Blog Godown » Wordpress

6 Reasons Why You Should Uninstall A WordPress Plugin

Dana — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 16:47:44 +0000

This is a guest article by Dana of Blogging Tips Blog where he shares his experience with nasty plugins that deteriorate the blog’s performance and why you should uninstall a particular wordpress plugin. You too can join in by following our guest blogging guidelines

In my opinion, WordPress is the best platform for blogging because there are so many WordPress plugins available that can be used freely to optimize your blog’s functions. WordPress plugins allow bloggers to use many advanced blogging functions without the need to learn “how to code”. Bloggers only need to find a suitable WordPress plugin (which is easy to find), upload, and then install it. There is no need to do coding like in the other blogging platforms. However, since the WordPress plugins act as a third party application, it may not work well for our blog sometimes. It may slow down our blog, produce a broken layout, or cause any other blog problem.

We may be forced to uninstall a plugin to overcome a particular blog problem or if the blog’s state is very bad or it needs to improve it’s performance. Here, I share six reasons why you should uninstall WordPress plugins from your blog:

Reason #1. You Can Do It the Manual Way

WordPress plugins are used to do certain advanced blog functions without coding in the first place. However, there are many WordPress plugins that perform very simple functions. These kind of WordPress plugins load our blog with unnecessary additional interfacing and increase the load time. Also, we can replace these simple WordPress plugins with simple programming code. Therefore, I suggest that we always use the manual way instead of using a WordPress plugin for simple functions since the code will be very simple. It will be able to reduce the blog fault problems and load time significantly.

Reasons #2. Slow Down Your Blog

I already mentioned it in reason #1 but I think it is better to discuss it in a separate section. It is because of this reason is extremely important. Since WordPress plugins act as third party applications and also, they usually need database resources, sometimes there will be a significant reduction in blog speed. It is always true that too many WordPress plugins will surely slow down our blog. The bad WordPress plugins are the major cause behind the slowing down of blogs. Therefore, we should uninstall all the WordPress plugins that significantly slow down our blog.

Reasons #3. Find A Better Plugin For The Function

There are so many WordPress plugins out there and some of them provide the same basic function. It means that we can always replace one plugin with another plugin and still enjoy the same functionality (with more features and advanced functionality). Therefore, it is normal that we uninstall a WordPress plugin and replace it with a better WordPress plugin. Improvement in blog performance is a good reason behind a plugin change.

Reason #4. Conflict With a More Important Plugin

If we use many WordPress plugins, there is a big probability that a conflict occurs – a conflict between two or more WordPress plugins. I, myself experienced this WordPress plugin conflict. The conflict which forced me to uninstall some of the WordPress plugins. In this conflict situation, we will be forced to sacrifice some WordPress plugins for more important WordPress plugins. It means that we uninstall the less important WordPress plugin so that the important one can run smoothly. We can remove it forever or search for another plugin that does not conflict with the important plugin.

Reason #5. Feed Up The Blog Resources

This reason is related with our web hosting service. There are many bloggers that use cheap web hosting service which allow limited resources to be used. If our resources feed up, our hosting account may be blocked or disabled. It is legal because it is already mentioned in their web hosting contract (Term Of Service/TOS). Therefore, we need to a keep the resources’ usage below the threshold. For this, we may be forced to uninstall our blog’s WordPress plugins since there are some WordPress plugins which demand very high resources to run properly.

Reason #6. Create Too Many External DoFollow Links

As we know, too many external dofollow links can harm our blog rank in search engine eyes. It is because too many external dofollow link make search engine determine our blog as link farm site. Therefore we need to be careful and always in full control of our blog’s external dofollow link. In this case, we may need to uninstall our blog WordPress plugin since there are some WordPress plugins which require dofollow links from users.

Final Words

In my opinion, the best thing about WordPress as blogging platform is that there are many WordPress plugins available to help bloggers who do not have deep knowledge in programming. Therefore, it allows Bloggers to have advanced blog functions without the need to do coding. However, sometimes, there are reasons to uninstall our WordPress plugins. In this blog post, I already shared six reasons to uninstall WordPress plugin from our blog. If we look at the relationships between all of the reasons that I mentioned in this blog post, all the reasons are related with improvement in blog’s performance.

That’s all the updates this time, wait for the next update!

6 Reasons Why You Should Uninstall A WordPress Plugin is a post from: Blog Godown

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9 Quick and Easy WordPress SEO Tips

Melissa — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:11:57 +0000

WordPress is one of the easiest ways to start a blog, and one of the most popular blogging tools in use today. By building a reader base, you can get your opinions out there, market your own business, and even link up with advertisers to make money. Regardless of your reason for using WordPress, you want more readers. The best way to expand your reader base is to employ search engine optimization, or SEO for short, to make sure sites like Google will put your site near the top of the results where it belongs. Use these tips to boost your ranking.

