirect plugin. This plugin allows you to redirect people who have made their first comment to a specific "thank you" page.

6.3. Keeping people in the conversation

Now that people have joined the conversation on your blog, you should make sure they stay in the conversation. That's why you should install the subscribe to comments plugin, that allows people to subscribe to a comment thread just like they would in a forum, and sends them an e-mail on each new comment. This way, you can keep the conversation going, and maybe your readers will be giving you new angles for new posts.

7. Off site blog SEO

If you've followed all of the above WordPress SEO advice, you've got a big chance of becoming successfull, both as a blogger and in the search engines. Now the last step sounds easy, but isn't. Go out there, and talk to people online.

7.1 Follow your commenters

There's been a movement on the web for a while now that's called the "You comment - I follow". They want you to remove the nofollow tag off of your comments to "reward" your visitors. Now I do agree, but... That get's you a whole lot of spam once your WordPress blog turns into a well ranked blog... What I do advocate though, is that you actually follow your visitors! Go to their websites, and leave a comment on one of their articles, a good, insightful comment, so they respect you even more.

If you think that's a lot of work, do realize that, on average, about 1% of your visitors will actually leave a comment. That's a group of people you have to take care of!

7.2 Use Twitter

Twitter is a cool form of micro-blogging / chatting / whatever you want to call it. Almost all the "cool" people are on there, and they read their tweets more often than they read their e-mail, if you even knew how to reach them through e-mail.

To boot, if you use WordTwit or Twitter Tools, all of your posts can be announced on Twitter, which will usually get you quite a few early readers! People will feel even more happy to comment on Twitter, which might get you into an extra conversation or two.

7.3 Find related blogs, and work them

If you want to rank for certain keywords, go into Google Blogsearch, and see which blogs rank in the top 10 for those keywords. Read those blogs, start posting insightful comments, follow up on their posts by doing a post on your own blog and link back to them: communicate! The only way to get the links you'll need to rank is to be a part of the community.

8. Conclusion

This guide gives you a lot of stuff you can do on your blog. It goes from technical tips, to conversion tips, to content tips, to conversation tips, and a whole lot in between. There's a catch though: if you want to rank for highly competitive terms, you'll have to actually do most of it.

If you want to keep updated on the latest news about WordPress, and hear more tips as I come up with them, then subscribe to my WordPress mailing-list right now!

written sources from: http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo

Importing Content « WordPress Codex

2009-08-22T08:51:00.000-07:00

WordPress currently supports importing data in the form of posts (articles) and most of the details or features supported by the content publishing platform.

Most of the following Content Import scripts can be found under the "Import" tab of your WordPress administration interface.

If you run into specific problems, a search on the WordPress Support Forum will likely lead to a solution or try the Codex FAQ. Users of a blogging system not listed here who wish to switch to WordPress are invited to ask for help in the WordPress Support Forum as well.

To help you understand the differences between WordPress and other existing software, we recommend you review the WordPress Features and more on Working with WordPress.

b2

The script for importing b2 posts into your WordPress blog is located on your site in the wordpress/wp-admin/import-b2.php.

(Note: In Wordpress 2.0.2, this is no longer true. There is a b2.php file under wordpress/wp-admin/import, however, it is empty.)

b2evolution

There are currently two methods of importing a b2evolution install into Wordpress described in this section.

Direct Import Between Databases

A non-WordPress script for for importing from b2evo to WordPress 2.x is available (legacy importer for WordPress 1.x).

Instructions:

Install WordPress
Download file, remove .txt extension, and upload to your wp-admin directory
Run the script and input your b2evo database name and password

Done! Details about the script and usage can be found in this forum topic with discussion and updates

This script has currently not been updated since September 2006 and is incompatible with the current (v1.9) b2evolution database structure.

Import via Movable Type Export Format

The second approach is to re-skin a b2evolution blog so that when its source is viewed it appears to be in the Movable Type export format. This approach, which should work for all versions of Wordpress, and all recent versions of b2evolution is described in full on this page.

Blogger

Users of WordPress 2.2 and above can import from Blogger. Earlier versions cannot import from Blogger because "New Blogger" was released by Google, invalidating all the old importers. Only WordPress 2.2 and later has support for "New Blogger".

If you haven't already, you must be using New Blogger and a Google Account on Blogger. If you are still using Old Blogger, the importer will not work.

