Lesson 5: How to Install Wordpress?

June 27th, 2010 by vicky View Comments »

Hope that everyone knows about what Wordpress is, and if you don’t know about it, then just feed this, “Wordpress is the best platform for blogging”. Installing Wordpress is not a big matter and can be easily done with few easy steps. There are already many resources available to help in installing wordpress, so I thought I should use the best one rather than writing the same matter again. Below are the videos that will support you through your installation.

1) How to install wordpess through cpanel:

2) How to install wordpress on websost:

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Tags: how to install wordpress on webhost

Lesson 6:Best Wordpress Plugins to Install

June 26th, 2010 by vicky View Comments »

Best Set of Plugins to be Used

The selection of useful plugins is crucial for the smooth functionality of blog. I don’t know why I like doing experiments with my blog but I never hesitate to try new plugins whenever there is something interesting to go with. Below is a list of those plugins which I found useful and I say them the best set of plugins to be with wordpress.

(If you don’t know about how to install the plugins, please watch this video)

1) SEO Ultimate

This plugin is the most useful part of anyone’s blog. Automatical optimization of titles, Canonical URLs, Auto Meta Tag Generator, 404 monitor are the few features of this plugin. So it is a must plugin that is going to improve your site’s ranking in the search engines. There is one more SEO plugin available called All In One SEO and that one also works perfectly. Download plugin.

2) Google Sitemap Generator

This plugin generates the sitemap.xml file automatically and also pings the various search engines whenever any change is made to the site. For example, new post, new comment or anything, it will inform that to search engines, so as a result of this, all the pages will be well indexed by the search engines. Download Plugin.

3) Google Analytics for Wordpress

I guess you know about Google Analytics. This plugin automatically inserts the analytics code to each and every page. So the solution of tracking of each page is also solved. Download Plugin.

4) DBC-Backup

What if you installed something or did some experiment with your site and ended with an error which corrupted the site’s data. If you would have a backup of that data, then it can be restored. So this plugin is a must for precautionary basis. Download Plugin.

5) Quick Contact

This plugin automatically creates a contact form which could be used by visitors to contact the site owner or whoever has the responsibility of answering the queries of visitors. It contains inbuilt captcha code generator to fight scam. Download Plugin.

6) Add To Any

This is a social network connectivity plugin which contains almost every famous networking site, through which user can publish the article he likes through his account to any network of his choice. Download Plugin.

7) Simple Tags

It is a very useful plugin which allows you to mass edit the post tags from one place. It can automatically link the tags present in posts. There is also a built in functionality for tag suggestions through various sites such as Yahoo, Google, MSN and many more. Download Plugin.

WP-SmushIt

This plugin compresses the images present in your whole website from one single place. After you install this plugin, you have to go to media gallery, and you will see a Smush It button in front of every image. Press the button to Smush (Compress) the image. Download Plugin.

9) Adsense Manager

There is no reason of not making money through your blog. This plugin helps you set up the advertisement banners in your site through any of the famous ad networks such as Google Adsense, Adbrite, Text Link Ads and many more. The ads can be placed through widgets as well as through a very small code which can be inserted anywhere into the post or template. Download Plugin.

10) Subscribe to Comments

This plugin helps your user to stay connected to your site. Whenever the user passes a comment, he will be asked to whether he wants to be notified of the comments coming after his comments or not. If he choses yes, he will be notified via email whenever a new comment is submitted to that article. Download Plugin.

11) WP-GreetBox

This plugin displays a different greeting message to your visitor depending on which site they are coming from. Like say, a user visits through a link from Digg, then he will be presented with a message asking him to Digg the post if he likes it. Similarly if the visitor has arrived through twitter, he will be asked to tweet the post. It’s a very good plugin which interacts to users directly and might also result in greater traffic. Download Plugin.

12) WordBook

I don’t know how I found it but is a very helpful one. The plugin directly posts a notification of new post into your Facebook account. So each and every person connected to you will be notified of new post. This can also be a traffic booster to your site if you have a good network on Facebook. Download Plugin.

