Have you ever noticed how WordPress like to put in the permalink a “category” base? This text can dilute you search engine link keyword value and it’s not a bad idea to get rid of it. But how? Let’s use the excellent WP No Category Base plugin. This will allow us to solve this problem code free!

Download WP No Category Base

Don’t get down and dirty with the .htaccess file if you don’t have to. Instead, log in to your WordPress admin panel and click on Plugins > Add New. Next, search for “WP No Category Base” and install the plugin.

Activate WP No Category Base

Now all you have to do is activate the plugin and it immediately starts working.

The Plugin Takes Care of Your Redirects

Don’t worry you don’t have to now go into your .htaccess file and insert a bunch of 301 redirects. The plugin takes care of redirecting your old links. Awesome!

The post WP No Category Base: Good for SEO and Easy to Use appeared first on WordImpress.

Negative text indents have been a debated topic in the web design world for some time. But why? Should they be used or not? Since Google chimed in to the debate, there’s been even more discussion swirling in the blogosphere. Let’s take a look at why this method of using CSS to hide text off-page ever came to be and why experts say you shouldn’t use a negative value to hide text off-page.

Where This Trick is Used Honestly

There are several reasons why web designers use a negative text-indent property to hide text off page. These reasons are used without malicious indent and some feel that Google and the search engines may just brush this off.

• Navigational Buttons
• The Ol’ Image Replacement Trick
• Alternate to display: none;
• Ease of Use

The Not So Honest Reason

Years ago when keyword density used to be the way to the top of the search engines, spammers would hide hundreds/thousands of keywords and links off-page to seemingly trick search engines into thinking their content was the most relevant to the searches pertaining to the hidden keywords. For a little while this worked and some sites saw great success in the search engines thus leading to the increased popularity of this spam technique.

Google Fights Back

All search engines hate spam sites. Google has lead the way with their top-secret algorithm at effectively removing these sites from their indexes. How they have done this, by effectively evaluating the integrity of your website through your code, content, reputation and lifespan… plus many other factors that many are still trying to uncover.

Hiding text or links in your content can cause your site to be perceived as untrustworthy since it presents information to search engines differently than to visitors -Google

What is certain is that there are various penalizations are incorporated in Google, Yahoo, Bing algorithms for websites that hide large amounts of text off page. Most likely this penalty depends on how much text you are hiding off page and whether you are trying to deceive the search engines and impact user experience. Google will only promote the sites they see best fit to fulfill the users need. If you are trying to be shady and trick the users by throwing a link in every other sentence that is only 2px by 2px and looks like a period, Google will find out. And so will Yahoo, Bing and others… (most likely). This is because it is written in their algorithm thanks to the spammy malicious sites created years ago that Google had to learn to trim for their search results.

Don’t Try to Play Pranks on the Search Engines

You have to remember that the text-indent property is just CSS styling. Google will still see the text that is hidden off page, whether or not they can read your CSS and JavaScript is up for speculation. As best practice, stray away from hiding text off page.

Does it Impact SEO?

While it may impact your website’s SEO only slightly if you hide minor text off-page, it’s not a good idea to use hidden text and links. Google has recommended not using this method to hide logo text, headers, and other tricks thus we must comply to make the almighty happy.

No More of This

h1 a {
  background: url(logo.png) no-repeat left top;
  text-indent: -9999px; /* bad idea */
}

Other Blogs on This Same Topic:

This is not an old topic, the blogosphere is still actively discussing this topic. Current and past employees of Google as well as other respectable SEO gurus have talked about why not to using CSS to hide text off-page. Here’s a few below that should give you a nice idea about the discussion.

1. Webmaster Radio Office Hours with Google Senior Developer Programs Engineer Maile Ohye
2. CSS Tricks Forum: Text-Indent: -9999px; = bad SEO?
3. Stop Using the text-indent:-9999px; CSS Trick by Luigi Montanez

Have You Been Penalized?

If you feel that you have been penalized by Google because you are not getting indexed or you are performing more poorly than you did in the past you can submit your site for reconsideration. Google will reconsider your site and most likely, if you have complied with their terms you can be included in the cool-club of search engine visibility. Ah, it feels good to be indexed.

The post CSS Negative Text Indent Property: Looks Spammy and Bad for SEO appeared first on WordImpress.

If you are running a WordPress site, most likely want to the best plugins to maximize search engine optimization (or SEO).  While there are many WordPress SEO plugins out there, knowing which ones to use can be a bit confusing.  The following is a list of WordPress’ top SEO plugins that will help you move up in the search engines and drive more traffic to your website.

SEOpresser

Link: http://seopressor.com/
Description: While the website for this plugin and the video may seem a bit cheesy, it does what it says.  Essentially, this plugin allows you to optimize your site’s content faster and more effectively.  Once you install the plugin you can begin using the keyword decoration feature and keyword density grader to add underlines, bold tags and headings to your content.
Special Notes: This is not a free plugin and many of the plugin’s benefits are geared more towards auto-blogs.  For the average blogger, this plugin won’t provide much more benefit than adding various keyword decorations and utilizing the SEOpressor score which you can get through Firefox’s on page SEO plugins anyways.

Robots Meta

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/robots-meta/
Description: Easily add robots meta tags to your WordPress posts and cisallow indexing of subpages to your homepage, category pages, author pages and tag pages, to prevent duplicate content.
Special Notes: This plugin requires some knowledge of SEO best practices to configure for optimal usage. Be sure you configure the plugin properly… you don’t want to prevent the robots from indexing relevant content.

