WordPress Directory Plugin

If you are using WordPress and you are interested in creating a link directory, you might consider using a WordPress Directory Plugin. Not sure why you’d want a link directory? Well…

A link directory enables you to offer a very targeted set of categorized links on your site, preferably to content related to the theme of your site. For example, the directory on my site is for web development. So all the links in the directory should be related to web development in some meaningful way.

There’s another bonus to creating a link directory: It improves your Page Rank (PR). Page Rank is something Google uses and it’s related to the number of inbound links to your site. There’s a huge algorithm for calculating PR, but for the purposes of this article, you basically want to increase the number of people linking to your site, and a link directory helps you do this by requiring that anyone who lists themselves in your directory provide a link back to your site.

So here are two WordPress Directory Plugins worth checking out:

WordPress Links Directory
I like this directory plugin because it offers a nice, clean layout. I’m also partial to the AJAX aspects of the plugin. The install was not easy, and required some modifications to some of the files in order to get it to display correctly for the theme I’m using. It seems many people have had trouble integrating this plugin with their theme, so you may not want to use it for this reason. However, the author of the plugin has added some common theme support here. This plugin supports SE-friendly permalinks, subcategories, and reciprocal-link checking, which is a major bonus. One click on the backend sends out a little spider to see if the people who say they are linking to you are really linking to you. This is dynamite for when you have a lot of links, so you don’t have to waste your time manually checking them.

WP-Directory
I decided not to go with this plugin, but it’s still worth considering. It’s set up is more like DMOZ, so if you like that style, this may be the choice for you. It also supports pretty permalinks, screenshots, subcategories, and a cool little sidebar widget. The installation looks a lot simpler too. View a demo of WP-Directory here.

If you need help installing either of these plugins, please contact me.

SEO Book

While reading John Chow’s book, I stumbled upon this great little book called SEO Book by Aaron Wall.  The book is 331 pages of genius for $79.  I’ve spent a lot of time learnign SEO through trial and error, so anything that allows me to take a few short cuts is worth it.  The book comes with lots of extras, including a list of SEO tools, including SEO forums, conferences, social bookmarking, analysis tools, keyword tools, link-building tools, pay-per-click and a ton of others.  It could take you hours of Internet research to find all the information that’s been neatly compiled in this book for you.

The book starts out at the beginning, helping you to select the right product, domain name and hosting.  Then Aaron walks you through selecting the right keywords for your product and putting them to use by optimizing your pages and your entire site.  Then you start registering with directories and link building.  All of this is presented in a clear, straight-forward way that leaves out all the guesswork.  By the time you’ve read this entire book, you will be an expert in SEO, and you’ll have access to all the tools (many of them free) that you’ll need to properly optimize your site.

However, if you know anything about SEO, then you know that this type of information changes rapidly.  So you might be thinking, why should I spend $79 on a book that will be out-of-date in a month?  Aaron’s thought of that, and he includes free updates with your purchase.  So far, the book has been update 20 times, so you know you’ll be on top of the changes when they happen.

 Of course, if you don’t want to do it youself, consider hiring me.

Google Webmaster Tools for WordPress

Google Webmaster Tools are free tools that help you do a lot of great things to help you site along; two of the most important being submitting your sitemap and specifying your prefered domain.  The first thing to do is get a Google Webmaster Tools account.

Next, you’ll want to sign in to your account and add your url to the account.

Then you’ll want to verify that you’re the owner of the url.  There’s two ways to do this: add a meta tag, or add an HTML file.  Here’s how to add an HTML file for verification using WordPress:

Part 1 - Create a new template page

1. Open notepad or some other text editor
2. Paste the following code:

<?php /* Template Name: Verification*/ ?>

<html>
<head>
<title>Verification</title>
<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>
</head>
<body>
</body>
</html>

3. Save the file as verification.php
4. Upload it into your WordPress theme folder

Why am I doing it this way?  Well, you could just skip to part 2, but you don’t really want your Google page to be indexed, hence the noindex, nofollow commands on the page.  Once you’ve set up the tempate, you’re ready for the verification process with Google.

Part 2 - Verify with Google

1. Sign in to your Google Webmaster Tools account
2.  Click on ‘verify’ to the right of your url
3.  Choose ‘Upload an HTML file’ from the dropdown
4. Copy the code they give you (starts with the word google and ends with .html)
5. Login to WordPress
6. Click ‘Write’ then ‘Page’
7.  Paste the code from Google into the title area
8. On the right hand side, click on ‘page template’ and choose your verification template from part 1 from the dropdown options
9. Publish the page
10. Go back to Google Webmaster Tools page and click the url that says yourdomain.com/googlecode.html.  The page should be totally blank.
11. If it looks good, click ‘verify’ and Google should immediately verify your ownership of the url

Submitting your Sitemap

Submitting you sitemap is pretty easy.  If you don’t have a sitemap, I suggest you pick up the all-in-one SEO pack for WordPress from uberdose. Then follow these steps:

1. Sign in to Google Webmaster tools account or go to the dashboard if you’re already signed in
2. You’ll now see your url on the dashboard, click ‘add sitemap’
3. Choose ‘Add General Sitemap’ from the dropdown options
4. Enter your the url of your sitemap and click ‘add general sitemap’ (your sitemap url is /sitemap.xml if you are using the all-in-one SEO pack)

Now you can follow how Google is crawling your site and using your sitemap.

Specify Your Preferred Domain

Specifying your preferred domain helps Google index only one version of your site. I talked about another important step in this process, which is setting up a 301 redirect Which if you haven’t done. you should do now.

 So now for adding your preferred domain.

1.  From your Google Webmaster Tools dashboard, click on your domain name
2.  Now click on ‘tools’ on the bottom of the navigation bar on the left side of the screen
3. Click ‘Set preferred domain’ from the sub-menu that opens
4. Set your preferred domain

You’re all set.  You’ve helped give Google some direction about how to index your site, which will help with your SEO efforst.  Now you can sit back, drink an ice-cold lemonade and watch as Google indexes your pages.

301 Redirect and htaccess for WordPress

So I told you I’ve been reading John Chow’s eBook and in it he brings up a good point about redirecting your website urls for SEO purposes. Here’s the way I understand it…

Basically, there are two versions of your site, and each on is unique. They are: http://www.yoursite.com and http://yoursite.com

These two urls lead to the same exact place. So basically, you can get people linking to the same site, but through two different urls, which degrades your page ranking for Google. Basically, you’re diluting the number of inbound links into your site and watering down your efforts for search engine optimization. But there’s an easy fix: 301 redirect.

With 301 redirect, you basically set up a rule in your htaccess file that says anyone who types in http:// gets sent to the www version of the site instead. Here’s the code I used:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

*Replace ‘domain’ with your domain name in both lines.

The final code looked like this:

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

Once again changing ‘domain’ to your domain name.

Now, as far as I know, this code will only work on a Linux server with the Apache mod-rewrite module enabled. This code worked for me, but it may not work for you, so you may need to search around a bit to find a different version that will work. Daily blog tips has a good guide with different variations of this code in their article How to set up a 301 redirect.

Everyone who’s interested in SEO should be doing this for their site to prevent dilution of their inbound links and help improve their SEO. For more great tips on setting up a 301 redirect, check out John Chow’s article: Setting the preferred domain. Since he’s the one that turned me on to the idea, I think he’s definitely worth checking out. He discusses how to use Google Wemaster Tools to set your preffered domain and why you want to use 301 redirect. There’s also instructions for how to do a 301 redirect on a Windows server in the comments of his article. I’m not sure if it will work, but it may help you out.