WordPress Plugin to Remove ‘Category Base’
Setting up correctly the permalinks in WordPress is one of the things that contribute to your blog’s better search engine optimization (SEO). Using relevant slugs for categories, pages and posts will help improve your general ranking. Those looking to get the most out of these permalinks will want to remove the ‘category base’.
There are about a dozen tutorials out there, telling you how to handle this job on your own, editing PHP files, the .htaccess file and adjusting WordPress settings, but what you actually need is one small and efficient plugin that does it all for your, with no extra effort, other than the download and installation process.
WP No Category Base
The WP No Category Base plugin will remove the category base from all your linkd in a SEO friendly way, using 301 redirects for all your old permalinks to the new ones. Also, it is compatible with other Sitemap plugins and works with multi-level categories.
Click here to read the full blog post!
How to Write a Good Link Bait Blog Post
The internet is filled with websites competing for the same niche, which makes it very difficult to attract visitors to each individual website. Without proper promotion, a website could just sit idle for days, weeks or even years and people wouldn’t notice it.
Website owners know this fact, so they have learned to adjust to the online fast-paced environment and one method of promoting websites they’ve come up with is to use link baits on their sites.
In this article you’ll find out what is a link bait, what types of link baits are there and how to plan and write the perfect link bait blog post.
What is Link Baiting?
The term ‘linkbait’ is used to describe a tool for websites designed to “lure” or generate incoming links to a particular site. It is there for the purpose of attracting web users to visit a website (increasing traffic), and as a result, they generate material which is linked and picked up by other sites.
Link baiting also pushes a site up on the search engine ladder, as a lot of search engines look at how many websites link back to yours, their quality, and measure your site’s value through these links.
Link baits definitely help promote a website, although not all link baits can be considered “good”. There are two basic types of link baits: good and bad link baits, based not on their effectiveness, but on their “attitude”.
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FeedBurner Email Subscription in Simple Balance 2.0
Since its launch, over 1800 people downloaded the Simple Balance 2.0 WordPress theme. For that, I thank each and every one of you!
The idea behind this theme was to keep it as simple as possible, yet effective. Simplicity in administration is one of the keywords behind its creation. But some things need a bit of coding knowledge to tweak.
One of them is the email subscription form, which, once you install the theme, serves only as a design template that does not work unless proper code has been added to it.
I’ve been asked via comments and email what’s wrong with it, or how can it be made functional and this made me write the following step-by-step tutorial on how to integrate the FeedBurner email subscription form in Simple Balance 2.0.
Click here to read the full blog post!
A Blog Reader’s Nightmare
How many times did you come across a blog post that seamed to deliver the right information, but the post itself was just too hard to follow? Countless times, I bet.
And so, what seamed like the perfect solution for your searches, easily turns into a nightmare.
Quality content is NOT enough
Writing a good article is obviously not enough to make people read it. There are many things that can be done to attract readers and back links to it. In the past, I wrote a few blog writing tips on how to make your blog post more readable and the proper structure of a blog post. Now, it’s time to take a look at some of the things that you should not do when writing a post.
The traps of WYSIWYG editors
For most people, the WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get) built in the blogging platform is a great tool, one that easily allows us to style our content in just about any way we want, but this “power” is tricky. Here are a few things you need to take in consideration whenever publishing a new article:
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How To Get 1000+ Visits On Your Blog From Day One
I know I wanted those visits and I got them! Further more, I kept on getting lots of new visits for a long period of time. Even now, almost 3 months after.
For me, a blog’s design is always a key element (of course, along with content) in deciding whether to come back and read again, or not. I know, I’m a designer and I have an appetite for good looking websites. But then again, would you prefer reading the same content in a unique, beautiful layout or a poor, overused one? This is one thing I’ve already told you in my past blogging tips articles, now let me argument that!
When launching Blogsessive I had to deal with the choice of winning time buy using a free, but customized theme, or creating a new one from scratch. For 2 weeks I used a free template, until I finally managed to find time to develop the one I currently use.
Beautiful easily turns into popular
When I applied the new theme to my blog, I took the time to submit it to almost every important design gallery I’ve found on Google, and went through all of them from the first 2 results pages.
Click here to read the full blog post!
Where To Find Free Images For Your Blog
After reading Kevin Muldoon’s review of PicApp.com, I’ve though about sharing some tips on where and how to find free images to use in your blog posts, like I do.
I know for a fact (and Kevin confirms this too) that many bloggers use Google’s Image Search to find free photos to use on their blogs, which is cool, but not necessarily legal. Let me explain.
The Google bot has a nasty habit of indexing every information and file that is linked from your pages, which basically gives him access to the /images directory of every website. This can be fought by using a robots.txt file to prevent search engine access to directories and files.
By indexing these folders, Google will share through his results copyrighted images used to develop the websites, or images from professional photographers’ portfolios. So, these images are not free. And so says Google:
“Image may be scaled down and subject to copyright.”
So, why risk using copyrighted images when you have quite a few options of free or extremely low-cost photos available? Check them out below.
Click here to read the full blog post!
