Just recently I’ve worked on two sites that needed a way to display testimonials and a way to collect them from clients via the website itself. With WordPress there are several ways you could achieve this, this is just the method I happened to come up with recently.

Most of the time, for testimonials I end up using the Testimonials Widget plugin. Mostly I like the widget that comes with it which rotates individual testimonials. It’s pretty user friendly to get up and running with as well.

Since I use Gravity Forms (cupcake, AKA affiliate link ) on pretty much all my client sites, it made sense to put the two plugins together to create the submission system. Gravity Forms comes built-in with the ability to have a user submit a form which gets saved in your WordPress site as a post. The Testimonials Widget plugin uses Custom Post Types to create a customized edit screen for adding new Testimonials. Fortunately there is a free plugin for Gravity Forms which extends that capability of saving form entries as posts,  to custom post types as well. It’s appropriately named Gravity Forms + Custom Post Types. Once the plugin is activated it integrates seamlessly with the usual Gravity Forms creation process. 

So basically we’re going to make a Gravity Form which will collect the testimonial info and save it as a Draft testimonial. So then all my client has to do is publish it. Before we make our form we need to know what elements to add to it. If we look at the Edit screen for a Testimonial we can see that what is typically the Post Title field is being used to collect the name of the person submitting the testimonial. The main post body is where the testimonial text goes. Then there are some custom fields which can be used to gather additional info if you want such as the company name etc.

So here’s the process to actually create the form. You may want to add in other fields, I’m just focusing on the Testimonial-pertient parts.

1) Create a new Gravity Form by going to Forms > Add New

2) From the Post Fields section on the right choose “Title”. Since the person filling this in won’t know they are actually submitting a post, I’ll label the field “Your Name” instead of “Post Title” since that’s the info we’re really asking of the user. Click on the Advanced tab to see the CPT magic. You’ll see the “save as post type” option and you can select “Testimonials” from the list.

I make sure it’s saved as a Draft so that the client can approve them before they go live on the site. I don’t worry too much about the other settings for this field.

3) From the Post Fields section add a “Body” field. This will be where the customer enters the actual testimonial itself.

4) If you want to collect any of the extra data that the Testimonials plugin offers, such as company name, just use as many “Custom Field” boxes as you need. For each one you can map it to a particular piece of info. So if I want to ask for the client’s company name I’ll select “testimonials-widget-company” from the drop-down of existing custom fields.

5) After someone submits a testimonial using this form, their entry will be saved as a Draft under Testimonials for you to approve or otherwise.

Easy! The one “gotcha” I came upon relates to using specific categories to organize your testimonials. If you have a custom taxonomy for this, it doesn’t actually show up in the Post Fields section as you might expect. You have to use a Drop Down field from the Standard Fields section. If you click on the Advanced tab you can then choose “Populate With A Taxonomy”.

Let me know what you think of this method in the comments. Or if you have a better way, I’m all ears!

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Seems like podcasts, especially of the video variety, are having revival at the moment. Here’s a few WordPress-related ones worth checking out. They are all feature some very smart developers and other members of the WordPress community so it’s a great way to learn about best practices and generally what the latest trends are within the community.

WP Watercooler

This weekly WordPress-centric Google Hangout is the brainchild of my friend and WP multimedia expert Jason Tucker. Every Monday at 11am PST, up to 10 WordPress developers, designers and consultants gather on Google Hangout to discuss a WordPress topic. Sometimes they even stay on topic ;) Hilarity and wisdom ensue.The hangout is streamed to YouTube so you can watch live or catch the archived episodes on WPWatercooler.com. If you prefer audio you can subscribe to the audio-only version via iTunes and Stitcher.

The DradCast

The sexiest duo since Brangelina, Dre Armeda (of Sucuri.net) teams up with Brad Williams (of WebDevStudios.com) for this weekly show which features the fellas choppin’ it up with a guest host each week. These guys have WP clout (that’s ACTUAL real life clout, not that fake Klout stuff), so guests have included Matt Mullenweg himself (co-founder of WordPress) , Chris Lema, Adii Pienaar of WooThemes and more. The show is usually an hour + long so they really get deep into topics.

MattReport

Matt Medeiros focuses on the business side of WordPress for this podcast where he interviews WordPressin’ entrepeneurs. A great podcast for freelancers to follow. Guests have included Thomas Griffin, the guy who created one of the best slider plugins around -Soliloquy and many other interesting characters.

YourWebsiteEngineer

Dustin Hartzler is a WordPress developer who shares his knowledge on this great podcast. You always learn something new here. Definitely recommended if you’re interested in development or simply going beyond the basics.

If you have a fave WordPress podcast not listed here, please share in the comments!

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While on the Facebook recently I was targeted with an ad that told me that if a certain 9 year old child can make WordPress websites, I should be able to as well.

It’s not the first time I’ve seen such marketing messages that tout WordPress to be so easy that a kid can do it. Even putting aside (which trust me, was reeeaaally hard for me to do!) the fact that the product seems to have been made by some cheeseball internet-marketing-bandwagon-jumper-type and that it’s all possibly fake anyway, this approach to selling WordPress irritates the bejesus out of me for a couple of reasons.

First, when you tell me I should be able to do something a kid can do, it makes me feel kind of dumb and it also makes me feel like you are being condescending to me.

Way to set the tone. (And I’m someone that does know how to make websites. So imagine how that feels to someone that has found it difficult to learn WordPress!)

Of course, I get the point they are making – WordPress isn’t rocket science so get over yourself and build that site you’ve been talking about. Fair enough. And yes, a child could quite feasibly set up and manage a blog.

