Doing WordPress SEO is not difficult, even Google says that WordPress is one of the best blogging platforms for search engines optimization. There is so much competition though so it is important to optimize your blog SEO to attract organic traffic from search engines.

WordPress SEO

I got an email about the new Scribe blog SEO software because I am user of the Thesis Theme. Scribe SEO was created by the same team as Thesis and I just had to check it out.

Scribe is basically a WordPress SEO plugin that helps work with the blog on-page search engine optimisation. Scribe sits in your blog post writing screen and allows you to analyse the blog SEO of the post by clicking the “Analyze” button.

Clicking Analyze brings up a pop-up screen which looks something like the screenshot above (analysis above is for the “What diet is your blog on” post):

I got a low grade of 51% for that post. Scribe looked at following things to decide the grade. The first tab is SEO Score:

Title

• how many characters
• how many words
• does it contain primary keyword
• does it contain primary key word at the beginning

Description

• how many characters
• does it contain primary keyword
• does it contain primary key word towards the beginning

Body

• how many words does the body contains
• what is the keyword density of the primary keyword
• how many hyperlinks are there in the post
• how many hyperlinks at the beginning
• what is the flesch reading score and level

Out of all these, it tells me which ones I am doing fine and which ones I have to fix. In this post the title doesn’t contain the keyword at the beginning, neither does the description, the keyword “blog” exceeds the maximum of keyword density, and there are no links at the beginning of the post. That is why I only got score 51%.

SEO Keyword Analysis

Second tab is Keyword Analysis which basically analyses primary and secondary keywords and phrases in your copy. It also lets you know what is the keyword density of each of the keywords.

Third tab is Change Keywords which tells you to use more of the keyword throughout the text if you want to make that keyword a primary one or use less of it if you want to make it a secondary keyword.

The Tag tab tells me the list of semantically relevant key phrases that I should use in the article.

SERP tab shows me how my listing will look in Google or in another search engine result page.

Blog SEO Best Practices

Last Tab is called SEO Best Practices. This is a text that gives me FAQ and a definition of terms used in the other tabs. It tells what the optimal length of the title, optimal length of the description and the body is, best practices around how many links per how many words, why the Flesch reading ease is important and so on. It tells how the score is calculated.

I analysed some of my best ranking articles and how to install WordPress post has a score of 65% and my best WordPress plugins post has a score of 87%! There is no “analyse all” button so I do not know which of my posts has the best score.

Scribe WordPress SEO plugin has been updated several times since I’ve been using it so it is good to know that it will be kept as current as the Thesis theme is.

All in all an interesting product that can help you take care of the generic on-page WordPress SEO and in the long run hopefully increase your search engine traffic.

It is important to note that on-page factors are only a small factor of the whole blog SEO so getting a lot of social media mentions, getting great links and having a keyword rich domain name are still the factors that will give you the most search engine success.

This post has been optimized to 100% for WordPress SEO and blog SEO according to Scribe so will be interesting to see how Google takes it.

See more:

1. Reader comment: counting keyword density and worrying about SERP’s
2. Add Keywords To Optimize SEO When Writing Blog Posts
3. 7 Steps To Keyword Optimize Your Blog Posts
4. How Google PageRank affects my search engine rankings and traffic
5. Link internally to increase blog page views, improve usability and Google rankings

Basic wordpress plugins every wordpress blog should must have.

If you are a WordPress user, then you are lucky. There are a lot of useful WordPress poll and rating plugins where you can download and use freely. Here, we share 9 useful WordPress poll and rating plugins with our readers.

Whether you’re a web developer whose clients need a great look and feel for their blogs, or just someone eager to bring a fresh new look to your own web site, there are literally hundreds if not thousands of free WordPress themes out there to consider. A number of those themes have been built by professional designers and talented amateurs, and are as easy on the eyes as they are easy on the wallet.

Whether you need a great photoblog layout, personal lifestream, or more business-oriented design, there’s almost surely an existing theme out there worth checking out for your next blog or blog upgrade. And if you’re already a developer or are willing to acquire a small set of template editing skills, you can always modify an existing theme to taste.

Have a look at some of our picks for great themes to either drop in as is or use as a starting point for your own tweaking and twiddling. Keep in mind this is only the tip of the iceberg — be sure to let us know about your other favorite themes in the comments!