Starting the importer

WordPress 2.7

In the left-side navigation, click Tools to expand the submenu. Next, scroll down if necessary and click Import to show the various import options. Next, click Blogger and follow the directions.

WordPress 2.2 to 2.6.5

Go to Manage → Import → Blogger and follow the directions.

Blogware

A Guide to Importing from Blogware to WordPress

Target page no longer exists. There is an import function built in to WordPress 2.5.1

Blosxom

A Xcript for Importing from Blosxom to WordPress

Perl script for converting Blosxom entries to WP-friendly RSS (Picky about html correctness in Blosxom entries, including final slash in img and br tags.)

Dotclear

View the tutorial(en) to import a Dotclear blog into a WordPress 2 one.

Drupal

2009/02/08 Migrate/Convert/Import Drupal 5.x to WordPress 2.7
2008/06/30 Joining the Migration from Drupal to WordPress
2007/05/15 How to migrate from Drupal 5 to WordPress 2
2006/05/19 Detailed migration of Drupal 4.7 to WordPress
2005/10/10 Migrating Drupal to WordPress

e107 CMS

You can find a dedicated script to import e107 news, categories, users, custom pages and comments to Wordpress on Coolkevmen's blog.

Excel/CSV Spreadsheet

To import a spreadsheet that contains posts, you can follow the Importing posts form CSV file into WordPress instructions.

Greymatter

The script for importing Greymatter posts into your WordPress blog is located at wp-admin/import-greymatter.php.

The script is fairly old. It was originally written to import from Greymatter to b2. There have been cases where the import script does not work with WordPress 1.5. In these cases, you can try this workaround:

Install WordPress 1.2
Import from Greymatter
Then upgrade to WordPress latest version

You can also read the forum thread at http://wordpress.org/support/topic.php?id=24110 for other workarounds.

Jogger.pl

There's a script that allows to import entries and comments from Jogger.pl - Polish, Jabber-powered weblog system. Comments and manual are in Polish (since Jogger is mostly polish), but if you have any questions, feel free to ask in comments on author's blog.

Joomla

LiveJournal

The script for importing LiveJournal posts into your WordPress blog is located at wp-admin/import-livejournal.php (Manage → Import → LiveJournal). It is available in WordPress 2.1.1. WordPress 2.3 and above, it is located at wp-admin/import/livejournal.php

The LiveJournal importer requires you to export entries from your LiveJournal account in XML format. Instructions for exporting LiveJournal entries can be found at LiveJournal export instructions. This tool seems to require exporting your journal one month at a time. However. the import tool will happily accept all the entries in a single file, so you may save them all in the same file. You may also have to do a "View Source" on the page that the Livejournal export tool returns, in order to see the XML source. You can then copy and paste this into a file to import.

If your exported XML file is very large (several years' worth of content, for example), the import script may run into your host's configured memory limit for PHP. A message like "Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted" indicates that the script can't successfully import your XML file under the current PHP memory limit. If you have access to the php.ini file, you can manually increase the limit; if you do not (your WordPress installation is hosted on a shared server, for instance), you will have to break your exported XML file into several smaller pieces and run the import script on the one at a time.

http://heinous.org/wiki/LiveJournal_XML_Export_Script has a perl script (ljexport.pl) that can export all LJ entries to one XML file for a range of years, saving the trouble of having to manually pull this for each month.
LJ Archive is a Windows-only exporter for LiveJournal.

Live Space (MSN Space)

Live Space Mover

Mambo

A Script for Importing from Mambo to WordPress (ZIP)

Motime - Splinder

These are brands of the blog hosting provider Tipic Inc.

Using a python script named Spleender, you can import the posts (not the comments), see an English case study or the full documentation in Italian.

You can import comments, posts and categories also using the WP Plugin Splinder/Motime Importer, see an English quick guide or the full documentation in Italian.

Pivot

There is a script: Importing posts from Pivot 1.2 with *Linux* server to WordPress

There is another script, which has been updated to work with WordPress 2.0: Pivot importer for WordPress. It tries to preserve users and categories.

However, Pivot also has an excellent RSS support and that WordPress can import RSS. Example.

Plone

An article on how to migrate Plone content into Wordpress via Movable Type format.