But the second and more important reason it bugs me is that it ignores a glaring reality that anyone who has actually tried to teach WordPress would understand:

It’s precisely because you are NOT 9 years old that you may find WordPress hard at first.

When people come into learning a new skill thinking it’s going to be a piece of cake, they will get frustrated much faster than someone who believes they will have to make a little effort. So while I do believe that most people are more than capable of learning how to use WordPress, we do have to recognize  and acknowledge some of the challenges that come when adults try to comprehend something completely new.

We Have Baggage

For some people it will be as easy as it is for a 9 year old. But for most it will be a little more challenging. I’m not saying WordPress is difficult but adults typically bring way more baggage to learning that a child does. I’m no neuroscientist, but every day I have the opportunity to observe how people approach and learn WordPress.

What I’ve seen is that the technical part of using WordPress is rarely the barrier. The mechanics are relatively easy to teach. But it’s all the emotional and mental stuff along with our habitual patterns that we bring into the learning process that often trips us up.

As adults we do have years of building mental constructs to overcome. There’s a reason that as children we can learn languages seemingly by osmosis but that it becomes harder as we get older. However some adults more than others tend to buy into the “you can’t teach old dogs new tricks” style of thinking. True, our brains may have some pretty entrenched pathways, but we can work to change those, and if you want to learn something new, you will have to. That’s actually quite exhilarating and most people feel very satisfied and excited by accomplishing this new understanding

That Hole Is The Wrong Shape

Ironically those that come to me from old school IT backgrounds, or from the days of building static HTML websites and have heard how WordPress is so easy, often have the hardest time. When we’re kids one of the first skills we learn is to put the triangle-shaped block in the triangle-shaped hole and so on. As adults however, we tend to get worse at this game and spend hours trying to change the hole to fit the block we have in our hand, instead of looking for the correct-shaped hole. People often try and fit WordPress into their existing mental molds when in reality you just need a different mold.

So how can you prime yourself for learning WordPress (or anything really)?

Try to get out of your own way and try and keep the following in mind…

As the old Zen story goes, if you bring a full teacup, there is no room for any more tea.

Your mental teacup must be empty if you want to add more learning to it. So no matter how technical you are or what you think you know about building websites, temporarily forget what you think you know and come with a fresh and open mind.

Have a child’s excitement.

You’re about to learn a new skill that could change your business and open up all kinds of new ways to connect with people. That’s pretty awesome, no?! Approach with a sense of wonderment and you’ll have fun!

Drop your ego at the door.

It’s OK if you don’t just “get it” right off the bat, most people don’t. But trust me, after a few tries and some practice, it’ll all start to become clear.

Watch your mental chatter.

Our minds are pesky things. Left unchecked they will come up with all kinds of ways to convince us why we can’t do something, why we’re not smart enough etc etc. Don’t believe everything you think, it’s mostly nonsense anyway :)

Share your story of learning WordPress – stumbling blocks and/or tips in the comments!

Last updated: April 2013

Another recent WordPress security scare  involved the popular plugin, Social Media Widget. This was one of my favorite plugins and was dismayed to hear it had been compromised and could inject malware into a website. As soon as WordPress.org found out about the problem an update to the plugin was issued to correct it, and it was yanked from the repository so it could no longer be installed. Since then, the developer of the plugin has profoundly apologized (scroll down the thread to read his response) and explained that he hired some programmers to work on it and they committed the evil deed without his knowledge. The safe version of the plugin is now back in the WordPress repository and available for use. However this has left many people skeptical about using it, and therefore looking for alternatives.

This plugin provided you with a new widget that would display icons with links to your social profiles. Those can be quite easily hardcoded into a text widget if you know HTMl, but for most clients, that’s too fiddly and difficult to update or edit. Social Media Widget was the perfect solution. The great thing about this plugin was that it offered a very comprehensive selection of social profile icons, in different sizes and with some nice rollover animations. You could even upload your own custom icons.

As yet I haven’t found another plugin to match all these criteria but here are my three preferred alternatives:

Social Web Links

plugin info

Social Web Links has a very broad selection of social profiles, but if you don’t see the one you need on the list you can add it yourself, or you can also add your own custom  icons to replace the plugin’s defaults. It includes the usual social networks in addition to many that are less commonly found  such as Amazon, Spotify, Lanyrd, Lastfm, Slideshare,and many others. There are no rollover effects on the icons, but if you use obscure social networks, this could be the plugin to go with. It also allows you choose whether to display the icons horizontally or vertically, and with or without displaying their names.

Simple Social Icons by Nathan Rice

plugin info

The nerds out there will appreciate that this plugin takes a different approach than most. Instead of using actual images, it  actually uses a font. If that has no meaning to you don’t worry. What it means for the regular person is something quite cool –  you can easily control the color of the icons to match your site and can easily apply a different color on rollover. You can specify the size to anything you want and are not restricted to the usual 16, 32 or 64px sizes. The set of social profiles included seems complete without being overwhelming – all the major ones are there including Pinterest and Instagram. The plugin is by a very respected developer Nathan Rice, so you can have peace of mind when using it.

Zilla Social

plugin info

This plugin is not in the WordPress repository, meaning you won’t find it when you go to Plugins >Add New and search. You have to get it from their website in exchange for your email address (they haven’t spammed me yet). They are a WordPress theme development team that I had heard of before and they make some pretty sweet-looking themes , so I wasn’t too concerned about downloading it, but I do still wish it was in the WordPress repository since generally that makes me feel safer.

The selection of social profiles offered is expansive and the icons look really sharp. There are no rollover effects but if you don’t care about that, it’s a good choice. For the more technical of you, they also provide a shortcode and a php template tag so you can show your icons pretty much anywhere in your theme.