1. Irresistible

2. Demet

3. P2

4. WPESP Portfolio

5. DarkHive

6. Google Chrome

7. Gallery

8. Selecta

9. BlackPower

10. Scarlett

11. Freemium

12. iBusiness

13. Meganews

14. Snapshot

Series supported by Rackspace

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More WordPress Resources from Mashable:

-10 WordPress Plugins to Help Build Community
- HOW TO: Build a More Beautiful Blog
- Top 10 WordPress Plugins to Promote Your Social Media Profiles
- Top 10 Tips for WordPress Plugin Developers
- Embeddable Waves: The Google Wave WordPress Plugin

Reviews: Google Chrome, Twitter, WordPress

Tags: blogging, BLOGS, design, free, Lists, Web Development, web development series, WordPress, wordpress themes

One of the great things about working with WordPress and developing your own themes is the community and all of the resources that are available. If you’re not sure how to do something or looking to see what solutions other theme designers and developers are using, you can find plenty of infomation and tutorials to help.

There are times when you come across a feature in a blog, and you just start thinking to yourself: How can I get this in my WordPress blog/site as well. Everybody have experienced this feeling. Sometimes you know you want it, and don’t know where to look for, or even what to look for.read more

One of the goals of this post is to help you build a portfolio. It’s an essential step for a designer, but it can seem a little daunting. Here are some quick tips to help you get started.

Jessica Faye Carter is an award-winning author and columnist. Her company, Nette Media develops social media technologies for women and multicultural communities, and she blogs at Technicultr.

The expression of community has changed considerably since the emergence of social media technologies, but its basic foundation — the notion of individuals exchanging information, ideas, and opinions — remains firmly intact. Today, one of the most widely-used tools in developing these types of exchanges online is WordPress, the popular blogging and publishing platform. Part of its appeal is the ease with which users can build advanced functionality into their sites with plugins. If you’re interested in building a community around your site, there are plenty of third-party add-ons that can help create one.

These 10 WordPress plugins add features that will help you to engage your user base.

Highlight Your Best Content

1. Featured Content Gallery – If you’re not an expert in programming or design, Featured Content Gallery makes it easy to highlight images, posts, or pages anywhere on your site. It comes with a sleek and contemporary design that is fully customizable through the WordPress dashboard, so that you can integrate your highlighted content seamlessly with the rest of your site.

2. Popularity Contest – Your users will want to know what’s popular and interesting to their peers in the community and the Popularity Contest Plugin can help. It keeps track of the most popular posts and pages on your site and acts as a leaderboard that directs users to the most active content in your community. You can customize the point values assigned to user actions on the site, such as comments or views, and display the results easily in a widgetized-sidebar.

Facilitate User Engagement

3. Viper’s Video Quicktags – Including video in your community is easy using Viper’s Video Quicktags. Just enter the URL of the video in the prompt box and see a preview of the video right on your screen. Then specify the dimensions and other customizations you’d like to add and see your final product before saving it into your post. Supported video sites include YouTube, Google Video, Vimeo and others.

4. WPtouch – Part of keeping the community vibrant means letting your users take it with them. You can go mobile with your community using WPtouch and avoid building a mobile website or the costs of developing an iPhone application. You can control the mobile user interface by allowing the browser to automatically route users to the interface of your choosing — your site or the WPtouch interface, which looks similar to an iPhone app. You can also show or hide post excerpts and customize the icons and general appearance of your mobile site.

5. Disqus Comment System – Nothing stops a potential commenter in their tracks faster than having to set up a user ID and password in order to leave a message on your site. At the same time, most of us would like some sort of authentication process we can use to identify and correspond with other users as we develop our communities. The Disqus Comment System allows users to engage with your site using their Twitter, Disqus, Facebook, OpenID or selected other accounts. This prevents users from having to set up new accounts while allowing for authentication. Bonus: the Reactions feature allows you to include the social component of user feedback into your comments.

6. Customize Your Community – Customize Your Community (CYC) provides some useful options for those building communities in WordPress. It allows you to re-brand the WordPress pages for registration, logging in/out, and lost passwords, as well as the user profile pages. In addition to giving your community a standardized look and feel, CYC helps with a long-standing navigational issue in WordPress: it automatically directs “subscribers” to their profiles and bypasses the WP backend entirely.

Measure on the Fly

7. Clicky – While Google Analytics provides you with a long-term perspective on your site metrics, Clicky gives you instantaneous feedback. The dashboard includes traditional site metrics, but also offers cool features, like “Spy”, which pinpoints the location of current visitors on a map. It’s an easy way to get a snapshot of your site’s current activity and, in conjunction with Google Analytics, gives you a comprehensive overview of your site’s activity.

