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You can easily make your Wordpress-powered website more Google-Friendly by putting in a little extra time and effort and see immediate results. Although there are both plugins and services which can increase your sites search engine optimization, you have to learn how to use (tweak) them effectively to get the most out of them. It can be intimidating when you’re working with things that often times are not very user-friendly, but don’t be deterred, there are some excellent tutorial resources available. I’ve gathered a few of them together here to help you get started. If you take your time and follow through them in order, Google will love your site and you’ll be able to closely track your sites visitor activity.

1. Yoast’s SEO Guide

Joost de Valk over at Yoast.com has a comprehensive article detailing how to configure nearly all Wordpress variables for site SEO. I suggest you start by following his guide and implement everything he suggests. There are quite a few steps to follow through, but it’s worth the extra effort! Here’s a quick look at what you’ll find there.

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2. Google Analytics

If you have completed the steps in Yoast’s guide, it’s time to set things up to see what Google is seeing. To do that you will have to set up a Google Analytics account and configure it to track your site. Google has a complete, well organized help page to get you started.  Again, take your time and be patient with yourself if this is your first time configuring SEO and tracking. Here’s a look at what you’ll find there:

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3. CLI.GS

You are probably familiar with URL-shortening services such as tiny-url. In addition to shortening otherwise long website addresses, there are some services which track the activity of shortened URL’s you have created. Let’s say you have created a great new blog post which you want people to read. If you Twitter about the post with a shortened URL, you can track how many people visit your blog post through twitter.  I have found the best service for doing this is cli.gs. It’s very easy to create a free cli.gs account and add new URL’s. Once you get things up and running, you will be able to see complete details on your site visitors. Take a look at cli.gs’s details below:

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4. CLI.GS + Google Analytics

Congratulations if you have sweated through the first three steps. You’ll be thankful you put in the time and effort  Now let’s configure your new Google Analytics site tracking to factor in visitors from your cli.gs. It only requires a couple lines of code. Click the image below for easy instructions, or hit “Show”

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5. Wordpress Plugins

Here are a list of links to the Wordpress plugins you will need to accomplish all of the above easily without having to touch a line of code.

• All in One SEO
• Google Analytics for Wordpress
• Twitter Tools

I hope you’ve found this article useful. Let me know if you have any suggestions to add. Now I’m off to create a cli.gs URL, add it to Google Analytics and see if/when you visit!

article sources:
http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/
http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/?hl=en
http://cli.gs/
http://webupd8.blogspot.com/2009/03/track-clicks-on-short-urls-from-twitter.html

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Wordpress-MD News

Note: All of the following discussion pertains to a Wordpress site running on release 2.8.4 and PhpMyAdmin access.

The broad, almost unlimited functionality of Wordpress is accomplished through installing plug-ins. From the simple to the complex, there are plug-ins for nearly anything you want to add to your Wordpress site, and they couldn’t be easier to install with the new features of the latest release of Wordpress 2.8.4.

Most of the time you’ll sail right through installing and using your plug-ins, but sometimes a plugin can create complete havoc. When that happens, the symptoms vary from warnings appearing, to your site disappearing (seemingly). If your site is simple, you probably don’t have or need a lot of plugins, but as you increase the number of plugins the chances of something going wrong increases because some plug-ins conflict with one another. Also, not following a plugin’s installation instructions can cause problems as some plugin require you to edit your template files. Let’s start with talking about plugin installation problems

1. The plugin won’t install and there is no warning.

1. Check that the plugin you are installing is updated to work with, or up to WP version 2.8.4.
2. Old, outdated and unsupported plugins should be avoided
3. Sometimes they’ll work with no problems. Try them at your own risk.
4. It’s a good practice to stick with plugins listed in the Wordpress plugin repository.

2. Plugin installation fails returning a memory error like this:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 2357261 bytes) in /home/xxx/public_html/wp-includes/http.php

memory limit

1. Don’t worry, the fix is simple. In the root of your Wordpress installation is a file called wp-settings.php.
2. Open the file in your favorite text editor.
3. Go to line 13. It looks like this (click thumbnail above): define(’WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’,'32M);
4. Change the 32 to 64.
5. Save your changes and try installing the plugin again.

