Getting Backlinks to Your Website

Any link from one website to another is called a backlink; and there are two good reasons that you need them: exposure and Search Engine Ranking.

Exposure gives more opportunity for your site to be visited by real people and search engine crawlers. The more links pointing to your site, the more visible those links and the more interesting their anchor text, the more visitors you will snatch for your website. More visitors equals more sales opportunities and more ad views.

In most circumstances, search engines are where most of your site’s traffic will originate. The more backlinks you have, the more relevant the linking page’s theme to your page and the more relevant the link’s anchor text to your page then the more value that backlink adds to your page’s search engine ranking.

You will have seen Page Rank, also known as PR, mentioned in most webmaster forums, blogs and “how to…” guides etc… Page Rank is a calculation of a webpage’s value as deduced from the number, relevance and quality of its inbound links. Most webmasters crave it whereas some think it is less important now than it used to be when it was first defined. What many webmasters don’t realize is that Page Rank is a patented process that is solely licensed to Google i.e only Google can use the Page Rank analysis algorithm that was devised by Larry Page (hence “Page” Rank). Other search engines like Yahoo and Bing use a similar algorithm to calculate a webpage’s value and relevance to their users search requests but Page Rank is specific to Google. For the purposes of the rest of this article I will use the term Page Rank generically to cover the PR algorithm used by Google and similar algorithms used by other search engines.

Page Rank (and the similar algorithms used by search engines other than Goolge) is part of the calculation that search engines use to estimate a webpage’s Search Engine Ranking. I don’t think anybody fully knows the full appraisal system used to calculate a page’s Search Engine Ranking because it is a closely guarded secret but it is common knowledge that most search engines determine part of a webpage’s Search Engine Ranking by comparing backlinks: the more links into a website, the more valuable that website is deemed; and a web page with high PR is more likely to show at the top of a search engine’s results than a page with low PR with the same or similar content.

Stop < pre > Text Overruns

Here’s the problem: when you write your own HTML or you use a content management system like Wordpress (using the HTML editor) and you want to showcase HTML code or any other code within a post then you have to do two things:

use Character Entities to represent the less than (< ), greater than (>), forward-slash (/), back-slash (\) and ampisand (&) characters so that the represented characters are displayed rather than used to designate code tags; and

use the 

 and  tags to instruct web browsers to display characters within their opening an closing tags in a monospace font i.e a font where each character has an equal width.

WordPress Tips, Tricks and Advice FAQ

This is an old (read very old) general FAQ of WordPress tips, tricks and advice found in JournalXtra. Each question is linked to the article where you can find more detailed information about its answer. This FAQ was intended to be regularly updated but I forgot to keep updating it. Maybe I’ll update it some time soon. While waiting for me to update it you can view the site index for more WordPress related stuff.

How do I automatically display article comments on every page?

Edit your WordPress template’s index.php file (also called the Main Index Template) by adding

<?php $withcomments = 1 ?>

just after

<?php get_header(); ?>

and by adding

<?php comments_template(); ?>

just before

<?php endwhile; else: ?>

The second addition might already be present. If it is, there’s no need to add it.

How do I automatically expand replies to articles so they display on every page?

See the answer to the question above this

How do I stop the WordPress TinyMCE editor’s background from using my template’s colour scheme?

Edit your theme’s style.css file (the main css file) and add

body.mceContentBody {
  background-color:#FFFFFF !important;
  background-image: none;
  text-align: left;
}

To its very bottom. Do not put it at the top or in the middle, put it at the bottom to prevent it from being overridden by other styling information.

How do I change the category listing order?

Use the My Category Order plugin.

How do I change the page listing order?

Use the My Page Order plugin.

How do I change the link listing order?

Use the My Link Order plugin.

How do I change the position of the admin login link?

1, use the BNS plugin to move the meta links (dashboard login links) to the footer of your pages,

2, use the Sidebar Login widget plug-in.

How do I add a sitemap to my blog?

Use the Google XML sitemap plugin which will create a sitemap at yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml after you’ve set it up and clicked Build Sitemap,

How do I optimize my blog for search engines?

Use the Greg’s High Performance SEO plugin, SEO Friendly Images plugin and TagPig.

How do I redirect URLs?

Use the Redirection plugin.

How do I automatically tweet my posts?

Use the shorten2ping plugin with either the Twitter setting or Ping.fm setting.

How do I automatically broadcast my posts to social networks?

Use the shorten2ping plugin with the Ping.fm setting.

How do I change the category listing order?

Use the My Category Order plugin

How do I add social networking buttons to my posts?

Use the Sociable plugin.

How do I display a message to visitors based on where they’ve come from?

1, use the WP Greet Box plugin,

2, use the Target Visitors plugin.

How can my users upload their own avatars to my server?

Use the the Avatars plugin.

How do I add a ratings button to my posts?

Some themes provide this as an inbuilt option so check your theme’s settings. Alternatively, use the GD Star Ratings plugin to add either/both ratings stars and/or ratings thumbs.

