Wordpress Leaks

Everyone these days tries to rank their site’s content higher in Google Search results. There are marketing firms earning a good deal of revenue in relation to the most notorious digital term these days, “SEO”. In this post I will be explaining the different aspects of “On Page SEO”, how to deal with it in WordPress using one of the best free plugins: WordPress SEO by Yoast.

This is a series of tutorials, in the first one we will be configuring and understanding different sections of the WordPress SEO Plugin. Future tutorials in this series will be about different aspects of SEO, how to utilize your site’s Tags & Categories, the concept of rel='canonical', a practical example of an SEO optimized post, and finally some discussion about what else you need to do after having this plugin configured.

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Our Goals

This tutorial will help you in optimizing your WordPress sites with the most popular aspects of On Page SEO. Today our goal is to configure this WordPress SEO plugin and to understand the meaning of each step.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s “natural” or un-paid (“organic”) search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users.

Why the plugin WordPress SEO By Yoast? I believe it is the best and most complete SEO plugin available for free, though not as easy as AIO SEO, but it comprises of certain vital SEO modules which are the results of the vast experience of Joost de Valk – An elite WordPress developer who developed this plugin.
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Dashboard

First of all head over to your WordPress admin panel and install the plugin named WordPress SEO by Yoast (Go to Plugins > Add New > Search for WordPress SEO By Yoast > Install it > Then activate it). After activating the plugin, if you observe the left side menu, you will find a new panel introduced with the name SEO, just like the one in the image below.

When you click it you will be inside the Dashboard of the WordPress SEO plugin. Here you can take a tour or restore the default settings of this plugin in future. More over you will find Tracking and Security check boxes.

Tracking

It allows the author of the plugin to track issues with the plugin if there are any, in future. If you are concerned about your privacy you should keep it unchecked.

Security

This option, if checked, will disallow your Editors and Authors from redirecting a post to another URL, which is one of the capabilities of the plugin. Checking this will also forbid them from no-indexing your posts. If you don’t trust your Editors and Authors, this option should be checked.

Webmaster Tools

These tools allow you to easily verify your site’s ownership by using the meta code provided by Google and Bing Webmaster tools. This option can also help you in verifying your site for Alexa (if you have their premium subscription). You can see I have filled in the Google Webmaster’s meta code.

Tip: Using Google & Bing Webmaster tools help you in understanding the behavior of your site (how much your site is linked, 404 errors, page speed etc).

After you are done with these configurations you can press the button saying “Save Settings“.

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Titles & Metas

Then comes the Titles and Metas panel, this panel helps you in configuring the title, site wide metas, and cleaning up the head. Let’s see what the options are here and how to deal with them:

Force Rewrite Titles

This option means that the WordPress SEO plugin needs to change the title tag of your installed theme, so that it can modify it as per your settings. This option should normally be ticked.

Site Wide Meta Settings

No-index subpages of archives: It should be checked as it helps your homepage to retain its importance, your Homepage is one of the most important parts of your blog.

Use meta keywords tag: I prefer to check it, as the Search Engines like Yahoo and Bing are known to give some importance to these meta keywords. These are the keywords around which your article is based.

Add noodp meta robots tag sitewide and Add noydir meta robots tag sitewide are used if your site is present in DMOZ or Yahoo Directory, sometimes Google prefers the description of your site from these directories, enabling these tags can help you remove this kind of error.

Clean Up the

There is a theory that Google prefers a clean head. Most of the SEO Analysts suggest to keep your site’s head portion clean, the top most links which the Google bot reads get more importance. I don’t prefer hiding these links, as in RSD, WLW Manifest Links and shortlinks of your WordPress posts are helpful in a way like if you use Microsoft Live Editor to Publish your posts then hiding these links is not preferred. If you plan to clean up the head of your blog anyway, I would recommend you check the first three options and leave the RSS links option unchecked. Why? Because RSS links are read by certain plugins and can get you more subscribers. Some people say these RSS links are valuable assets for your blog. Enough said!

Done with Title and Metas? Press “Save Settings”

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Homepage Settings

Click the Home tab inside the plugin and you will land on the page where all the settings of your Homepage can be found. These settings are kind of ‘set and forget’ settings. You can see the character limits in the image below, fill according to your domain name and niche.

Title: 70 Characters, can be Domain Name with Slogan. e.g. TheBookShop.com – Buy Books at Cheapest Rates

Description: 160 characters in which you will use your focused keyword once. e.g. If your site is for a book shop, you can include the term Buy Books here.

Meta keywords: Don’t spam this box, just put 5 to 6 keywords here, and you should put long tail keywords here, e.g. Download Books at Cheap Rates, Cheap priced Books Downloads etc.

