Learn About WordPress

WordPress Foundation Formed

501C NonProfit Organization

Matt Mullenweg and several Automattic employees have started a new 501C NPO to house various trademarks for WordPress and WordCamp. I think that’s the right choice for a project like this that was started by a couple coders writing for the Open Source community and wanting to remain so. Foundations and Associations de-personalize open source projects legally. No matter what happens down the road in terms of disputes or in fact if the original licensees unexpectedly die, the Foundation is in theory unaffected.

Life is Expensive

The main apparatus for much of the WordPress dominion is the aforementioned  San Francisco based corporation called Automattic. The free and popular wordpress.com and Gravitar and the new VideoPress all are Automattic products. Starting with a single hand full of employees 4 1/2 years ago, Automattic is now a company of 40 or more and they actually live all over the planet physically. To run a huge project like wordpress.com required full time employees and support and it could not have been done without forming a corporation… because life is expensive and so is running wordpress.com. The code behind WordPress continues to be Open Source and free for the world’s use although part of the apparatus is a commercial operation. And I think that’s appropriate and actually honorable in this day and age.

Time Flies and Then You Die

Before 1993 as a Technical Officer in a Fortune 100 Wall Street firm, my internet use was mostly done with a dialup company called CompuServe. We used primitive tools that were called “Gopher” and “Finger” and “FTP” to access file systems at Purdue University and other edu’s and government repositories. We also used it for file sharing because email systems were very limited with the file size capacity of their attachments. It cost a shocking 30 bucks an hour to “go online” in the late 80’s with CompuServe and by the early 90’s it was still around 5 bucks an hour for full featured service although personal accounts could be had for 10 bucks a month.

In 1993 the first practical “WWW” tool appeared. It was called Mosaic and it made CompuServe immediately obsolete because cheap online access companies could now form using friendly web browsers to “surf the net”. It was developed and paid for paid for by the US Government and freely available to download and use. Except the 2 guys that were paid using US Taxpayer money to write the code also did something sneaky that the NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) did not anticipate. They retained legal rights to the code. And they became very wealthy by forming a company called NetScape and they sold cheap dialup online access and the browser commercially. The NCSA originally sued the developers they had paid to write the code but they were unsuccessful – and I think it’s because they did not force the programmers to sign a non-compete agreement but I’m not 100% sure. What is for sure is that the code paid for by you and me went into forming Netscape and it helped initiate or at least propel the DOT COM Bubble. NCSA was then more or less forced to sell all commercial rights to Mosaic in 1994 to another company and it became the so called Microsoft “Internet Explorer”. Microsoft IE became the most popular browser in the world for many years because of unfair trading practices.

The DOT COM Bubble Giveth and the DOT COM bubble Taketh Away

and so Netscape became a flash in the pan. It was purchased for a hugely over inflated price by AOL and then it died when the bubble burst taking down most of AOL and the support for Netscape commercially. What started as Mosaic, then became Netscape, finally morphed into an Open Source project we all know and love – Mozilla Firefox. In 2009 FireFox became the #1 browser in the world because it was clearly a better product than IE in terms of reliability and additional addon tools available – all for free – all Open Source at this point.

Remaining Open Source

WordPress could have gone the same route at a couple strategic points but it never did because Matt Mullenweg stayed true to the original Open Source ideals. And the world is better for it because WP is free to distribute and use. To make sure WordPress stays free and Open Source, this new Foundation will retain the trademarks anyway for now and we will just have to see what’s next. I do hope Matt has realized financial gain along with the huge thanks he deserves from literally millions of users and developers who use and support WordPress.

At a later time I’ll explain my dislike for WordPress Theme developers who violate the spirit of Open Source for their own personal profit. They take the WordPress code written for free by many people and they sell a product on top of it that cannot exist without WordPress by using slick marketing techniques . They do it for their own personal profit without making the products free to use the way it was intended by the Open Source developers. I hope the WordPress Foundation takes them on legally. There are superior Themes written that are Open Source of course, and their developers profit financially by selling premium support. For my commercial rollouts I use only Open Source Themes that sell support, and I use free Themes. I experiment with and do personal sites sometimes with themes that are not open source just to see what they’ve got that will “push the envelope” for developers. We will just have to wait an see what happens to the rogue for profit only theme makers. I hope they all get on stage with their lawyers in the front row at the next WordCamp SF.