13) Wp- Http-Compression

This plugin outputs the pages in Gzip format which makes the site loading fastly. The various Site analysis tools like Firebug, Woorank etc also give positive points if the site has Gzip enabled. Download Plugin.

14) Wp- Postratings

A very good plugin allowing the users to rate the post. It seamlessly integrates at the bottom of each post and has various options available to customize the looks and functionality. There is no messy coding needed to be added to each post. Just install and activate it, rest will be done automatically. Download Plugin.

15) All-in-one-seo-pack

It is an enhanced version of SEO-Ultimate plugin and carries all the functionality along with some extra ones. The interface is easy to use and there is a provision to add/edit the titles and description of posts in a bunch. Download Plugin.

16) Easy Review Builder

A rating plugin that allows visitors to rate the articles by the stars. The user has to insert a short code snippet wherever he wants the rating to appear. Download Plugin.

17) Tweetmeme

Direct integration of a tweetme button on each post so that users can tweet the posts directly from your blog. This increases the popularity of your post certainly as users can tweet the post by just a press of button. Download Plugin.

18) Contact Commentators

It would be a great thing to interact with the users who commented on your posts via email. This plugin allows you to send occasional invitations to the commentators so that users can be kept up to date about your site. Download Plugin.

19) Commentor Emails

This plugin fetches email of all the commentators. You can download the email addresses in .csv format that can be pasted off then to send email at one go to all your visitors.

20) Comment Reply Notification

A small plugin that provides an option to be notified about the post he has commented. The plugin sends an email to the visitor whenever any comment is made on his commented post.

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Posted in Blog Lessons

Tags: best wordpress plugins

Lesson 7: Selection of Quality Wordpress Themes

June 25th, 2010 by vicky View Comments »

Appearance of your site is the first impression that each of your visitors is going to view. So take this part seriously and decide first about how your site is going to look like.

Choose a theme that looks professional as well as gives a plenty of space for the content to be written. There should be a navigation bar at the top providing links to categories or the static pages of your blog.( Static pages generally contain pages like About, Link to Us, Discliamer, Contact Us etc.). Also there should be sidebar pointing to categories of your blog, recent posts, archieve of old blog posts, advertisements, Links to other sites you like etc. When you have searched such a theme, look for graphics and interface of that theme. It should not be to animated or heavy with graphics otherwise it might make your blog slow and as a result will definitely increase your blog’s bounce rate (Number of returning visitors). Spend a little amount of money on a premium theme if you have. There are plenty of websites that provide free themes. Few which I found best are listed below:

1) Digital Nature

2) Stylish Templates

3) Choice themes

4) Hongkiat

The next part will give you links to premium wordpress themes. But I guess you want to know why you should spend your money although you can have a good theme for free on the above listed sites.

The first reason, anyone can download and install a free theme, so they are all the way common giving your website a not a very new look.
Premium themes if chosen correctly, are all professionally designed themes which offer perfection and will hence boost your site’s performance altogether.
There is a support from the theme designer; after all you are paying him for his work. You have the right to point to bugs present in the theme and get them rectified from the designer.
I will receive sales commission if you buy through my links. (I also love money and want to earn). So please be generous.

Below are the list of premium themes sites which are selected in view of there best performance. So you don’t have to bother Google for themes search:

1) StudioPress Themes

2) Blog Oh Blog

3) Classi Press

4) ThemeJam

5) The Diplomat Theme

6) Thesis Theme By DiyThemes

So now when the theme is selected, we have to make it look personal by removing the external links to the theme designer. For this, go to Appearance>>Editor. Here you will find all the theme related files which you can modify according to your likes. You must have some knowledge of HTML or PHP to take this risk or you can end up ruining your site. The result of editing should look professional and perfect.

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Posted in Blog Lessons

Tags: quality wordpress themes

Lesson 8: Some Useful Tools For Blogging

June 24th, 2010 by vicky View Comments »

There are many things on the web which are unknown to many people. Few of those things are tools which can be a lot useful and might save you a lot of time in finding small pieces of information. These tools will not cost you a penny and will surely help you in some ways. Please have a look on them. We would be glad to share if you have info on any more good tool that can be added here.