After that, go to your profile page from the top right corner of the Admin Bar, fill in the Google+ URL of your profile and select your name from the users list at the Home Tab of the WordPress SEO plugin, so that your thumbnail is displayed with the exact domain name in Google’s Search. It is due to the rel="author" attribute that WordPress SEO adds this to the header with your profile link. This helps you get a good deal of exposure and more clicks. Make a Google+ page for your blog and add the URL in the box at the end, so that rel="publisher" can be added. These two rel attributes are important for your On Page SEO, and help your site rank better.

After all these settings you need to click “Save Settings”.

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Post Types

Then click the Post Types tab where you will generically configure the On Page SEO elements for Posts, Pages and Media files.

Posts SEO

The Help tab provides the details about these generic tags we are using here, but I recommend you do it the way it is done in the image below. Why? After experimenting for about three to five years, I have found these settings best. Of course, we are not going to no-index the posts, but if you tick the Meta Robots No-index then search engines won’t index your posts. Either you check the date snippet or not, if your theme supports the date tag then Google will include it in its search results. I find the date factor very important in On Page SEO, though you can find contrary suggestions about this factor from a lot of people.

• %% Replaced with the title of the post/page.
• %%focuskw%% Replaced with the post’s focus keyword.
• %%tag%% Replaced with the current tag/tags.
• %%category%% Replaced with the post categories (comma-separated).
• % This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series The Beginner's Guide to WordPress SEO by Yoast Everyone these days tries to rank their site’s content higher in Google Search results. There are marketing firms earning a good deal of revenue in relation to the most notorious digital term these days, “SEO”. % Replaced with the post/page excerpt (or auto-generated if it does not exist).

Pages SEO

Set the pages’ parameters as mentioned in the following image:

• %%sitename%% The site’s name

Media SEO

If you want to index media files separately then you can uncheck the checked box against Meta Robots, and set it like the below image:

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Taxonomies

The WordPress SEO plugin allows you to configure the On Page SEO parameters for taxonomies like Categories, Tags, Formats and any Custom Taxonomies, if you have them.

Categories VS Tags

Normally Categories are used to categorize the content into organized form, and tags are used to put more aliases for a single post. Right now our focus is towards the configuration of WordPress SEO by Yoast, so we will skip this discussion, but you will read some details about this in next tutorial of the series.

What to Do?

I don’t index both of them so that Search Engines should give most importance to my main article’s titles instead of Tags or their Categories. Here are the settings, if you see I have checked Meta Robots Nofollow so that the Google bot never indexes them.

Formats

Same goes for formats, I have checked no-index for them, you can index them if you want.

Author Archives

It is a matter of your choice, you can index them if you want or else no-index them, Joost de Valk the developer of this plugin has explained it below the options very well.

Date Archives

I recommend you no-index as shown below, you should disable them to save yourself from a Content Duplication penalty.

Other Special Pages

Search and 404 pages can have the following template settings:

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That’s All for Now…

In the next tutorial we will configure the Social part, XML Sitemaps, Permalinks, Internal links, RSS, and will look into the robots.txt file. Do you have any questions regarding this tutorial? Let us know.

P.S. I tried my best to be as generic in approach as I could. You can find a lot of contradictory opinions about what I discussed, so to be clear once again, this is how I do things at my side, and I have been working with gigantic blogs and vast networks, these settings and configurations have proven to be great in my experience.

Original from: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Wptuts/~3/sOqBQ_522js/

I’m very happy to announce that Jeffrey Way’s latest course is now out on Tuts+ Premium…and it’s free for everyone! Jeffrey is a code editor addict, he’s tried them all! He adopted Coda early on, fell in love with TextMate, and got infatuated with Vim. Until he discovered Sublime Text 2, which he says is the best code editor you can find today.

I’ll demonstrate what I consider to be the perfect workflow. />~ Jeffrey Way

In this free course, Jeffrey demonstrates what he believe is the perfect workflow in Sublime Text 2. If you’ve watched any of Jeffrey’s other courses, you’ll know he doesn’t skimp on the details. This course will cover everything from the basic core features, such as multiple cursors and the command palette, to the most popular and useful plugins you should try, to working with Sublime’s build system.

If you’ve heard people extolling Sublime Text’s virtues, but haven’t yet dug into it yet for yourself, let Jeffrey convince you to finally make some time and give it a try.