Improve User Navigation

Home » Dance Music » Saint Etienne » Method of Modern Love

Breadcrumb NavXT, the successor to Breadcrumb Navigation XT, improves your site’s navigation by building this kind of virtual breadcrumb trail for your users to follow. This way, users will know where they’re located on your site. This plugin may require customization, depending on your theme; check out the Advanced Options section of the plugin’s homepage for additional instructions.

Monetize It!

9. Advertising Manager – If you were previously using the Adsense Manager plugin, you’ve probably noticed that it hasn’t been updated in a while. That’s because it has been succeeded by Advertising Manager, which is recommended unless you are using WordPress version 2.5 or earlier. The renamed version supports a broader group of ad networks in addition to Google AdSense, such as Adify, AdBrite, and several others. It also imports your AdSense Manager settings, for users of the previous plugin.

10. WP125 – Do you prefer a more hands-on management style for your advertising? WP125 allows you to do everything from arranging the ad display so that it fits your site design to setting timelines for ads (they can be removed automatically or manually at expiration). It also provides a placeholder for empty ad space, which you can switch to your own customized version.

Do you have another plugin that’s been helpful to you in building your community? Share your favorites in the comments below.

More WordPress resources from Mashable:

WordPress Themes: “Top 12 Stunning WordPress Themes“, “30+ WordPress 3 Column Themes,” “20 WordPress 4-Column Themes,” “30+ WordPress 1-Column Themes,” “10 Unusual & Original WordPress Themes”

Plugins: “50+ WordPress Plugins for Multimedia,” “30+ WordPress Plugins for Statistics,” “30+ WordPress Plugins for Comments,” “30+ WordPress Plugins to Get More Blog Readers,” “Top 10 WordPress Plugins to Promote Your Social Media Profiles”

Miscellaneous: “WordPress God: 300+ Tools for Running Your WordPress Blog,” “The 7 Weirdest and Wackiest Uses for WordPress“

Alguna vez viví la historia donde a alguien se le ocurrió alguna iniciativa para la web y en la búsqueda de desarrollarla rápidamente instaló un wordpress (también pudo ser un drupal, joomla, vbulletin, phpbb u otro prefabricado). Las siguientes semanas o días para los más inquietos fueron una colección de desveladas que incluyeron la revisión de temas, plugins, asignación de un dominio, de configuración en webmaster tools de google, de empuje a motores de búsqueda y creación de un primer post.

Pero seamos claros con esto, en el proceso anterior no estamos arrancando el próximo killer project de Internet. Llamemolo correctamente y digamos que instalamos un wordpress, configuramos otro blog más. Aja, otro más. Nada más que eso y muchas veces, allí quedo todo el entusiasmo.

Hablemos entonces de estrategia

Ahora, repasemos este ejercicio siendo más estrategas, más analíticos. Queremos hacer algo especial, queremos que nuestro proyecto destaque y venga a proponer algo diferente a una red saturada de todo tipo de copias (y aunque algunos copycats han funcionado son siempre la minoría). Tenemos que ser únicos desde el inicio. No crean que me refiero al aspecto técnico del asunto y me refiero a programar algo desde cero, sino a el paquete completo de este asunto.

¿Qué te hace destacar hoy en día?

Y aquí me refiero muchísimo a tus ventajas competitivas actuales, a lo que sabes hacer, a tu red de contactos, a tus pasiones. Trata de volcar todo esto a la web o busca un equipo que pudiera competir seriamente en las grandes ligas. Porque queremos llegar a las grandes ligas, cierto? Si quieres ser mediocre con tu próximo proyecto web o le estás vendiendo eso a un cliente, no solo vas a disfrutar poco la experiencia sino que serás uno más del montón, de los que trabaja porque hay que comer. Desde el principio sería más interesante que hagas las cosas para pasarla bien, para retarte y para aprender.

¿Cuál es el objetivo?

Si alguna vez fuiste a algún curso de Administración o conoces a algún amigo que estudio ciencias comerciales o algo por el estilo seguramente te sabrás el speech completo sobre la planeación estratégica, los objetivos, la visión, la misión, blah, blah… boring.