Honorable Mention:

Brankic Social Media Widget – Offers a choice of about 50 social profiles, but each instance of their widget seems to only allow for 8 to show up. This would be more than enough for most people, but it seems like a strange restriction. Instagram was NOT included and there is no choice of size. The widget looks pretty slick but the other plugins noted above seem more flexible. Only use this if you don’t need Instagram and like how it looks right out of the box.

Tested but decided against:

Social Media Icons Widget – I think I tested this because it was one of the first that came up in the search. It functions OK but overall just seems outdated and a bit limiting. It does have several sets of icons you can choose from, which the other plugins do not offer – this is really only useful if you’re going for a more novelty look rather than a modern look. However the social network selection is missing both Instagram and Pinterest.

Do you have a fave social media widget plugin that I haven’t listed? Share with the class in the comments!

If you’ve been on the internet in the past week or so, you’ve probably heard about the spate of “brute force” attacks that have been made on WordPress sites, specifically targeting accounts with the username “admin.” It has always been a security best practice to not use this username, or any other similarly generic one but the recent attacks have highlighted the issue to the masses, which is really the silver lining here.

The reason “admin” is the target is because it is the default username that is assigned upon installation of WordPress. If you install WordPress through your hosting control panel, you are usually, but not always, given a chance to change that before installation, but many unsuspecting folks, especially new users, may not see a reason to change it. So now a hacker has 50% of the information that he needs to get into your site. Since most people use extremely weak i.e. simple, passwords, hackers can automate the submission of zillions of attempts at guessing your password. If your password isn’t strong, they have a good chance of gaining access.

So the easiest step you can take in securing your site is to delete the admin user account if your site is using it. To verify whether it exists (even if it’s not the username you are personally using) simply log into your site and go to Users > All Users and look in the Username column for “admin”. If you find it there, skip to Step 5 below. If you yourself log in using the name “admin” you must take the following steps:

1. Click Add New and set up a new user account with a different username
2. Give this account a STRONG password. Random numbers/letters/characters are best. This won’t be a problem for you if you use a password manager like 1Password or LastPass.
3. Assign the role of Administrator to this user.
4. After creating this account you then need to log out of the “admin” account and log back in using the new credentials you just set up
5. Go to Users > All Users and mouseover the admin name – you will then see the “Delete” option. Click Delete
6. On the next screen you will be asked if you want to assign all the posts that were created by “admin” to another user (yes you do!) – choose your new user account and then confirm the deletion.

Congrats! Your site is now more secure.

Other small steps you can take:

1. Install the Limit Login Attempts plugin which is designed to prevent brute force attacks.
2. Make sure you’re running Cloudflare on your site. Cloudflare can intercept a lot of attackers before they even reach your site and took a proactive stance when these attacks started happening.

If you are ever in the unfortunate situation of having your site hacked, I recommend you contact Sucuri to clean it up for you. They are the leaders in web security and for a low fee will clean your site and provide monitoring going forward.

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I recently had to find a mobile solution for a client. Their theme had been custom made a while ago and was not responsive so the easiest route (and the one that fit their budget) was to use one of the many available mobile plugins for WordPress.

What’s the Difference Between A Responsive Theme and A Mobile Plugin?

A responsive theme adapts to the size of the screen it is being viewed on, so it retains a consistent overall look and feel. The mobile plugins work in various ways – some of them do let you use a responsive theme of your choosing, but oftentimes they install their own mobile theme which could look significantly different than your standard theme, but it may have some handy mobile-specific features. A mobile plugin will detect the actual device being used (rather than just the width of the screen) and show a different display based on that. It’s a quick and easy way to get a mobile solution for your site. Retrofitting an existing theme to make it responsive requires custom coding, so for many people, a plugin is the easier way to go.

Criteria for Comparing Mobile Plugins

As I played around with various plugins, several key distinguishing factors emerged. So before you start looking at plugins you may want to think about these factors and how important they are for your circumstance so you can make an informed decision:

• How much could the look be customized, either through an options panel or through custom CSS?
• How does the plugin handle widgets?
• Ability to choose which devices the mobile version would be displayed to, i.e.  could you treat tablets differently than phones? My client in question specifically wanted iPad users to see the desktop version of the theme, not the mobile version.
• Can I provide a separate navigation menu for mobile devices or would I have to use the same navigation items as the regular theme? This is useful if you have a lot of pages but you want to provide a more streamlined experience for your mobile user.
• Ability to choose a different homepage for mobile
• Does the plugin provide its own mobile theme or does it let you select from a theme you may have on your current WordPress installation?
• How does it handle image resizing?

I tested a number of plugins – below are the ones worth mentioning, either because they are a good solution, or because you should avoid them! If you Google for WordPress mobile plugins you’ll find tons of lists and there are some reputable sites (not mentioning names) that are making poor recommendations that do not seem to be researched. So that’s why I’m including some plugins that I would not recommend because you’ll see them listed elsewhere by people that clearly have not tested them, and I want you to know the real deal!!

MobilePress

Plugin info

• Allows you to choose a specific homepage for mobile site
• Comes with one mobile theme included which is pretty clean looking. You can create and upload your own custom mobile themes.
• Doesn’t display your widgets
• The hugely major problem I found is that there seemed to be no navigation menu! I have to imagine this is a bug rather than intended behaviour, but in any case I saw a lot of other people also complaining about this in the forums, and no solutions offered.

