We’ve seen a lot of great WordPressSEO tips and tricks out there, but not all of them are practical and easy toapply.
In this article, we are going to change that and head straight for theactual, practical steps you can do to make your WordPress site search engineoptimized.
A WordPress Theme is a collection of files that produce the graphical interface for a wordpress website. You can find plenty of free or premium themes on internet. A good premium theme providers will aggressively
Update their themes with new features and functionality
Add more security features or bug Fixes
Update any browser compatibility issue
Keep up with the latest WordPress enhancements.
Whenever a new version of your WordPress theme is released, WordPress dashboard will notify you to update your theme to the latest version. WordPress experts always recommend you to update yo themes to your theme to latest version.
But when you update your theme, you’ll lose all the tweaks you made to it. How can you update a WordPress Theme without losing customization? WordPress is providing an easy mechanism to solve this issue. It is parent theme child themes combination.
What is a Parent Theme?
A parent theme is a complete theme which includes all of the required WordPress template files. Any theme in your /wp-content/themes/ folder is considered as parent theme. What is a Child Theme?
A child theme is simply a theme that inherits the functionality and looks of another theme – the parent. Read More
Most website creators using WordPress today to create website. You can easily build and manage your site with WordPress. When you convert your your existing business website(.html / .php/ .aspx files) to wordpress, it’s a good idea to set up a blog and test a new version in a subfolder (example.com/WordPress) so that it does not affect their main domain. Once completed, you can move the new site over to the root directory for the domain.
This tutorial assumes you have already created, tested your site in a subfolder called “wordpress”. Refer following articles if you need help on how to install wordpress.
Log into your WordPress Admin, go to Settings -> General.
Change WordPress address (URI) from (example.com/WordPress to example.com)
Change Site Address address (URL) from (example.com/WordPress to example.com)
Step2: Physically move the files from a sub folder to your main folder
Before moving the wordpress files to root, take a backup of your site in root folder. After you have made your backup, it is time to move your WordPress to the primary folder. You can use the cPanel File manager, an FTP program, Shell using SSH, or HTML editor like DreamWeaver.
Moving Files Using Cpanel
Log into your cPanel dashboard.
From the main cPanel area, look for the Files category and then click on the File Manager tool.
Once inside the File Manager, you will want to navigate to the folder you have the WordPress site in. (For example, a folder named WordPress.)
You will see a list of all the WordPress files and folders in the right hand panel. Highlight them all and click on the Move File icon from the menu toolbar across the top of the page.
A popup will appear so you can enter the destination folder. Continuing with our WordPress folder example, it should show as public_html/WordPress. Remove the /WordPress from the destination path so that it simply displays as public_html. Click the Move Files button.
This will move the files up to the public_html folder. You should now see the same files as you have in your WordPress folder.
You can now delete the old WordPress folder.
Moving Files Using FTP
Open your FTP program. Select files from “WordPress ” folder.Drag files to root folder.
You wrote a very long post and have some issues with load times on your posts, it is better to split that long WordPress post into multiple pages. Reading long posts can be hectic or boring for users. This can increase the bounce rate of your site. So for better presentation and readability, divide along post into several pages. This also will improve the look and feel of your site and increase the number of page views on your site.
Dividing your posts into two or more pages is simple in WordPress.
In the post editor, click on “Text” tab to switch to “Text” editor mode.
Add the following tag wherever you want to split your post.
<!–nextpage–>
You can add this tag anywhere you want as many times as you want.
WordPress Widgets are independent content blocks designed to provide specific function. Widget is a simple and easy-to-use way to arrange the various elements of your sidebar content or any widgetized areas of your theme. Widgets enable non-technical users to customize your theme without having to change any code.
There are so many different widgets available. WordPress by default comes with several widgets that can be seen on on the WordPress Administration Appearance > Widgets panel. See a list of Top wordpress sidebars widgets. Note: You can install new ones by searching the WordPress Plugins Directory. See how to install worpress plugin.
How to use Widgets
To use/display widgets, you need to add widget areas into your Theme. Most WordPress themes are widget ready. It would always be a good idea to select a theme that is Widget Ready. If theme is not widget ready, you can widgetize just about every part of your theme. See how to widgetize your theme.
