WordPress is one of the most popular blog software packages in use today yet despite all the work that has gone into writing the software, there are still some basic flaws in the package.

One of those flaws is the lack navigation breadcrumbs. These breadcrumbs have several benefits to your blog including user navigation, search engine navigation (which helps your SEO) and a general professional look.

Breadcrumbs are the navigation text you often see on some blogs. A good breadcrumb addition will show a complete navigation structure from your categories. For example, the top of the post could show Home > SEO > WordPress SEO indicating the post is in the category for SEO and subcategory WordPress SEO.

If the breadcrumb utility is well written, each component will be ‘clickable’, in other words, a link through to the previous section. There are several plugins available that place breadcrumbs on your single pages (don’t use them on your front page). One plugin that works quite well comes from Yoast and is well worth checking out. A search of WordPress’s plugins will uncover more.

A breadcrumb plugin makes life a little easier on your visitors and may even help keep your visitor a little longer as they click on category link to check other posts. This is one plugin which will not hurt your blog at all, it may actually help.

Your footer is the perfect place to put your internal links to pages that may be of value to your readers, but are not part of your blogs main direction.

These links could include privacy statements, disclosures, sitemaps and perhaps you’re about me pages. Why in the footer? Your blog has a reason for being. It may be a business blog that is promoting the products or services. It may be an information blog or could just be a personal blog detailing your day to day life. What you don’t want is to divert attention away from your blogs content.

With the exception of the ‘about me’ page, the other pages are really just polite policy pages. If people care, they will visit and read them. Generally speaking, these pages receive the lowest volumes of traffic, and that should be the way you want it. Your ‘about me’ page is a little different and may be a page that you want people to visit frequently. If so, place it higher on the page.

There are several ways to use the footer, the easiest being to use the theme editor. Rather than playing with PHP and trying to code the links from the database, use a direct link in HTML. This can be done by using the standard a href= code. To separate the links, just place the “|” symbol between each one. It looks cleaner and may just clean up some the clutter from your sidebars.

Using the footer to publish this information has been fairly standard for many years on web sites. As you tour around visiting blogs, check out where they publish the links. Many are now turning to the least used space on their blog, the footer.

Some people are quite fastidious about keywords and exactly what sort of percentages they have on their pages. Other people like to sneak keywords in wherever they can in an attempt to increase the number of keywords on a page.

Keywords are important. We suggest you include a keyword in the page title and that you spread your keywords throughout your posts. This works well for most websites and blogs. You can, however add one more keyword or set of keywords and that is through your WordPress login.

You will notice that this blog has “written by Brick Marketing” just below the post title. If you were an online business with several departments, let’s say furniture is your business and you have departments and keywords for ‘bedroom furnishings’, ‘dining room furnishings’, ‘living room furnishings’ and ‘outdoor furnishings’. Create logins for each department and you will have a post title followed by “written by bedroom furnishings” (if the post related to that department).

Of course you would need to ensure you logged in with the correct keyword every time. One additional benefit to using keywords like this as a login is that you can personalize your author. This works particularly well if you can get one person from each department to write their blog post. Your login and post author would like “written by Bob from dining room furnishings”.

This can look far more professional that just ‘written by admin’ that I often see. It is certainly more personal, it puts a name and department to a post whilst, if each department is authored separately, gives some pride and ownership to blog author.

There are times when you may need to insert a table into WordPress, either into a post or into a page. WordPress is not terribly effective when it comes to HTML and where one template will handle the code relatively easily, another template may not.

One of the strange things about WordPress is that after very carefully crafting a table you can go straight to publishing. Everything appears to look fine until you find a mistake and need to go back and edit. The moment you load that page into the editor the code goes crazy.

It seem WordPress can publish the code with little problem, the editor has a lot of problems in converting it back when you need to edit that page. There are several work arounds. The first, and most obvious, is to make sure everything is 100% right before publishing. Once published, leave it alone and don’t return to edit it again.

There are plugins that can help. One sets up a table section under the Manage menu. However it does not handle links within the table.

The third option, and in the longer the easiest, is to use MS Word. Create your table using Word and when you are ready to place into the page, use the ‘Paste from Word’ option that can be found under the ‘Advanced Toolbar’ button.

If you do need to re-edit that page and the code corrupts, make the alterations in word and simply delete everything from your WordPress page and re copy and paste. Works a dream every time with no coding and hassles.

WordPress is by far the most popular blog software in use at present. Out of the box, most WordPress themes are terrible when it comes to SEO. So bad in fact it could actually be costing you when it comes to search result placings.

