Create a Sitemap for your WordPress Blog with XML-Sitemaps

If you have done any search engine optimization for your blog or others, you have probably heard of the concept of XML sitemaps. Whether you have a site built on Ruby on Rails (ROR), or you are just looking to create an HTML sitemap for your dynamic Joomla or WordPress site, having search engine sitemaps can help robots find their way through your website.

Now if you know XML (which by the way is not that difficult), you can come up with a decent sitemap for your WordPress site. But if you are like me and post frequently to your sites, you’d be surprised how much time it will take to create a sitemap for your blog. Now keep in mind that if you have a very small blog, you may want to stick with the free version of this software, but if you have a huge website, you can save yourself a lot of time and trouble as XML-Sitemaps:

• creates XML, ROR, Text, and HTML sitemaps for your blog. This is especially useful for Ruby on Rails sites.
• Pings search engines when your sitemap is complete so they can send their robots to use your sitemaps to find about your hard to reach websites.
• Discover broken links so you can fix them in time before search engines penalize you for having them on your site.
• Allows you to create cron jobs to automate the process of sitemap generation. In essence, you can set it and forget it with this PHP script.

I have personally used the paid version of this program, and it has saved me a ton of time by automating things and minimizing the effort on my part. But a lot of my friends have not graduated to the paid version. You can create site-maps for websites with less than 500 pages. Believe it or not, a lot of my clients have less than 200, so the free version will do. You get all the formats when the process is done:

A lot of people talk about how sitemaps are overrated, and I even heard from my former boss that he thought sitemaps would hurt our ranking. But that usually comes from people who don’t want to put the effort to create sitemaps. But with this script, you can do everything automatically, so there is no excuse. Check it out for yourself here.

WordPress On Crack WordPress Programming Training

I have been searching for a PHP course that specifically addresses the issues surrounding WordPress, writing plugin for WordPress, and the ins and outs of WordPress plugins. Most books that are out there on Amazon tell you how to create an array in PHP or how to write a function, or how to connect to a database using PHP. It’s fair to say that there are a few sites that show you a little bit of this or that, but none present you with the information that you need to start from scratch and learn not only how to work with WordPress, but how to optimize your blog for search engines, and even how to write useful plugins.

So I searched, and searched. I must have read 10 PHP books before finding WordPress on Crack. I remember I wanted to learn how to write plugins for myself. Outsourcing is one way to go, but people suggested crazy numbers to write WordPress plugins for me. They told me that WordPress programmers are rare, and you’ve got to pay a premium to get them working for you. But WordPress is a PHP system. Everything in it is written in PHP.

There is so much content in this package that I haven’t been able to finish reading the whole thing in a month. Having said that, I started with the plugin programming part. I love WordPress and love learning how to do tweaks to CSS or RSS, but at the end of the day I was interested in WordPress plugin programming. Here are my favorite plugins:

• E-Mail Announcer Plugin: Notify others (with “post-to-blog” enabled) that you have made a new blog post.
• Squeeze page for WordPress: create squeeze pages and grab your readers’ information
• Search Tracker Plugin: Find out exactly what your readers are searching for.
• Opt-In Booster Plugin: Put an opt-in form right into the middle of your blog posts

There are a few other plugins available in WordPress on Crack, but once you get a hang of writing plugins, you’d be surprised how many ideas you come up with to enhance your WordPress blog without having to pay thousands of dollars to get others to do it for you.

Keep in mind that while this whole package is designed to teach you how to learn WordPress programming, you will need to have at least some programming knowledge to take advantage of the technical training in this package. You can obviously implement the SEO recommendations without knowing much of PHP. But if you know programming or some PHP, you are golden with WordPress on Crack

SEO Plugin: Virtual Silo Advanced SEO Plugin

I don’t know if you have heard of the concept of creating silos for your webpages instead of just creating sitemaps. Silos are arguably more search-engine friendly, and at the end of the day, they give search engine robots pathways to go through your pages more easily. In case you don’t know what a Silo look like, please take a look at below:

As you may know, search engine robots discover relevance based on numerous factors such as keywords, anchor texts, LSI (related terms that you can figure out using Adwords Keyword tool), and other factors. By only having one link in and one link out, you can not only pass PR effectively through your pages, you can also pass relevance more effectively. Bleeding PR has been one of my biggest headaches and that’s why I started reading on the concept of Silos. Silos are in essence one level below Blackholes (no we are not talking about astronomy here). But before you get to the Blackhole level, you want to make sure you implement the Silos technique to pass rank through your pages.

If you have a thousand pages, then changing your structure to make Silo happen is time consuming and next to impossible. That’s why I am grateful to the creator of Virtual Silo. The plugin is so easy to use, and it works right out of the box. Best of all, no programming is required to implement the Silo structure for your WordPress blog in a second.