NOT RECOMMENDED

WP Touch (Free and Pro versions available)

Plugin info

I think this plugin has been around the longest. It’s certainly one of the most referred to. It gets quite a bit of flak from developers and others for its sterile look,  but after testing it, I find that view to be very shortsighted. The Pro version in particular gives you quite a bit of control over customizing the icons and the look as a whole and if you take a minute to play with the options you can avoid the sterile default look and create something more custom-looking. The in-built themes of most of the mobile plugins discussed here are actually all quite similar at the end of the day.

Free Version

• Can select a page to use as the mobile home page
• Can upload custom icons
• Allows you to enter google adsense for ads in mobile posts
• Smooth handling of image resizing for small screens

Pro Version

• Can choose to show your regular site  to iPad users (this is a big deal – most plugins lump tablets in with mobile phones)
• Can specify a custom navigation menu for mobile
• Includes a couple of different mobile themes each with various customization options for the look
• Can easily create a child theme for further customization
• Widgets are not displayed be default but developers can create a child theme and add some code to enable widget display
• Can customize header, footer, all the icons and more.
• There are actually a ton of other options in the Pro version that get quite detailed which I didn’t find elsewhere. I recommend you read all of them on the plugin site (linked above)

PRO version RECOMMENDED, Free version is a little stiff looking.

WordPress Mobile Pack

Plugin info

• Can deliver mobile site based either on browser detection or mobile domain
• Lets you turn on and off your existing widgets for mobile version – this is a powerful feature I did not find elsewhere
• Can choose any of your installed themes to serve for the mobile version (so doesn’t have to be your currently active theme, as long as it’s viewable on your Manage Themes tab, the plugin can use it), or can use one of their basic included themes. WordPress’ Twenty Twelve makes for a good mobile theme and looks better than their included themes.
• Doesn’t offer a separate mobile homepage or navigation menu .
• The styling for the menu in the plugin’s own mobile themes is very primitive and not attractive especially if you have drop-down menus.
• Widgets are displayed at the bottom of the screen
• Overall look of the in-built themes is so-so – fairly clean but a little dated
• The handling of image re-sizing of the plugin is really bad!  If you enable the “shrink image” feature,  it makes images way too small, but if you don’t enable it, your large images will be too large for a small screen.

Worth looking at if you have a basic blog, but if your content is not blog-based, I wouldn’t recommend it, especially if you have more than a few items in your nav menu.

WP Mobile Detector

Plugin info

• Allows to choose whether to show mobile version to tablets or not
• Widgets are placed at the top of the page in a clickable tab
• Has a couple of mobile themes included
• No way to provide mobile specific homepage or navigation
• The MAJOR problem with this plugin is that it places an ad at the bottom of the screen which you cannot switch off.
• Even worse is that after you click on a few pages it interrupts with a full screen video ad!! Again, there is no mention of this in the plugin info and you can’t turn it off. Yuck!

AVOID LIKE THE PLAGUE due to the spammy handling of advertising.

Mobile Smart (Free and Pro versions)

• Pro version allows you to define mobile specific content on each version of your page/post
• Mobile specific  menus only available in Pro version
• Lets you choose any installed theme to use for mobile, so again, you would have to have a responsive theme in your WordPress installation for it to work. The plugin does not provide its own mobile theme.
• Free version does allow you to turn off mobile theme for tablets
• Free version has some developer features for customization, such as template tags, but regular users won’t get much use out of that.

The free version is recommended as long as you don’t need to customize menus and homepage for mobile. The Pro version is only $13. I didn’t purchase it, but it seems very reasonable for the extra features.

Obox Mobile

plugin info

This is only available as a paid plugin for $60

• Can choose which page to use for mobile homepage
• Can set up a mobile specific menu
• Has some  basic but pretty clean looking in-built mobile themes
• Does not seem to display widgets
• Has a comprehensive set of options, comparable to WPTouch Pro
• Has a in-built featured slider which can be enabled
• You can provide custom logos and background
• Image scaling works well
• There are 5 in-built themes or you could custom create and upload your own.
• Major downside is the lack of ability to turn off the mobile theme for tablets. I personally think that a $60 mobile plugin should include that feature.

RECOMMENDED as long as you don’t care about treating tablets differently than mobile phones.

Conclusion

WPTouch Pro and Obox come out tops for me. I couldn’t use Obox for my client because of the lack of iPad control, but otherwise its solid. Both these plugins have comprehensive options, withWPTouch Pro having a slight edge (for me). If you’re looking for a free solution I think I  might use Mobile Pack  or Mobile Smart with a responsive theme such as Twenty Twelve. The Pro version of Mobile Smart is inexpensive so for a budget-friendly solution with more options, that could be good.

A couple of tips before I go:

If you have a caching plugin running on your site, you may need to make some tweaks so that the mobile version works correctly on the right devices.

Without actually owning all the various mobile devices, it could be hard to actually test out these plugins. But an awesome method I found was to install an add-on for the Firefox browser called Override User Agent. This lets you have your browser act as if it were a mobile device (and it has a good list of devices to choose from) so that the mobile plugin you are testing thinks you are an iPad 9or whichever device you choose), and therefore you can see how the site will look on that device. Extremely handy!

So that’s my roundup. What has your experience been with mobile plugins? Have one you love? Leave a comment!

It’s been a little while since I’ve done any WordPress webinars or in-person classes. But I finally got around to setting up a few. Just to clarify, webinars take place online only whereas classes are conducted in small groups in the Los Angeles area. Those sexy folks that are on my email list always get the first opportunity to sign-up and they always get a coupon code for discounts. So if you are not yet a member of my email list, now is a good time to fix that….Go ahead…I’ll be here waiting….
SIGN UP HERE

OK, so below is the upcoming schedule with links for more info and registration. Both webinars and classes have a limited capacity so early sign-up is recommended. Classes will have no more than 9 people so that everyone will receive a lot of value and have their questions answered. Webinars will also include Q&A time and online access to the recording afterwards.