Cheers -

Wordpress SEO – All You Need To Know

Learning WordPress SEO – All You Need To Know

Here is my WordPress SEO Checklist you can use as a guide:

1. Figure out what keyword phrases you want to rank well for and assign 1 or 2 per page.
2. Use the great WP plugin “All In One SEO Pack”.
3. Don’t use the WordPress default permalink structure… I use /%post_id%/%postname%/
4. Get inbound links from high PR authority sites using your keyword phrases as anchor text.
5. Add good H1 or H2 titles and use more h2’s for subtitles throughout your blog post.
6. Include bold or italics or even some bold + italics text on the page.
7. Link out to at least 1 high PR authority site per page.
8. Create interior hyperlinks with a keyword you need for the target page.
9. Make bulleted lists (ordered and unordered) whenever you can.
10. Write in targeted keyword phrases and their derivative variations in your text.
11. Add Alt tags for some images using your target keyword phrases.
12. I always add images to every blog post and static page.
13. Use Google’s drive toward Universal Search to your advantage.
14. Encourage commenting with do follow links and respond to good comments.
15. Be cleaver with your blog post titles and use 3 or 4 word most of the time.
16. Check your robots.txt file to make sure you are not blocking search engine spiders.
17. Update your sitemap.xml file automatically with a plugin.

If you type “wordpress seo” on Google, the first entry on the SERP is from WordPress legend and SEO pundit Joost de Valk. Joost is from the Netherlands and his name is actually pronounced like “yoast”. And that’s why he named his famous and incredibly high (I’ve been to Amsterdam 7 times so far) PageRank 6 website yoast.com.

OK so you can see what one of the brilliant stars in SEO and WordPress says about the subject by going to his site first. Joost is one of the world’s leading WordPress plugin developers and he is almost scary smart. It’s a good article.

We all know Google Loves WordPress right? Well it’s true. The Master Mind Anti-Spam King at Google is Matt Cutts and he himself uses a WordPress blog even though his company makes Blogger. Matt talks about WordPress in positive terms because there are many features that just lend themselves to automatically following the recommended Google WebMaster Guidelines. That being said, here is what you can do to improve the built in linky goodness.

I take a straight forward approach to WordPress SEO that may be simple, but for the person out there who needs help, you can get by on this and maybe get some great rankings that might have otherwise escaped you. As a web design consultant I don’t do this for the sake of art. I build beautiful WordPress sites that rank well on Google, Yahoo, and Bing so my clients can get new prospects from the internet and make millions of dollars. These recommendations are what I do for every professional site I build and maintain.

1.) Figure out what keyword phrases you want to rank well for.

Assign one or 2 phrases per page and know that your homepage and your about us page are going to get the most views and have the best luck getting ranking for your primary keyword phrases. Most websites do best shooting for 1 or 2 primary keyword phrases and a total of 5 phrases all together. Professional SEO’s sometimes will map out 50 keywords on a large website but it takes a lot of work and it’s really for professionals. My personal record so far was a site that I got 34 Google #1 rankings for at one time in English and almost as many in Spanish. I also had a total of 110 Top 10 rankings on that site in English the same month. So it is possible to map 50 or even 100 keywords to a website but it’s hard. Most of you out there would do well to find 1 keyword or 2 and go for it.

2.) Install the plugin All In One SEO currently maintained by Semper Fi Web Design.

Every blog post and every static page on your website should have a custom written meta title and meta description. This plugin will do the job of making these meta titles and meta descriptions automatically for you. It also gives you the option in every blog post and static page to enter your own titles and descriptions. Being a professional full time SEO, thats a big part of my job every day and I make custom titles and descriptions that are way better than the automatic ones the plugin creates. But I’ll tell you about that in another post. For now just know this is the single most important thing you can do for yourself in terms of WordPress SEO. Plugin developers need your support with a small donation every once in a while by the way.