PostNuke

Conversion script to migrate Postnuke 0.75+ to Wordpress 2.5+ Taxonomy Migrate from PostNuke to Wordpress. Detailed wizard to migrate topics, sections, posts & users.

Movable Type

To import from Movable Type, select the Manage tab, then the Import sub-tab. You can also run the import.php program manually. It is located on your site in the wordpress/wp-admin/import.php. Select the link Movable Type and TypePad.

Nucleus CMS

A Guide to Importing from Nucleus CMS
James Sasitorn's Script for Importing from Nucleus CMS mentioned in http://wordpress.org/support/topic/2893
Nucleus zu WordPress-Konverter, a script for converting, with German explanation.
Tested working importing from NucleusCMS 3.24 to Worpress 2.1
Ultimate NucleusCMS to any blog migration: Adding any blogging engine, including wordpress, to a nucleus directory, keeping all old URLs intact and without issues with images etc.

Radio Userland

A Guide to Importing from Radio Userland

Roller

You can fairly easily import data from Roller using the MovableType import script. First, you need to export your blog from Roller database, then use it to create entries in your new blog. Pictures you need to copy to appropriate content directory yourself. Modify the $user, $oldresources, $newresources, and $connection variables in a beginning of script, store it on somewhere on you web host where php execution is allowed, and you will get the dump of your Roller blog in MovableType Import format in return. You can just use wget to store it into file. Then follow the instructions for MovableType import...

Importing From Roller is complete and comprehensive. This should work for Roller pre-2.0 release. After Version 2.0, the comment table is changed to roller_comment. Just change the select statement to roller_comment.

Also have a look another technique explained at the blog Null Pointer.

Textpattern

The script for importing Textpattern posts into your WordPress blog is located at wp-admin/import-textpattern.php.

Another script may be found on the WordPress Forum on this forum thread.

(Update March 31, 2007) The wordpress textpattern.php import script seems to be buggy. Therefore, another script(hack of the wordpress-included one) and step-by-step importing instructions are to be found over here.

TypePad

The Importing from Movable Type to WordPress works for TypePad blogs, too. The only difference is in the process of exporting entries from the TypePad blog. Contact TypePad support for instructions on exporting entries from TypePad. Once you have the exported entries, follow the instructions in Importing from Movable Type to WordPress to complete the import into WordPress.

Typo

Script and instructions for automatically importing typo articles, pages, comments, categories and tags into WordPress

web-log.nl

Script and Instructions for Importing from web-log.nl to WordPress

WordPress

To import from a WordPress export file into a WordPress blog follow these steps.

Log into that blog as an administrator.
Go to Manage: Import in the blog's admin panels.
Choose "WordPress" from the list.
Upload this file using the form provided on that page.
You will first be asked to map the authors in this export file to users on the blog. For each author, you may choose to map to an existing user on the blog or to create a new user
WordPress will then import each of the posts, comments, and categories contained in this file into your blog

Xanga

xanga.r is a program that parses xanga pages to get the post and comments. Then it can output them in the WordPress rss 2.0 xml format for WordPress to import.

Xanga Archives

If you had paid for Xanga Premium and saved your archive files before switiching to WordPress, an importer can be found here.

Zoomblog

These are the instructions to import your posts from Zoomblog:

Go to your Zoomblog account and export your blog data (it generates an XML file).
Download the Zoomblog importer from here. Unzip it, and upload the file zoomblog.php to your wp-admin/import directory.
Login into WordPress and go to Manage:Import:Zoomblog.
Choose the Zoomblog XML export file and it should be done.

It imports all posts and comments, and creates new categories, though, unfortunately, there's no way to figure out the proper category name, so you'll have to edit them afterwards. It does not deal with multiple authors.

Importing from an RSS feed

2.0.x

2.0 introduced this as an option in the Admin menu under "Import".

First, save the RSS feed you wish to import someplace on your local machine. This would be the source and would come from the site that has the content you wish to import into your WP blog. A simple way to get the feed into a text file is to find the RSS link for that site, click it and view it in your browser, then copy/paste that to a text file. Or, of course, use your preferred tools.

Click the "Browse" button and navigate to the file containing the feed you wish to import and click "Import" to let it run.

Note: Depending on the feed and format, you may not get the entire thing loaded on the first attempt. One option is to determine how much got imported (Manage -> Posts) and remove those sections from your saved RSS file and then re-import. Lather, rinse, repeat as necessary.

