Desperately Seeking WP » Plugins

Bulk Editing of Posts and Categories, Tags, and other Terms

admin — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:47:43 +0000

We’ve found two plugins that make editing a batch of posts and categories a snap! First, use Term Management Tools by Scribu to turn all those categories into a nice easy to manage hierarchy of main categories, sub-categories, and tags.

Then use Batch Cat by Lenin Lee to add /edit / remove the appropriate terms from the posts in bulk.

I just edited several hundred categories and 1,700 posts in about 30 minutes.

We heart plugin authors!

To install plugins:

go to Plugins -> Add new.
Search for the title.
Match the author against the results.
Install and activate.
Visit the corresponding Tools or Settings page to configure.

Guest Post at SavvyBlogging!

admin — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 21:44:26 +0000

We’ve been featured on SavvyBlogging today! Head on over to

check out our list of the 12 Essential Plugins for 2012!

Button

And then don’t forget to follow the conversation on twitter at #savvyblogging. A lot of great questions & answers are posted there daily.

WP SEO Plugin by Yoast – Set up

admin — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 17:57:07 +0000

Recently we covered how to use WP SEO Plugin by Yoast. In this review, we will explore the set up process of this plugin. Setting up this plugin isn’t difficult – the plugin configuration is located in the left panel in your WP admin dashboard. The configuration is broken down into 9 tabs (shown below).

Dashboard Settings

The first in line is the Dashboard. The dashboard, contains two functionalities:

1.) the general settings and

2.)the webmaster tools.

Configuring the General Settings tab enables you to disable, hide or change the basic features of this plugin.

The webmaster tools area, allows you to submit your website to major search engines (it covers the 3 giants of SE mainly Google, Yahoo & Bing). If you’ve ever tried to ‘verify’ your site with these services you understand the nuisance that it can be. WP SEO plugin by Yoast, allows you to verify your website by a simple copy/paste of the verification key and voila– you’re site is verified!

Titles Settings

The “Titles” section gives you the ability to change your titles’ default settings. We recommend the following:

Homepage:

 %%sitename%% - %%sitedesc%%

Post, Page:

%%title%% - %%sitetitle%%

Category:

%%category%% - %%categorydescription%%

Keep in mind that any of these can be overwritten. See how to override the SEO Titles here.

Index Settings

The indexation settings covers the following aspects: Plugin Settings, Open Graph (Facebook), Indexation Rules, Internal No Follow Settings, Archive Settings, Robots Meta Settings and Cleanup section.

Have you ever tried to ‘share’ something to your stream only to discover that the thumbnail you wanted wasn’t available? This solves that problem (partially). OpenGraph are the tags that Facebook uses to grab your images and descriptions for excerpts that are posted in Facebook Activity Streams.

You need to have a Facebook plugin or app already active – this does not replace those. If you already have a facebook App, paste the ID as well as the Page and Admin Ids here.

The Indexation Rules lets you disable indexing for entire sections of your site. Be very careful using this section – this will disable the ENTIRE section.

We recommend choosing one – either categories or tags – and indexing one and precluding the other. If you content is organized by only one, then its easy. If your content is organized by both tags and categories, it could likely be considered duplicate content and potentially hurt your rankings. For now, our best use scenario is to use one or the other.

If you only have one author, you can disable the author archive.

If you have your content organized in categories or other ways, then we also recommend you de-index your date-based archives.

The “Internal no follow Settings” is another powerful function. We recommend setting these to no-follow: comments, admin, login and meta widget.

We do not recommend any changes to this section. Curious as to what noodp and noydir mean? We can explain that. Noodp stands for “No Open Directory Project” and Noydir is the same as noodp it’s just that noydir is for yahoo directory.

The open directory projects are used by search engines to generate small descriptions for the pages of your website. Because SE’s use the open directory project, the descriptions or snippets that the robots generate are dated and most of the time are not useful. You can specify your own descriptions on a per page basis and if you haven’t specified a custom description, WordPress automatically takes the first few sentences of your blogs post and uses it as your snippets.

The clean up section is for advanced users who don’t like the many tags that are present in the head section of your source code. This has no bearing on SEO functions.

XML Sitemaps

We recommend you disable your current sitemap plugin (if you have one) and use this instead. *XML Sitemaps basically provides search engine an idea of your site’s structure, including pages and links. A validated XML sitemap gives the crawler an easier access to your site in which often times helps in better indexing.*

Permalinks

The Permalinks tab has two helpful settings – the permalinks setting and the canonical settings. This feature allows you to re-structure your links. This can BREAK your page links so be careful.

We recommend -leaving everything as is, except for adding a trailing slash – this has the benefit of speeding up (just slightly) load time.