How to Make Your Blog Posts More Readable
Have you ever come across a post title that startled your interest, but as soon as you got to the content you couldn’t read it? I did! And why didn’t I read the post if the title was so interesting? Because the content was too cluttered. Because no matter how valuable was the information, I simple could not pull my self to go through a labyrinth of words to find the good ideas.
When you’re offering quality information, are you willing to lose your readers because you did not organize your blog post the right way? It’s extremely important to have a better structure in each blog post, before you hit that “Publish” button, and by doing so, you will dramatically increase your blog’s readability.
What I need to find in a blog post
As I said, I often come across long, cluttered posts that annihilate the initial interest. I bet that most of them offered great insight on different matters, but, to make me read them it would have taken some of these elements to guide me:
Click here to read the full blog post!
How to Improve Your Readers’ Perception
A blog’s success is measured by the number and loyalty of its readers. Not by how many visits it receives daily, not even the number of backlinks. In the end, the more time your visitors spend on your website, the more pages they visit and the more they come back or further recommend your blog are the real measuring tools of your blog’s perception. In this post I’m going to cover 5 important factors that can improve this perception.
While writing about topics of interest or optimizing your blog for better search results could be enough to generate visits, the readers’ interest has to be maintained through a perception improvement.
Readers tend to react better to bloggers to whom they can relate, to bloggers that have similar views, ideas, even lifestyle. That’s why it’s very important to find your voice and give everything you write a personal note.
Click here to read the full blog post!
How To Remove the White Space in wp_list_pages()
wp_list_pages() is one of the most common WordPress template tags. Sometimes, the little white space that some browsers add to the output of this function can create a big mess in your theme’s template, making it hard to style, especially when trying to create a horizontal list. The fix for this is quite simple and requires minimum coding knowledge, if none at all.
The Problem
The wp_list_pages() generates either a series of <li> elements containing links to all of you blog’s pages, or a full unordered list with a heading at the beginning.
The output of this list looks like this:
Click here to read the full blog post!
How to register a domain name for your blog
So, you’ve just got a brilliant new idea for a blog! That’s awesome!
You already know what the blog is going to be about. Plans are shaping inside your head. You can already see titles, content, ads and you even know what theme to use.
There is only one little problem: you need to register a domain name. And not just only a domain name, but one to help you better promote your blog, one that truly represents your ideas and stands out in the crowd. In this article we will cover the best ways to find and register a perfect domain name for your blog.
Register a domain name
The first place you need to look is the website of a company that offers domain registration services, such as GoDaddy, Dynadot, Moniker or NamePros. For a comprehensive list of domain registrars, rated and reviewed, please follow this link. The minimum price of a .com domain registration with a trustworthy company is $5.99, while the maximum goes up to $9.99. Some of the domain registrars offer a free domain name along with a hosting account opened through their services.
On these websites you can also make a domain search to find out if your desired name is available. Be careful where you check the domain name availability, in the past there have been reports of companies that register your queried domain, only to offer it back for a higher price. It is always a good idea to do a search over the internet for forum topics and blog posts about your chosen registrar’s services and business conduct.
Assuming that from all your searches there are no available domain names, there are still three options that might just get you that perfect name.
Domain name snapping
Your first option would be to try and “snap” that name as soon as it becomes available. This kind of service is offered by companies such as SnapNames & Pool, where for a fee you can ask them to try and get you that domain name. Working with a “domain name snapping” company gives you improved chances to finally get that name. Assuming that there are more people who want to acquire the same name as you, you won’t stand a chance against the snapper’s bots if you try to register the domain by yourself. If you and all these people will use a snapper’s services and the domain name gets snapped, an auction will be opened and the highest offer will take the domain. If you are the only one that wants the name, as soon as it’s snapped it will be transferred to you.
Domain name auctions
If the above option doesn’t sound appealing to you, you can always check for registered domain names available for online auction, either on marketplaces like GoDaddy’s Domain Name Aftermarket, Sedo’s Domain Catalogue and Moniker’s Aftermarket or on the marketplaces available no famous internet and computer related forums like: NamePros, Digital Point or SitePoint. Here, registered users place domain names from their portfolio for sale at prices as low as $0.01. Since on these forum markets there is no contract signed, the risk of getting scammed is greater than on other markets, where the company that owns the market acts as an auction leader and payment intermediary.
Expired domains / Dropped domains
If you’ve tried both of the above options with no success there is still one think you can do, check for expired and dropped domains. Such lists of expired domains are regularly uploaded and updated on websites like StuckDomains. Since these lists are public, there is always a chance that someone else saw that name and registered the domain before you.
Tip: When auctioning online for a domain name you should first try and find out the real value of that name, including valid PageRank, backlinks indexed in search engines, domain age, domain length and keywords. All these will help you pay the right price and not more than the real value of the domain.
Thus being said, we wish you good luck in you domain search hoping that our little guide on how to register a domain names has helped you in your name hunt.
Domain Names for Bloggers
Looking for the perfect domain name for your blog? Look no further! Check out the Domain Names for Bloggers series on Blogsessive and choose from a variety of handpicked available domain names covering a wide selection of topics.
- Domain Names for Bloggers (16)
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- Domain Names for Bloggers (3)
- Domain Names for Bloggers (2)
- Domain Names for Bloggers (1)
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