WordPress 2.5, the much anticipated latest release from the team at Automattic officially hit the streets on March 29^th complete with a radical overhaul of the WordPress “corporate” site as well.

Here are some of the cool features on the “inside” that make life a little easier, or at least more convenient. 

1.              The dashboard has been “widgetized” enabling you to customize what you see.  Of course there is the invaluable WordPress News, a feature displaying information about your posts, links, popular plugins and integrates with WordPress stats so you can easily see your traffic, latest visitors, etc.  This upgrade takes a little getting used to if you’re a hardcore WP user, but even after a few hours you’ll fall in love with the Web 3.0 design and functionality.

2.              Enhanced Search – WordPress 2.5 used to search only posts, it now searches pages as well which enhances search engine optimization and user friendliness by providing information to your visitors on your “static” content, not just your posts.

3.              Concurrent Editing – if you’re running a multi-author blog – for example a company site with several “administrators” who add/edit content, WordPress 2.5 “locks” the post or page so that the “2^nd person” can’t save edits until the “1^st person” is done – and let’s you know that someone else is working on it.  This is a handy addition, and reduces the “dude, I just changed that” factor!

4.              Tag Management ­ - no more widgets, it’s built into WordPress 2.5.

5.              WordPress Plug-in Upgrades – instead of the old, delete, replace method WordPress 2.5 features what they term “a few clicks upgrade” – depending upon the plugin developer, this is a very cool feature.  However, it depends upon your host as to whether it will work – should be good for most.  It might be a good idea to write down how you did any custom configuration on your plugin before upgrading.

Here’s a list of WordPress Plug-Ins that have been updated for WordPress 2.5.

Now here’s the two main WordPress Theme and design features.  Here’s a list of WordPress 2.5 Compatible Themes.

1.              TinyMCE 3.0 – for anyone who has used previous versions of TinyMCE as their visual editor for WordPress you might have had the occasion when stuff just didn’t come out the way you put it in.  TinyMCE 3.0 is supposed to have that fixed.  This is a boon for those WordPress users that don’t really want to do creepy coding to make double spaces work and the like.  And great for WordPress Theme Designers who go nuts “fixing” little problems for clients/end users who “want it to look like Microsoft Word”!

2.              Built-in Galleries – this is wicked cool.  If you use the multi-image upload to load up a whole series of photos, WordPress 2.5 has a new shortcut that allows you to add a WordPress Gallery by just putting in [ gallery] without the space in your post.  The shortcut code in WordPress 2.5 will display all of your thumbnails and captions with a link to a page where visitors and readers can comment on the image.  You can easily set up multiple galleries for use with different topics, categories, posts, etc.

There are some other cool options like how many columns and the size of the thumbnail for example that you can simply use.  The Codex has all the info you need.

So far we’ve had a good experience with WordPress 2.5 and this release is a real testament to the development team, the leadership and the community as a whole.  It just keeps getting better!

If you haven’t tried it out yet, it’s most certainly worth every second you spend, and since it’s open source, the price is right, the experience is invaluable, and the hits just keep on coming!

 Christopher Conlan is Managing Director of Kaboodle Ventures and has been working with WordPress for two and a half years.  Visit his blog at www.web30technology.com for more information, if you need help with a WordPress blog, search engine optimization, e-marketing strategy, or want to subscribe to his newsletter. 

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By Karon Thackston

I was so excited to read his post!  Google-icon Matt Cutts was blogging on August 21st and hit the nail on the head (as he does quite frequently).  The title of the post was, “SEO Advice: Writing useful articles that readers will love.”  That, in and of itself, says it all.  Why is this such a thrilling post?  Because it reinforces what I’ve been saying for years.  Whether you’re writing content for a website, an article or any type of SEO copy, you must think of the reader first.

There is such a barrage of worthless articles floating around the ‘Net these days.  Keyword stuffed, useless ramble that Read the full story

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By Linda J Bruton

The more I use Wordpress, the more I love it. It has 2 very important features that Blogger doesn’t yet support.

Number 1, you can set up Wordpress to automatically ping all the RSS and blog feed directories every time you make a post. This is a very powerful feature if you want your blog to get a lot of traffic right away. On top of that, you’ll be quickly developing backlinks to your blog almost automatically.

Think about how long it can take you to build a regular site, get the search engines to index it, get backlinks to improve your listings, and then start getting traffic. A blog like Wordpress can do all that “grunge” work for you automatically. Read the full story

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By Christopher Conlan

Blog, Blog, Blog. It’s like getting the theme song from The Bridge on the River Kwai stuck inside your head. A blog can be your best friend, or your worst nightmare. If used in “moderation” a blog can be a benefit to your bottom line, but beware, blog are addictive. It’s easy to get caught up in your blog and lose focus on your core business goals, so here are 5 simple ways to make your blogging life easier and more successful.

So put down the proverbial blog crack pipe, and remember the blog is there to serve you, not the other way around!
Blogs (or Web Logs) aren’t new, but they have become a fast mover in the world of web design and search engine optimization. A blog is a website first and foremost, with a small twist. It usually has a neat user interface that anyone can publish their latest news, product updates, whimsical thoughts, technical specifications, customer service/FAQ information and more. You can use a blog for just about anything you can think of. The more creative you are the better.

There are plenty of low-cost or free ways to get started
blogging. WordPress, Blogger, Easy2Blog, B2Evolution and more are all free. I’m a WordPress guy myself because I dig plug-ins, but if you don’t know anything about programming I would suggest Blogger (Google) or Easy2Blog (easy as the name suggests).

The 5 Ways to Improve Blog Performance are more for those of you who have are using publishing software such as WordPress. So here we go (remember, a blog is a website).