3. You have installed several plugins in a short time and suddenly your site breaks.

As with any trouble-shooting, let’s start with the simple approach first.

1. De-activate all of your plugins
2. Re-activate them one at a time, each time clearing your cache and reloading and viewing your site to see that it is working.
3. When you activate a plugin and your problem(s) return, that’s most likely the source of your problem(s). Deactivate that plugin and delete it.

And now the more complicated fix. Proceed at your own risk and only do this if you remember the last plug-in which you installed before a problem arose.

1. Deactivate all your plugins.
2. Login to your c-panel (hosting site control-panel) and go to PhpMyAdmin.
3. Navigate to the database for your site.
4. Select wp-options on the left-hand side.
5. Put a check-mark next to “option-values”.
6. Hit “browse” at the top menu.
7. Look for “active-plugins”.
8. Hit the edit (little pencil)
9. Looking at the large white box, it should be empty since you deactivated all your plugins. If it isn’t, delete whatever may be there.
10. Hit “GO” to save your changes.

4. Your plugins are active, you have uninstalled a plugin, but it’s still causing problems.

1. Follow all the steps above except no.1 above and then…
2. Below is an example (click thumbnail) of what you may see.
3. In this example we will assume that akismet is our problem plugin you would delete the italicized portion.
4. a:14:{i:0;s:53:”admin-management-xtended/admin-management-xtended.php“; i:1;s:19:”akismet/akismet.php”;i:2;s:43:”all-in-one-seo-pack/all_in_one_seo_pack.php”;i:3;s:24:”headspace2/headspace.php”;i:4;s:27:”redirection/redirection.php”;
5. Pay special attention that you will edit out only the bolded-red portion of the line which starts with a letter and ends with a colon.
6. Hit “Go” to save your changes.

phpmyadmin

There are probably other scenarios where what I have mentioned will not work. In that event search the Wordpress Support Forum. Also, it bears repeating a dozen times, but I’ll just mention it once – Back-up your site daily! It’s easy to do with the plug-in WP-DBManager.

If you have other plugin solutions or problems to share, please leave a comment and we’ll discuss it.

Paul

Wordpress-MD News

1. Deactivate all plugins. Reload your your blog page with the problem. Does it work now? Activate all your plugins one by one, reloading your blog page each time – and the one that breaks it is the problem (deactivate and delete it).
2. With all plugins still deactivated – activate the “default” Wordpress theme. Does it work now? If so – you’ve hacked your theme and broken it. Try downloading a fresh copy (or just switching themes)
3. Links to your own blog pages don’t work? Go to “Settings->Permalinks” and just hit “save” to update them again. Do they work now?
4. Blank pages, blank Wordpress dashboard login – or can’t login: check your wp-config file first and make sure it’s there and has the right connection information. Reupload all the Wordpress core files again to see if one was corrupted, and check your theme page again.
5. If you’re still having problems, the first thing I would do is to contact your web host and ask if there were any recent upgrades to the server you’re hosted on. Sometimes upgrades to apache or security rules can screw up Wordpress sites, and you might not be the only customer affected. If that’s not it, search the Wordpress Support Forum – there might be someone with the exact same problem as you, that has already found a solution!

Wordpress-MD News

There are hundreds of sources to choose from to download either a free or premium theme for Wordpress, but not all themes are created equal. Behind the look of the theme itself can be hiding code that should not be there, or possibly even malicious code. Since good security practices will keep your site safe it’s not a bad idea to find out if there is any potentially harmful code hiding in your theme. How do you do that?

Theme Authenticity Checker (TAC) is a Wordpress plugin which will scan all of the files in your themes and return a report like you see above for you to see if you are safe or not.  The plugin is available for download here. In all likelihood you’re safe, but why risk being sorry later.

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