Upcoming WordPress webinars:

Introduction to Search Engine Optimization for WordPress
April 23rd, 11am – 1pm PST, $25

How To Maintain Your WordPress site: Backups, Updates and Maintenance for Speed and Security
May 7th, 11am – 1pm PST, $25

Upcoming In-Person WordPress Classes:

How to Choose WordPress Themes: how to decipher demos, what to look for plus a tour of some major themes
May 1st, 7:30pm – 9:30pm, $40

Build an Email List – Using Mailchimp with WordPress
May 15th, 7:30pm – 9:30pm, $40

Ecommerce with WordPress: Sell Products and Services
May 29th, 7:30pm – 9:30pm, $40

This guide is current as of v 1.4.4 of the plugin, March 2013.

This post is really long so I’ve turned it into a .pdf for easy reading and printing (but think of the trees before you print). 
Download the PDF version of The Complete Guide To Using The WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast 

The WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast is on most lists of ‘must-have’ WordPress plugins. As much as is written about, the extensive set of options it provides can seem intimidating, especially to newer users.

Yoast has a fair amount of commenting and explanatory text throughout the plugin screens so I won’t duplicate anything he’s saying there, but just try and clarify the less obvious parts.

SEO > Dashboard

Security

If you are an advanced user, leave this unchecked, but otherwise it’s ok to check it, particularly if you have multiple users on your site that might wreak havoc with this.

Webmaster Tools

Yoast provides a very handy way to verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools, Bing webmaster tools and Alexa. Each of those services will give you a meta tag to paste into your code as a method of proving your ownership of your website. However by pasting the meta tag here you can save yourself the need to touch any code. Google Webmaster Tools is a must-have account since it will give you useful information about the health of your website, and will provide enhanced info inside your Google Analytics account. Bing webmaster tools also provides some helpful info, including a good keyword research tool. As for Alexa, well it won’t do any harm to verify your site there but in all honesty I personally don’t put a lot of stock in Alexa and I rarely use this. Below you can see the meta tag that Webmaster Tools provides you. The underlined part is what you will paste into this field of the SEO plugin.

SEO > Titles & Metas > General

Title Settings

Force rewrite titles – This box relates to how the meta titles for each page are produced by the code. It may be necessary to check this box depending on your theme. Sometimes there’s a conflict between the WordPress SEO plugin and your theme which may also be outputting some SEO info. The typical indication of this is duplication of the meta title. You can check for this either in the source code of one of your pages, or at the very top of your browser window:

So if you have strange output like this you will need to check the “Force rewrite titles” box to resolve the problem.

Sitewide Meta Settings

noindex subpages of archives
It’s recommended to check this box to avoid people performing a Google search and ending up on, for example, page 2 of your archives which may not be the best place for them. Archive pages change over time as you add new posts – so something that is on page 2 of the archives today, could be on page 3 tomorrow. It’s not ideal to have people land on these pages because they may not be able to easily find what they are looking for. You want people to always land on the most relevant page/post for their search and typically that’s NOT an archive page.

use meta keywords – This is not needed because no search engine uses these for ranking any more.

add noodp tag and add noydir

Generally speaking you’d want these boxes checked, although it may not make any real difference to your site unless it’s listed in the Yahoo or DMOZ directories. This makes sure that search engines don’t use Dmoz and Yahoo meta descriptions for your site, instead of the meta descriptions you will provide. These directories used to be authoriative guides to the web but now they are significantly less so, so there’s no value in using info from those listings.

Clean Up The Head

By default, WordPress outputs a lot of extraneous information in the <head> section of your site. This is a section of code not visible on your webpage itself, but if you use View Source in your browser you’ll see it. The less irrelevant code Google has to crawl through the better, so Yoast allows you to clean up some of this unnecessary stuff.

Hide RSD Links - These are used to connect with 3rd party services that use xml-rpc to publish remotely to your blog. For example, I use Diigo for bookmarking websites. It has a feature that lets me post directly to my blog from Diigo. For this remote publishing feature to work, the RSD links have to be visible to Diigo. When I used this option to hide the link, I could no longer connect Diigo to my blog for this type of remote posting. If you don’t use any 3rd party publishing like this, you can check the box. It can always be un-checked at a later time if necessary.

Hide WLW Manifest Links – You can check this box unless you use Windows Live Writer. If you don’t use, or even know what WLW is, you can safely check it ;)

Hide Shortlink for posts – WordPress provides what it calls “shortlinks” for your posts (which are really just the default permlink with the number at the end, not a real shortlink like bit.ly). Again, if you don’t use, or even know what the shortlinks are, you can hide it. It’s not a huge deal either way, but hiding them will make your <head> code more compact.

Hide RSS Links – If you have a blog on your site, do not check this box.

SEO > Titles & Metas> Home

This is the section where people tend to get confused. A couple things to understand.

First, one must understand that one of the major points of this plugin is that it allows you to control the meta information for each piece of content on your site, in all the ways that WordPress displays it (homepage, single post, tag archive, category archive etc)

Secondly, “titles & metas” refers to the meta title and the meta description which determines how your site’s pages/posts appear in Google search results pages.

What is a meta description or meta title template?

Ideally you would hand-craft the title and description for every single page or post. But if you’re only starting this process when you already have a lot of content not yet optimized,or perhaps you have authors who you think won’t fill it in, the templates you can create in this section allow something to be output in the event you don’t handcraft it, or if you just want to “set it and forget it”. So at least you will be providing some information to Google rather than nothing at all.

