If you’re involved with social media sites like Digg, Facebbok or Reddit, you’ve probably seen stories with images next to them. If you’ve submitted stories there, you may have seen it present you with a few image choices, sometimes the one you want is there sometimes it isn’t. Then there’s the the case where the social media site chooses the image on it’s own, and it’s a crappy image or worse yet an ad … dooming your story to failure. Did you know there’s a way to fix that problem?

Many social media sites like Digg and Facebook work with what’s called the facebook share standard, so you can tell these services which image you’d prefer they use. This tutorial deals specifically with Thesis, but again can be used on any wordpress blog, but remeber things are just easier with thesis

We need to open up custom_functions.php and add the following code:
// facebook connect digg social media image
function get_social_img() {
global $post;
if ( is_single ()){
$image = "";
$image = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'thesis_post_image', $single = true);
?>
<link rel="image_src" href="<?php echo $image; ?>" />
<?
}
}


The code is pretty small and easy so I’ll walk you through it.

1. We create a new function named – get_social_img
2. global $post; let’s us get all the data
3. if ( is_single ()) says only execute this code on a single post
4. we then get the thesis_post_image for this post
5. and write it to the HTML code.

Now we have to tell thesis where and when to execute the function, we do that by adding this to custom_functions.php

add_action('wp_head', 'get_social_img');

You may not have seen wp_head before, it’s a built in wordpress shortcode that tells it to execute this code in the head area of the page. That’s it easy as pie. You could improve the code, by maybe adding an if/then to chose the thumbnail over the big picture, or maybe see if there is a special field and then fail over to thumbnail or main image. I think this funtionality should be added to the next version of thesis, if you agree let them know (wink wink nudge nudge).  if you enjoyed this post check out some of my other thesis tutorials.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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If you’ve spent any time visiting blogs lately chances are you’ve seen those small little photo’s accompained by a title or bit of text in or near the masthead. I’m not sure if it has a proper name, but most people I’ve talked to call it a carousel, in this tutorial I’m going to show you how to add one to your blog.For the few of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, here’s a screen shot from gawker.com which is the first place I saw it being used.

As time goes on the stories move across the banner,  eventually dropping out of view, similar to the way horses do on a carousel. I’m going to be showing you how to do this with Thesis, as with many of these tutorials you can adapt the programming to work with any blog, it’s just easier with thesis.

First we’re going to need a way to isolate which posts we want to appear in the top. Chances are you are going to want to pick the best of your newest posts (not all new posts are best). I like to keep my blog low maintenance or self maintaing, so I decided to use the featured category which is the same I use to fill the visual slider that’s on the homepage. However you could just as easily use tags instead of an isolated category.

To make the carouse happen we’re going to create a custom function in custom_functions.php called top_carousel() and inside of it we’re going to add global $post (which allows wordpress to get items outside of the current post) and an “if” statement to make the carouse appear only on single post pages (I felt the homepage looked to “busy” with a slider and a carousel, but that’s your choice). Here’s what the initial code looks like:


function top_carousel(){
global $post;
if (is_single ()){
}
}

Next we’re going to add a “wrapper” for carousel this will allow us to add some visual styling once we’re done:


function top_carousel(){
global $post;
if (is_single ()){
echo '<div id="topcarosel">';
echo '</div>';
}
}


Next we’re going to need to construct a database select statement that selects only the posts we want. In my case, I wanted the last 6 published posts, from the “featured” category, in reverse date order. To do that we’ll use the following query

$the_query = new WP_Query(array(
'category_name'=>'featured',
'orderby'=>'date',
'order'=>'DESC',
'showposts'=>'6'
));

Explaining the intricacies of WP_Query is beyond the scope of this post however you can read more about it on wordpress or lots of other tutorials on the web. However hopefully it’s easy to reverse engineer, select only posts from the “featured category”, order them by date, in descending order, and select a maximum of 6 posts.