1. Content, content, content! - While you want to include terms that people are likely to search for, no one is going to read a plagiarized blog, one that merely spams search terms, or nonsensical writing. People want to see originality and creativity, so pull out all the stops. Depending on your audience you may want to use humor, anecdotes, or other literary devices to get your point across and draw in readership.

2. Linking Up – Use search keywords as links to other sites which will backlink you, but only after making sure your link destinations make sense. For a gardening blog, you wouldn’t want to link to your mechanic’s business site.

3. Location is Key – Having key phrases is great, but don’t forget to state where you are. Many business sites overlook the fact that they usually only provide services to people in their immediate area. If you’re a lawyer in Chicago for example, you may want to use phrases like “Chicago attorney,” and switch that up with names of Chicago suburbs as well.

4. Education Priorities – If your website has anything at all to do with education, make sure to get reciprocal links from .edu sites. Since .edu sites are more heavily weighted on search engines, this will make your page ranking increase. Some .edu sites do actively look for link sponsors, so check around for them, or if you know anyone who works on a website for a local school district or university, talk this plan over with them.

5. Phrases not Words – Most bloggers know to switch up key terms, but aren’t always aware that most people’s searches consist of phrases in order to narrow down results. For our lawyer example, using “personal injury law,” “injury attorney,” and “personal injury legal representation” will generate many more search hits.

6. Call to Action – While you don’t want to oversell yourself by spamming your business name repeatedly (since most people won’t be searching specifically by your business name), you do want to let readers know you’re open for business. Make sure you have a strong call to action in your conclusion that links to your main business website.

7. Adapt and Survive – SEO rules change on a daily basis, so expect to start thinking of your WordPress page as a constant work in progress. Don’t be afraid to change up phrases and techniques in order to stay on top of the game, and read up on which search terms are hot in your industry at the moment.

8. User Based Content – You’ll notice that many popular sites and blogs allow the viewers to put their two cents in. Enabling features like reviews, comments, and sharing options will drive more traffic to your site, and thereby help improve your page ranking. People love to check out sites where they get to give input as well.

9. Fresh Content – Your WordPress site will fall into oblivion if not updated constantly. You can be the most talented writer in the world, but people will not visit unless they can expect new entries on a regular basis. At the very least, try to update your site 1-2 times a week to keep it fresh in the public eye.

This article is a part of the guest blogging contest. If you liked this article, then help in supporting this author by retweeting and commenting on it, which will enable the author to win this contest. By the way, you can be a part of the contest, it is still not late

9 Quick and Easy WordPress SEO Tips is a post from: Blog Godown

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Great SEO tips for Everybody

Onibalusi Bamidele — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:56:05 +0000

This is guest post by Onibalusi Bamidele. Want to write for us ?

SEO short formed as search engine optimization is a process whereby a website is being optimized to appear and rank in the search engines. So many people think SEO is not required to rank in the search engines, but i want you to know that if everything is not in place such as the robots.txt and some other on page factors then your page will not be indexed by the search engines. So many factors are entailed when talking about Search Engine Optimization but we have to deal with the important ones first.

i. ON PAGE FACTORS: The onpage factors of a website has a long way to go in affecting a websites search engine rankings. Some you need to work on are:

META TITLE: The meta title is your website’s title, it is what is being shown to your visitors by the search engines. The following are tips for choosing a good website title:
a. Let the title be attractive.
b. Let it make sense.
c. Let it be in line with the theme of your website.
d. Make sure your keyword is included in the tilte.
e. Make sure the title is as short as possible.
META DESCRIPTION: Aside the meta title, the meta description and keywords does not influence your search engine rankings, but why is there a need for optimization? You ask! The need for having a good meta description is because this will be shown to your visitors by the search engines, it will also improve your click through rate. It is possible for you to achieve high search engine without getting the right amount of visitors if you have a poor meta description. It is important to make your meta description attractive, but don’t worry about the keywords in the description because it will not affect your search engine rankings.
META KEYWORDS: This has to be the list of your desired keywords, you might not bother much about this as it is less regarded by the major search engines.
KEYWORD DENSITY: This is also a very important and overlooked method of achieving high search engine rankings, this is also very important when targeting highly competitive keywords. It is important to make sure that your keyword density is not more than %3 of your whole content.

ii. OFF PAGE OPTIMIZATION: Every other thing that can be done outside your website to improve your website rankings/traffic is called off page optimization. Some of the important off page optimization strategies are link building, Social bookmarking,Creating media awareness e.t.c.

