January 18th in Wordpress Tips by Wordpress Jedi . 
Buying a WordPress theme is not something you should hurry into. It’s something that you need to do proper research before taking action on. The topic is very close to my heart as I have bought numerous themes in the past few years. While it’s fun to go through designing a custom made WordPress theme, you are going to save yourself a lot of money by buying a premium theme and modifying it.
Not all premium WordPress themes are created equal. And you do get what you pay for in most cases. So if you see a theme that is going for $20 and another that is going for $400, there got to be a difference. You just have to try and find it. After having bought numerous WordPress themes, here is what I look for in a good premium WordPress theme:
- Enhancements: not every coder codes the same way. If you are buying a theme to customize and enhance it, you should try to figure out if it’s easily customizable. After you buy a theme, you are going to figure out how a coder codes. But if you haven’t bought a theme from a specific coder before, you should try to ask on forums, blogs, and Twitter about his/her previous customers. Ask them questions about their themes and do your research before paying up for a theme.
- Graphics: not every coder provides you with Photoshop files that can save you time customizing your theme (ElegantThemes is one of those coders). Think about it. If you are not really that great with graphics and you get a theme with no customizable logo and images, you are going to have to do things from scratch yourself or pay for it. It really helps to get the files you need to customize your theme fast!
- Plug-ins: some themes come with a set of built-in plug-ins. You want to make sure you get all the information you need to get going without too much trouble.
- License: before buying a theme, you want to make sure what you are paying for. Some coders ask $100 to $500 more for you to have the right to remove the footer information. Also, just because you buy a theme for $300 doesn’t mean you can use it on an unlimited number of sites. Make sure you know your rights before paying up. [click to continue…]
Continue Reading January 14th in Wordpress Tips by Wordpress Jedi . A few months ago, a very good friend of mine told me about the necessity of masking links on a blog. I own a SEO blog and I link to many resources on that blog. Some of those resources are frowned upon by Google, but I never thought that it would affect my blog if I no-followed the links. But the reality of the situation is, you should always mask your link not only to avoid any issues with search engines, but also to avoid folks from hi-jacking your links.
Thankfully, there are internal and external solutions that allow WordPress webmasters to mask links without too much trouble. Depending on your links, you should try a combination all these solutions to be on the safe side. [click to continue…]
Continue Reading December 30th in Wordpress Tips by Wordpress Jedi . Choosing the right name for your blog can be the difference between catching fire or having a blog that no one cares about. If you look at the top 1000 blogs, the majority of them have decent, catchy names. Naming a blog can be easy on the surface, but it really isn’t. A lot of us struggle to come up with an original catchy name.
I am sure you have heard of all the buzz that was going around a while back about folks using “Digg” to model their names. Then we started having “gg” at the end of 100s of new websites. While I can appreciate folks trying to use Digg’s success to come up with catchy names, it’s just too unoriginal to use the same letters. I mean I would get if you use “waterr.com” as your domain (even though it’s still not catchy).
Here is the thing. Folks want to have unique domains but they often think too hard about it. You don’t have to come up with some magical domain name to be successful. You want to have a domain that is:
- Easy to type: easy to type on a computer, a laptop, and a mobile phone such as the iPhone. For instance, putting hyphens and underscores is just not too easy for mobile visitors.
- Easy to remember: a domain that is easy to remember can help you get more traffic. Think about it. How difficult is it to remember Digg.com?
- Meaningful: I get all the crazy domain names out there, but your domain should be somewhat meaningful. Digg can stand for digging up stories.
- Brandable: a brandable domain is one that you can use to push your brand. Amazon, eBay, Digg, are all brandable names. While I have seen folks brand some not so brandable domains, it just makes your work easier if you have a catchy enough domain for that purpose.
Once you have found your desired domain, you should try to register it. Forget about registering anything obvious these days as everything is taken. You may want to consider buying a domain if it’s registered but that comes down on how large your budget is (you can expect to pay anything from $200 to $2M for a good domain). There are plenty of good domains still available to purchase. Just make sure you find a unique one that has the above characteristics (and is a .com).
Continue Reading December 26th in Wordpress Tips by Wordpress Jedi . 
WordPress has been the talk of the town lately. After all, everybody has waited so long to their hands on WordPress 2.7 that it’s not even funny. But not me. I decided to switch to WordPress 2.7 Beta a couple of months ago. Me and my folks own over 60 blogs and we updated all of them to 2.7 Beta. It has been so easy that I wonder why many other folks didn’t do it earlier.
Usability
WordPress 2.7 is much easier to use than WP 2.6. You can see your posts, comments, drafts, and everything else in between. You can also press quickies on the fly with the new interface.
Plug-in upgrade
Unlike previous versions of WordPress, no longer do you have to download plug-ins to your PC and then upload them to your server. With WP 2.7, you can do all this in one process. You can search for plug-ins using the interface, and then upload them and activate them on the fly. Can’t get any easier than that.
Version upgrade
WP 2.7 takes care of the dreaded “there is a new version of WordPress available” message that you would get when your installation is out of date. You can now update your installation by clicking a button from your tools menu. Very easy to manage 60 blogs like that.
Compatibility
When I started upgrading my blogs to WP 2.7, I was really nervous. I have bought many premium themes and have spent thousands of dollars in the process. If these themes and plug-ins were not compatible with WP 2.7, I would have had to find a way to upgrade them or stay with WP 2.6. I have not seen any major incompatibility which is great. I wish Microsoft could learn from the WordPress folks with this whole thing.
There are thousands of other reasons that make migrating to WordPress 2.7 a no-brainer. But the above reasons were the main reasons I made the jump a couple of months ago. It’s just so easy to patch your installation now, and I feel bad for folks who make a living out of hacking out of date WordPress blogs. There is simply no exucse for not having the latest update installed on your blog with WP 2.7.