Next we need to display the posts based on that query, here’s how we do it:

while ($the_query->have_posts()) : $the_query->the_post(); $do_not_duplicate = $post->ID;
$image = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'thesis_post_image', $single = true);
echo '<div class="carouselu">';
echo '<a href="';
echo the_permalink();
echo '" >';
echo '<img src="http://www.wolf-howl.com/wp-content/themes/thesis-wolf/lib/scripts/thumb.php?src='.$image.'&w=140&h=140&zc=1&q=100"></a>';
echo '<a href="';
echo the_permalink();
echo '" >';
echo the_title();
echo '</a>';
echo '</div>';
endwhile;

That bit of code executes the previous SQL query, display’s the thesis picture for that post, resize it down to a 140×140 square, links it to the permalink for the post, then display’s the title as a link to the permalink as well, and wraps the whole thing in a “div”.

There’s only one last bit, since we are going to use CSS to float the individual carousel unit DIV’s, we’ll need to make sure we clear the float’s when we are done like this:

echo '<div style="clear:both"></div>';

Ok now to put it all together, it should look something like this:


function top_carousel(){
global $post;
if (is_single ()){
echo '<div id="topcarosel">';
$the_query = new WP_Query(array(
'category_name'=>'featured',
'orderby'=>'date',
'order'=>'DESC',
'showposts'=>'6'
));
while ($the_query->have_posts()) : $the_query->the_post(); $do_not_duplicate = $post->ID;
$image = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'thesis_post_image', $single = true);
echo '<div class="carouselu">';
echo '<a href="';
echo the_permalink();
echo '"  >';
echo '<img src="http://www.wolf-howl.com/wp-content/themes/thesis-wolf/lib/scripts/thumb.php?src='.$image.'&w=140&h=140&zc=1&q=100"></a>';
echo '<a href="';
echo the_permalink();
echo '"  >';
echo the_title();
echo '</a>';
echo '</div>';
endwhile;
echo '<div style="clear:both"></div>';
echo '</div>';
}
}

Only 2 steps left, we need to add this code to custom_functions.php to tell thesis when to activate and display the carousel, we do that like this:
add_action('thesis_hook_before_header', 'top_carousel');

Then we need to add a bit of styling to our custom.css file, in my case I used this:
#topcarosel {border:1px solid #efefef; padding: 0px;padding-left:10px;}
.caroselu {width:150px;float:left;padding:3px;text-align:center;}
.caroselu IMG {border:2px solid #ccc;display:block;}

That wraps a light gray border around the entire top carousel and puts a bit of padding in place, then sets a 150px width for each of the “carousel units” with a bit of padding and “floats” them so they appear side by side, and then puts a light gray box around the image in the carousel and make sure no single letters creep into the display. If you did everything right it should look like the screen shot below:

That code is pretty bare bones and there’s lots of opportunity for you to improve/change it, here are a few suggestions:

• Have the first one or two slots fill from a different tag/category, if you have any sort of “news” content on your blog, that would be really useful.
• Look at the tag/category of the current post and choose related posts for the last one or two slots, this should dramatically increase CTR.
• Change the position of the carousel for example Techcrunch currently mixes it into the “content” block, the New York Times puts it at the bottom of the article.
• Use multiple carousel’s in the sidebar or after the post, to display related posts.

Thanks to Sean Percival for writing about carousel’s last week and inspiring me to get off my kiester and figure out how to do it, and thanks to Nick Reese who helped with a coding issue, you might also want to check out some of his thesis tutorials.

While this tutorial isn’t a programming masterpiece, it might be a bit beyond you if you have very little programming experience. However if you’ve been wondering is Thesis just for “newbies” I hope these last few thesis tutorials have shown you thesis really is a framework that makes it easy for you to interact with your blog and get things done quicker and easier, no matter how experienced you are, so why not give it a try?

