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.
Most people have heard they need a sitemap so Google will like their site but what are they and how do you 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. Search engines typically discover the content on your site by following all the links that exist to your site, and within your site (your navigation etc). When you have a large site or one that has a complex structure which might make it harder for Google to find all the pages on your site, a sitemap is especially helpful because it simply lists all of the available content.
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.
The easiest way to create an XML sitemap is by using an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO or All-in-One SEO. Both have the capability to create an XML sitemap.
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.
Today's Quick Tip comes courtesy of WordPress media expert Jason Tucker. oEmbeds allow WordPress users to easily embed content from 3rd party sites such as YouTube and Vimeo by simply pasting the url of the video in the WordPress post…
WordPress.tv is a wonderful resource for WordPress users of all levels. They post all the videos of presentations gathered from WordCamp events all over the world. You can see some amazing speakers with excellent info to share.
The video below is from my friend Natalie MacLees who is an extremely talented WordPress designer & developer and also runs the SoCal WordPress Meetup group (highly recommended if you are in the LA area). She spoke recently at WordCamp Phoenix on how to go about setting up a WordPress site the right way. And don’t be fooled by the title…this is not your average tutorial about how to install WordPress.
If you have a WordPress site on GoDaddy, keep a close eye on it. This week alone two different people have come to me with site issues that have turned out to be the same exact hack. There seems to be a spate of them going on – see this thread in the WordPress forums that I came across – this is the same hack that I found. Fortunately in the cases I’ve seen it hasn’t caused a ton of damage – more a nuisance than anything, but it indicates vulnerabilities in your site. GoDaddy of course will provide you with no help at all – they won’t even check if it’s a hack, they will just assume it’s some WordPress issue and not even give you a place to start trying to fix it. I’m not a security expert so I’m not sure if the timthumb vulnerability was the way in, but in both cases that vulnerability was present. In both cases I found code added to the functions.php file as well as a few other dodgy files showing up.