Note that newlines will be converted to
. Therefore be sure there is no newlines between any

Pre 2.x

WordPress also has a generic RSS importer, which you can find in your WordPress source at wp-admin/import-rss.php. If your current blogging system can export in a valid RSS format, you can import that into WordPress.

Importing the RSS data is done by running the import-rss.php script from the server. For security reasons you have to edit the script to point to the file where the RSS data is stored.

If you have your blog at http://example.com, you can place your file, for example oldblog.xml, in the wp-admin directory on your site.

Edit import-rss.php by changing the value of RSSFILE in the beginning of the script. After you have changed this, run the script by accessing the script with your browser, in this case you’ll go to http://example.com/wp-admin/import-rss.php.

If the script finds your file, a link marked Begin RSS Import occur, and by pressing this link the import will start.

The RSS data are now imported, and you can remove the RSS file and restore the script.

Importing from [X]HTML

Using trial and error one can make an e.g., perl script to concatenate [X]HTML files as RSS s, saving into a single file.xml, then import that as RSS. Note however to first remove any newlines between

s, as mentioned above.

The format allowed is quite simple in fact. Just make each HTML file into an as below and concatenate them together:



Wed, 30 Jan 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Kites

Taiwan

Fun times

What great times we had...
And then Bob...



...

Just be sure the line is a single long line with no newlines embedded.

Microsoft Word « Support « WordPress.com

2009-08-22T08:46:00.001-07:00

Microsoft Word is a fine word processor for producing documents to be shared or printed, with a wealth of print-based options for indexing, and producing table of contents. As a web publishing tool it is a little less than ideal and produces very messy HTML. The same applies when using OpenOffice, or other word processors.

When text is pasted it initially looks fine:

But looking at the HTML code you can see that it is full of additional tagging information.

The more you edit this post the worse the situation gets. Should a problem occur you will then be faced with a lot of work trying to figure out what has happened and how to fix it. The same code above can be written a lot more cleanly using the WordPress visual editor:

Using Word Cleanly

If you decide that you still want to use Word then you should use the Word cleanup feature to remove all extraneous tags from your text. From the visual editor click on the show kitchen sink button:

Then click on the paste Word button:

A window will appear where you can insert your Word content.

When satisfied you can then click insert and it will clean the content and insert it into your post. Note that all your formatting will be removed so any styles will need to be added in afterwards.

Wordpress 2.7 Released

2009-04-08T11:06:00.001-07:00

The much awaited release of Wordpress, the version 2.7 is here and available for download. The new interface of Wordpress 2.7 comes with new dashboard that you can arrange with drag and drop to put the things most important to you on top, QuickPress, comment threading, paging, and the ability to reply to comments from your dashboard, the ability to install any plugin directly from WordPress.org with a single click, and sticky posts.

The new improved look of Wordpress 2.7.

You can check out this video to see the complete features available in the new version of Wordpress.

Apart from the visual changes and better navigation, one of the major changes is the automatic upgrade of Wordpress. The new version of WordPress includes a built-in upgrade that will automatically notify you of new releases, and when you’re ready it will download them, install them, and upgrade your blog with a single click.

The dashboard also has a very neat and clean look giving complete information of your blog.

Overall the changes are really good with improved navigation. So what are you waiting for, go ahead and upgrade to the latest version.

Download Wordpress 2.5 RC1

2009-04-08T10:43:00.000-07:00

A release candidate of the latest version of Wordpress (2.5), which is slated to arrive in a few days from now, is available for download at the Wordpress blog. The latest version has a customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times. The new Wordpress dashboard has the look and feel of the demo wordpress site which was made available few days back. There was lot of discusion and dislike for this new dasboard.

There has been lot of changes in the layout and its mentioned that primary function like managing posts, comments etc have been separated from secondary tasks. The final version should be soon available once the feedback from RC is available from testers. You can download and try the latest features of Wordpress 2.5

Download Wordpress 2.5 RC

Download Window 7 Theme for XP

2009-04-08T10:41:00.000-07:00

Window 7 is the upcoming OS from Microsoft and its expected to be released in 2010. There are lots of rumors and pictures of this upcoming OS, but nothing is confirmed as of now. Microsoft has confirmed that there would be minimal UI changes in Windows 7. By the time we wait for more news on Windows 7, try out the Windows 7 theme for Windows XP.