Google XML Sitemaps

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/
Description: Let Google know how to index your website easiy with the Goog,e XML Sitemaps Generator. Notify Google, Yahoo, Bing and more each time you publish a new blog post effortlessly. This is easily the most popular sitemap generator plugin for WordPress.
Special Notes: This plugin is fairly easy to setup and configure and for less advanced users offers a great library of documentation.

All-in-One SEO

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
Description: Like the name says, this plugin is used for “All” SEO purposes. Now while this plugin is excellent, that’s taking it a little too far.
Special Notes: Be sure that if you using a predeveloped theme or creating your own that there are not duplicate meta tags. Often themes will place their own meta keywords/descriptions for SEO purposes (because they assume you wont be using this plugin) and then when you utilize this plugin it will insert them through the wp_head.

All-in-One Webmaster

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-webmaster/
Description: Allows you to integrate Google Webmaster tools, Yahoo SiteExplorer and Bing Webmaster Central into your WP backend. Additionally, you have the option to add analytics tracking code for Quantcast, Clicky, Compete.com, SiteMeter.com.
Special Notes: Makes working with Google, Yahoo and Bing a breeze and is a snap to configure once you have the plugin installed.

Pretty Link Pro

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/pretty-link/
Description: Allows you to shrink your urls, track them, twitter integration and a lot more.
Special Notes: The social icons and retweet buttons this plugin can integrate are table-based and not easily changed. Often, they manage to conflict with custom developed WP themes.

Akismet

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/akismet/
Description: Search engines hate spammy sites. Make sure your comments are clean of spam and the back links they put on your site. Akismet is the best anti-spam plugin for WordPress, that’s why it’s there by default.
Special notes: This plugin is packaged with the installation but you have to activate it via the plugin settings page in your WordPress backend.

Got Suggestions?

If you are using a WordPress plugin that you think is awesome for SEO then let us know! We’ll be sure to put it on the list above if it meets the criteria. Hopefully you have discovered a plugin you haven’t heard of yet from this list. Let us know what you think, comment below!

The post Top WordPress SEO Plugins appeared first on WordImpress.

Widgets for Blog Listing Pages

If you have a blog listing page and you want to show the twitter and facebook social share buttons for each listing rather than the blog page itself then the code below will do just that. You will simple need to add the following code into your WordPress loop after either the_content() or the_excerpt() depending on your preference.

For Facebook Share Button:

Notice for the “share_url=” we are using the wordpress permalink function to grab the article’s url.

<a class="facebookShare" name="fb_share" type="button_count" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php" share_url="<?php the_permalink() ?>">Share</a>
<script src="http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php/js/FB.Share" type="text/javascript"></script>

For Tweetmeme

<script type="text/javascript">
	tweetmeme_style = 'compact';
	tweetmeme_url = '<?php the_permalink() ?>';
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js"></script>

Widgets for Single Posts and Pages (single.php and page.php).

If you want to add the Facebook and Tweetmeme buttons to your single posts then open up your theme’s single.php for posts and page.php for pages and add the following code after your WordPress loop

Facebook Dynamic Like Button for WordPress

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=<?php echo urlencode(get_permalink($post->ID)); ?>&amp;layout=standard&amp;show_faces=false&amp;width=100&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;height=80″ scrolling="no" frameborder="0″ style="margin-left: 30px; border:none; overflow:hidden; width:100px; height:40px;" allowTransparency="true"></iframe>

Twitter Dynamic ReTweet Button for WordPress

If you want the Tweetmeme retweet button then you can use the following bit of code to display compact retweet buttons. To change the tweetmeme size all you need to do is change the tweetmeme_style to the larger version remove tweetmeme_style = ‘compact’;.

<div class="social-item">
 <script type="text/javascript">  
   tweetmeme_url = '<?php echo rawurlencode('http://' . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']); ?>';  
   tweetmeme_style = 'compact';
</script>  
 <script type="text/javascript" src="http://tweetmeme.com/i/scripts/button.js"></script> 
</div>

Thanks to Rommel Santor and his great blog post for getting me started in the right direction: check out how his detailed article about adding dynamic facebook and tweetmeme widgets to your blog

The post Awesome Way to Add Dynamic Facebook and Tweet Widgets appeared first on WordImpress.

Open album-extend.php

This file is located in your Nextgen Gallery folder withing your WordPress install’s plugin folder: wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/views/album-extend.php/

Turn the DIV into an H3/H4

Depending on your preference, modify the following gallery title div to be a heading rather than a just a div. Search engines will recognize this and give more value to the text.

<div class="ngg-albumtitle">
       <a href="<?php echo $gallery->pagelink ?>">
          <?php echo $gallery->title ?>
       </a>
</div>

Now change the beginning and end DIV to an H3 as shown below.

<h3 class="ngg-albumtitle">
  <a href="<?php echo $gallery->pagelink ?>">
    <?php echo $gallery->title ?>
   </a>
</h3>

Save the file

Remember, modifying files in a plugin’s directory means that in the future, if you update the plugin the changes could be overwritten. Luckily this is just a quick change so it’s not really a big deal.

The post Quick Tip to Further SEO Optimize Your NextGen Gallery Albums appeared first on WordImpress.