Google Webmaster Tools has a lot of information that can be helpful about your blog. All too often people do not get their sites verified so that you can use these tools.
The process can be to put it bluntly a pain. You either needed to add a file to your server or add a meta tag to your theme to verify your account.
Now there is a plugin that you can simply install that will allow you in a couple of clicks to do this.
It is called Google Site Verification Plugin. Just install it on your blog and run through the steps. (You do need to have a Google account.)
Go to your settings once you have installed the plugin. Click on Google verification.
Then click start verification.
Then grant access to the API.
And you are done with it.
Now you can take advantage of the information from Google Web,aster tools and see how Google sees your site.
About the author
Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.
After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.
If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.
Yesterday was Ash Wednesday for the Christian community and marked the start of lent. Mardi Gras is over and it is time to switch from excess to sacrifice. Lent usually includes giving up something. It may be your favorite beverage, chocolate or any thing else that would be a sacrifice.
Maybe it is time to think about using this time frame to give up a plugin from your blog too.
It is not unusual to find that the 5 or 6 plugins you started with are now 25-30. Maybe more for you or maybe less. I know I am guilty of this quite often.
You know how it works. You see something new and neat and just have to add it and see how it works. We all love new shiny objects. Then the bad part happens.
You forget about it. Next thing you know the number of plugins keeps climbing. You think you have 10 or 15 plugins and when you check and actually look, it is double that number.
So as we start lent, now may be a good time to check how many plugins you are using. If your number has climbed, just take a minute or two and see what you have actually added.
Are they helping you or hurting you? A slow load speed can hurt you with Big G, so do you really need all of them.
If you find you have a few that you don’t even remember why you added them then maybe you should give them up for lent. Check and see if it helps or hurts your results. (You are tracking your blog aren’t you?)
If it helps or is neutral then maybe you did not need it to start with. Obviously if it hurts your results then start it back up.
Take advantage of this time of sacrifice to do this and find out if your blog is bloated. Like changing the batteries in your smoke alarms when the time changes it can be a good maintenance item.
Just going through and checking how many plugins you have installed may be an eye opener for you.
That is what I think. What do you think? Leave your comments below.
About the author
Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.
After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.
If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.
WordPress and plugins go together like peas and carrots. (Yeah I know a Forrest Gump thing, love that movie.) Plugins make things easy and can be very helpful but are they getting over saturated?
Over the last few months I have seen more and more plugins released. Some are free and some are paid plugins. Now I don’t have a problem with paid plugins. Have recommended some that can do things to help or automate things.
Really it is surprising that so many authors offer so many for free.
The problem is some are for CMS purposes and some are for blogs. Some are just because of laziness. That last category is the one that can hurt you.
Yes, WordPress has become really close to being a complete CMS (content management system) and not just software for running a blog.
Quite a few of those new paid plugins are specifically for making WordPress into a CMS and that part is fine. More and more I am using WordPress as the base for all of my sites. Except for older sites almost every new site I create uses WordPress to run it. Even minisites.
The problem I am seeing is that each plugin you add has the potential to slow down the loading of your blog. As Google is using load speed as part of their algorithm, page load speed matters.
The point is that although a plugin can make something easier, what is the trade off?
Often a bit of coding, like using a widget, can add the same thing a plugin does with some html. If you add a plugin versus adding some of your own code often you slow your load speed.
Think about it next time you think about adding a new plugin. Ask if there is an easy way to do something the same or similar without adding the plugin.
That little bit of thought may help your load speed.
About the author
Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.
After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.
If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.
Well as they predicted earlier this week when they put out a release candidate they released WordPress 2.9 by the end of the week.
I had hoped that the author of Simple Tags would get an update out to make it work as they have done on the last 2 major releases. It hasn’t happened yet and as this is not a security update I will not be pushing to upgrade quickly.
If in a week there is no update on Simple Tags then I will be looking for a replacement and once I test it only then will I be upgrading all of my blogs.
Simple tags was the only plugin that I have been recommending that seems not to work with this version and I do expect an update shortly. Then it will be time to take advantage of some of the new features.