There is a 3rd field that is optional called the meta keyword field. Google does not use it but I think they still look at it and I’m sure other search engines do look at the meta keywords. I enter them. Just add a few words that appear on your page and don’t do any keyword stuffing here. That might give you 1 strike with some of the SE’s.

3.) The WordPress default permalink structure is bad for SEO, don’t use it.

I use this permalink structure: /%post_id%/%postname%/    That gives me keywords right in my url so search engines can grab onto them.

4.) Get inbound links from relevant high PR authority sites using your keyword phrases as anchor text.

Don’t pay for them from cheap outfits – that will get you caught and it won’t get you banned, but it won’t help you. Don’t ever get involved with any linking schemes – they don’t work anymore. Those “you link to me and I’ll link to you” schemes are terrible… your PR out and PR in negate each other. You get a tiny bit of credit but it’s simply not worth your time to do it any more. The single best way to get inbound links from high PR authority sites is to use paid directories like Best of the Web and Yahoo Dir. If you have a huge spend available then buy every directory listing that gives you a do follow link that you can find. Avoid any directory that links to a lousy community of course.

5.) Add a good H1 or H2 title as the opening characters on a blog post and use more h2’s for subtitles throughout your blog post.

6.) Add some bold or italics or even some bold + italics text on the page. Use secondary keywords for these.

7.) Link out from the page to at least 1 high PR authority site. You can link out to a hand full but try not to go over 5 for an average post. If it’s a list of some kind then by all means link out like crazy. If it’s a site you like and trust, use do follow outbound links. It’s going to take PR from your page whether you use a do follow or a no follow anyway.

8.) Use at least one interior hyperlink with a keyword you need for the target page. You can use 2 or 3 internal hyperlinks if you want but remember each takes a percentage of the potential PR on that page.

9.) Add bulleted lists and ordered lists when you can. I try to get one per post at least.

10.) Use targeted keyword phrases in your text. Use them several times and especially at the very top of the page where they are deemed “prominent”.

11.) Add Alt tags for images using keyword phrases. Don’t over do it with alt tags. I don’t use them on every photo but I do use them maybe once or twice on a page.

12.) I always add images to every blog post and static page. I don’t know if this helps much with ranking but I think it must because it makes the blog posts more robust.

13.) Play the Universal Search game.

Google loves to find references for search phrases in meta titles, on page text (especially in H1 or H2 tags), anchor text from inbound links, in alt tags, and in Podcasts and Web Videos. It’s called Universal Search when Google includes all forms of media. Get yourself some web videos that are relevant and use keyword phrases you are trying to hit for in their titles.

14.) Encourage commenting and respond to good comments.

Allow Do Follow on good and relevant comments but strictly do not allow spam comments. If surfers know they can get a good do follow link from you they will more often than not leave you a good comment. Spammers and spam bots will feast on it if you let them. Use the Akimet plugin developed by Matt Mullenweg and delete all spam comments frequently. I eyeball every comment and delete all except for the 1 or 2 decent comments from real people and friends. When your WordPress site is popular enough you can just do away with the do follow and go to the default of no follow.

15.) Be cleaver with your blog post titles.

On WordPress sites I have that are “heated up” where they have been around a while and I post to frequently… my post title goes to #1 on Google within a few minutes of me submitting the blog post. That’s not just because I’m a good SEO, but also because I use 3 or 4 word titles that I carefully construct that will get me hits for my keywords but will not be competing with IBM or HP for top ranking on 1 or 2 word phrases. Trying to rank top 10 for a title like “web hosting” is nearly mission impossible. Trying to rank top 10 for a title like “cheap reseller web hosting” is doable.

16.) Check your robots.txt file every once in a while to make sure it is not blocking bots and search engine spiders.

The robots.txt file is an ascii text file at the root level of your WordPress site that gives specific instructions to search engine spiders that they may or may not abide by.  Usually the directives tell bots where they are welcome to look and where they are not welcome to look. The big SE’s will usually agree to your robots.txt directives but sometimes in the search for images even the big bots will ignore exclusion directives here. You can even try to tell “bad bots” to stay away from your entire site, but that rarely works. You can also specify the location of your sitemap.xml file.