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Outline

Here’s the full lesson outline for the course. Order’s not important here, just jump straight to the parts that look exciting to you:

• Hello
• Installation and Base Settings
• Services and Opening Sublime From the Terminal
• Multiple Cursors and Incremental Search
• The Command Palette
• Instant File Changing
• Symbols
• Key Bindings
• Installing Plugins Without Package Control
• Package Control
• Your First Snippet
• Adding Snippets Through Package Control
• Easier Testing With Snippets
• Zen Coding
• Emmet
• Cross-Browser CSS With Prefixr
• Fetch Files With Ease
• Lightning Fast Folder and File Creation
• Sidebar Enhancements
• Sublime Linter
• Sexy Code Snippet Management With Gists
• DocBlockr
• Pretty Task Management
• HTTP Requests Within Sublime
• LiveReload
• Regular Expressions in Sublime
• Vintage Mode
• Quicker Stylesheet References
• Joining Lines
• Sublime and Markdown with Marked
• All About Projects
• Configuring and Mastering Split Windows
• Custom Builds
• See Ya!
• Course Quiz

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Exclusively on Tuts+ Premium

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Even better, whether you prefer the most popular books, visual training, or in depth tutorials, we have you covered.

So, if you enjoy this free course on Sublime Text, hopefully, you’ll come by and say hi! Enjoy!

Original from: http://wp.tutsplus.com/articles/news/perfect-workflow-in-sublime-text-free-course/

Knowing how to read code is one of the founding pillars of programming. While writing and practice are intrinsic to learning any programming language, much can be gained from reading the code written by other, better programmers. Just as a reading of Tolstoy, Twain and Austen is essential to the education of any serious writer (with even a book devoted entirely to this subject), every competent programmer should devote at least some time every day to reading high quality code.

Almost every programming book pays lip service to reading code, but few actually teach you how to read code. The peculiarities of a language and a coder’s personal idiosyncrasies can make a piece of code frustratingly difficult to read. You can’t really print out some open-source code, grab a cup of coffee and thumb through it leisurely as you would with a novel; there needs to be active engagement with the code and a continuous attempt to analyze its conceptual basis.

According to a research paper by the University of North Carolina’s CS department, we do not actually “read” code but, trained by habit, scan it for any recognizable mistakes, going through the function headers, then the function body, and finally resting our eyes where errors mostly reside, the loops. Effectively, what we call ‘reading’ actually amounts to actively scanning and comprehending code.

Learning how to read code efficiently is a skill that often sets apart excellent coders from the merely good. But it’s a skill that can be easily learned, especially by picking through examples of high quality code. SourceForge, Google Code and GitHub are three excellent resources for finding well written open-source code in a variety of languages.

Reading these five books with their heavy emphasis on writing and reading code will also take you a long way in acquiring this skill:

1. Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective

One of the few books to tackle the subject of reading code head on, this should be the starting point for anyone trying to learn how to read, and eventually, write good code.

This book works on the example method: the author, Diomidis Spinellis, a PhD in Computer Science from Imperial College, London, digs through over 600 real world examples to analyze how they work, how to read, and how to understand them.

2. Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective

A sister book to the above entry, ‘Code Quality’ uses real-life examples from open source projects to teach you how to write quality code. While not a particularly easy read, it is nevertheless a good book to buy for the budding programmer. Most of the best programmers in the world learn the foundational basis of writing quality code through years of experience; this book simplifies the process by providing helpful examples of well written code culled from hundreds of open source projects.

The purpose of the book might be oriented towards non-functional aspects of programming such as structure and problem solving, but the advice is equally useful for coders who want to learn how to read code.

3. Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

This book extols the virtues of clean code (even though the author, Robert C. Martin, maintains throughout the book that writing clean code is a ‘lot of hard work’) and approaches the process of writing code almost as an artist would approach an easel. Software engineering is compared to craftsmanship; the end result, therefore, must be suitably clean and sufficiently alterable by others.

4. Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

Refactoring is the process of altering the internal structure of a software program without affecting its actual functions. The end process leads to better designed, more readable, and more ‘coherent’ code that’s much easier to manage and modify.

Much can be learned about reading (and writing) code from the process of refactoring, namely, how to spot errors in code design. Learning about refactoring (a useful skill by itself) helps you read code better, as you will already be thinking about what changes should be made and how they should be made.

5. Code Complete: The Practical Handbook of Software Programming

Steve McConnell’s masterpiece, Code Complete, can be usually found proudly displayed on the shelves of programmers all around the world. Indeed, this seminal volume in programming literature has enjoyed tremendous success over the years, and is often dubbed the “coders’ Bible.”

Code Complete focuses on the principles of good programming, teaching with examples from academia as well as real life.

Going through the well-written code samples (and McConnell’s insightful commentary) is an education in itself, and will teach you not just how to read code, but also how to think like a top notch programmer.

Original from: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/speckboy-design-magazine/~3/QKp6W2m6IPY/