SEO Update

Get homepage images without a custom field

When the first magazine themes arrived a couple of years ago, custom fields were the big thing that drove them. Trouble is, everyone hates filling them out. Thankfully, it is very easy to circumnavigate the need for custom fields with a piece of functions.php code. We’ll also be resizing the image, using phpthumb, the which was used in the example above.

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// Get URL of first image in a post
 
function catch_that_image() {
 
global $post, $posts;
 
$first_img = '';
 
ob_start();
 
ob_end_clean();
 
$output = preg_match_all('//i', $post->post_content, $matches);
 
$first_img = $matches [1] [0];
 
// no image found display default image instead
 
if(empty($first_img)){
 
$first_img = "/images/default.jpg";
 
}
 
return $first_img;
 
}

All that is left to do is display the image on the homepage, which we can do with the following code:

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<img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/phpthumb/phpThumb.php?src=<?php echo catch_that_image() ?>&w=200" alt=""/>

The image will be resized to 200 pixels wide.

Source – WordPress Support Forums

via 10 tricks to make your WordPress theme stand out.

FreeFoto.com : Lots of images, orgnized in different galleries.

Dexhaus : Good site with excellent photos.

Kavewall : images and textures.

Digital Dreamers : Different falleries.

StockVault : Very well-known, and very good of course.

FreePhotosBank : Good choice.

via 50 sites to find free stock images.

1. WP Security Scan

This very easy to use plugin will sort out some of the basic security issues with WordPress – it’ll change your database’s name and alert you to flaws in your installation’s security, amongst other features.

Download.

2. Protect your plugins

Plugins are an easy way for a hacker to get access to your blog if they’ve got flaws in them. An easy way for hackers to find out which plugins you’re using is to go to /wp-content/plugins/, and they’ll find all the plugins that you’re using. The solution? Put a blank index.html file in the wp-content/plugins/ folder.

via 10 Easy Ways to Secure your WordPress Blog.

Protest Loudly Against Spam Blogs to Those Who Host Them

Report specific scam, scraper, and spam blogs to those who host them. Blogging about it won’t change anything. Go to the sources and those who host them.

Demand Google’s Blogspot/Blogger or WordPress.com, and other blog and social media hosting services to clean up their sites and remove all spam blogs and help you fight back against copyright infringements and plagiarism. It’s their responsibility, so remind them.

via The Year of Original Content: How to Fight Back Against Abusers | The Blog Herald.

Here are my five favorite RSS plug-ins for WordPress:

Subscribe Remind by Trevor Fitzgerald – places a small reminder at the end of each post to remind readers to subscribe to your RSS feed. Check out the below screenshot’s very last line after the related posts. (11,689 all time downloads from the WordPress Plug-in Directory)

subscriberemind

WP Greet Box by Thaya Kareeson – This plugin inserts a welcome note with a link to your RSS feed at the beginning of a blog entry very similar to what the Subscribe Remind plugin does. However, this plug in is setup for referrals from Twitter (pictured below), Google, Yahoo!, Digg, sSumbleupon, Technorati, etc. Plus it has a admin page where you can create your own welcome message for other services. (26,352 all time downloads from the WordPress Plug-in Directory)

wpgreetbox

RSS Footer by Joost de Valk – This is another plugin that adds an extra line to your blog posts that invite your visitors to become subscribers of your RSS feed. Very nice admin interface which allows you to customize the text and its location in your blog post. (22,671 all time downloads from the WordPress Plug-in Directory)

Extra Feed Links by scribu – This small plugin adds auto-discovery links for RSS feeds based on what type of page and content is displayed. It then shows that RSS feed to your browser and it will then add links to those various other RSS feeds for category, tag, search, author and comments. More options to subscribe will usually result in more subscriptions. (2,411 all time downloads from the WordPress Plug-in Directory)

Feedburner Email Subscription Form in a Sidebar Widget. This one is not actually a plugin but a way I get an email RSS subscription form in my sidebar for visitors to sign up for email based delivery of my sites RSS feeds.

To get this form in the sidebar I simply choose a Text widget in the appearance admin panel and then paste in the email subscription form code from Feedburner’s website into its text area and save it. After that I now have the below text box in my sites sidebar.

emailsubscriberssfeeds

via Five Tools to Increase the RSS Subscribers for your WordPress Blog | Weblog Tools Collection.

# Upload a blog post with a title very similar to the trending term – ideally you want your title to be an exact match of the trending term or at least at the beginning of your title tag.

# Make sure it’s pinged to Google blog search, you’ll probably have this set up by default but it’s important to be indexed early.

# Point a few links in its direction, they don’t have to be particularly high quality, perhaps from your twitter account or from a couple of popular blogs you know get spider-ed often and ideally have their links followed

# Make sure you have plenty of internal links pointing at the page – if you have a really complex page rank sculpting system in place the pages getting cached that day might not encourage the bots to spider the page you’re hoping to slingshot into the rankings.

# All the usual SEO best practice tips apply, key phrase in url, h1 etc. But you’re blogs already set up like that right?

via Using Twitter Trends to Pick Up Easy Search Traffic.

3. Show related post based on search queries

When a visitor comes to your site through a search engine, they are looking for something very specific. If they land on your site and do not immediately find what they are looking for, they are as good as gone. It would be smart for a blog to detect these search terms from search engine visitors and display a list of posts that closely matches these terms. That way if the current post is not what the visitor is looking for, they will be tempted to visit other posts relating to their search terms before they leave your site.

To implement this, all you have to do is install either WP Greet Box, Referrer Detector, or Landing Sites WordPress plugin.

4. Thank a first time commenter

Most people love human interaction. I love reading blogs because I know that there is somebody on the other side that I can email and chat with. A good way to gain loyal readers is to thank first time commenters for contributing to your blog. This helps you breaks the ice and assure your new reader that you are there if they ever want to email you.

For this feature, you can use the Comment Relish WordPress plugin.

via 9 Ways to Make Your WordPress Blog “Smart” | Weblog Tools Collection.

Copyscape

You can call Copyscape a ‘content theft search engine’. All you have to do is go to the site and type in your blog’s URL, and it scours the internet for websites and blogs that have either stolen or quoted your blog’s content. You can then decide on further course of action by contacting the plagiarist or the web host. Copyscape also provides a premium account using which you can do unlimited searches, copy and paste a block of text to look for its copies on the web, etc.

Visit Copyscape

Fair Share

Most of blog content theft these days happens using automated RSS Feed scraping. You can go to Fair Share and type in your blog feed URL. Their engine searches for plagiarised content and provides you with an RSS feed that links to the scrapers’ sites, so that you can keep an eye on the plagiarists from your feed reader itself.

Visit Fair Share

Tracer

Tracer is a pretty aggressive way to track content theft and it works only after you install its gadget or code in your blog. It then tracks user activity just like an analytics program, looking for copy paste activities on your blog. When somebody copies your content and pastes it, the pasted text is automatically accompanied by a link to your blog. Have a look at the screenshot above for an instance where the pasted text is followed by the source link.

Visit Tracer