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

17.) Keep your sitemap.xml file updated, and since it’s so time consuming, make sure you do it automatically.

Search engines look at the sitemap.xml file on your WordPress site to see if you have added a new file. They also spider the site and discover files but they will get the new content faster if you automatically update the sitemap every time you add a new blog post. I use a couple different plugins for this on different sites but mostly I use the “Google XML Sitemaps” plugin by Ann Brachhold and I recommend it.

(I was not paid by any persons or companies listed in this post – Cheers – Mal)

WordPress 2.9 Batch Plugin Upgrades

My first 2 WP 2.9 upgrades went well tonight. Only 20 more to go. One of the features I’ve been looking forward to is the ability to upgrade all plugins that can be upgraded all at the same time. I can tell you from experience maintaining a fleet of WP installations is time consuming and there is a significant amount of pure maintenance work. Updates to WordPress  itself happen frequently, and depending on your site you might have 5 to 10 plugins that all get updgrades from time to time. So anything that can do the grunt work better, faster, and more efficiently is appreciated.

Note the location for the batch upgrades feature is found at:  Dashboard/Tools/Upgrade

My results were flawless on the first time around with the batch upgrade process:

So I’d like to welcome the version to a long healthy life, I’ll just mention it’s called Carmen McRae after the late Jazz great…

WordCamp Boston 2010 is Sold Out

Sold out over a month early that is. Wow. I’m glad they announced the sell out immediately because I was just about to get a hotel. My brother is at Harvard graduate school and I’ve been meaning to visit him for a while. This was going to be it. Oh well. I got shut out of WordCamp NYC last year when it sold out early too but this year was just a blast in New York with the unlimited capacity venue at Baruch College. I hope with the increased awareness and participation in Big City WordCamps that we can have a few less sell outs on the east coast.

If there is a change in the status I will post it up ASAP. And get hotel reservations ASAP as well.

WordPress Site Review – Kitty Bradshaw

I got a chance to meet Kitty Bradshaw at one of the volunteer sessions for WordCamp NYC 2009 at Baruch College. We were making name tags and chatting about WordPress and SEO. We exchanged cards and she asked me to take a look at her site. I did a site review for her last night and I mentioned a few things I would change but overall I was very impressed with the amount of artwork and the color palette match. It was visually impressive and there was a lot of eye candy for the men and the ladies in Kitty’s targeted audience. This is another Thesis WordPress Blog and like many production sites built on Thesis it was adapted beautifully from the central logo / header.

Kitty had a PR3 on her homepage and about a year and a half of blog posts so the site is primed for big gains once it’s search engine optimized. She has around 300 blog posts and they’re packed with great images and well written original content with a unique perspective. A winning combination.

(I was not paid by any of the people or products mentioned in this article – Cheers Everyone – Mal Milligan)

WordPress Automatic Upgrades

For all of us who have installed and maintained the stand alone version of WordPress since “quite some time ago”, the automatic upgrade feature was a “small step for WordPress and a giant leap for webmasters”. OK, so in the beginning and really until early 2009 all WordPress upgrades were manual. That is the new files had to be copied to a local machine and unzipped… then they were uploaded to the server to over-write the existing core files, and then the database had to be updated in many cases. Lots of work, lots of places for human error. But always exciting nevertheless.

Enter WordPress version 2.7 – Yeah !! With WordPress 2.7 in February 2009 we had automatic upgrades available for all future upgrades. (Not Automattic). So we can login to the admin Dashboard and see immediately when we have to upgrade Wordpress itself, or any of our plugins.

A word to the wise is appropriate here. Please resist the urge to upgrade everything immediately when you see the notices that you can upgrade. Be sure your backup is rock solid before you start upgrading anything. You can check my backup routine or of course use your own but make sure you can restore the entire site if something goes terribly wrong during your upgrade.