The template is created by replacing the variables you see with the content from that post. So for example, %%title%% will be replaced with the title of the post or page in question. %%sitename%% will be replaced with whatever you have designated as your site title in your Settings > General > Site Title

This template would translate to this for an individual post:

All the possible variables are found in the Help tab. The defaults that the plugin sets up are pretty good to use for templates, but as I mentioned before, hopefully you’ll be customizing on a per post basis (see below).

Even if you set up templates, you can still customize individual pages/post by filling in the info in the WordPress SEO box on that individual piece of content as described later. The template just makes sure that your title and description aren’t totally empty.

Homepage

In WordPress, if you have set your blog posts to display on your homepage, you’ll need to use this section to control the Title and Description specifically for your homepage. If you are using a static homepage, you can control the info on that individual page.

The default is the site name then description as you’ve set in your WordPress Settings – but you can override that here with more specific info.

Author Metadata

This is for Google Authorship. If yours is a multi-author blog you may not want to specifiy one author for the homepage. But you will want to specify your Google business PAGE as the publisher. This adds the necessary rel=publisher to the <head> of your site for Google to detect. You also need to go into your Google Page and add a link from there to your website to complete the loop.

SEO > Titles & Metas > Post Types

This allows you to set up templates for the output of the meta title and description for every regular and custom post type on your site.

Meta Robots: I don’t recommend checking this box unless you know what you are doing since it will prevent an entire set of content being indexed by Google. There are definitely use cases for this, but if you’re a beginner, best to leave alone.

Date in Snippet Preview: There’s varying schools of thought on this. Generally speaking you would want to show the date in the snippet preview if you run a news-style site that has time-sensitive content. For other sites you’ll probably want to leave it un-checked.

WordPress SEO Meta Box - this is the box that appears on the editing screen for every individual piece of content on your site – allowing you to customize the meta information for it. 99% of the time you need to leave this un-checked.

If you have custom post types (such as a portfolio, or products for example) they will automatically show up here and you can customize them just like regular posts and pages. If your custom post types have archive pages, they will show at the bottom of this screen.

SEO > Titles & Metas > Taxonomies

Allows you to control meta information for all the taxonomies on your site such as tags and categories, in addition to any custom taxonomies generated by themes or plugins.

SEO > Titles & Metas > Other

Here you can set up meta information templates for other archive pages such as date-based archives, author archives, as well as your 404 pages and search pages. You’ll notice that for the Date Archives the default is that the “noindex, follow” box is checked – this is to avoid duplicate content issues on your site so it’s good to keep it checked. On single author blogs, you may want to do the same for the Author Archives since it’s just showing the same content that’s already available on your blog homepage and category and tag archives.

SEO > Titles & Metas > Help

This tab contains all the variables that are used in the meta info templates – use it as a reference or if you’re creating your own template, you’ll find what you need here.

SEO > Social

This is a very cool feature of Yoast’s plugin, but you should make sure you don’t have other plugins duplicating what’s being done here.

Facebook OpenGraph

As long as you don’t have another plugin also outputting Open Graph info, you’ll want to check this box.
When you (or someone else) posts a link from your site to Facebook, it typically displays with a title, description and thumbnail. If your links are not showing up with the correct or desired info, it’s probably because you have not specified your OpenGraph info. This is a set of tags in your site’s code that Facebook looks for in order to gather info about the page and use that info when shared on Facebook. If you don’t provide it, Facebook is left to its own devices and sometimes that results in random thumbnails showing up etc.

So the WordPress SEO plugin can output that info for you, but other plugins also do it, so only turn it on if you don’t already have it in place. Or turn off the other plugin instead.

To see if your site is outputting open graph info you can view the source code of your site and look for the following og tags:

Facebook Insights and Admins
By clicking “Add Facebook Admin” while logged into your Facebook account, it will allow the plugin to detect your FB user ID and set it as the Admin for your website so that you will get insights (stats) about your website inside Facebook.

Frontpage settings
Since you may have several different images on your homepage, particularly if your front page is a blog, you’ll want to specify which one should be used when someone shares a link to your homepage.

Default settings
This is the fallback image to be used if a post doesn’t have any images.

How Social Works:
The plugin will find any images in the post and assign them each an og: image tag. This means that when someone shares the link on Facebook, they will have a choice of thumbnails to assign to the post.

Note that Google Plus also uses the OpenGraph Protocol to determine how shared links show up.

Google Authorship: WordPress SEO will create the necessary markup in the code for Google Authorship – that’s where your photo shows up next to your content in the search results pages. In order to make this work, you need to go into Users > Your Profile and fill in the link to your G+ profile there. You also need to add a link to your website in the About section of your Google Profile.

Twitter: WordPress SEO can add the Twitter meta data that would be needed to have a more detailed summary of your post show up inside Twitter when shared, but that feature doesn’t happen automatically on Twitter. This is not due to the plugin, but due to Twitter itself. You have to submit and be approved here for participation in Twitter Cards:
https://dev.twitter.com/form/participate-twitter-cards

SEO > XML Sitemaps

Having an XML sitemap helps Google find all of the content on your site quickly and efficiently. The XML sitemap automatically updates as you add new content. This type of sitemap is designed for bots not humans.

You should submit this URL to your Google Webmaster Tools account. inside Webmaster tools, from the nav menu on the left, click on Optimization, then Sitemaps. You will see the Add/Test Sitemap button at the top right. Click that and then Submit Sitemap. add your sitemap url and you’re done.

Note that an XML sitemap is designed for search bots, not for humans. Read this post for understanding the difference between XML and HTML sitemaps

If there are certain post types that you never want to include in your sitemap (because you don’t want Google to know about them and index them) you can exclude them all here, but you can also control it indivudally per post type.