I did add in the upgrade video for those that do not use Simple Tags.
Will keep you updated and put out some more information as the plugin compatibility gets resolved.
About the author
Mike Paetzold got started blogging in 2003 and has become an expert on using WordPress. He has become known as The WordPress Guy.
After being an under ground niche marketer using his blogs he has surfaced to share some of the ways he uses blogs to enter various niches profitably.
If you would like help in building your business check out my coaching offer.
Just saw a tweet from Alex Syseof and went ot check it out. If you are into WordPress and blogging you should follow Alex on Twitter as he finds good blogging info and always shares.
This time it was a new plugin. It is an anti virus plugin and will check your files daily and send you a report. You can also scan your files at anytime so this looks like a good way to catch some of those nasty injections that can get you in trouble with Google.
It is easy to set up just upload and activate it.
Check the enable box and save the changes. You can run a manual scan but you may get some false positives where it will ask you if this is a virus. As I have been testing this it is usually instructions that are added to the theme and it is easy to tell. When it is completed you get all of the boxes to turn to green.
Looks like a good plugin that I will be adding to all of my blogs shortly barring any unforeseen problems. You can get it at
I will be going into more detail on occasion here. Today we will look at this tip.
19. StumbleUpon and Digg.
If you’re not using StumbleUpon and Digg yet, you’re totally missing out on my favorite tool for watching what’s hot (and you’re missing out on boatloads of traffic). I love my StumbleUpon.com traffic, but I also use the site to research interesting ideas for blog posts and Twitter tweets. Check out the site.
StumbleUpon and Dig can be an excellent idea platform and let you know what is really hot in your niche. First go to StumbleUpon and login.
You will see a search box in the upper right. Add in your topic and click search. Because I like blogging I will use that as a keyword.
I used a very general term and the first thing you will notice is the ability to apply a filter with options listed of related filters. Because I write about WordPress here I will use that as my filter..
Then I can either browse those results and I did the top topics was plugins so I can drill down a bit more by clicking the plugin filter.
Next I can sort the list by either ratings or reviews.
Looking at these lists I can see that the strongest ratings and the most reviews are consistently plugin lists. So if I am looking for a topic I would now look to do a post on one of the following.
Top 10 Must Have Plugins
8 Plugins Every Review Blog Must Have
5 Plugins To Reward Your Commenters.
Now it only took me about 3 minutes total going through StumbleUpon to find these topics and come up with potential blog posts with my slant that I know have a good chance of being popular.
You can sort through Digg in the same manner but StunbleUpon is my personal favorite for ideas.
Once you know the keywords you are looking for finding ideas that have a good chance of being popular is easy. If you do not know how to create your keyword tree and find profitable keywords check out the Keyword Call this Wednesday with Steve Roye and myself.
Just a quick FYI if you use All In One SEO plugin. Seems the upgrade to the latest version turns it off. You will get a notice that you need to enable it. You will get this message.
Click the link to go to the admin page.
Update both of the data base links. (Make sure you have a data base backup – something you should do anyhow.)
Then make sure you have clicked the radio button to enable and then click the update button.
The good thing is that until you complete the tasks you will see the first warning message in your dashboard.
Keep them updated but make sure you complete the process or you will lose the functionality of the All In One SEO plugin.
Just downloaded the latest beta version of WordPress for the new upgrade for the 2.8 version. WordPress is “begging” for plugin authors to check their plugins on this. From their post…
We especially suggest, recommend, and beg that plugin developers test their plugins against beta 2 and let us know of any issues. Notable fixes in beta 2:
* Translation of role names fixed
* mp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title
* Upload error messages are now correctly reported
* Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed
* Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed
* SSH2 filesystem requirements updated
* Switched back to curl as the default transport
* Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload
Now so far all the plugins I normally use seem to be working fine but for any of you that have created plugins take the time to test them with the new beta release. This way you will save your self some grief from people that have problems and provide more value to your customers.
Looks like this is very close to being a full release and I will keep you updated.
