Wordpress

WordPress jumped 32%, powering 48% of top 100 blogs

April 24, 2012 in Featured Articles, News and Updates, Wordpress by Rob  |  No Comments

There’s no doubt that WordPress is the dominating content management system, powering well over 73 million web sites, per WordPress’ Stats, with about half of those being self-hosted.

Royal Pingdom released their 2012 update earlier this month, reporting that WordPress powers 48% of the Top 100 blogs, an increase of 32% from their findings just three years ago. Self-hosted WordPress sites make up 39% of the share, with hosted (both the free wordpress.com and WordPress’ SaaS VIP services counting as hosted).

Other platforms have therefore shrunk, with TypePad dropping the most, from 16% down to 2%. In addition to TypePad, I expect to see more and more people moving to WordPress from Drupal, Blogger, Movable  Type, & BlogSmith. So does Matt Mullenweg, founding developer of WordPress and founder of the company behind WordPress, Automattic, saying:

”The last few years we’ve really focused on both the usability and flexibility of WordPress, which has resulted in accelerating growth in both big and small sites. I expect even higher adoption among the largest sites and blogs over the next year.”

If you’re interested in making the switch to WordPress, we’d love to help you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3 Surprising WordPress Uses Beyond Blogging for Business

April 9, 2012 in Featured Articles, Tips and Tricks, Wordpress by Rob  |  Comments Off

WordPress Guest Blog Series

I am guest blogging for sister company Fandom Marketing on Blogging For Business, covering some unique WordPress topics.

Here’s a summary of a recent post, with the link to the full article:

WordPress powers lots of web sites and blogs such as CNN’s blogs, and can be extended with plugins to power more common advanced needs like e-commerce or portfolios, but here are 3 surprising uses of WordPress that aren’t typically thought of together with the WordPress platform. I hope this inspires you to add more features or functionality to your own web site above and beyond blogging for business, or migrate to the powerful WordPress platform if you haven’t already.

Read the full post at:
3 Surprising WordPress Uses Beyond Blogging for Business

How to Optimize RSS to Display Featured Blog Images

April 2, 2012 in Featured Articles, Social Media, Tips and Tricks, Wordpress by Rob  |  Comments Off

WordPress Guest Blog Series

I am guest blogging for sister company Fandom Marketing on Blogging For Business, covering some unique WordPress topics.

Here’s a summary of a recent post, with the link to the full article:

Images are playing a bigger part of blogging, with themes that highlight the posts’ featured images becoming more popular, creating great visually appealing layouts. Even more so with the popularity of Pinterest and Facebook sharing, which uses an image from the page or post. Even with various methods for including specific Facebook OpenGraph code within your post, your content could be shared via other methods that don’t take the Opengraph information into account, like RSS and feed syndication or sharing services like the awesome DLVR.it or Feedburner.

Here’s a fairly simple way to include the featured image of your WordPress blog post in the RSS/Feedburner feed itself, so that services that syndicate or share via RSS, use it when posting to Facebook and other image-friendly sharing sites like tumblr or posterous, etc.

Read the full post at:
How to Optimize RSS to Display Featured Blog Images 

How to Set Up 301 Redirects to Maintain WordPress SEO

March 27, 2012 in Internet Marketing, Search Engines, Wordpress by Rob  |  Comments Off

WordPress Guest Blog Series

I am guest blogging for sister company Fandom Marketing on Blogging For Business, covering some unique WordPress topics.

Here’s a summary of a recent post, with the link to the full article:

“WordPress SEO can be maintained when moving domains or redesigning your blog using 301 redirects. It’s a vital step to keep existing search engine links working. Follow these instructions to maintain your search engine optimization on your website or WordPress blog.”

Read the full post at:
How to Set Up 301 Redirects to Maintain WordPress SEO

Today’s 3 fav WordPress plug-ins

April 1, 2011 in Tips and Tricks, Wordpress by Rob  |  Comments Off

I came across these three plug-ins, and thought I’d share them. First up, a great IE 6 warning plug-in. IE6 needs to die.. and this plug-in can help warn the ignorant:

Shockingly Big IE6 Warning

From WordPress.org: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/shockingly-big-ie6-warning/

The Shockingly Big IE6 Warning is a plugin that shows a warning message alerting the user why it is bad to use IE6, the security risk and the bad compatibility of Web Standards.