Many of the SEO problems associated with WordPress can be fixed. If you have obtained an SEO friendly theme then some of these problems should have been taken care of. SEO problems include:

Sidebar code appears before the content. This is double edged sword. As most pages use the same sidebars, every page will appear the same to the search engines until they reach the content. This is not such a problem if everything is working smoothly. If, however, there is one code glitch in the sidebar, the search engines will not actually get to read the content. No content, no page indexing.

Archive and Category pages showing duplicate content. This can be taken care of with a plugin. The alternative is to simply set each of these pages to display excerpts only. You can also set them to not index the meta tags.

H2 tags used in sidebars. H2 tags generally signify content of importance. Using H1 or H2 tags in the sidebars may send conflicting messages to the search engines spiders. Good effective coding in the CSS code can avoid the overuse of H1 or H2 tags. This can be a problem when comments use H1 or H2 and you have a lot of comments.

Title tags and HTML poorly set up. WordPress, out of the box has no SEO structure when saving pages/posts. You can set the permalinks to create good SEO titles and URL’s using the page title first. There are plugins that can help to create page titles.

With a little care and a little patience you can create an extremely friendly SEO WordPress site.

WordPress is one of the most used blog programs around at present, yet it is one of the least understood. The fact that it is pretty much an ‘install and go’ program means few user really delve into the power behind the code.

Sidebars are a good example. Templates and blog designs come with no sidebars, one, two or even three sidebars. Some fancy templates go so far as to divide the sidebars so you may have a top sidebar followed by left and right (funny how the left and right can be all on the left or all on the right) followed by a bottom sidebar.

What appears in your sidebars will appear on the front page and on every other page including archives and static pages. This is not always optimal. Do you want your blogroll appearing on every page, or just the front page? Do you need archives or categories on every page?

There are many reasons for saying no to the above questions, particularly when it comes to SEO and controlling the ‘link juice’. Sometimes you want pages that have very little in the way of outbound links and what links you do have you want control of.

It is possible to change the sidebars for individual pages and for archive pages. The process is a little tedious and one that I will leave for another day. What you need to decide is what information you want displayed in your sidebars on single and archive pages. Wordpress has more power than most people are aware of.  Rethinking your sidebars is just one possible change you could make.

WordPress 2.6 has been released almost a month ahead of schedule. The latest release is not a major overhaul and has not addressed some of the issues that many had called for following the release of version 2.5 - it does however have a few nice changes.

For blogs with multiple authors, the latest release allows for the tracking of changes made to content.  Other changes include a toolbar feature that will allow you to insert content directly into a post. Compatible sites include Flock, FriendFeed, Facebook, Tumblr, and Delicious.

Other changes include:

• Word count! Never guess how many words are in your post anymore.
• Image captions, so you can add sweet captions like Political Ticker does under your images.
• Bulk management of plugins.
• A completely revamped image control to allow for easier inserting, floating, and resizing. It’s now fully integrated with the WYSIWYG.
• Drag-and-drop reordering of Galleries.
• Plugin update notification bubble.
• Customizable default avatars.
• You can now upload media when in full-screen mode.
• Remote publishing via XML-RPC and APP is now secure (off) by default, but you can turn it on easily through the options screen.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• You can now have many thousands of pages or categories with no interface issues.
• Ability to move your wp-config file and wp-content directories to a custom location, for “clean” SVN checkouts.
• Select a range of checkboxes with “shift-click.”
• You can toggle between the Flash uploader and the classic one.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.
• Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.

Updating is quick and smooth with no problems. One of the smarter aids is the plugin balloon that lets you know when plugins need upgrading. Plugins generally require upgrading due to security issues or bugs so it always a good idea to upgrade them as soon as possible.

WordPress 2.6 continues to grow and evolve - is it getting better!

WordPress is a great tool for blogging. It can be easy to use, even for a novice and making changes to your site can be very easy. These WordPress tips will help to make some aspects even easier.

Making Changes:
If there is one aspect of WordPress that is frustrating it the inability to see changes as you make them. If you change the order of your widgets, or perhaps get brave and make changes in your style sheet, it doesn’t become obvious until you go back to your WordPress Page.

Tip:
Once you have entered WordPress’s dashboard, right click on the ‘view site’ button and click to open in a new window or new tab. You will now have a copy of WordPress in edit mode in one tab/window and a copy of WordPress in ‘view site’ mode in another tab/window. Every time you make a change, flip across to the site tab/window and refresh - you will see the changes straight away (if you are using a cache plugin, disable it until you have finished).

Changing Theme:
I hate changing the theme on any site - more so if the WordPress owner has signed up to endless different programs.  Many of these programs or social sites require the installation of snippets of code in the header, footer or body.  When you change themes these have all got to be found and written into the new themes code.

