SEO Tag Cloud Widget and More Plugins

January 19, 2010 by Kathy Drewien · Comments
Filed under: Tips & Tricks - Sites, Software, Shortcuts, WordPress - Blog Tips, Plugins & How-To

SEO Tag Cloud Widget – Love ‘em or hate ‘em, a lot of people use tag clouds on their blogs. Since their inception they have been fairly unreadable by search engines, but with this plugin they will be converted to an SEO-friendly HTML markup that can be indexed.

SEO Title Tag – Your tags are an important part of your site for making sure that search engines know where to place your posts, and SEO Title Tag focuses exclusively on this. Unlike some other plugins, and WordPress itself, this extension will allow you to add tags to your pages, your main page and even any URL anywhere on your site.

Simple Tags – An extremely popular plugin that focuses on helping you choose the best tags for your posts by offering suggestions, auto-completion of tags as you type, an AJAX admin interface, mass tag editing and a whole lot more.

Sitemap Generator – This is a more customizable sitemap generator than most with options to support multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, permalink support, choices on what to display, options to show number of comments and more.

TGFI.net SEO Wordpress Plugin – This particular plugin will do most of the usual SEO work of optimizing titles and keywords, but it adds a unique twist as it is mainly directed at people who use WordPress as a CMS.

What did we miss? Let us know in the comments.

20 Questions to Answer Before You Install Your WordPress Site

January 12, 2010 by Kathy Drewien · Comments
Filed under: Social Business - Strategy & Networking

WordCamp Atlanta answered questions about WordPress

WordCamp is a conference type of event that focuses squarely on everything WordPress. Everyone from casual end users all the way up to core developers show up to these events.

Presentations at WordCamp Atlanta covered design, development and content for beginner, intermediate and advanced WordPress users.

Several people I met at WordCamp Atlanta are not yet using WordPress. They have creative ideas and stories to share, and are attracted to the open source platform — the support of the WordPress community.

It’s easy to install WordPress and dive into blogging. Install and write. Easy-peasy.

Now, some of us are stepping back to consider more strategic questions.

Who am I? Where am I going? Why?

Seth proposed a list of questions we need to answer before we spend money on a website. WordPress is free, so we get started first, ask questions later. To be successful we must answer these strategic questions:

What is the goal of the site? In other words, when it’s working great, what specific outcomes will occur?
Who are we trying to please? If it’s the boss, what does she want? Is impressing a certain kind of person important? Which kind?
How many people on your team have to be involved? At what level? Who are they?
Who are we trying to reach? Is it everyone? Our customers? A certain kind of prospect?
What are the sites this group has demonstrated they enjoy interacting with?
Are we trying to close sales? Are we earning permission to follow up?
Are we telling a story?
Are we hoping people will watch or learn?
Do we need people to spread the word using various social media tools?
Are we building a tribe of people who will use the site to connect with each other?
Do people find the site via word of mouth? Are they looking to answer a specific question?
Is there ongoing news and updates that need to be presented to people?
Is the site part of a larger suite of places online where people can find out about us, or is this our one sign post?
Do we want people to call us?
How many times a month would we like people to come by? For how long?
Who needs to update this site? How often?
Does showing up in the search engines matter? If so, for what terms? At what cost? Will we be willing to compromise any of the things above in order to achieve this goal?
Will the site need to be universally accessible? Do issues of disability or language or browser come into it?
How much money do we have to spend? How much time?
Do we understand ‘everything’ is not an option?

What’s your experience? Did you dive in and start writing? Is your site a strategic decision? Let’s talk about it in the comments.

Missing Your WordPress Scheduled Posts?

December 31, 2009 by Kathy Drewien · Comments
Filed under: WordPress - Blog Tips, Plugins & How-To

Many WordPress users report their self-hosted WordPress site missed scheduled posts. The earliest reports of the “missed schedule” posts date back to WordPress version 2.7, with more frequent reports noted with the WordPress version 2.9 upgrade.

I believe this is because the timeout value is too short: wp_remote_post($cron_url, array(‘timeout’ => 0.01, ‘blocking’ => false));

When making a request to wp-cron.php, it won’t return until all cron jobs are executed. And 0.01 is too short. It doesn’t hurt to extend the time span, as much as 10 minutes even. It will return as long as the mature crons are fired up and executed; in most cases only a few seconds.

For those of you who know how to edit the /wp-includes/cron.php file, simply edit 0.01 to 10 and extend the time allowed for running future scheduled posts.

Detailed instructions for extending the timeout value in /wp-includes/cron.php are below. You need ftp access to your server and a text editor. I use Notepad++, however Notepad2 or Notepad may work well for you.

How To Correct Missed Schedule Posts in WordPress

Login to your ftp server account and locate the /wp-includes/cron.php file.

The cron.php file is located within the wp-includes folder.
Open the cron.php file in your source code editor.
NOTE: Save a copy of the original file to your desktop prior to editing.

Locate the following source code in the cron.php file.
}
set_transient( ‘doing_cron’, $local_time );
$cron_url = get_option( ’siteurl’ ) . ‘/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron’; wp_remote_post( $cron_url, array(‘timeout’ => 0.01, ‘blocking’ => false, ’sslverify’ => apply_filters(‘https_local_ssl_verify’, true)) ); }
Change ‘timeout’ => 0.01 to ‘timeout’ => 10
Save the edited cron.php file and upload to the /wp-includes folder, overwriting the current cron.php file
REMEMBER: Backup the original file before overwriting.
Schedule a post and test for success.