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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I’ll admit that when I first saw the Thesis wordpress theme I wasn’t really keen on it, in fact I really didn’t see the point. While I’m not a programmer by trade, I know enough HTML, CSS, and PHP to make things happen in the code. However after seeing some of the behind the scenes stuff on Rae’s blog I finally gave it a try, and PURCHASED MY OWN COPY. I can now say that I’m a big fan of Thesis, and am probably what you’d call a brand advocate. If you’re like me and can do your own programming, or just don’t get why Thesis is cool, then read on, and I’ll try to explain some of the benefits.

If you are a novice programmer of have no programming experience, Thesis makes it really easy to dip your toe in the water, since Rae did an excellent job covering that in her Thesis review I won’t rehash that it here. But what about those of us who can do some coding, are developers or publishers, or have more than one website whats the advantage? Chances are you’ve graduated past the free themes and you are using a premium theme like someplace like solostream or woo themes. They are nice looking themes for sure, but they have their limitations. Lets imagine you want to customize the look and feel a little, add or remove things, I can tell you from firsthand experience it’s not an easy task, sometimes it can be excruciatingly difficult, because you have to start modifying the core theme files. Every few months the theme will get an update and therein lies the problem, you’ve now got two choices, stick with your old version of the theme which has your customizations, or migrate all of your changes back into the new version of the theme. If the theme has updated because of a wordpress update, your’re pretty much screwed (I speak from first hand experience here).

When you work with Thesis you won’t have these problems. To customize Thesis the only thing you have to do is change two files custom.css and custom_functions.php.  Every time thesis updates, you copy those two files, upload  the new version of thesis, and put your two files back. That’s it there’s no go ing back through the core files trying to figure out how to put your modifications back in. Again I’ve done this several times across multiple blogs, not just this one, and each time it goes off without a hitch.

Knowing that I only have to work with these two files is huge time saver. If you’ve ever tried to work with a theme someone else wrote, you  know that working with template files can involve a bit of hunting and pecking, is that coming from archive.php or archives.php, where is the author template pulling from, which sidebar file is that coming from, again working with thesis has already saved me a huge amount of time, so I can get more done, and less time wasted on playing with the code.

Another bonus of thesis is how easy it is to change the layout. Sometimes when you work with “pixel perfect” layouts you run into problems. You need to put a 250px wide widget in your sidebar, but the designer made the column 200px wide. In theory you should just be able to go the CSS file and change the two width and everything falls into place. However everyone who has been coding for more than 24 hours can tell you 99% of the time it’s never that easy. You’ve got to spend time going through multiple nested CSS sheets and classes, and hope that a graphic wasn’t involved. However with Thesis it really is that easy, you choose how many columns (up to three), how wide each one is, hit the “big ass save button” and you’re good to go (screen shot below click to enlarge)

For me the biggest bonus of using thesis comes from the time it saves me. Once you understand how to write hooks customizing thesis really is breeze. If you run more than one website you can leverage the programming across multiple sites even though they all have a different look and feel with different custom CSS file. Hooks are really easy to write, lots of people share theirs, you can see my thesis hooks here, and I do plan to publish more. Simply put Thesis helps me get things done with my blog, instead of wasting time on design, themes, and set up distractions.

To be clear this is not a sponsored post, or sponsored review. I bought my own developers license with my own credit card, I was not given a “review copy”, comp’d, reimbursed, or in any way incentivized to write this post. I wrote it because I like the software and I use it, and to be honest I think a lot of you could benefit from it to. In fact I like this program so much I’m announcing a new section on my blog called Recommended where I’ll be listing software I use and think is worth using and owning.

If you think thesis is cool and want to give it a try, a personal copy is $87 and developers license is $164 (under priced IMHO). if you only run one website the personal copy is fine, have more than one the developers license, lets you put it on as many websites as you want. You can also always upgrade from a personal to the developers license.  If you found this review helpful and want to pick up your own copy of thesis, you can use my affiliate link to make your purchase.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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I solved (at least partly) my problem maintaining rankings over time. Old pages that used to get traffic are once again seeing inbound search visits. I did it by tweaking my blog’s category pages, but I think the lessons are also helpful for ecommerce sites.

