WordPress Tips

WordPress magazine style themes have been all the rage lately, and everyone seems to want some aspect of their WordPress blog to have a magazine-y look and feel.

So if you have been around blogosphere recently, you must have seen those cool image thumbnails with short excerpts displayed on many blog home pages.

Today I went around searching for the easiest post thumbnail method, and was surprised to see how unnecessarily complicated some of the code junkies make something as simple as adding image thumbnails to posts.

So I hunt around a bit more and came up with an easy as pie way to add pretty little thumbnails to a WordPress 2.5 powered blog.

What you need to know: You need to know how to copy and paste.

What you don’t need to know: You don’t need to know how to open Photoshop.

So let’s get started.

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And our life as bloggers, my friends, is about to become a lot easier.

Here are some of the exciting new features as told by Matt:

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 sound interesting to you? Then WordPress 2.5 might be the release for you.

What’s even cooler is that Jeffery Zeldman is the man behind the dashboard redesign. This explains the way-too-cool new interface WordPress developers couldn’t have put together all by themselves.

More info and download WordPress 2.5 RC1 here.

OK, I usually don’t post about software updates and stuff on Blogging Bits, but WP 2.5 got me so excited I couldn’t resist.

Currently playing with WordPress 2.5 on my local machine.

In this post, I am going to list some of the most essential SEO tips and tweaks for WordPress that I’ve learned so far. This isn’t a full-blown SEO guide, but after applying these tweaks, you’ll notice a nice boost in your search engine traffic.

So let’s get started already!

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Did you notice the sideblog in the sidebar where I have been featuring my favorite links? Would you like to know how I did it?

Running a mini blog (also called asides) alongside the main blog is not really a new idea, people have been doing it since the dawn of blogging. But the credit for making me give serious thought to sideblogging goes to Michael at Pro Blog Design. check out his detailed post on the pros and cons of using a sideblog.

How do I feature links on my sideblog?

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A customized WordPress installation can handle every kind of task it is given very comfortably. Thanks to its unmatched flexibility and an ever increasing repository of Plugins, we are able to set up WordPress to do things that it isn’t supposed to do.

You may disagree with me and say that every use of WordPress other than as a blog is its misuse, but trust me, WordPress is more robust, intuitive, and flexible than many of the free services and CMS out there. We trust WordPress because we know it so well, and it has never let us down.

The other day I was searching for a way to integrate Tumblr with WordPress, and came across some unique uses of WordPress. People have devised ingenious ways to turn WordPress into full-fledged CMS and whatnot. Here are some of the best ones.

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So, you want to have a go at creating your own Wordpress theme? No problem. Once you know the basics, you’ll be wondering why you didn’t think of designing your own Wordpress theme before.

Yesterday I highlighted the importance of going custom and investing money in a new blog design. But if you are anything like me, the last thing you want to do is shell out money for a blog template. So, I have compiled a list of tutorials, guides and lessons that I have used myself to learn the basics of Wordpress theme development. Go through each one of them, they are all unique and point you to even more useful resources.

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Permalinks are important. Permalinks in WordPress are the URLs that you see in your browser’s address bar.

Permalinks are one of the few prominent elements that appear in search engine results, therefore, it is really important to give them the best structure.

Short URLs with less clutter and more actual words fare better than those dynamically generated and with a whole lot of unnecessary strings and numbers attached. Search engines as well as human beings find the former a lot easier to read.

I contend that the shorter the URL the better. The reason is obvious, the longer URLs confuse the user, and the mouse pointer automatically goes to click the link which has a shorter, more compact URL. It’s just the way we normally see things; simple looks pretty.

Now, which one of the following is going to get my attention first?

Cut Off The WWW

WWW that precedes your URLs is unnecessary and should be gotten rid of.

To redirect the url with WWW to new no-WWW URLs you need to add the following lines to your .htaccess file (located in your Wordpress root directory) replacing domain with your own domain name.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [R=301]

Apart from that, go to Options > General in WordPress Admin and enter your URL in WordPress address and Blog Address without WWW.

Yay! Good bye WWW!

Tweak WordPress Permalink Structure

In Wordpress the first thing you need to do is get rid of default permalink structure via Options > Permalink. WordPress gives you complete control over how you want to customize your permalinks.

Having rejected the default structure you have three other options left:

1. Date and name based (No thanks, it’s too long)
2. Numeric (Umm.. no, we hate numbers alone)
3. Custom (Now we are talking!)

So you are going to enter custom structure tags in the Custom field. On WordPress codex you can learn more about how a combination of structure tags can be used to customize the permalinks to the hilt.

We are looking for brevity i.e., shorter URLs, so the only thing you are going to enter is /%postname%/

This gives us the shortest possible permalink structure: http://domain.com/post-name/

On the same page, there is another optional field named Category base. And while you are at it, you are going to make use of it too. You are going to enter a short word to replace the word category that is attached to your category URLs. Let’s enter /tag here (or anything else that is shorter than the word category)

Again, yay for getting rid of clutter!

Long Titles Short Permalinks

As opposed to short permalinks, your post titles need to be fairly long, because titles are the first thing searchers see when your posts appear in Google search results. So, a title should summarize the whole post in at least six or seven words. Although we know the importance of titles, we do not want the titles to stretch our permalinks to fill up the whole address bar!

Luckily, when on Write Post page, you can make use of Post Slug sub-panel, located on the right side of your Write Post panel, and add custom permalinks for every post!

For example if your title reads “Learn the art of blogging” you can enter “learn-to-blog” in Post Slug. You leave out the unimportant words and keep the main key words.

Yet again, A big YAY for structring the shortest yet meaningful permalinks!

By doing all I have suggested above you make sure that your URLs are going to look pretty in search engine results, and you are going to force the searchers to click through to your blog.

Do you know of any more tips that I should add?