Amongst the topics covered in Matt’s presentation were:

• What is Pagerank, and how is it distributed?
• How to identify and incorporate keywords into your posts
• How to write compelling blog posts
• Building a reputation

Not only does this presentation from Matt cover the fundamentals and best practices for optimising WordPress for Google search engine rankings, but is a great resource for any budding internet marketer who wants to learn or confirm the basic principles of SEO.

 

View Matt Cutts’ WordPress presentation here

No related posts.

If you’re interested in automatically embedding actual thumbnails (that is, automatically generated images of website pages which appear as images)  into your WordPress blog using a simple plugin, now you have not one, but two choices.

Read the below excerpt from an email from ShrinkTheWeb, who have created the latest addition to the WordPress Thumbnail Auto-Generator plugin pile.

Hello,

If you are a WordPress user, this might interest you…

You may already be aware that we offer a WordPress plugin that
will allow you to easily show mouseover preview bubbles for
links in your posts. Now, we have enhanced that plugin with a
long awaited update.

Many people have been asking for us to make it easier to embed
screenshots in posts without having to copy/paste code. So, we
are releasing v1-1-0 of our plugin:
http://www.shrinktheweb.com/uploads/stw-wp-thumbnails.zip

With this new version, we introduce the ability to embed a
screenshot of any website by simply using a tag set. Example:

We also support all six(6) default sizes for embedded previews.

Installing the plugin is simple and quick. Simply upload to your
WP plugin directory, activate, and adjust the settings to your
liking. It\’s that simple!

Best wishes in 2009!

-ShrinkTheWeb

http://www.shrinktheweb.com

Looks like we now have another contender for WordPress plugin of the year! It looks like these guys are really honing in on WordPress as its use across the world continues to flourish.

So take your pic (sic). Will it be ShrinkTheWeb, or PicDonkey, that gets your vote?

My next tip to both ShrinkTheWeb and PicDonkey, and whoever else out there is developing these nifty little applications is, when can we get rid of those pesky “Thumbnail currently queued for processing” message. Only then will we achieve website thumbnail bliss!

No related posts.

So what does this little script (and I mean little, it’s just one line of code) do? Well, you know those tiny little pictures of a website’s homepage, that take heaps of mucking about to create (especially when your graphics editing skills are sub-standard, to say the least!).  An online application called Websnapr inserts a little bubble next to every hyperlink you create, allowing your users to preview websites before actually visiting,  just by hovering over the little speech bubble icon beside each link.

This means you, as the website administrator or blogger no longer have to muck about creating those thumbnails yourself! S-weeet, you know have more time to waste on Facebook! And it also means your visitors are less inclined to click on links and leave your site unless they really really want to, thanks to Websnapr’s nifty ability to allow visitors to preview other websites without actually leaving YOUR site!

Websnapr and its various thumbnail apps have been around for some time, to make your life a whole lot easier. If you want to reap the rewards of the Websnapr suite of apps (and yes, they are FREE), sign up for Websnapr, and you will be able to create thumbnail images of any website or URL in mere seconds.

If only everything on the web was this easy!

No related posts.

A year or two ago, I created an Archives page on WordPress blog (on tshirtalert.com), however it required a bit of PHP coding that I’d rather avoid unless completely necessary. So I was desperate to find a plugin to avoid getting my hands dirty with PHP code.

And my discovery was nothing but good news. It seems that these days, you don’t even need a plugin to create a WordPress Archives page. WordPress has the smarts to create on for you, if you just follow a few simple steps outlined on the WordPress Codex.

Those WordPress guys really are trying to make our lives easy aren’t they….once you’ve created your own archive, post a comment with a link to your brand new shiny WordPress archive page.

No related posts.

It’s called the Google XML Sitemap Generator , and if you have a WordPress blog then YOU NEED THIS!

Why? Because this handy little plugin, which literally takes 30 seconds to install and generate a sitemap, does all the hard work for when it comes to getting your new blog posts and pages indexed by Google as quickly as humanly possible. This is a must for anyone who is interested in WordPress Search Engine Optimisation (otherwise knownin simple terms as ‘getting as many hits as possible to your blog’).

That should be 99% of you out there – the other 1%, perhaps you should take a little beach holiday and think about what it really is you want to achieve in life…

Everytime you edit or create a post, the Google XML Sitemap Generator plugin updates a sitemap which sites on your server.  For example, the sitemap created for this site is here http://www.breadmilkdigital.com/sitemap.xml

All major search engines that support the XML sitemap protocol (of course, the most important one at this point in time being Google because of its dominance in the search engine marketplace) will then be notified of the sitemap update automatically courtesy of this neat plugin.

Having the Google XML Sitemap Generator is a vital way of ensuring search engines are crawling and indexing the most recent and relevant information on your WordPress blogs.  Go install it now.

No related posts.

You can’t go past the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin.  I’ve installed it on a few of my sites (tshirtalert.com, and this very blog that you are reading, breadmilkdigital.com) and can vouch that plugin is one of my most important WordPress tools, as well as being quite addictive and entertaining, as I watch my stats climb and fall according to how much coffee I have consumed (and consequently, the quality of my blog posts!)

If you need a little bit of help with the whole installation process and setting up a Google Analytics account, this article might also assist.

Happy wordpress-google-analytic-ing!

No related posts.