By default, Wordpress category pages show 10 posts. Similarly, most ecommerce category pages show 9 products per page (in a 3×3 grid).

This sucks for SEO, because your individual blog posts or category products get less and less internal linklove over time as they get pushed to the secondary category pages.

There are two types of secondary category pages – the extremely deep ones that no one will ever get to because it takes 10 “next page” clicks to get there. For this problem, Egghead created Wordpress pagination. Adding “1,” “2,” “3,” … links is just a partial solution, though. And as Rand highlights in this fantastic Whiteboard Friday (prompted by a question of mine, I believe ), pagination is still not great.

Search engines don’t have a particular reason to crawl deeper than the main category page, as a general rule.

This is more true for ecommerce sites where the products tend to resemble each other (e.g. diamond rings) and a deeper crawl is unlikely to make the results returned to searchers significantly better. Search engines also have that incentive in a Wordpress blog context since a percentage of the newer posts likely rehash older ones, though the rehash is less pronounced relative to ecommerce sites.

Further compounding the problem is the fact, as I just recently found out, that All In One SEO – probably the single most popular Wordpress SEO plugin around – adds a meta robots noindex tag to your category pages! (Or perhaps it writes to robots.txt; I didn’t pay exact attention but that’s a technical detail that is beside the point.) If I were a search engineer, I would treat links from noindexed pages as less valuable than those from pages meant to be in my index. No, I haven’t run this test scientifically – this part is just a hunch.

The Takeaway Tips on Optimizing Archival Material:

1) Go to Settings (aka Options in older versions of Wordpress) – All In One SEO – and remove the checkmark next to ‘noindex category pages’.

2) Go to Settings – Reading. Set “Blog pages show at most: ” to 100. Rand suggests (in that Whiteboard Friday) that this won’t solve all your problems, because it doesn’t scale. So here’s how to scale it…

3) Ironically, the answer is in another SEOmoz post. Consolidate the repetitive long tail post selection by moving all your content on a narrow subject to one particular post. This will reduce the number of posts (and hence the depth to which spiders need to crawl) as well as make for a single, more comprehensive post.

That makes it more linkable, incidentally. And it should help bring in more longtail traffic too, due to the mix of previously absent words with those already present! While we’re getting all Wikipedia style, why not throw in a table of contents for good measure, since your post is going to be getting longer?

4) Take Michael Gray’s tip on putting posts in just one category (see the vid below). This will enable you to maximize the value of each category page in getting posts indexed (or each subcategory’s power, as Rand cleverly advises in the Whiteboard Friday video).

For example, I recently wrote that my idea for measuring social media results could be coded using the Friendfeed API. Well, the Friendfeed API blurb is going to be integrated into the main post as soon as I find time. Similarly, a number of my link buying posts can be simplified and consolidated.

The Ideal Category Archive SEO Solution:

• Ajax – 100 posts can be intimidating, especially when that scroll button gets all tiny. Instead, why not have 100 posts loaded, but only 10 or 20 visible? To get to the others you click an AJAX link. Only when you get to say, the 100th or 200th post does a new page need to be loaded. This makes for decent usability while keeping things search engine friendly.
• Value-add tagging and sorting system – Essentially, you’d be able to tag something on the backend on a scale of 1-5 on how useful a post is. Alternatively, you could base this on user ratings of how good a post was, but this depends on having a large enough user base to sustain this.
  Then, users viewing your category archives could sort them by how valuable or popular an individual post is. This ’sort-by-importance’ view would be the default for search engines, ensuring your best content gets the most crawler attention.