Virtual Silo comes with many options, but you can see from above that you don’t have to do any programming whatsoever. You check a set of radiobuttons, and you are on your way. Keep in mind that the above values are what I use for my blog and may have to be different for you blog. My WordPress blog was a mess so I had to change the default values to account for a few problems.

Virtual WordPress Silo is one of the best and worthy SEO plugins that I have found on the web. The goal here is not to smash atoms, but to do a simple process for a huge blogs. And Virtual Silo accomplishes that brilliantly. You can also get Silo for Joomla but that’s outside the scope of this blog…

Create Ultimate Contact Forms With Cforms II 8.7

I got to admit that I had heard of cforms II when it came out a while back, but I never bothered to try it out as I never saw the need to create contact forms for my blog. After all, I could just put my e-mail and other information on “about me” page and forget it. But since I have used it on my business blog, I have been hooked. And I can’t believe it’s for free. But if you are looking ot create professional contact forms such as the one below, then you should definitely check out cforms WordPress form plugin.

The guys at deliciousday have done a magnificant job of designing this form plugin. When you install the plugin, it shows up next to your comments tab on your WordPress dashboard. So it’s very convenient to find unlike a few other plug-ins that are tough to figure out.

Once you click on that link, you are going to get a host of features that allow you to design your desired form. For instance, you can define read only fields, checkboxes, radioboxes, file-upload boxes, radio groups, select boxes, and password fields for your form. In addition, you can disable fields, make them read only, or even clear them on focus. The possibilities are limitless in that regard.

But that’s not all. You can customize your messages (success or failure) or change the text and button labels easily with cforms. Not only that, you can define the email address that your readers will see when they fill a form on your blog. You can also redirect them to a whole different page once they have completed your form, which is great as you can walk your readers through your sales funnel.

But what I liked the most about this plug-in was the tell-a-friend feature for some of my WordPress blog. That’s one way to go viral, and a lot of people do take time to e-mail about your service to their friends if you over deliver.

The plug-in is very easy to use, and essentially does what it’s supposed to do, create brilliant contact forms. I can’t believe that the programmers have released this for free, but then again, I am glad they did. Version 9.0 is going to be even better, so watch this space for that. You can get more technical details about cforms II form WordPress pluging on the author’s page.

Press75 Super Sale Is On!

Press75 has announced that their 4 best video blogging themes will be on sale for $299.99. You will get unlimited rights and you can remove the links in the footer and use these themes on unlimited WordPress websites. Here is what you get with this limited time offer:

On Demand Video Blogging WordPress Theme: this is one of my favorites and was just released. You could pay about $250 for the unlimited rights, but that is included as a part of this package.

TV.Elements Vlogging Theme: I personally use this one on a bunch of my websites (a tennis and a MMA site). It’s very good looking, but it was a pain to have only rights to 5 sites. I wish I had bought the unlimited rights, but that is of course included as a part of this sale.

Video Elements Theme: this is a very useful theme to run a video trailer site with WordPress (the review will be up soon). But unlimited rights to this one is also included in this sale.

Video Flick WordPress Theme: VideoFlick features a galley style layout with a primarily thumbnail based navigation. I have seen the theme used for video and movie websites. Unlimited right to this theme is also included in the package.

You can get all this for $295 on WpElements, but if you don’t feel like spending that kind of money on all these themes that you may not need, check them out one by one here.

TV.Elements Vlog Theme Goes 2.0

We had a post about TV.Elements a few weeks ago as we evaluated this excellent video blogging premium theme. TV.Elements 2.0 is significantly improved and now comes in black and white, which means you are pretty much getting two designs for the price of one. The price has stayed the same which is a big plus, but now you can do normal blogging in addition to Videoblogging. Who can beat that?

We’ll post a full review on TV.Elements 2.0 soon. In the meantime, don’t forget to read our review of the earlier version to get a taste.

How To Fix Tiny MCE’s Disabled HTML Tab

I had heard about all the issues with TinyMCE’s glitches when it comes to working with WordPress. But I had never personally experienced any glitches with it until I upgraded WordPress Jedi to WordPress 2.6.2. What happend was that TinyMCE’s HTML tab became disabled. It pretty much crippled me as I write code in Microsoft Expression and put it on WordPress. So let me tell you it’s not a pleasant thing to deal with, especially if you are late for work.

But the solution is not that hard really. It’s often a cache file that break things with TinyMCE. I found that there was a file in my content folder, under upload folder, inside the JS_cash called tiny MCE. Now it’s usually there on all my blogs, but if you remove it, it solves the issue with TinyMCE. I know that some of my friends have fixed their issues by doing a clean re-intall but I certainly don’t recommend that. So there you have it. A tiny thing like that can really cripple you and your blogging performance.