Go to Appearance > Widgets. Here you can see available widgets and widget ready areas in your theme.
Choose a Widget and either drag it to the sidebar where you wish it to appear
drag widget
Or click the widget, (select a destination sidebar if your theme has more than one) and click the Add Widget button.
Add Widget
Preview the site. You can see the new addition there.
To arrange the Widgets within the sidebar or Widget area, click and drag it into place.
Drag to re-arrange
To customize the Widget features, click the down arrow in the upper right corner to expand the Widget’s interface.
Edit widget options
To save the Widget’s customization, click Save.
Edit widget options
To remove the Widget, click Delete link in the configuration options as show above.
How to add Widget area to your theme
You can widgetize just about every part of your theme. See how to widgetize your theme. Widget can be added to the header, footer, and elsewhere in the WordPress design and structure. There are 2 main parts to add widget area in your theme:
Register the widget area in functions.php
Insert widget area in the WordPress Theme
#1: Register widget area
Open the functions.php file from the WordPress Theme Editor . Add the following block of code. In this code, we are registering one sidebar. We have given a name(e.g.’Home right sidebar’) to identify them on Widgets screen and id(e.g.’home_right_1′) is used to call it in theme file to display.
After registering Dynamic Sidebars, New widget area appears in Appearance » Widgets screen. Users can drag and drop widgets into these sidebars. #2: Insert widget area in the WordPress Theme
You need to insert the following block of code in your template like sidebar.php /footer.php or any other template file where you want to display the widget.
Have you ever thought how cool it would be to have the ability to write WordPress posts without having to go on-line and login to your dashboard? This is a question that pops up often especially among WordPress owners who have to write multiple blogs. It would also be great to have a local back up of your posts or having to upload photos faster. In this article we will examine different ways to login remotely and perform admin functions.
A major Pre-requisite
To manage any aspect of WordPress remotely, there is a fancy API called XML-RPC that MUST be turned on. All Weblogs (Blogging software that run on your local machine) post to your blog via XML-RPC.
According to the official WordPress Site , XML-RPC functionality is turned on by default since WordPress 3.5. However if you are still attached to older stable versions you can still enjoy the functionality of XML-RPC. To enable this, simply login to your site’s dashboard, go to Settings > Writing > #remote publishing and check the checkbox. Now you have the green light to work remotely.
1. Your favourite Email Client
Indeed it’s that simple! Your email client whether in your desktop or mobile device can write posts to your WordPress site. All that is needed is a unique email on your wordpress site that will Serve as a recipient of post content. WordPress will frequently check that email address via POP protocol for new messages. For every email message, the Subject is assumed to be the post title while the body is assumed to be the content for the title.
The built-in WordPress functionality to post via email is deprecated and will be removed in future wordpress versions. But all hope is not lost thanks to good old plugin methods. There are 3 popular plugins that achieve this:
We may not review all these plugins in this article since there are other remote publishing techniques that am dying to tell you about. For now lets use Post by Mail in Jetpack as a case study. After installing it go to Profile > Your Profile page, and enable Post by Email. A unique email address will be generated and this will serve as the recipient where you will send the post.
CAUTION: Let this recipient email remain private. Don’t CC anyone else when writing to the unique email.
Now let’s go to your favourite Email client (Outlook, Thunderbird or Apple Mail) and send a post to the unique email address. You can add other aspects of the post using shortcodes in the body. Assume we are writing this article from an email client. Here’s what we would have:
Screen shot
2. Windows Live Writer for Windows users
This is a great app that comes as a feature of Windows live essentials. In addition to the post writing functionalities that are readily available in Microsoft word, one can crop and resize images and attach maps from virtual Earth. There is even a custom Custom WordPress sidebar for easy navigation to your dashboard.
What do you need to run Windows Live writer?
Any 32 or 64-bit version of Windows 7, Windows 8 or Windows Server 2008 R2.
Processor:6 GHz or higher with SSE2 support.