What do you make of these ideas? Would you do any of this differently? Have additional tips on this? Why does All In One SEO noindex category pages by default, and likewise Joost’s robots plugin?

Gab Goldenberg writes on SEO at his SEO blog. Check out his services if you’re in the market for something professional.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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There are a lot of times when you are working on your blog template where you want things to happen based on how old a post is. This tutorial shows you how to do it. The programming is pretty simple and you don’t have to be using the Wordpress Thesis Theme to do it, but it would be a lot easier if you were …

Lets tackle the big question first why would you want to change your blog based on how old each post is? When your posts are new maybe you want social media bookmarking buttons to appear, but you don’t want them on older posts. Maybe you don’t want to annoy your regular readers with advertising, but after a posts is over 30 days old you want to monetize your archives, with adsense. Maybe your listings in the SERP’s show a date with them, this may be helpful for posts that are new, but as posts age this may cut down on the number of clicks you get from a search engine. Those are just a few examples, there are many many more.

In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to ad a block of adsense under the author by line. Let’s step through the code, the first thing we want to do is figure out how old the post is, here’s how we do it:

//how many days old is this post
$daysold = (current_time(timestamp) - get_the_time('U') -
(get_settings('gmt_offset')))/(24*60*60);

That’s a lot of wordpress functions strung together that says, get the current time adjust to your local timezone and convert it to days (that’s the 24 hours times 60 minutes times 60 hours part). The variable $daysold now has a numerical value for how old the current post is.

Next we want to tell the code to only activate if it’s a single post

if (is_single()){
//code to do stuff goes here
}

This code uses a wordpress function that says if this is a single post do what’s inside the curly braces.  There are other wordpress functions like is_home() (for the homepage) and is_category() for category pages.

The last piece of code uses the $daysold value to test if the current page is older than our 14 day threshold and looks like this

if ($daysold > 14 ) {
//code to do stuff goes here
}

This code says if our post is older than 14 days do what’s inside of the curly braces. The last thing you need to know is this

<? php

and

?>

Since we’re working in PHP we need to tell the program when we want it to switch to plain HTML. The top one says stop doing HTML and start doing PHP the bottom one says stop doing PHP and start doing HTML. The file we’re working in is a PHP file so usually you’ll have to tell it to stop doing PHP and start doing HTML first.Now let’s put it all together.

If you aren’t already on thesis one of the things that makes it so great is all the custom programming goes in one file custom_functions.php that means no hunting around through template to make sure you have the right one or miss something, it’s just easier. We’re going to put out code inside of a function named uauthor_byline() here’s what it looks like:

//this appears under the author byline
function uauthor_byline() {

//how many days old is this post
$daysold = (current_time(timestamp) - get_the_time('U') -
(get_settings('gmt_offset')))/(24*60*60);
    //only display on single posts
    if (is_single()){ 

        //only display  if post > 14 days old
        if ($daysold > 14 ) { ?>
            <script type="text/javascript"><!--
            google_ad_client = "pub-xxxxxxxxxxxxx;
            google_ad_width = 468;
            google_ad_height = 60;
            google_ad_format = "468x60_as";
            google_ad_type = "text";
            google_ad_channel ="xxxxxxx";
            google_color_border = "FFFFFF";
            google_color_bg = "FFFFFF";
            google_color_link = "000000";
            google_color_url = "000000";
            google_color_text = "000000";
            //--></script>
            <script type="text/javascript"
              src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
            </script>
           <? php
        }
    }
}

lets review we named a function uauthor_byline inside of that function we figured out how old the current post was. We said if this is a single post and if it’s over 14 days old go ahead and display an adsense banner. If you are going to copy and paste this code be sure to put in your adsense publisher ID and adsense channel.

Next we need to activate the code and tell thesis where to put it, that’s the easy part just one line of code with a thesis hook as follows

add_action('thesis_hook_before_post','uauthor_byline' );

If you are going to use this for adsense I’d also suggest using section targetting (see How to Add Adsense Section Targeting).