Link building: This is one of the most important factor for ranking websites and it is very important to consider mostly dofollow websites in your link building efforts. It is also very important to deeplink to inner pages of your website from bot your website and other link sources.
Social Bookmarking: This is another method of improving your search engine rankings, and any webmaster that is not tapping this yet is missing a lot. Some good social bookmarking sites to start with are: Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, Sphinn and Twitter(social networking).
Creating Media Awareness: This can be done by creating videos and uploading them to video sites such as Youtube. Just make sure your link is included in your description and and video when doing this. It is also important to consider press release sites.

Great SEO tips for Everybody is a post from: Blog Godown

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7 Must Have WordPress Plugins

Gautam — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 05:30:32 +0000

After starting a new wordpress blog, the next step is to add functionality to it by installing plugins. Plugins are pieces of code which can be customized in the wordpress dashboard to achieve the desired function. Plugins help in optimizing and increasing the productivity of the blog. There are a lot of free and premium plugins available online, but this post will focus on 7 must-have wordpress plugins, which are very useful and are quite helpful for a rookie blogger. They are as follows :

1. Akismet

If you have just converted your blog, you will see a gush of spam comments coming your way. It is hard to tell that how these spam commenters get to know about the blog which has just been created, even when search engines are not aware of it, but they somehow manage. These spam comments make the comment moderation an arduous task. In this situation Akismet acts as a savior and it automatically filters comments which are considered spam and decreases the immense load of spam comments that come your way and reduces the moderation time.

2. Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap compliant sitemap of your WordPress blog. This format is supported by Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search and is very important for indexing in search engines and for overall SEO purposes.

3. WP Super Cache

WordPress uses PHP script which is dynamic in nature. As the pages in wordpress are dynamic, they take a lot of time to load, especially if the number of plugins used is huge. WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates static html versions of the dynamic php scripts. As the page is static, it loads faster and so the plugin helps you speed up your WordPress blog significantly.

4. All in One SEO Pack

If you are beginner and don’t have any knowledge on SEO, then this plugin will work wonders for you. The All in one SEO pack automates the work of SEO by automatically adding the Title Tags and Meta Keywords. Though if you want to do the SEO work manually, you can do that easily with the help of this plugin.

5. Contact Form 7

A simple yet flexible contact form plugin. It is easy to use and it requires only a one line code, which should be pasted on a page where you want it to be displayed.

6. SEO Friendly Images

SEO Friendly Images is a handy tool for Image search engine optimization.

7. WP Greet Box

WP is a nice little plugin which displays greeting messages to users coming from different sources. It is a great tool to increase the number of subscribers to your blog.

These are some of the few plugins which are required for the progress of a new blog. There are plenty of options for advanced functions and it all depends on the blog owner’s choice.

Which wordpress plugin is your favorite?

7 Must Have WordPress Plugins is a post from: Blog Godown

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Blogger to WordPress Tutorial

Gautam — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 06:06:18 +0000

Now you know why you should convert your Blogger blog to Self Hosted WordPress.The next step is to convert from Blogger to self hosted WordPress.

There are many questions which come to mind before converting from blogger to wordpress.The most asked question is:

Will there be a decrease in blog’s pagerank due to the conversion?

If you are using a blogspot domain, you will be losing out on page rank because blogspot domain is only available for blogger and for wordpress you have to buy a custom domain. If you have a relatively new blog, then there is no need to think about page rank, because you can always regain it by posting good content and link baiting.

If you have already bought a domain and you are using it for your blogger blog, then you would not be losing on anything, so go ahead and convert.

Blogger To WordPress Conversion

Blogger to WordPress conversion can be done manually or by using Harsh’s excellent Blogger To WordPress services.

You can convert your blog manually using the following steps :

1. Buy Web Hosting

The first and foremost step in conversion is buying a reliable web hosting. Web Hosting is required to set up your wordpress and also to add files. You don’t need hosting in blogger because blogger provides free hosting for posts and 1GB hosting for images which is enough for most bloggers.

There are a lot of Web Host providers in the market. But there are only a few which have a good service and support.

Some Recommended Hosts

BlueHost (It is recommended by WordPress)
HostGator
WPWebHost
FatCow

2. Changing Nameservers

If you are already have a domain name, then after buying web hosting, you will receive a mail from web host provider containg nameserver details. You need to add the details of the nameservers in your DNS dashboard. This will help in forwarding your domain to the blog posts.

3. Installing WordPress

In your email you will also receive your host account information. After logging in to your cpanel, click on Fantastico and then click on WordPress and then install it. You will have to add details regarding your database, and then username and password. After filling in all the details your wordpress is will be up and running.