You can choose from 3 types of warning:

  • TOP, a discreet top bar
  • FULL, a fullscreen warning
  • CRASH, the mean option

 

Up next, an on-the-fly QRC generator for your blog, allow users to scan the URL using their favorite tool…

Generate QR codes

From WordPress.org: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/super-cool-qrcode/

The “Super Cool QRCode” use the Google Chart API to generate on-the-fly QR codes  for your blog.

 

And lastly, an easy way to set the favicon for your site, plus a special favicon for your WordPress Admin page.

Shockingly Simple Favicon

From wordpress.org: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/shockingly-simple-favicon/

The “Shockingly simple favicon” changes the favicon of your blog without having to edit the theme files, and put a WordPress icon in the admin interface, so you can easily spot the admin tab in your browser.

 

Until next time, enjoy!

How to set WordPress to stop prompting for FTP info

January 25, 2011 in Tips and Tricks, Wordpress by Rob  |  Comments Off

It’s pretty simple… just edit your WordPress wp-config.php file, adding the following lines:

//* FTP login credentials to stop WordPress asking for FTP details *
define('FTP_HOST', 'ftp.yoursite.com');
define('FTP_USER', 'Your_FTP_Username');
define('FTP_PASS', 'Your_FTP_password');

//*If you can use SFTP SSL connection set this to true*
define('FTP_SSL', true);

WordPress DB Optimization Made Easy

January 5, 2011 in Featured Articles, Tips and Tricks, Wordpress by Rob  |  Comments Off

Update: I located a WordPress plug-in that can be scheduled to automate your database optimization: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-database-optimizer/

Many WordPress customers ask about their database disk use, or their disk quota in general, because they are getting warning emails, or having performance issues with their site. Many times, the cause of a large database has to do with overhead in the database that hasn’t been cleaned out in a while. Overhead is caused by deleting lots of records often, and the tables become fragmented. Optimization cleans up this fragmentation. Here’s how to do it easily in WordPress 2.9.X and greater:

1. Edit your WordPress “wp-config.php” file and add the following line, perhaps near the top so it’s easy to find for undoing afterwards:

define(‘WP_ALLOW_REPAIR’, true);

2. Visit the special “/wp-admin/maint/repair.php” URL and click the “Repair and Optimize Database” button. It’s usually at one of these locations:

http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/maint/repair.php

or

http://yourdomain.com/blog/wp-admin/maint/repair.php/wp-admin/maint/repair.php

It will scan, repair, and optimize all your WordPress tables.

3. Edit your wp-config.php file again, removing the line you added. Or, set it to false.

That’s all there is to it. Reach out on Twitter if you have any questions or concerns.

WordPress Search Engine Tips

August 18, 2010 in Featured Articles, Tips and Tricks, Wordpress by Rob  |  Comments Off

Here’s how to get your WordPress web site optimized for search engines to index and display your site with the keywords and descriptions you want. With a few tips and tricks, you can make WordPress very search engine friendly, and customize it’s design to rank much better than a default WordPress site ever would.

The first tip would be to host your WordPress site yourself, not on wordpress.com.  The reason for this is because a self-hosted site is completely customizable, and can include additional plug-ins and other custom code that really makes a difference.  We offer WordPress hosting very inexpensively, and provide help if you ever get stuck or need help with doing something you can’t figure out. Here’s more information on all the possibilities for customizing your self-hosted WordPress site:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Blog_Design_and_Layout

The most popular plug-in for WordPress is “WordPress SEO”:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-seo/

A quick overview of WordPress SEO is:

  1. Change your Permalinks to “/%postname%/”
  2. Optimize your Titles for SEO: “%%title%% – Blog Title”
  3. Optimize your Descriptions to add “%%category_description%%”
  4. Optimize the More text to be keywords from each post
  5. Image Optimization: Add ALT and Title tags to images using the SEO-Friendly Images plug-in.

These quick tips above give you the most bang for your buck right out of the gate!

Some links to plug-ins, helpful info, and more detailed explainations:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/search-engine-optimization

http://codex.wordpress.org/Search_Engine_Optimization_for_Wordpress

http://www.tomrafteryit.net/boost-search-engine-optimisation-seo-using-permalinks/

http://www.seobook.com/video-google-seo-friendly-page-titles

http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

Let us know if you have any SEO tips to share in the comments, or reach out to us for more SEO help.

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