Internal links

In the internal links section of this plugin you will see “breadcrumbs settings.” Breadcrumbs lets your users navigate your website easier and provide valuable internal links. If you do not already have breadcrumbs and you would like them, you can activate them here. In some cases, you will need help getting them to show up on your templates.

RSS

The RSS feature lets you add content for your RSS feed. This is a handy way to add copyright to the feed that is difficult for content scrapers to remove. We recommend:

This article originated at %%BlogLink%%. If you are not seeing it there, or in the Blog’s feed, this content has been STOLEN. Please report this to the original author immediately! Thank you.

Import & Export

The import & export tab of this SEO plugin by Yoast gives you the ability to import your SEO data from Headspace or All in One SEO. If you’re using a different plugin or Genesis Settings, you can use the SEO Data Transporter plugin.

You can also import settings from 3 of Yoast’s other plugins: Breadcrumbs, Robots Meta, and RSS Footer.

The export settings on the other hand allows you to backup your settings any time.

Edit Files

Can I just say, “Ignore this”?

This part is for the most advanced users. This section allows you to configure or edit you htaccess files without even leaving your WordPress site. Be forewarned – you can break your site in an instant!

This wraps up our review for the functions and features of WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast.

SEO for WordPress made easy!

admin — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 18:00:40 +0000

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. And we will show you how to increase your SEO for WordPress using a plugin by Yoast.com. Search engine optimization plays an important role in making a site successful. Whether your goal is promoting a topic or making a living, increasing readership is vital. And one of the key ways to increase readership is to be found in search engines. For most web owners with limited budget hiring an SEO specialist is not an option. The good news is that any WordPress user can optimize their site through the use of themes or plugins. And many are free to use. Of course, we have a favorite that works above and beyond – you’ll love it! We install it on all the All in One packages — it’s called WP SEO by Yoast. This is SEO for WordPress at its easiest!

We’ll break it down for you (you are gonna LOVE it):

After set up, the WordPress SEO by Yoast has three tabs in each post/page: the General Tab, Page Analysis & Advanced.

SEO for WordPress: Basics

In the WP SEO section below the post, you’ll find places for your Snippet Preview , Focus Keyword, SEO Title & Meta Description

Let’s break it down into each field and explain what each does:

The first feature we see under the general tab is the Snippet Preview. Snippets are basically the short description that we see whenever we search for something on Google (the description that shows under a website title). Here you can preview the changes made whenever you write your meta descriptions (see Meta Descriptions below).

Focus Keyword: In this field, is where you can write the keywords for which you are optimizing. The coolest thing about WP SEO plugin by Yoast, is when you typed in a keyword in the focus keyword field, the plugin automatically generates related keywords. This means that you can use keywords suggested by the plugin or you can copy the keywords suggestions and research about them before posting your article. This makes SEO for WordPress that much easier.

Furthermore, this plugin let you see if you are placing your keywords in the correct places (Title, body, url & meta description). It also gives you the ability to see if the keyword(s)/keyphrase(s) are contained in the most important areas of your posts, just by looking at the keyword numbers indicator.

SEO for WordPress is no different from other pages in the use of SEO Titles. Every page needs a title that is readable by search engines. The SEO title field lets you enter your customized title for that specific post. This is only needed if you are not using a search-engine friendly post title. If you have a “Q&A with Cathy” post, that doesn’t mean a lot to a googler. They likely searching for the questions within the post. So for the googler’s sake, use keywords and meaningful words to help them find your content. Instead of “Q&A with Cathy” it could be, “How to create an optimized post in WordPress using an SEO plugin”.

In addition, the SEO Title section lets you see how many characters you’re using for your title. Search engines usually displayed 70 characters in the search page results and if your title is more than 70 characters, it will be truncated. The indicator is really useful especially if you want your whole title to show up in the search results.

Meta Description: WP SEO Plugin by Yoast, allows you to write your Meta description. The Preview Snippet area gives you a live preview on how your description or snippet will look in search results page. Just like the SEO Title field, the meta description section has a number of characters indicator.

SEO for WordPress: Analysis & Training

This is where WordPress really shines. All your SEO for WordPress pages can be optimized within this one post-editing screen. Use the page analysis tab regularly and follow the suggestions. By doing so, every single page in WordPress can be SEO optimzied.

SEO for WordPress: Advanced

Lastly, the “advanced tab” is where you can set permissions to Meta Robots and where you can set your canonical URL or redirects. This is excellent if you don’t want the search engine to index a specific post or you want to set up a 301 site redirect.

This is the best there is (paid or free) out there for SEO for WordPress. It’s not hard to use and it also improves your knowledge of SEO basics, teaching you how to improve your page’s SEO. Have we mentioned that the plugin is FREE?! We suggest you give it a try!

(Tomorrow we’ll post the best practices for setting up the plugin.)