What’s your take? What do you like the most with WP 2.7?
Continue Reading December 12th in Wordpress Tips by Wordpress Jedi . We are getting awfully close to the release date of WordPress 2.7. I personally believe that WordPress 2.7 is the most significant upgrade for the WordPress platform. If you are a professional blogger, you are probably familiar with the goods and bads of WordPress 2.6. WordPress 2.7 is far superior to WP 2.6 in almost all areas. Here is why:
- Simplicity: WordPress 2.7 is programmed for idiots. Not literally, but if you upgrade to WP 2.7, there is no excuse for not getting things done. Almost everything is placed where it needs to be placed. If you can type and you can press a button, you can blog. The teen bloggers are highly technical these days, but even if you are old like me, you can still do what you love without having to master the art of PHP.
- Usability: WordPress 2.7 is simply in another world when it comes to web usability. WordPress 2.6 and below were good enough in this area, but WordPress 2.7 is designed to get you more productive. No more fooling around with countless menu items, searching for things.
- Backward Compatibility: I can’t tell you how impressed I am with WP 2.7 in this area. I have over 60 blogs that me and my staff manage on a daily basis. We have not had to make any significant change to make our themes compatible with WP 2.7. Better yet, we have not updated any of our plug-ins and things are still working great. The only minor problem that we had was with All-in-One SEO plug-in, and that was solved by the programmers.
- New Features: WP 2.7 seems to be designed from scratch which makes using it a pure joy for a WP junkie like me. But lots of new features have been added to bring more convenience and security to your WordPress experience. For instance, you can now search for plug-ins by tag or keywords and download them to your server automatically. You can also update your WordPress installation without having to mess with FTP and all that stuff. If this is not simple, I don’t know what is…
Overall, WP 2.7 is one of the best upgrades ever (including Windows XP over Windows ME). The full version will be released in a flash, so get ready!
Your take: how would you improve WP 2.7?
Continue Reading December 6th in Wordpress Tips by Wordpress Jedi . 
WordPress is the most popular blogging platform in the world and it’s used by most folks as their primary website creation package. Folks just don’t use WordPress to create blogs, but they also use it to create serious corporate or other types of sites. Popularity has a price, however. Hackers are always out there to target the most popular software packages and sites that are using these packages. The attacks on WordPress blogs have been nothing short of intensive.
One way folks can figure out how to attack your site is by figuring out what plug-in you are using or hacking your WordPress account. While there is no foolproof way to avoid getting hacked, there are ways to protect it. Here is how:
You should Prevent others from uncovering your plug-ins: many hackers use plug-ins that you have installed against you. Many of these plug-ins are not up-to-date or come with security holes that can compromise your blog. Folks just type in your plug-ins URL to get a list of plug-ins that you have in place. I personally use Redirection plug-in to redirect all invalid requests to home-page. You can also put an empty index file in your plug-ins and themes folders.
You should disable user registration: a lot of folks like to give their readers the ability to register accounts on their blogs. That is simply not a good idea as it makes protecting your blog more complicated that in needs to be. Disable registration to give yourself some peace of mind.
You should Hide Your WordPress Info: you should try to hide your WordPress version from public eyes. Many of us don’t apply the latest patches instantly, which means our blogs could be targeted by hackers. You should take out all the references to your blog presence from the public eye.
At the end of the day, you should try everything in your power to make life hard for hackers. You are never going to be able to protect your blog against hackers, but the above techniques give you a start.
In the 2nd part of this post, I’ll talk about other ways that you can protect your blog against hackers. So stay tuned.
Continue Reading December 4th in Wordpress Tips by Wordpress Jedi . Folks in the Internet marketing world are obsessed about losing their rankings on Google. Google drives a whole lot of traffic, and you simply cannot compare it to Yahoo! or other search engines when it comes to traffic potential. I used to be one of those folks who had this obsession with my rankings. If I lost a place on the SERPs, I would just get mad or completely overhaul my blog. I would check my rankings every hour to see if there had been any changes. Those are the dark age days…
Google does slap folks and sites that allow folks to take a shortcut to the top of the SERPs. Search engine optimization is all about hard work, and you cannot expect to buy or shortcut your way to the top. Now, you may come right out of the gate and have the best site in your niche, but Google and other engines are not smart enough to realize if you are “legit.” Besides, consistency matters as well, and website who have been around more than you have may get the nod over you.
Unless you haven’t been paying attention, a whole lot of folks have been complaining about their sites having dropped or disappeared from the face of Google results pages. That could be devastating if your mortgage payment depends on it. But blaming WordPress for your failure to comply with Google guidelines is just another way of not taking responsibility for your actions.
Google has prepared a whole list of guidelines for all webmasters to read, and just because you are running WordPress, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read it. For instance, WordPress does suffer from duplicate content issues, and you will need to modify your .htaccess to fix those issues. In addition, you need to make sure you have the right permalink structure to maximize your SEO rankings. Now this is important: ALWAYS look out for nasty errors in your code. My site disappeared from Google a couple of months ago, and I tried everything I could to get it back. Nothing worked. I was lucky to try W3C validator, and found out that my code had a nasty error in it that was blocking the whole validation process. Now if the validator can’t go through your code to figure out more errors, there is a good chance Google bot can’t either. Needless to say, I was back in the SERPs two weeks after I fixed the error.
It’s true that your WordPress site can get slapped by Google. But it’s also true that you should be responsible enough to take care of your WordPress site. Blaming the platform for your woes in the organic search channel is pointless and a waste of time.
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