Lo más importante es que vos en menos de un parrafo detectes que tu proyecto a futuro tenga sentido. Y que seas muy específico. Cambiar el mundo suena bonito, pero estoy seguro que es más fácil mejorar algún servicio web del que tu y alguna serie de contactos son dependientes y sufren por su desactualización. Es más, por la dependencia que puede existir hacia el servicio ya puedes empezar a pensar en la forma como esto va a sostenerse. Hacer las cosas por amor al arte y sin fines de lucro siempre suena lindo en papel, pero a largo plazo, muchos se aburren, se cansan y dejan los proyectos en el abandono.

¿A qué hora instalamos el wordpress?

Eso es lo más interesante de dedicarle muchas horas a pensar detenidamente tu proyecto, de escribir al respecto, de hacer gráficos, de imaginarte detrás de la pantalla utilizando tu aplicación/servicio/website. Esto podría incluso generarte pasos adicionales que pueden ir por el diseño de la interfaz o buscar ese epicentro de la funcionalidad para diseñarlo, hasta la búsqueda de un equipo que te apoye. Muchas veces el convocar al equipo, conseguir socios o empleados, así como fondos puede ser más importante que empezar a hacer algo y a los hispanos nos gusta ir creyéndonos nos podemos solitos cuando una gran cualidad que he encontrado en gente muy exitosa es que sabe trabaja en equipos, formarlos y motivarlos.

En el camino encontrarás el punto donde toca instalar algo, configurar otra cosa. Tal vez sea una tarea que luego delegues a algún colaborador más experto que vos, o que vos seas el experto para dejar a alguién más tomar las riendas del asunto. Tal vez toque programar o utilizar servicios ya disponibles para mezclarlos en la licuadora y que salga un mashup.

Lo que si tengo claro es que mientras más nos pongamos a organizar los proyectos haciendo un download de la cabeza al papel, donde también se vale el bloc de notas o hasta un wave, empezaremos a ver ideas más concretas y gente con la que a muchos nos apetecerá colaborar.

Imagen por Frits Ahlefeldt-Laurvig

Si, ya hay otra nueva actualización de WordPress (2.8.5) que viene a solucionar algunos problemas de seguridad. Tampoco significa que si no actualizas cuanto antes vayan a entrar en tu blog, podrían hacer que tu sitio consuma más recursos de los que debería. De todos modos deberías actualizar, no te quita más de unos minutos.

El problema principal que soluciona esta actualización tiene que ver con los trackbacks y un ataque especial que puede afectar a cualquier blog que una versión anterior a WordPress 2.8.5. El ataque está explicado a detalle en Desvaríos informáticos (y en mi opinión un tanto exagerado sobre el impacto en la seguridad). Dicho ataque tiene que ver con la función mb_convert_encoding() y de como WordPress maneja los valores de entrada. Este es el código en donde se utiliza mb_conver_encoding():

if ( function_exists(’mb_convert_encoding’) ) { // For international trackbacks
   $title     = mb_convert_encoding($title, get_option(’blog_charset’), $charset);
   $excerpt   = mb_convert_encoding($excerpt, get_option(’blog_charset’), $charset);
   $blog_name = mb_convert_encoding($blog_name, get_option(’blog_charset’), $charset);
}

El valor de $charset viene de $_POST['charset'] y contiene los juegos de caracteres (separador por coma) que posiblemente se hayan usado en los textos de la petición; no se controla su valor ni le limita su tamaño. El problema viene a ser cuando se utiliza como argumento en mb_convert_encoding(), si se envía una petición donde $title y $charset sean absurdamente grandes (350KB según el ejemplo en Desvaríos informáticos), mb_convert_encoding() haría demasiadas comprobaciones, tomando hasta varios minutos por cada petición.

El impacto obviamente depende de la configuración del servidor y las capacidades de este, pero como la mayoría no tenemos un servidor dedicado, nos dejarán con el servidor atascado. La solución a este problema consiste en limitar $charset para que solo permita indicar un juego de caracteres (al eliminar las comas):

$charset = str_replace( array(',', ' '), '', strtoupper( trim($charset) ) );

Solo queda el caso de si $_POST['charset'] fue definido como un Array (y que WordPress no lo soluciona explícitamente) ya que mb_convert_encoding() también permite definir la lista de juegos de caracteres de esta forma. Por si acaso, modifiqué el parche de Wordpres incluyendo:

$charset = (string) $_POST['charset'];

Con eso debería cerrarse la puerta a problemas por esa parte. WordPress 2.8.5 soluciona otros problemas menores que nunca dejan de aparecer, pueden ver la lista completa de cambios y bajar solo los archivos modificados desde WordPress 2.8.4

Javier Aroche para Maestros del Web.
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