SEO > Permalink Settings

This is fairly advanced stuff – most typical users will not have need for it. Yoast’s comments are pretty well detailed here.

SEO > Internal Links

Breadcrumbs Settings

Breadcrumbs are navigational aids that help humans orient themselves within a site – understanding what section or sub-section they are in. They also provide help to bots in discovering all the content on your site. For most personal blogs breadcrumbs wouldn’t really be necessary. But if your site has a more complex structure that goes several sub-sections deep, or provides many ways to get to the same content, as many ecommerce sites do, for example, you may find them useful. This is what breadcrumbs look like:

All of the options in this section let you customize how you want your breadcrumbs to look and where on the site you want them to show up. However, unless you happen to be using one of a handful of themes that natively support Yoast’s breadcrumbs (Thematic and Hybrid are examples), you will have to add the code that Yoast provides into your theme. If you are a beginner uncomfortable with code, this would not be recommended. You would be best not bothering with this section.  You can check if your theme has its own method of breadcrumbs built-in – many do.

SEO > RSS

This is a genius feature Yoast has provided to foil scrapers (dodgy sites that automatically republish content from other sites without permission). They work by scraping the content of your RSS feed, so Yoast provides a way for you add a footer or header to your feed which contains links back to your site. This way, even if someone does scrape the content, at least you will be credited. If you’re not sure what to do here, just leave the default settings.

SEO > Import & Export

So let’s say you’ve been using some other SEO plugin on your site for a long time and now everyone is telling you to use Yoast’s plugin. Will you have to start from scratch or lose all that meta data you already input in your other plugin? NO! Yoast provides an import featured here which allows you to move your exiting meta information from another plugin into WordPress SEO so that you don’t have to  re-do everything. Likewise you can also export all of your Yoast data here as well.

SEO > Edit Files

Beginner users will generally want to keep out of this section. It provides easy editing access to your site’s robots.txt file (which you may not necessarily have) and your .htaccess file. For advanced users you can use .htaccess to do redirects, security tweaks and various other things but you should only be in this section if you know what you are doing!

So those are all the main settings for the plugin, but you will also find various WordPress SEO by Yoast boxes throughout the backend of your site, on almost every piece of content. So if you look at the editing screens for individual posts, pages, categories, tags etc, you will see a WordPress SEO box that lets you customize meta information for that section. The thoroughness of this plugin is one of the reasons that it is so highly recommended. It gives you tons of control.

Posts, Pages and Custom Post Types

You will see the following box at the bottom of each piece of content you are editing:

General

Earlier in this article I talked about how the plugin allows you to create a template for your meta title and description, but that you may want to customize it on a per-post basis. This is where you would do that.

Snippet Preview – If you set up a meta information template in the SEO > Titles & Metas section you’ll already see some information populated in the Snippet Preview area. This gives you a preview of how your post will look in the Google results pages, based on your current settings. You will notice that if you start typing something into the SEO Title or Meta Description fields, the snippet preview will change in real time to reflect the new information you are providing.

Focus Keyword -Many people on first glance get hung up on or confused by this field. Here’s what you have to understand – this is a TOOL only, and does NOT affect the ouput of the plugin. Using the Focus keyword field is optional, you only need to use this if you want to do the page analysis and use the check button in the Publish box.What this tool will do is the following:

You enter your focus keyword (that’s ONE keyword or ONE phrase) for your post, then after updating your post you will see a quick checklist of where your keyphrase was found.

Note that as you type in the focus keyword field, you’ll see a dropdown of suggestions – those keywords and phrases are based on Google searches, so this function helps you refine your focus keyword based on real-world searches. Click on the Page Analysis tab to get even more detail.

This tool is designed to help you improve your on-page optimization skills. If you are already well-versed you will not need this tool, but it may be helpful for beginners. The color indicator up in the Publish box shows how well you’re doing.Don’t obsess about making it turn green however – you never want to sacrifice well-written content for the sake of search engine optimization. Additionally it occasionally provides inaccurate information such as saying your keyword is not in the title when it clearly is. Each post or page should be tightly focused around one concept- that’s why you only enter one word or phrase in this tool. If you don’t know what to put it means you may not have a clear direction with this piece of content.

SEO Title, Meta Description

If your post titles are strong, meaning keyword-rich and descriptive you may not need to customize your SEO Title. However in some cases you may have crafted a clever or funny post title for your readers, but that may not be the most search-engine friendly way of describing your content. So the SEO title lets you give Google a more straightforward and descriptive title.

Everything should be written in human-friendly English (no lists of keywords or other tricks). The title should have your keywords for that post/page in it. The description is like ad copy – a compelling description of the content that will encourage people to click on your result in the SERPS.

Advanced

This gives you control over the robots meta tag for the page/post, allowing you to specify if the page should be noindex-ed and/or nofollow-ed.  Most regular users won’t need to do anything here. A common use case would be if you are creating a landing page that you don’t want to show up in search results. You can also control the canonical url for the page, or set up a 301 redirect. The latter is useful if this piece of content is perhaps out of date. You generally don’t want to ever delete pages on your site since they can result in broken links, 404 errors and poor user and googlebot experience. You can instead point a page to a better version using a 301 redirect so that users and googlebots find the new content instead. If you don’t know what any of these settings relate to, you would be advised to stay out of this tab!

Social

The Social tab provides some very handy functionality. By default, whatever you have created for your Meta Description will be used as the snippet when your link is shared on Facebook and Google+. However you may want to craft a unique snippet for Facebook that is different than the meta description on the search engine results. The Social tab lets you specify those different descriptions. Although there is a box for a Google+ description, it doesn’t actually seem to do anything. I don’t see anything different output in the code of the page, and when you share a link to Google+ it will use your Facebook description if there is one, otherwise the meta description.