Memory: 1 GB of RAM or higher.(You are better off with at least 2GB)
Resolution: 1024 × 576
A fast and reliable Internet connection: Don’t blame this application when you find it hanging frequently. It has to synchronize with your site server constantly so ensure your internet connection is nothing short of ‘good’.
Here is a detailed user guide to using Windows Live writer. If you like it you can download it here. But what if you’r not a Windows user?
3. Gnomeblog
This is desktop blogging application for Linux and Unix that connects seamlessly with WordPress based sites. It comes with an easy and quick to use interface to write posts. As the name suggests it works on Gnome based linux flavours (Ubuntu and the likes). It has a WYSIWYG styled text support with Spell checking linked to the dictionaries in your linux box. Oh! And the drag and drop support for images is relatively faster than other Weblog clients. You can crop, caption and resize them just as you want the article to appear on your website. Head over to the official site and grab it for free.
4. SmartxBlog
We haven’t forgotten you Mac users! SmartxBlog is to you, what GnomeBlog is to Linux fanatics. In addition, you can preview the articles in a browser before publishing them. I like the fact that you can also add multiple castegories, tags and even create an RSS feed. SmartXBlog has built-in Image Editor so you don’t have to bother using third party Image Editors. Think of this app as a local wordpress version that syncs to your live site.
To enjoy all these features make sure you have Adobe AIR runtime installed on your computer. Then head over to http://smartxblog.com/ and download the app. You will get a 30 days trial period after which you part with $9.9 for a 5-user licence and lifetime updates. There is a windows version too.
5. WordPress app By Automattic for Android and IOS
WordPress is now mobile thanks to this great app. You can now leave your laptop when going on holiday. With a tablet or smart phone you can now write posts and publish them instantly. You can even login to multiple WordPress sites you own and approve and reply to comments on your articles. It may seem abit confusing that the whole power of your dashboard has been brought down to an app. Even the icons that you are used to have changed. However after using it several times you get the hang of it.
Well, that covers most of the devices. Hopefully by now you can do remote publishing in wordpree.But just in case you don’t find an app for your Operating System check out this list. Have fun and remember: The security of your devices will determine the security of your wordpress site.
If you are used to logging in to your WordPress account in a public Wi-Fi network like at malls or from your local coffee shop, anyone on the same connection can sniff your WordPress credentials. Anyone who knows how to use FireSheep can gain access to your WordPress account.
This was discovered by Yan Zhu, a staff technologist at Electronic Frontier Foundation who works for Frontier Foundation on the HTTPS Everywhere and Privacy Badger extensions.
The cookie, called “wordpress_logged_in’ is what WordPress.com use to determine if the user is logged in or not. If this is set, then WordPress won’t bother to ask user credentials until this cookie expires.
Oftentimes, WordPress hosting companies recommend to install a plugin like Limit Login Attempts. Although a nifty tool, sometimes Limit Login Attempts can be an annoyance as it can lock you out too if you entered a wrong password a few times.
The easiest solution is to delete Limit Login Attempts using FTP then re-install it later once you can login.
For advanced users who are familiar with MySQL and PHPMyAdmin, you can unblock limit login attempts using the following SQL query:
UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = ” WHERE option_name = ‘limit_login_lockouts’ LIMIT 1;
If you want to unblock specific ID, run this query:
UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = REPLACE(option_value, ‘111.222.111.222’, ”) WHERE option_name = ‘limit_login_lockouts’ LIMIT 1;
Changing the permalink structure of your site is always a pain in the neck. Before you do that, you have to be sure that you want to make this change because it can have a huge impact in your site’s SEO. This can also cause a lot of errors and broken links if handled incorrectly.
However, with a simple plan and the right tools, you can carry out these task without any issues.
Permalinks are a part of a website that comes after your domain name and point to a specific post and page to your site. When set correctly, it allows your readers to have a clear understanding on what your post is about and also helps visitors find your page faster.
In this post, we’ll show you how to change permalinks to your site without damaging it.
Comments allow users to engage with the content in your your website. This is why it is important to make your comments section more attractive by creating a comments layout and comment forms that are user-friendly as well as good looking.