4. Importing Blogger comments, Blog Posts

Next step is to transfer all the posts and comment data to your server, this can be easily done using the WordPress Import feature.

Go to Tools>Import

Then click on Blogger and then click on authorize.

You will be redirected to a page as shown below.

Click on authorize, then you can easily import posts from any blogger blog that you own by clicking on the import button.

5. Maintaining Blogger Permalinks

Blogger has a really different permalink structure than wordpress, it uses month and date and the title of the post in permalink, whereas wordpress uses postnumber(eg.http://www.bloggodown.com/?p=123). To prevent any loss in page rank, we need to modify the permalink structure used in wordpress, to keep the blogger permalinks intact.

To do this, Go to your Dashboard and then click on Settings>Permalinks

And change it to Custom Structure and enter /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

Keeping Blogger Permalinks Intact

6. 301 Permanent Redirects

301 redirects will be used to tell the search engine that your blog has been moved to a new place, and all your traffic will automatically redirected to thenew domain address.

For more info on 301 redirects follow the information provided by the following post

How to migrate from blogspot to wordpress with 301 permanent redirection without leaving traffic behind

Now start posting and try it out .

Blogger to WordPress Tutorial is a post from: Blog Godown

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Why you should convert your Blogger Blog to Self Hosted WordPress

Gautam — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 14:24:57 +0000

As many of my readers might have noticed, i have changed my blogger blog to wordpress, due to a lot of reasons which kept on accumulating by time and also when i received more and more traffic.

Reasons why you should change from Blogger to WordPress :

1. Professional Blogging :

Most of the blogger blogs are owned by bloggers who blog as a hobby not as a business or a profession. Blogger is a really good platform for newbies, who don’t have any knowledge of blogging and who just want to explore. Through Blogger one can easily learn the basics of blogging and the art of writing good posts.

But if you are looking to move ahead and start blogging professionally then you should take the next step and switch to wordpress, because of its features and the ability to have full control over its design layout.

2. Multi-Author Blogs and Guest Blogging

Guest Blogging and Multi Author blogging is a mess in Blogger, because there is no way to moderate posts submitted by other authors. In comparison to this, WordPress has the ability to moderate posts and also assign roles to content submitters as Authors, Contributors or Admin. This way you can easily control and decide which authors should be moderated and which should be allowed to have full control.

Another cool feature of the latest version of WordPress stable release 2.8.6 is that it fixes two security problems that can be exploited by registered, logged in users who have posting privileges. This makes Guest Blogging and Multi Author Blogging extremely secure and a really good experience.

3. Plugins

The Plugins feature of WordPress is one of the major reasons why bloggers move to WordPress. Though Blogger platform has recently added the Gadgets feature which is quite similar to wordpress plugins feature, but it is a relatively new concept and there are a handful number of people who are actually creating new gadgets. On the other hand, WordPress Plugins feature is an old one, and there is a vast collection of useful plugins. Actually there are so many of them, that you need a guide to tell you which plugins are actually worth installing to your blog .

4. HTML vs PHP Scripting

Blogger uses HTML and WordPress use PHP scripts. PHP scripts have much more functionality as they use dynamic HTML and therefore it can change automatically, but for HTML we have to manually update the code. Besides individual blog posts in Blogger can only include HTML, no javascript can be used. Whereas in WordPress, you can easily add javascript to each page.

5. Themes and Design

Before the new version of Blogger was released, it really had no major design customizability and the Themes were few. And even when the new Blogger has been released, most of its themes are converted from the original wordpress ones.

WordPress has got a huge list of themes to choose from, some have good seo features, while others have good navigation and JQuery effects. You will always find one that suits your needs. And if you want to design your blog by yourself, you can do so easily, using the popular seo optimized Thesis Theme.

6. Search Engine Optimization

SEO is very important for your blog, because it increases your search engine rankings and hence gets you a lot of organic traffic.

In Blogger, you can do SEO for images and Posts by adding the the meta keywords and alt tags for each post manually. And to top it all the meta keywords are to be added to the template, which increases the size of the template and hence decreases blog speed.

WordPress has the most sophisticated way to do SEO. There are many plugins which can optimize the site for SEO automatically. The best plugins for SEO in my opinion are the All In One SEO Pack and the SEO Friendly Images. So SEO work in WordPress is minimal.

In all, Blogger is for new and rookie bloggers and WordPress is for the expert and professional bloggers.

Blogger to WordPress conversion is not very new and many have got fabulous results with WordPress.

What’s your opinion?

Why you should convert your Blogger Blog to Self Hosted WordPress is a post from: Blog Godown

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