 Still have questions? Leave a comment!

Sitemaps are much-hyped and oft-misunderstood. Most people have heard they need a sitemap so Google will like their site but how to go about creating one?

Sitemaps are recommended for search engine optimization to help Google (and other search engines) discover all of the content on your site. They are especially helpful when your site is large or has a complex  structure which might make it harder for Google to find all the pages on your site.

Sitemaps come in two flavours: XML and HTML

XML sitemaps are designed for search engine bots, not humans.
HTML sitemaps are more geared toward humans, but search engine bots can crawl them too.

How To Create An XML Sitemap

If you use the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast, it has the capability to create an XML sitemap. If you are not using that plugin, or are an advanced user who needs even more fine-grained control than that which the Yoast plugin provides, I recommend BWP XML Sitemaps.

What To Do Next

An XML sitemap will not be linked from somewhere visible on your site. It will live on your server, at a url such as yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml – the plugin will automatically place it on your server for you.
If you’re curious, this is what an XML Sitemap looks like:

But you do not need to place a link to it in your navigation. What you need to do is login to Google Webmaster Tools (and Bing Webmaster Tools if you have an account there) and submit your sitemap directly.

Inside Google Webmaster Tools, from the nav menu on the left, click on Optimization, then Sitemaps. You will see the Add/Test Sitemap button at the top right. Click that and then Submit Sitemap. Add the sitemap url your plugin generated for you. The sitemap will then update itself when you create new content and search engines will be notified. Mission accomplished.

HTML Sitemaps

Dubbed “HTML” sitemaps to distinguish from XML sitemaps, this is what most people think of when they think of a sitemap. A lot of websites will have a “Sitemap” link in their footer which will take you to their HTML sitemap. It’s basically just a list of links to every section of that website. It helps humans easily see and find all the content on a site, and helps search engines because they too can follow all those links to discover content.

Below is the Zappos HTML sitemap. You can see it’s a little easier on the eyes than the XML sitemap above.

How to Create an HTML Sitemap

In WordPress this is easy to do. The plugin I like the best so far is Kwayy HTML Sitemap
Simple Sitemap is another plugin you will see referenced a lot but the difference is that Kwayy HTML Sitemap includes custom post types and gives you a little more control over the output of the sitemap. Simple Sitemap is good if you only have posts and pages on your site (although custom post types are on their roadmap for the future).

After installing the plugin and adjusting any settings, all you do is create a Page on your site, title it “Sitemap” and add the plugin’s shortcode to the page. Place a link to this page in your navigation somewhere. The plugin will generate a list of links to all your content on that Sitemap page.

Do you need both?

If your site is large and complex then yes, do both. If not, I would just go with the XML sitemap. If your site is easily navigable, humans should be able to easily see and find all the content they need. This applies particularly to WordPress blogs since by placing Category and/or Archive widgets in your sidebar, you are basically providing a simple HTML sitemap to all the posts on your site. Remember a sitemap is  just a simple list of links to all your content. If you have a lot of pages or custom post types in addition to posts, then it would be recommended to use a plugin to create an HTML sitemap for those.

Still have questions? Leave a comment!
Header image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kalexanderson/6868776842/sizes/o/in/photostream/

Swiftype is a new plugin on the block. It is designed as a replacement for the in-built search feature on your WordPress site. The main thing that’s cool about it is that it has an autocomplete feature which is commonly found on many modern websites such as Amazon, Google etc. That’s where you start typing something and before you’re even finished, you see a list of possibilities that would complete your search. This is how it looks on Amazon.com:

It’s a pretty slick feature that will give your site a more modern feel. I tested it out on my local installation of WordPress and it works pretty nicely. It wasn’t quite as fast as I would have liked initially, but then, sites like Google and Amazon have trained me to expect almost psychic levels of autocomplete. However I will say that it seemed to get faster over time, meaning that if I searched for the same or similar thing multiple times, it produced autocomplete faster after the initial search.

You can check it out in action on Mixergy.com and it seems to work faster there than on my test.
This is how it looks on my test site:

Pros & Cons

One downer is that it currently does NOT index custom post types, only regular posts and pages. So if you have, say products on your site or a special portfolio section, it may not be able to display results from those sections. According to their site, adding custom post types is something they are working on.

Other cool features include the statistics you have access to in your Swiftype dashboard (which you have to look at on Swiftype.com, not from your own WP dashboard). You can see what people have searched for on your site and how many times. It’ll also show you the number of clickthroughs from the search resutls page to the actual post/page. Additionally you can integrate the information into Google Analytics. So this makes it a valuable part of figuring out how people are using your site and what they are interested in.

How To Get Swiftype Up & Running

1) Sign up for a free account at Swiftype.com and get your API key
2) Install the Swiftype WordPress plugin – available from the WordPress directory in your dashboard
3) Enter your API key on the settings page and give your search engine a name (this lets you use Swiftype on multiple websites and be able to differentiate between them).
4) Allow Swiftype to index your content
5) If your site already has a search function available, either as a widget or from your theme, then Swiftype will already be active. If not, simply add the standard search widget from your Widgets screen. Swiftype comes with its additional widget which will let you restrict searches per category. Otherwise Swiftype automatically replaces any other standard search widget on your site.

If your WordPress is a standard site with no custom post types, this is a cool plugin. If custom post types make up a large part of your content, I wouldn’t recommend it just yet. But definitely keep an eye on it, once they add this feature it’ll be a much more valuable addition to your site.