As I said in the begining of the article this code could be adapted to work with any wordpress template, it’s just a little messier than working with thesis. Also you don’t need to use it just for adsense you could use it for anything else like banner advertisement.

BONUS TIP

I like to mix things up on my blog, when posts are new they have social bookmarking buttons, when they are old they shift to adsense. There’s an easy way to do that with some slight changes to the code above. To do it you’ll need to take this code:

         <? php
        }
    }
}

and change it to this code:

        <? php
        }else{
        ?>
         <!-- the code for bookmarking buttons goes here-->
        <?
        }
    }
}

What I just added was an else condition so if the post “fails” the older than 14 days old test then it does the other thing, in this case displays a bookmarking button.

I’m sure some nit-picky programmer type will be along to tell me it’s more efficient if I put the $daysold math inside of the is_single test, and if that were the only place it was used, yes I agree. However I’m using it in the same function to do other things, which is why I placed outside of the if-then condition.

I’m a big fan of thesis and have a few more tutorials, planned, if there’s something specific you’d like to see covered let me know in the comments below.

If you found this post helpful and you’re thinking of buying thesis using my affiliate link would make me happy. If you want to buy thesis directly that’s ok too … I’ll just be sad for weeks on end

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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Using Adsense on your blog usually isn’t the most profitable way to monetize it, but it is fairly quick and easy, which makes it a popular choice for many website owners. Last week I moved one of my commercial blogs to Thesis, and was reminded of the importance of using section targeting on your blog.

Section targeting is an adsense approved method of telling the ad serving algorithm which parts of your websites to pay attention to and which parts to ignore. Because blogs sometimes have a lot of extraneous info, non essential keywords, or low profit keywords on them, Adsense isn’t always as profitable as it could be. However by telling Adsense to use only the contents of the post for determining which ads to show AND (that’s a big and) putting the ads in that section, you usually get the combination of on target ads that are going to generate the most profit.

Is section targeting worth doing … the graph below shows Adsense CPM for the month of February, the three days in the box are the days the blog didn’t have section targeting enabled.

Once the section targeting was added back in you can see the earnings returned to normal. I’m pretty sure you aren’t allowed to show actual dollar amounts, CPM, or CTR rates from your Adsense account, but since this is sanitized I think I’m ok.

Now on to the real part of the tutorial, we’re going to be using hooks to add Adsense section targeting. If you aren’t familiar with how to add thesis hooks, you should read Thesis Tutorial – Hooks for Dummies.

Inside of your custom_functions.php file you want to add the following code:

//adsense targeting functions
function open_adsense_targting(){
echo "<!-- google_ad_section_start -->";
}
function close_adsense_targting(){
echo "<!-- google_ad_section_end -->";
}

That adds the functions to open and close the section targeting tags. You could use shorter names but I’m a big proponent of easy to understand programming, and if you come back 6 months from now it’s going to be really easy to tell what that programming is and what it’s used for.

Next we need this code:

add_action('thesis_hook_before_post','open_adsense_targting' );
add_action('thesis_hook_after_post', 'close_adsense_targting');

This uses the hook locations to tell it to open the tag before the post and close the tag after the post. If you are looking for a list of all hooks here’s a nice reference. That’s it that’s all there is to it.

I’m a big proponent of thesis, and and am going to move my blog onto it as soon as I stop being so lazy busy. The real benefit of thesis is it acts like a management layer for your design, so you don’t have to go into the template files to make your changes.  You don’t have to worry about messing up and breaking tinkering with core wordpress functions. It also makes it easy and painless for people who aren’t exceptionally skilled with programming to make changes. If you do know your way around the code it just makes it easier to get things done. It’s $87 for a personal copy or $164 for the developers license (which for me was a no brainer) if you were thinking of buying it feel free to use my thesis aff link or you can go straight.