In this post, we’ll show how to add JQuery tooltips to your WordPress comment form. These tooltips appear when a user takes their mouse to an item to provide a brief description about what they can do to a specific form. By adding such tooltips, it will enhance your user experience as well as it will make it look nicer.
Did your site ever had a brute force attack? Are you aware of it? In this post made by Tony Perez of Scuri Blog, he tells the story of how a brute force attack was able to hack into his site and how an unused WordPress theme was used as a medium to to do it. The attack was a defacement of the site, but this is only a part of what the hacker has in store. The good thing is that the attacker wasn’t able to inject backdoors into the site.
As a website owner, the one thing that will keep you from the hacker is to generate a secure password for your site.
Stick Posts are great for highlighting your featured content, but there are certain places in your site where you don’t need a sticky post. WordPress cannot guess a certain area or page where you don’t want a stick post, so in this article, you’ll be taught how to take away the sticky feature of the post.
To take away the sticky ability of the post, you need to change the loop so that WordPress will ignore that a post is sticky and shows it in normal order. Using such code, the sticky post will appear in the loop but not be placed on top.
By default, the theme and plugin editors of your WordPress site is just a plain text editor. So if you are aiming for a development tool right in your site, you are out of luck because the text editor included is only meant for taking a quick look at the code or make some minor changes.
This post will show you how to have a more robust text editor with built-in syntax highlighting, line numbers, and row highlighting that makes it a lot easier to code inside your WordPress site.
If you are a coder or developer who is looking for ways to set your website apart, this article is for you. This article will demonstrate how to code and integrate several snippets to your WordPress website or blog. It will aim to improve the functionality, security, and the look of your website. In order to follow this tutorial, we expect you to have a few PHP, CSS, and HTML knowledge. It is also recommended if you are familiar with the overall WordPress structure. The advanced tutorial, on the other hand, will involve modifying your existing WordPress PHP files and modifications to the HTML, CSS, and .htaccess files.
Google trends will help you decide what post will be trending and what won’t. Google trends show graphs of how popular a search term is at a particular event. It is useful for your post so you can determine what your readers are actually searching for when looking for your post.
Here is a shortcode to embed Google Trends post in pages.
Either you’re a designer or a customization freak, you can benefit from this huge list of codes for your WordPress site. This huge list of codes are taken all over the net and consolidated into one blog post for easy reference.
Codes include post customizations like displaying the most recent posts, displaying recent comments, top comments, display categories, archives, dynamic title tags, tag clouds, external rss feeds, most recent twitter entry, and many more.
You’ll never have to look for these anymore as these are all compiled just for you to reference and even try out.
Image hotlinking is a way most spammers display images to their blog using your own bandwidth. This in turn hogs your bandwidth; therefore causing you to pay more than what you need or getting your site exceed bandwidth limit for no reason. To fight against image hotlinking, we enter a command in the .htaccess file but as a result, it will also prevent your images to appear in the feeds. Although this can be solved, writing htaccess codes can be a bit intimidating specially for novice users.
Here is a plugin which lets you save from doing all the work. It prevents image hotlinking by simply installing and activating this plugin.
If you need to portray chunks of information to your readers, a bullet point is an effective way to do it. Sometimes, the usual bullet point appearance doesn’t display what you want to actually say to them that as a result, their eyes get tired of your posts. Bullet points make it easy for readers to read your posts, and draws attention to the eye of scanners. It emphasizes the idea between points and helps to communicate with your readers easily. This is why bullet points are important specially for text-heavy posts.
Widgets are an easy way to add or remove items to your WordPress blog or website. However, most themes don’t have enough space to add plenty of widgets. So, if you saw a beautiful theme but lacks the needed widgets for your site, you simply abandon all hope and find a new WordPress theme.
Do you know that you can add new widgets in your post and page content by just following this guide. You don’t need to worry if your theme can occupy the widgets you have because you can add new ones all by yourself.
There’s those times where you don’t want a post from one of your categories appearing in your stream of posts in your homepage. It could be an unrelated post, a short, quick guide, or an announcement that you want hidden because it has to exist elsewhere. With just a little bit of code, you can remove what category you don’t want to appear in that stream. This technique is perfect to display only what you only want to show and hide those that aren’t required for your post.