Can I add a forum to my blog?

Yes you can. Use the Simple:Press plugin to add a completely integrated forum to your blog that resides within your blog’s template. The alternative is to cross-link your blog with a non-integrated forum package such as SMF or phpBB. Simple:Press is the most integrated option in that it’s designed to function with-in WordPress and not as a standalone product.

Can I write my blog using RSS feeds?

Yes. Use any or all of these three plugins: Feed WordPress, WP-o-Matics and/or WP Autoblog. WP Autoblog has been discontinued but I do have a copy of it and will provide if you ask nicely.

Can I add more options to the TinyMCE editor?

Affirmative. Use the TinyMCE advanced plug-in to unhide the secret options hidden by the WordPress development team. This plug-in also enables you to re-arrange the editor’s buttons’ layout. There’s a button in the TinyMCE editor called the “Kitchen Sink” (it looks like a TV screen with multi-coloured dots scrolled across it): either click it or remove it to display extra buttons.

What’s the best way to add ads to my Wordprss theme?

Use the Ad Buttons plugin to create a sidebar widget into which you may display ads. It’s easier than editing your WordPress theme. Other options are: javascripts that display text-link ads; and the Linkerator plug-in which allows you to attach links to keywords without editing posts every time you want to change the keywords.

How do I put a copyright notice at the bottom of my blog?

Either edit your theme’s footer (has to be done to every theme you use) else use the Blog Copyright plugin.

Can I automatically translate my blog into different languages?

It can be done using the Global Translator plugin which creates multiple language versions of your website. When using a translator plugin, be careful to write you posts in complete sentences with few to no unambiguous words; keep your grammar and syntax as pure as possible – short sentences might work best for some people; try to not end sentences with a preposition.

How do I display random posts in my side bar?

Use the Random Posts plugin.

Can I add a link directory to my blog?

Yes, there are several link directory plugins available; I like to use the WordPress Link Directory plugin because the frontend can be customized to look as I want it to look and the backend is intuitive to use. In all honesty, if you want a serious link directory (and not much of a blog) then you can use Joomla! as a pure link directory via a plugin or you can make a few edits to your WordPress installation’s files to make it into a directory not a blog.

How do I redirect my default RSS feed to my Feedburner RSS feed?

Install the FD Feedburner plugin and add your Feedburner feed’s details to its configuration page.

Is it possible to have post tags automatically written?

Yes, use the TagPig plugin. It scans the text in your posts, compares the words and phrases within it against keyword lists held by tagthe.net, Yahoo and your site’s tag database.

Can I copy the plugins from one blog over to another blog?

In most cases, yes. Some plugins must be installed afresh but, generally, most plugins can be installed by copying yourdomain.com/wordpress/wp-content from your source blog over to yourdomain.com/wordpress/wp-content of your destination blog. Once the copying is complete, visit the destination blog’s Dashboard’s Plugins page and activate the new plugins.

What’s the easiest way to add videos to my blog?

This answer assumes you do not want to use third party hosting when embedding your own video content.

Use Viper’s Video Quicktags to embed content from Youtube, Flickr and Google etc.., and to embed your own videos as uploaded to your WordPress media gallery or directory to your server.

Is there a user friendly gallery plugin for WordPress?

Absolutely. The most versatile and user friendly WordPress gallery (to my thinking) is NextGEN Gallery. It allows you to post thumbnails, full images and slideshows in various layouts. This plugin isn’t limited to javascript, it has a php display option too (don’t worry if you don’t understand that: javascript requires a viewers browser to have javascript enabled where as php only requires the viewer to have a browser capable of displaying graphics).

How do I stop code examples from displaying outside of my template?

You need to edit your template’s style.css file by adding the following code at the top of it:

pre {
white-space: -moz-pre-wrap; /* Mozilla, supported since 1999 */
white-space: -pre-wrap; /* Opera 4 - 6 */
white-space: -o-pre-wrap; /* Opera 7 */
white-space: pre-wrap; /* CSS3 - Text module (Candidate Recommendation) http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-text/#white-space */
word-wrap: break-word; /* IE 5.5+ */
white-space: -khtml-pre-wrap; /* Safari, not working --  maybe on Konqueror khtml */
color : #000000;
width: 99%;
font-size: 14px;
}

And you need to convert all instances of < to &lt; and > to &gt; and & to &amp; within the example code.

Text Manipulation FAQ

This is the FAQ for the article entitled Huge Text File, Need to Extract Specific Lines? Here’s How. Working examples and more detailed information for each of these commands is available through that link. All these commands work in the Linux terminal, some of them will work in the Windows command line. When using sed, … Read more

WordPress: How to Auto Expand Comments by Default

Just a little gripe I have with some of the WordPress themes created by some of those amazing designers out there. Some theme designers forget to provide the option to have the comment dialogue box auto expand at the end of articles. Not a problem when there’s a button stating “add comment here” but it … Read more

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