To execute an automatic upgrade with Wordpress or any of the plugins that support automatic upgrade, you will be challenged for login credentials like this:

And following a successful upgrade, you will be rewarded with this screen… note this does not mean your new files will work. This just means that the upgrade process appeared to have completed successfully. Immediately after any upgrade, I check to make sure my plugins are all playing properly together. But that’s another story. Cheers -

WordCamp NYC Genius Bar – Bring It On!

And you thought the so called “Apple Genius Bar” had a trademark on the phrase “Genius Bar”? No way. WordPress fans have their own version of the Genius Bar and the WordCamp NYC event will have one all day on November 15th at Baruch College. I’m working as a volunteer at the event but I’ll be bring my questions to the bar with the other WP Padawans. I’ll be asking my NJ web design buds if anyone has the courage to deliver. Steve Bruner who was the original organizer for this year’s event mentioned he wanted to have one if we had enough Geniuses to support it over a month ago. And now there are enough. There are over 50 presenters at the 2 day event and from the field we’ve managed to get enough WP Guru power to have the Genius Bar this year.

From today’s WordCamp NYC 2009 newsletter:  “The idea behind the genius bar is a place where you can come to ask your toughest (or easy) questions to members of the WordPress community and get great answers. Whether you are having a problem with your WordPress theme or want to know the best place to find a new one, have a question about a plugin or two, or just want to know the best way to get started with WordPress – we are there to help! ”

If you want to and can volunteer to work the Genius Bar, please contact Barry at http://barry.wordpress.com/contact-me/. Thanks !!

WordPress Site Review – Frugal Kiwi

I was looking at incredible food pictures on Tastespotting as I do every once in a while. An interesting picture lead me to a beautifully designed site from New Zealand by web designer and web copywriter Melanie McMinn. The Frugal Kiwi – “Live Well Spend Less”.

I exchanged a few emails with Melanie as she described her Thesis Theme WordPress website. Melanie called Thesis as “an incredibly flexible framework”. She mentioned other WP themes she’s used and she said the features and customization you can do with Thesis left the others “in the dirt”. She went on to say the price tag for developers was very reasonably priced. I was especially interested in Melanie’s report that the built in SEO options were handy.

For me the most impressive feature was that the site was so eye catching and artistically designed. It looked like it was built from an artistic composition… if you’re in the business you would just say “a comp” or a “PhotoShop Comp”. I really like the header integration with the theme and the fact that the Nav Bar is above the header and the image flows down into the context area seamlessly. The fat footer is nicely done with plenty of links to her recent posts and categories to make navigation easy and search easy. Her widgets on the right sidebar are artistic and interesting… also fitting the overall look and feel perfectly.

The Frugal Kiwi has a Google PR3 now on the homepage and a PR2 on the About Page.

I’m going to have to look more into Thesis. I’ve heard a lot about Thesis from Rae Hoffman at Sugarrae but this is the best design I’ve seen to date on Thesis. Nicely Done Melanie – cheers !!

(I have not been paid in any way by any companies or persons listed in this review – Mal Milligan)

Backing Up WordPress

Sometimes there is a right way and a wrong way to do something. In this case, there are a lot of right ways to get your Stand-Alone WordPress blog backed up. I’m going to demo my system and you can use it if you have a similar set of parameters or just get a grasp on the tasks if you have a different set of circumstances.

The official core WordPress document written to help you with backups is one you should be familiar with. It’s on the official WordPress Codex and it’s located here: http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Backups

I’m running on a Unix host with a Plesk Dashboard / Control Panel.

• Make a copy of the local folder where you keep your WordPress blog. After I copy the entire folder / directory tree, I usually rename the old one to wordpress-blog.old and then I’ll make a brand new folder (empty) for the next step.

• Use FTP to copy the entire directory tree from your server / host down to your local folder. With the latest versions of WordPress allowing version updates and plugin updates to the server directly, you really have to make a fresh local copy of whatever you have currently on the server / host. In the past my master copy of a WordPress blog would be local, but since I use the automatic update feature constantly with updates to WP and plugins, the master is always on the host these days.