Tip:
Keep a log in a notepad file. Everytime you add a snippet of code document it in that notepad file. Don’t forget to remove it from the file if you remove it from your WordPress file. If you are logical the placement of these codes, that is, where ever possible you bundle them together, the next time you decide to change themes the snippets of code will be available to copy straight into the new theme. No more hunting for any code - no more missing code.

WordPress is a very user friendly  blog platform - remember these tips and you will find that it is even easier to use.

There is nothing that turns potential visitors off faster than a slow blog. Many blogers have great designs and their page is full of every imaginable widget - the problem is, the blog takes minutes to load.

Your blog is no different to any other web page. It should load quickly and be ready to be navigated within seconds - certainly not minutes. There are many causes so if your blog is slow to load, check some of these key areas:

Plugins:
How many plugins are you using and do you really need all of them? More importantly, how many plugins do you have that have been de-activated. De-activating a plugin is not enough as WordPress still loads them. If you have de-activated a plugin, either delete it entirely, or move into a temporary directory away from the ‘plugins’ directory.

Widgets:
How many widgets do you have on your sidebars and do you really need them? It is nice to have pictures of all your visitors from places like BlogCatalog and MyBlogLog, do you need both? Other widgets like sitemeters can be very slow as well. Double check your widgets and make a decision as whether they really do enhance your blog.

Graphics:
Graphics can be very slow. Even more of a problem are video and audio files that auto run. Leave the auto run off if possible and let the user decide whether or not play them. Graphics should be optimized. If your server is slow as well, store your graphics off site.

Page Design:
What loads first, the sidebars or your content? Your content should be the first to load. Your visitors can be reading it while the sidebars load. If your sidebars load first and there is a delay, it can be minutes before the content appears.

Header Image:
How big is your header image and is it optimized or does it need resizing to load? Header images, whilst first to load, can be the slowest part of your page. Make sure it optimized for quick loading.

Code:
There are some areas of your pages code that never changes, yet it is written in PHP and makes calls to the database. For example, when loading the header the code will often get your blog name from the data base. Use the ‘view code’ option in your browser to see the HTML equivalent. You can rewrite some aspects in HTML to remove the slow PHP and database calls. This can change the load speed of your blog.

Slow blogs are a no-no these days. Optimize your blog to ensure it loads quickly and provides your visitor with a great experience.

Many probably didn’t notice, nor care, that WordPress turned 5 on the 27th of this month, but then, WordPress was pretty quiet about too. WordPress tips still abound however, and today’s tip comes courtesy of Lorelle on WordPress and deals with graphics stored away from the WP content directory.

Lorelle, who is arguably the Grand Dame of WordPress, suggests the following solution for locating graphics with your blog site.

By using a feature called base href in the head of your header.php template file, you can establish the artificial “root” from which to look for file references. eg,

base href=”http://example.com/”

This single command instructs a browser to treat the sites root directory as the default directory. Lorelle has other WordPress tips on offer including working with the template files.

This WordPress tip is aimed at those who have not bothered to update their software for sometime. If use or rely on Technorati they will soon stop indexing sites that have not upgraded to the latest software.

Technorati are taking this action due to the number of security breaches that have been detected in recent times. These breaches include the insertion of hidden links on blog pages created prior to the version 2.3.3 update. To quote a lengthy piece from Technorati’s blog post on the topic:

Blogs that have been compromised by this security vulnerability are typified by having links to spam destinations inserted onto the blog page. These link insertions may be invisible to casual observations; the links are often obscured by style attributes that render them invisible.

You can check your blog for links using the page source code or the Tools - Page Info - Links option in Firefox. The ramifications are, again from the Technorati blog:

Because of this ongoing problem, we’re discontinuing processing crawls of blogs that exhibit common symptoms of being compromised. We strongly recommend upgrading your WordPress installation. Even if you haven’t been afflicted by a compromise, by the time you are aware that you have been a number of negative consequences may have already occurred (for instance, flagged spam by Technorati, Google or Yahoo!) — this has been reported by many WordPress users.

The last thing you want is to suddenly lose your rankings within Google or Technorati due to ‘link selling’ when in actual fact you have been spam linked. The biggest WordPress tip for the year so far is to upgrade to the latest software, check your pages for any spam links, and protect your hard earned rankings.

And with WordPress there is always more. One of the reasons that WordPress remains as the number one blog software platform is due to the fact that it stays up to date and constantly releases fixes to any known problems.

WordPress 2.5.1 has been released to block a possible security breach and patch 70 (yes 70) known bugs. These bugs include:

[sourced from WordPress.org]

• Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
• Better performance for those who have many categories
• Media Uploader fixes
• An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
• Widget Administration fixes
• Various usability improvements
• Layout fixes for IE

Depending on your installation, you may be able to upgrade through your web host particularly if you are using cPanel. If not, you will need to download the upgrade and install it manually. Full instructions are available with the download.

