Wordpress 2.8 Upgrade Experience

Wordpress 2.8 offers 790 bug fixes from v2.7 provides  several cool new features. You can now upload new themes using the admin panel, edit plugins from the editor, standardized drog and drag widget activation and placement and many other things that speed up wordpress’s performance.

I chose to manually download and FTP the unzipped files into my hosting account. I pulled up the admin area as soon as the uplaod was finished and was greeted with a “Upgrade Database” button, that I pushed, then was promptly presented with a Success page. It couldn’t have been easier.

I updated a few out of date plugins (Wassup, All in One SEO Pack, Contact Form 7) and took care of a few other housekeeping items while I had my hands dirty.  Share your upgrading experiences by leaving a Reply below.

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the practice of researching and molding a website’s content and content tags to reach the desired audience that is searching for specific products, topics, or services using Internet search engines. Sites often look pleasing to the human eye but are unreadable to search engine spiders. I think of a search spider as if they were a 1st grader wondering through my site. Different pages of the site have to be clearly marked with descriptive texts so that the spider knows what it is looking at. No links can be completely buried or they will never be found. A simplified sitemap with links to all the important areas of your site is a must. Link to the sitemap from every page of your site so the spider never gets completely lost.

Using Common Sense SEO Practices
A common sense approach to site building is often the best SEO tactic. When you are linking to internal pages or article on your own site think twice about the words that you use for the link titles. The relevancy of any page in Google is heavily weighted to the keywords used in the link titles on external sites and pages that link to it. If you are linking to certain pages/areas of your site on all your pages, make sure that you use descriptive link titles. For example, many people link to “Contact” on each page of their site. Who searches for just the word “contact”? Using the title “Contact Jim Brown” for the link will boost the page and overall site relevance for “Jim Brown”. I see problems like this all the time on E-commerce sites where the designers have a link to “Products” instead of “Laptop Products” or “Cell Phone Products”. Do they think people just go to Google and type in “products” and hit enter?

A Flexible CMS (Content Management System)
Using a CMS (Content Management System) is necessary unless you want to constantly edit 100s of pages each time you discover something that has a positive effect on your ranking. Nearly all open source CMS systems have plugins available that will improve many important aspects of your site’s readability to search spiders. One of the main reasons I like CMS systems are because they allow you to create the URL for the article on the fly, totally based on what title you type in. Google and other search engines give relevancy points if they keyword is also contained in the url.

Experience Counts
To better understand how to get your web site ranking higher in search results, it’s necessary to understand which terms you should focus on ranking for, and the logic used by different search engines to serve their results. There is not substitute for experience and continuous education when trying to decipher Google’s logic for how they determine the order of their search results. You need to locate some trustworthy forums, twitter users, and SEO experts on various social networking sites where you can dig into the latest SEO topics and tactics. No time for SEO? Hire an agency.

WP-O-Matic Auto Blogger WordPress Plugin

WP-O-MATIC is a well developed auto-blogger / rss feed aggregator plugin for WordPress. I needed this plugin to read my RSS feeds from TwitPic and insert them into the Photos area of this Blog. Why have a blog if you’re sending people to some service to view your recent photos? WP-O-Matic was the perfect solution for bringing external content into your WordPress blog on a scheduled basis (controlled by a cronjob).

Full Features List and Free Plugin Download: http://wordpress.org…(visit external link)

WordPress – Control Where Categories Are Displayed

If you ever want to exclude all  posts in specific category from being displayed on the index page of your wordpress blog, the archives, your feed, article lists, or anywhere else, you need a Category Visibility Plugin (unless you want to do the code yourself in The Loop).

After installing and reviewing a few, I am recommending the ACE Wordpress (Advanced Category Excluder) Plugin for Wordpress V2.7 +.