• Backup the database. Lots of ways to go about this. The first is to do it manually. You can go to your Plesk dashboard and then access the db via phpMyAdmin. There are a staggering number of possible combinations selecting the export manually, so I just use a WordPress Plugin. The one I have been using lately is called: WordPress Database Backup and it’s located at: http://ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup/ This plugin allows you to set it for weekly backups to the server, to an email address, or a “Johnny On The Spot” backup to your local machine.

That theoretically covers the backup portion and you will find other references on the internet for the “3 step WordPress backup” in a number of places.

You will normally restore this backup to the original location if you have to but you can also use this backup to move your WordPress installation to an entirely new location. I’ll cover that in the next post.

Why use WordPress?

There are a lot of reasons why Web Design WorkPlace builds WordPress websites instead of using the old traditional HTML designs of the past. The biggest reason is that Google loves WordPress, and that’s easy to prove.  We are firm believers that no matter how beautiful a website is, if it doesn’t rank well on Google, the business value is entirely questionable. Here is list that I can rattle off from the top of my head on why we use WordPress instead of traditional HTML.

Advantages of WordPress Websites over traditional HTML websites:

1. Google praises WordPress. Well known Google evangelist and Anti-Spam Manager Matt Cutts has made numerous favorable comments about WordPress for a few years and he uses WordPress instead of Google Blogger for his own personal blog. In June 2009 at the San Francisco WordPress “WordCamp” Matt Cutts said [if you use WordPress] “you have all made a fantastic choice”.
2. WordPress sites have many SEO features built in so they work automatically.
3. Adding new pages and content to a WP site is as easy as adding a new blog post. New content keeps search engine spiders on the site more frequently. Content is King and WordPress makes it easy to build a content rich website.
4. Admins can add content to a WP site from an iPhone or any hand held device.
5. Adding content does not require any programming knowledge whatsoever.
6. Since WP is built on an Open Source platform, the top developers in the world can access the core software components to fix problems and make upgrades. The old saying “two heads are better than one” was never more evident.
7. It’s FREE
8. WordPress is incredibly cross-browser compliant. While it takes a long time to build and fix cross-browser compatibility problems with HTML, most of that work is already done for us by the WordPress development team.
9. Internal page linking and cross-linking with WP sites is automatic in many cases and easy to setup in others. In traditional HTML sites, internal linking usually means more hard coding with Dreamweaver.
10. WordPress sites are insanely configurable. It’s easy to make a WordPress blog look like a traditional website with a unique artistic style all it’s own.
11. WP sites are built around a CMS database so they take advantage of many content management system advantages natively that are hard to implement with traditional HTML sites.
12. There are thousands of freeware “Plugins” that are software modules designed to take care of situations that would require tons of programming time to implement on a regular HTML site.
13. Readers can make comments to new content and Admins can choose to approve or delete these comments or they can turn the comment feature completely off.
14. The Control Panel can be updated instantly to allow guest writers or alternate admins to join and participate in the site management.
15. The core programming framework and all the plugins can be automatically updated from a single Dashboard. Out of date software is clearly indicated from the Dashboard.
16. The “Themes” concept allows the entire look of the website to be changed in a single click without any additional programming
17. New Plugins can be located, evaluated, and automatically installed from the Dashboard using search commands.
18. New security issues for WordPress sites are resolved frequently and patches are made available to emerging threats immediately.
19. There are dozens of Premium WordPress Theme developers with large active communities.
20. While traditional HTML sites can be nearly impossible to fix when the original programmer is not available for future changes, WordPress sites built by one developer can be fixed or updated easily by another developer. The content is kept in a MySQL database, so it’s largely independent from the core WordPress programming structure.
21. User friendly. The world wide user community is active and vocal keeping every feature as easy to use as possible.
22. Accessibility. There is no other website platform in the world that is more user accessible than WordPress. People will various levels of viewing capabilities can use WordPress sites without additional programming modifications.
23. Easy to install. Most hosting packages have a feature to do a “1 click WordPress install”. Even using the traditional install method takes about 20 minutes. There are countless resources to help with WordPress installs.

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