One of the reasons I love using a blog rather than a static web site is the ability to interact with your readers. Yesterday I wrote about making sure you upgrade your plugins and 2 of the comments had great questions that need to be addressed.
See the interaction allows me to expand on the questions I did not think of and you get information that answers those questions.
Quick question, Mike – if the automatic update fails, does it just stop the current plugin from functioning, or can it disturb the blog installation itself? Is it important or superfluous to back up an installation just before trying to automatically install a plugin update?
Got another question for you Mike,
What if everything goes just fine with the upgrade, but once the upgrade is done you have conflicts with another plugin or the plugin just stops working with the theme you have?
How do you recover from this?
I realize that you could just un-install and re-install the old version back assuming you still have it available, but what if there is a lot of configuring that you have done with the plug-in. Do you lose all of that?
First lets address backups. You should be backing up your blog regularly. It is not necessary to do it before you upgrade a plugin because the backup process will only effect the plugin itself. It shuts off the plugin, downloads the latest version then installs it and turns it back on. If something goes wrong it has not altered any files other than that plugin.
The question really is should you back up the old plugin first? For me the answer is no. There is either an update or a security flaw or there would not be an upgrade. Worst case is I go grab the plugin and install it manually if there is a problem.
Now to the problem of what if this creates a conflict. That can and may happen and can be a royal pain in the you know what. The odds are against it but it is possible.
At that point I would have to test to see which items are conflicting. First I would try the default theme as a test. I use the default theme because that is what most plugins are tested against. If that solves the problem you know that it is the theme. Not very likely but an easy test so I would do that first. Then you have a choice of how important your plugin is versus how important your theme choice is to you.
If that was not the problem then I would start de-activating the other plugins to find out where the conflict is. Once you have isolated the two that are conflicting you have a choice to make. Which one to keep?
As there are probably a minimum of three choices of other plugins to do what any particular plugin does see what is available to replace one of the problem plugins and which features are most important to you.
Finally as to the configuration question. If you have done the configuration through the dashboard then it is saved in the data base and you will not lose anything. (The upgrade process for a plugin does not touch the data base.)
If you have edited the plugin itself (rare for most people) then I probably would not be upgrading it to begin with. I would be looking at the specs to see what was changed and any notes on why and then make a decision on it. If you are doing this type of thing you are probably already competent in the coding and would download the new one and see what changed and edit it before adding it. This probably does not apply to 1% (and that may be a high estimate) of my readers.
Again I do appreciate the interaction and the questions so feel free to continue to contribute.
Just saw MaxBlogPress Opt In Adder and had to test it out. It is created to allow you to easily add an opt in form to your sidebar or the bottom of the post. It works with a few caveats.
Those are enough that I won’t be using it here but if you are not comfortable with playing in the theme this can be a valuable addition.
There are a lot of customization available and it is easily done. You can change the background color, border color and button display. The WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface allows you to customize the text and works well.
The problem is the size of the table it creates. It is not customizable and if you have a narrow sidebar it may create theme problems. On this blog it works quite well in the wide top portion but can’t be used in any of the narrower sidebars.
You can also automatically add in an opt in form at the bottom of the posts. This works well but again I have a problem with the size. Being relatively narrow I did not care for the way it looked on this blog with a wide text area and could not add it in exactly where I would want it to display.
The only other complaint I had was that the set up for it displays under tools and not either settings or directly under plugins like most plugins. Took me a bit to find it when looking to change settings.
Now to be perfectly clear here I am not the target market for this plugin as if I want an opt in box at the end of the post it is easy for me to add it in and format it to suit me. I do the same with adding them to the sidebar. The plugin does work as advertised and makes it very easy to add your opt in box to the blog.
If you aren’t comfortable with doing those things this does a good job of creating an opt in box as long as your theme side bar is (and this is a guess) over 200 px wide.
Being brand new I am sure as input comes in that some of these items might be addressed in future updates.
All in all a nice plugin for those that aren’t comfortable playing in the theme with the caveats mentioned.
As always your comments and questions are welcomed.
Still looking for more ideas on the plugin Robert Plank has offered to make for my readers. Have a good idea let me know.