1) Mozilla Firefox Browser

The first and foremost, this browser is a very powerful thing which carries loads of features with it. You can use plugins available at their home page to enhance it’s functionality. Few of them which I use are

- Alexa Sparky

This plugin embeds on the bottom right corner of the browser in the status bar and tells about the traffic trend of the site you are visiting along with the Alexa traffic rank. There are although other options available which you can set according to the preference.

- Web Rank Toolbar

This tool displays rank of the visited site from Alexa, Quantcast and Compete. It also displays about the number of pages indexed in Google, Bing and Yahoo. The only reason of using this along with Alexa Sparky is that this add-on does not show the traffic trend of last six months.

- WOT

Web Of Trust, this is all it implies. It warns users about the visiting site if the site is not trustable. It installs itself as a button in the navigation bar. The color turns to dark green if the visited site is marked as trusted in WOT’s directory and also it turns to Red if it’s marked as non-trustable.

- Flagfox

A bunch of tools telling about the location of current site server, similar sites, safety checks and whois info.

2) WOORank

WOORank is a tool used to rank your site according to some predefined set of parameters. These parameters include alexa rank, google page rank, all the meta tags, backlinks, digg links, .org links, geotags, pages indexed in google, text/HTML ratio and much more. I use this tool regularly so that I could be aware of making some mistakes.

3) Pingdom Tools

I tried many tools for checking the speed of my blog online but was never purely satisfied with any of the tools present. This tool is also not fully satisfying but still it’s preferable according to me as I have tried many online tools for speed test.

4) Google Analytics

Who doesn’t know about this? I guess I am telling this for a formality. It’s a tool used to fetch the data of daily traffic on the site. It gives you details about how many visitors visited, how many returned, how much time everyone stayed, where they came from, whether they are new visitor or the older one, etc. These details help you to target your content.

5) Sitemeter

This is another tool like Google Analytics that is loved by many sites. The functionality is almost the same as with Google Analytics except that you have to install a small logo image of Sitemeter somewhere on the site. One more difference between Google Analytics and Sitemeter is that Google allows its free usage to as many sites as you want whereas Sitemeter allows only one site per profile. You have to pay if you want to add more sites.

6) Copyscape

Just enter the url of the content and you will get a list of the locations of the same content. This tool can help you to find out about where your content is being copied. It is a very old tool that is quite famous for its operations.

7) Pingoat

This service pings the number of known service that keep track of weblogs. Whenever you update your blog, a ping is sent to all these services and hence they crawl the blog and publish the content resulting in increase in popularity.

Ping-o-Matic

Another service for pinging but is a byte superior then Pingoat. It’s interface is more easy to use and is not buggy.

9) Digg

Digg is a social networking tool which if used in some proper way can enhance your presence on the web. You have to build a good network to get it working. The funda is, “You submit your content to Digg, Digg publishes it on front, other people on the network vote for that content (shortly called Digg it) and if that content gets enough votes, it gets a space on the top content page”. This sounds simple but it’s very much complicated. You have to build a very strong network who like reading your content.

10) StumbleUpon

Somewhat like digg with different procedure and interface. If you don’t like Digg, go on here.

11) coComment

To build links, we have to comment on other blogs, and that to with genuine comments. After commenting we generally forget about those comments, so to sort out this problem, a service was developed called cocomment, that keeps tracks of all your comments from the web. Just sign up and install it in your mozilla web browser.

12) Indiblogger

Recently I found this platform to increase my blog. It connects all the bloggers to increase network, promote the posts, ranks and also places contests time to time. This site is specifically targeted to Indian bloggers, but I guess there should be sites of these types for other countries to. Do have a search on Google.

13) Technorati

A very good tool to submit your site to. It links your blog through the feed. It crawls the updates on the blog and accordingly ranks the blog.

We consistently work to provide our visitors with more and more useful information. Do visit this page again to find latest updates on more powerful tools.