Thesis has an incredibly powerful and helpful community of supporters so it’s something I have no problem reccomending.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Thesis Tutorial – How to Add Adsense Section Targeting

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I’m cruising through my feeds this morning and I notice a headline from the New York Times that might interest me

Have I mentioned lately that partial feeds really suck. I’ve really really really really got to want to know whats on the other end to bother to click through to this page (sucky implementations deserve sucky anchor text)

But what about tracking and metrics? Yes I get it the NYT is using antiquated metrics, and doesn’t factor RSS views into them. In a world of Digital Nomads and Mobile Web Workers, isn’t this a short sighted and narrow viewpoint. Put the content in front of the people to use and make it as easy as possible for them to consume it, if you don’t your competition will.

But what about loss advertising revenue? The New York Times certainly has a big enough IT budget to come up with a custom solution, for publishers who are bootstrapping try something like RSS Feed Footer, or webmaster welfare RSS style.

But what about scrapers re-using your content and you getting a duplicate content penalty? Well Google thinks they’ve got that licked, but if you want to be cautious use RSS Footer to automatically insert links into all your posts. Just change your linking text every 3-4 months most scrapers are too lazy to filter it out or make constant adjustments.

Everybody has a big BUT in their lives … except the people who get off their butts and see everyone else problems as their opportunities …

Are you too busy worrying about your own but, instead of looking at someone elses?

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Let’s Talk About Your Big But

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After my SEO plugins for wordpress and backend plugins for wordpress most people would think that should cover most of the things anyone would need. However I can think of two that are needed right off the bat.

Search Link Plugin
When you are working/writing in wordpress or editing posts of other authors, sometimes you want to link certain words that aren’t already linked. When Clicked this plugin would go to a search engine and return the top 5 results for the highlighted term(s) allow you to click one and automagically generate the hyperlink for you. I say the top 5 because not everyone wants to link to wikipedia (looks squarely in the direction of Google). Ideally you would be able to set a default search engine of your own choosing, but also be able to use the results of any other search engine thru tabs or a drop down interface. Yes it’s simple and easy to highlight the text, click your custom configured center mouse button to execute a search and copy the result URL of your choice, but efficiency comes from streamlining little tasks that are performed hundreds and thousands of times each year.

Amazon Auto Link Plugin
This plugin would automatically recognize amazon product links and append your affiliate ID onto the end. For example if I were to write a post saying I found the History Channel Revolution DVD series particularly enjoyable (which I did), I would use this link http://www.amazon.com/History-Channel-Presents-Revolution/dp/B000IB0DD0/. To make that an an affiliate link I would add my affiliate ID to the end http://www.amazon.com/History-Channel-Presents-Revolution/dp/B000IB0DD0/myaffid-123. Sure it’s easy if you have only a one author blog and have an easy to remember ID number, but it becomes more important on multi author blogs. This plugin would automatically add the affid onto the end. I suppose you could appease the Google Gods by adding a nofollow option as well. Again it’s all about automating and using computers for repetitive menial tasks so you can move on to bigger less tedious things.

If anyone knows of plugins that have this functionality or is willing to donate some programming bandwidth write them and kick them into the public domain, drop a link in the comments, and I’ll modify this post to link to them.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Two Wordpress Plugins That Need to be Developed

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So over the years I’ve been asked more than once do I accept any guest posts, and they answer has always been no. Well I’ve decided to change that policy and try letting a few guests posts go out and see what happens.

So what’s it take to be accepted as a guest author? Well you don’t have to be an A-list well known SEO or social media blogger, I’m a big believer in giving people a break and paying it forward, so A-lister thru Z-lister you’re all welcome. Next your post has to be either informative, educational, or entertaining and you’re a shoe in if it’s more than one. Please don’t submit anything lame rehashing stuff that all ready out there and been said a million times. Also you don’t have to agree with me, if you love love love Google and think wikipedia is the best thing since sliced bread, bring it on, I don’t stifle people who have differing opinions. You’re spelling and grammar should be good … or at least not any worse than mine

Yes you can put in your own links, but if it looks like you are linking to yourself or all your friends in an overly gratuitous nepetistic fashion … well we might have a problem. You can go where you want with your subject, as long as it fits what I usually write about, if you need help picking a subject let me know.