How to install this theme;
1. Download the Windows 7 Theme.
2. Install the UXTheme Multi-Patcher 6.0.exe” from “UX Theme Patcher” folder in the zip file.
3. Double click on the “Windows 7 M1 VS.msstyles” in “Theme\Windows 7 M1 VS” folder to install the theme.

Via

Monitor and Remove Autorun from USB Drives

2009-04-08T10:37:00.000-07:00

Most of the time, spreading of viruses can happen due to the autorun.inf file which executes programs automatically from USB drives. AutoRunExterminator is a free utility which can monitor all drives and prevent autorun.inf file from being executing itself. This application monitors all logical drives (from C: to Z) looking for the file “autorun.inf” and if it finds a file with this name in the root of any drive, will exclude it.

This application will not disable autorun from CD/DVD drive as it is not writable. The utility runs from the Windows system tray and monitors all drives. You can also add the application to the start up folder of Windows.

The AutoRunExterminator shows in your window how many files “autorun.inf” were found and how many were excluded. The application is tested on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. The application needs Microsoft .Net framework 2.0 for working.

Download AutoRunExterminator

Automatically Find and Save Documents in Firefox

2009-04-08T10:23:00.000-07:00

OutWit Docs is a simple Firefox Add-on which can find documents from any website, collect them and save them to the location specified. You can specify an URL or click the Outwit docs button on the Firefox Toolbar and the add-on will collect and automatically save all the documents. You can directly open the documents from the search results.

OutWit Docs searches website and common search engines and will find multiple types of documents, including Office (DOC, DOCX, XLS, XLSX, PPT, PPTX), CSV, SWF, or PDF files. Apart from this you can also specify document types to be searched.

OutWit Docs is a great way to search text documents, datasheets, PDF files, presentations from multiple online sources. All you need is to specify the URLs or click on the Outwit toolbar.

Download Wordpress, SEO, Script, Codex, Plugin, Template

All in One SEO Pack

Author: hallsofmontezuma

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Blogspot SEO

Search Engine Optimization for WordPress

Search Engine Site Submissions

Search Engine Optimization Resources

Meta Tags

Robots.txt Optimization

SEO Title Tag 2.3.3

WordPress SEO

WordPress SEO

The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For Your Blog

1. Basic technical optimization

1.1. Permalinks

1.2. Optimize your Titles for SEO

1.3. Optimize your Descriptions

1.4. Optimize the More text

1.5. Image Optimization

2. Template Optimization

2.1. Breadcrumbs

2.2. Headings

, and nothing else. Your blog's name should only be an

on your frontpage, and on single, post, and category pages, it should be no more than an

. These are easy to edit in the post.php and page.php templates. To learn more about why proper headings are important read this article on Semantic HTML and SEO.

2.3. Clean up your code

2.4. Aim for speed

2.5. Rethink that Sidebar

3. Advanced WordPress SEO and Duplicate Content

3.1. Noindex, follow archive pages

3.2. Disable unnecessary archives

3.3. Pagination

3.4. Nofollowing unnecessary links

4. Altering your blog's structure for high rankings

4.1. Pages instead of posts

4.2. New wine in an old bottle

4.3. Linking to related posts

5. Conversion optimization: get those readers to subscribe!

6. Comment optimization: get those readers involved

6.1. How should you get people to comment

6.2. Bond with your commenters

6.3. Keeping people in the conversation

7. Off site blog SEO

7.1 Follow your commenters

7.2 Use Twitter

7.3 Find related blogs, and work them

8. Conclusion

Importing Content « WordPress Codex

b2

b2evolution

Blogger

Starting the importer

WordPress 2.7

WordPress 2.2 to 2.6.5

Blogware

Blosxom

Dotclear

Drupal

e107 CMS

Excel/CSV Spreadsheet

Greymatter

Jogger.pl

Joomla

LiveJournal

Live Space (MSN Space)

Mambo

Motime - Splinder

Pivot

Plone

PostNuke

Movable Type

Nucleus CMS

Radio Userland

Roller

Textpattern

TypePad

Typo

web-log.nl

WordPress

.

These are easy to edit in the `post.php` and `page.php` templates. To learn more about why proper headings are important read this article on Semantic HTML and SEO.