Scrappers are everywhere at present and often you will not even be aware of there presence. For those who are uninitiated, a scrapper is someone who copies your content and publishes as their own. These tips may at least help to thwart them.

My first tip, whilst it wont stop them,  it certainly provides you with links back to your pages and advertises to the world that the content has been scrapped.  The tip, include a least one link within the post to one of your pages. You can also use a second little trick which involves publishing your post, noting its url, then editing the post and including the url somewhere near the end.

Having you post covered with your links may not stop them, it will however provide you with some links. The second step is to actually determine if you are being scrapped. This can be fairly easy. Copy a paragraph of text and paste it into Google’s search engine. If your content is out there Google should find it.

If you have been scrapped, contact the owner and ask them to delete the post. If they don’t, contact the host. At the same time advise Google of content theft. If they are displaying Google ad units they will most likely be suspended.

Scrapping is hard to combat particularly some of the new smart scrappers. They are subscribing and using your RSS feed as a post.  This is often only the first paragraph and they are smart. They will link back to your site to  ‘read the rest of this article’ but use a written by fictitious name.

If you have been scrapped, and who hasn’t these days, get your feed published through Feedburner. This often gets your new page indexed quickly, faster than a scrapper can get it published. Together with your links in the content the search engines will generally assume yours is the original the scrappers dulplicate content.

You can try to sue but these guys are fly-by-night so it is rather pointless.  The are many WordPress tip on how to stop these guys. The bottom line often is to just let them go, milk them for links, and notify Sheriff Google each time.

Probably not busted but this WordPress tip reveal 6 of the main myths and debunks them totally.

WordPress is really for amateurs: Really, does that make me an amateur. One of the good things about WordPress is that it is great for everyone - amateur to professional. You can virtually use it ‘out of the box’ or customize it as much as your skills allow. There are many professionals who use WordPress as their preferred blogging tool.

You can build a complete site with WordPress: No. WordPress is a blogging and CMS (content management system). There are themes and plugins that enable you do a lot with the software. In practical terms, WordPress is to heavy on CPU usage to be a viable web page. Dedicated web pages are leaner, meaner and much quicker.

WordPress can handle as many plugins as you want: No. There is a point where even WordPress cannot cope. Your server will most likely suspend you before that happens. WordPress uses a lot of CPU time and each additional plugin simply puts more stress on that CPU time. When it comes to plugins, leaner is meaner. The more plugins you have, the slower it all becomes.

WordPress is easily hacked: Only if you allow it. WordPress is as safe as most sites. If you keep your version up to date and pay attention to any notices from WordPress regarding security, you will be fairly safe.

It is hard to find help for WordPress: There is probably more documentation on WordPress than any other blogging software. WordPress.org has pages and pages of help. A simple Google search will find millions of article on just about any WordPress issue.

WordPress is limited to just 10 text boxes in the sidebar: There are several fixes to this issue. The reality is that you can have as many text boxes in your sidebars as you want. The reality. Just like plugins, the more text boxes you have the slower it all becomes.

WordPress is free: I just knew I would come across one myth that I couldn’t debunk. Yes, WordPress is free and so are many of the themes and plugins.

WordPress is a robust and very popular blog software platform that is used by millions every day. There are thousands, if not millions of WordPress tips, it just takes a little sifting to find the right ones - or you could just come back here occasionally.

WordPress is arguably the number one platform for bloggers in today’s Web 2.0 environment. Everywhere you look there are blog plugins that can do everything from changing your admin screen to administering comments to monetizing your blog - and everything in between. Not only are you faced with so many plugins, everywhere you look there is another WordPress tip about which blog plugin is best for your blog.

As a blogger it can be difficult to know where to start. Which blog plugin is right for me? Which WordPress tip should I follow? At the risk of being added to those questions, here a few tips to help you out.

Less is More: Start with the bare bones and build slowly. Don’t add every plugin that sounds good. Plugins actually slow down the load speed of your blog  so the fewer installed, the less drain on your blogs load time.

A Plugin Should Solve a Need: Plugins should really only be installed if they are either solving a problem (for example, a spam filter for spam comments) or fulfill a need (for example, improve your RSS feed).  I have come across blogs that have had both Askismet and Big Brother installed - and they wondered why they were having problems.

Plugins Should be Optimized: If you install a plugin then read the install files and the usage files. If there is a configuration option then ensure it is configured to do what you require. Some plugins will not work unless configured correctly.

Blog plugins are generally written to fulfill a need. At last count there were over 1500 plugins - possibly more. It is obvious you are not going to need all of them. You need to be selective with your choice of plugin. If it doesn’t do the job required, de-activate it and delete it and find a plugin that will do the job.