We’ve been waiting for Wordpress 2.8 since yesterday and finally, the latest and fastest version of WordPress, version 2.8 “Baker” has been released today with a one day delay.

New version has been named in honor of noted trumpeter and vocalist Chet Baker. Baker version gives  better user experience with many new features and has fixes over 790 bugs.

I just started using Wordpress Baker and will soon let you know about my 2.8 experience. I wonder if it has any new features to make our blogs and websites  more SEO Friendly.

Here is a video to give you some insights of what 2.8 is all about:

According to Wordpress Codex, WordPress is going to release Wordpress Version 2.8 next week, on June 10 2009. 2.8 will bring many enhancements and new features and hopefuly less bugs than version 2.7.

Check out  Codex if you want to see how new version will improve user’s experience and what new features it will bring.

I hope image upload problem that is so common with 2.5 and above versions will no longer be around with Wordpress 2.8 as I am so tired of looking for solutions and still haven’t found a long-term fix yet.  It can be very frustrating to see HTTP Error or just a blank white page especially when I am working on my client’s websites. Keep fingers crossed for next week and please let me know if you have a fix for image upload issue.

Anyone who has a website or a blog can make money from these assets by letting ad spaces to advertisers online or joining to affiliate partner networks. But owning a website is not enough by it’s own, there should be a good traffic coming to your website and you should prove your statistics to your advertisers in order to request an advertising fee unless you own a very well-known website with a high page rank etc. If you join to an affiliated network then you should have a good traffic to see leads and convertions.

I’ve just found out that there is a Wordpress plugin which shows your Google statictics as unique number of visitors called Google Analyticator. I guess there are several other tools free to use but what if you are not happy with your number of visitors?

Improve your website traffic with SEO

The best thing to do is increasing your natural traffic by Search Engine Optimization. SEO is a great way to drive visitors from search engines, increase the value of your website in figures and to generate sales and income through your website. Stick on on-page SEO practices for the beginning and once you are happy with it, go for off-page SEO tactics like link building and spend at least an hour everyday by visiting forums, micro-blogging sites and relevant websites to improve your visibility. It is not the most joyful thing to do but it is fruitful at the end.

If you need help in your SEO practices or simply need SEO services, give me a shout now!

Wordpress is a wonderful platform for blogging and it can even be used as a CMS solution for a professional company website by just some clever adjustments. ( See one of my clients website in real estate market ) Optimizing Wordpress for better search engine rankings is easy and there are several plugins ready to use on your optimization process. Here are a list of useful Wordpress Search Engine Optimization tips to help you build a SEO Friendly structure in your blog.

Optimization of Internal and External Links

SEO Smart Links is a great plugin for internal link building. It can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog, allows you to set up your own keywords and set of matching URLs. It also adds “nofollow” attribute to external links and opens links in a new window.

Optimize your meta tags and dublicate content 

All in One SEO Pack  is a must- have plugin. It addresses many important on-page factors like titles, descriptions, keywords, dublicate content and saves time.

Optimize your permalinks

Use either /%postname% or /%category%/%postname%/ permalinks URL structure while optimizing your URL’s. You can do it from your dashboard by going to Settings>Permalink Settings and custom your structure in common settings area.

Optimize your titles

Use your targetted keywords while giving titles to your posts. Don’t make your titles too long and try to use most attractive keywords for both search engines and real users.

Edit your template for header tags

Header tags are important factors when telling search engines what important topics are covered in your content. Make sure your template uses <h1>, <h2>,<h3>,…tags in important sections of your pages and use header tags yourself while creating content wheneven applicable.

Use Robots.txt file and Sitemap

Use Google XML sitemap generator, a great one-stop plugin for your sitemap needs. It creates a robots.txt file and addresses your sitemap itself so you no longer need to do it yourself.

Socialize your blog

Social bookmarking is a must-do off-page link building strategy and  there are several plugins helping you at this point. I am using Add This plugin which has rich array of features, not only enables bookmarking in several favourite sites, but also printing and emailing the content as well.

Refresh your content regularly

Don’t use copy and paste method to create content as major search engines won’t rank your content unless it is unique.  You should deliver fresh content to your blog regularly so search engines would visit and crawl your website often and rank you higher.

Promote your social micro-blogs and vice versa

You can use plugins for social micro-blogs like Twitter, FriendFeed. For example Twitter Tools creates tweets in Twitter whenever you post a new content in your blog, with a link to the blog post. It is a quick-win that leeds Twitter users to your website.  It is also an intelligent way to extend your network and followers in those social websites.

Create a community 

You can use subscription plugins like Subscribe2 to send email notifications to a list of subscribers when you publish new content to your blog so your readers would visit your website regularly as long as you provide new content.

If you know other ways of optimizing  Wordpress please let me know…

I love wordpress. It is easy to set up a blog and enhance it by plugins day by day. Thanks to all those Wordpress community for their efforts.

Now, let me tell what my favourite plugins are and please send me your opinions and your favourites as well.

Akismet
Google XML sitemap generator
All in one SEO pack
WP super cache
Contact form 7
Flexible upload
SphinnIt
Twitter tools
Twitter for Wordpress
Date exclusion SEO
Advanced category excluder
Umapper
SI Captcha

Do you have any other suggestions?

When we want to upload images in a post using Wordpress 2.7, it sometimes comes with a blank white screen and upload doesn’t accomplish successfully.

I tried different plugins and spend sometime with heart attacks and finally found the solution. Happy days.

My recommendation is Flexible Upload plugin to over come that drawback of 2.7 version. It works quite good however rarely gives the previous white page error and all you need to do is deactivating the plugin and activating it again. Hope it helps.

********UPDATE********

The problem appeared again and flexible upload couldn’t fix it this time. So, I guess it can be helpful to a degree but don’t stick to it for long-term. Please let me know if you have other suggestions for Wordpress image upload problems.