That’s it so if this sounds like something you’re interested in get in touch.

UPDATE
Going thru requests no decisions made yet just hang in there folks

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Looking for Guest Posts

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Ever since my initial SEO plugins for wordpress post almost two years ago, I get asked for an updated list a few times a month. Well since we’re up to wordpress 2.5 I thought the time has come. I’ll also put some of my other favorite plugins at the end, they either enhance wordpress features or just make things easier.

SEO

Meta Robots WordPress plugin – Adds meta tags automatically to posts

Aizatto’s Related Posts – Adds related post information to posts and feeds

Cross-Linker – Set up commonly used words to link to posts or redirects (also useful for affiliate links)

Sitemap Generator – Automatically builds and HTML style sitemap

Google (XML) Sitemaps – Automatically build and ping multiple sitemap services with an XML file

HeadSpace 2 – A monster plugin that lets you rewrite titles, meta data, and host of other features watch the video on the page for the full list of features

SEO Title Tag – Don’t need all the power of Headspace try SEO title tag

SEO Slugs – keeps slugs from becoming too long

Utilities

Secure Form Mailer – makes building and integrating multiple and custom forms easy

FeedBurner FeedSmith – Makes integrating with feedburner easy

Feed Footer – Adds advertising, copyright or other custom messages into feeds

Flickr Photo Album – Integrate your flickr photo’s, albums, sets, and groups into your website

flickrRSS for WordPress – add photos from any flickr RSS feed into your website

Future Posts Calendar Plugin – A calendar that shows which days you have posts scheduled to publish, very helpful for multiple authors and scheduled posts.

Full Text Feed – Lets you use the “more” tag and still publish full feeds

GoCodes Redirection Plugin – Add tiny URL style functionality into your blog

Got Banners – Makes adding advertising banners quick and easy without having to monkey with the template

Highlight Author Comments – Makes giving authors comments a different style much easier

Objection Redirection! – Makes setting 301’s (especially lots of them) easy as pie

Wordpress Organizer – Makes adding and managing uploads and images easier

Who Sees Ads – Makes ads or other elements conditionally displayed

Absolute Comments – Makes replying to comments and managing them much easier

Photo Dropper – Makes adding Creative Commons licensed photos from flickr quick and easy

Search Pages – Lets the search box search both posts and pages

Permalink Redirect – Keep urls with parameters from being indexed

WordPress Mobile Edition – Display a simple stripped down version of your site to mobile users

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin – Save yourself thousands of hours of time upgrading wordpress

WordPress Database Backup – Automate backups of your blog

Social

Increase Sociability Wordpress Plugin – Display custom messages for people who came from social sites like Digg and stumbleupon

Share This – add buttons for social networks under the share this icon

Subscribe to Comments – let people subscribe and be notified when new and follow up comments are made

What Would Seth Godin Do – Display a message to a new visitor on your blog

Twitter Tools – Integrate twitter functionality into your blog

Maintenance

Close Old Posts – Closes old posts keeps them from becoming spam targets and maintenance issues

Search and Replace – Lets you easily search and replace information in your database

Simple Tags – Manage and get tag suggestions for all posts

Reports and Analytics

Blog Metrics – Gives you comments and stats on monthly and author levels

Google Analytics and Feedburner Reports – get feedburner and google analytics in your wordpress admin section

Search Meter – Find out what people are searching for on your site

Advertisement: Efficiently manage your SEO and Social Media campaigns with Raven’s powerful suite of Internet Marketing Tools

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

SEO Plugins for Wordpress Part II

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