Content

There are plenty of ways to get content for your blog. It’s best to keep it relative to your topic. Ezinearticles and GoArticles are great places for free, syndicated articles for your blog. Just be cool about it and remember to cut and paste the text or code exactly as it is and give attribution to the writer (the author link).

Simply syndicating everyone else’s articles isn’t enough, you need to add your own viewpoints. Try and write one a day, even if it’s not 500 words or more. Be careful. It’s easy to become obsessed with adding content to your blog. Spend more time on adding content on the front end (when you’re building the original blog structure) and then simply commit yourself to 10 minutes a day writing at least one post for your blog.
It’s easy for a BLOG to become a BLOB that your reader’s will soon turn away from.

Categories

Set up and manage several different categories related to your “topic”. You can publish the same article into different categories. Example: if your blog is about Search Engine Optimization you may have 5 different categories (plus the main category). Your categories could be – On Page SEO, Off Page SEO, Link Building, Directory Submission, and Site Design. Not every article or post will be relative to each category, but some will overlap. Don’t go crazy and put every post in every category every time. You’ll lose readers and value.

Blog Search Engine Optimization
There are a series of tools/plug-ins that will help with search engine optimization for your blog. DagonDesign has a great plug-in for WordPress and it’s free and easy to install. Having clean URLs for your posts is extremely important. When you post an article about “Choosing Colors for Your Website” you don’t want your post URL to be www.blahblahblog.com/?=ID1234 . In WordPress, for example, you want to at least choose the built in selection “Date and Name based” (click “Options” then “Permalinks” in the Dashboard view”). If you feel comfortable and are a bit crafty you can create a custom permalink structure.

Submit your Blog to Blog Directories

In addition to the traditional directory submissions you would make with any website. Most of these directories require a link back to their directory. There are two ways to handle these links (1) create a new page called “links” or resources” and post the links there (make sure you use the HTML editor/button on the post page otherwise the link will show up as code and won’t count), or (2) put the link on your main page in the sidebar.

Keep in mind that the blog directories are for the most part human edited so it may take some time for them to confirm your link and blog content so be patient. Also, it’s a good idea if you’re setting up a separate links page to write down the URL of that page, the directories will ask you for the location of the backlink to their directory when you fill out the form.
Most of the general SEO principles for a regular website apply to blogs. Don’t forget to put a link to your main website and to your blogs main page in the footer of your blog (and tag it properly for maximum effect).

Blog Design

Almost every blog is designed using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). CSS is a great tool for website design and especially blogging. It allows you to create new pages on the fly without redesigning each page. For WordPress (and Blogger, etc.) there are a ton of pre-designed, free templates, themes, skins, layouts (all the same thing) out there you can download, customize or use “as is”. Be a decent blogger and make sure you leave the backlink in the footer for the designer. If you don’t know anything about customizing blogs you can follow the link back to the original designer or the person who “ported” it to the blog format, they may be able to help you with customizing the blog for a couple hundred dollars. Matt at http://www.dagondesign.com/ can help you out here.

Calls to Action

Just like your website, your blog should have specific calls to action so that reader’s can interact with you. Whether it’s a simple “contact us” form mailer or a more elaborate ecommerce function, once you “got ‘em” there, they need something to do. Again, Dagon Design has a cool form mailer plug-in that’s easy to add to your site. You may have to create a separate HTML page and link to it from your blog (put it in your header so it’s on each page) if you want to add a shopping cart.
These are just the first 5, stick around for more, or visit our blog at http://blog-template-layout.com and check out what’s new.

Remember, your blog is just an extension of you and your business, so give it some personality, define some goals and make some rules for your blog.

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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Christopher_Conlan http://EzineArticles.com/?5-Ways-to-Improve-Your-Blog&id=219670

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By now hopefully you have a basic understanding of social bookmarking. So let’s move onto one of the primary aspects related to social bookmarking, popularly known as tagging.

Tagging is really the act of bookmarking a site with one of the related services and a tag is actually nothing more than an anchored keyword. Let’s say for example that you are interested in gardening and you find a really resourceful site on gardening, you could “tag” that site with the tag of “gardening” as well as other relative terms and then distribute the page from your chosen bookmarking service with others. This is generally the way that tagging is used by the most social marketers and promoters to share sites with each other.

So now you are probably pondering how you use this to uphold your sites and actually make some real cash off it. It’s really quite simple.

Let’s say you have a site about cycles and you write a resourceful article about the the cyclists of this era. Well, you attach the article with the tagline, “Cyclists of this Era” and then link to the URL on your site where the article actually resides. It is really that simple, the tag just needs to be appropriate to the subject matter you are linking to.

Relevancy in tagging is of utmost importance in order to gain a knowledgeable flow of interested prospects.

The more traffic you can generate the better it is for search engine ranking. Thus, the more traffic you can channel onto your site, the better are your chances to actually get even more traffic to your site.

Similar to keywords and search engines, the longer phrases usually dominate tag lines. However it is better to keep the tag quote simple to enable its unearthing by search engines as well as by the casual surfers.

When it comes to the application of social bookmarking and tagging for business promotion you can place tags on your site which and promoted in the social bookmarking directories.

Remember that persevering with respect to social bookmarking will certainly reek in the benefits in the longer run. http://www.peteyboysprofitcentral.com/

Peter has an extensive knowledge of Internet Marketing and loves to write about it.  He manges many campaigns on different levels as his articles states.  The [http://www.peteyboysprofitcentral.com/blog]website he has develops is there to help anyone who needs it.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Peter_T._Rosenblum http://EzineArticles.com/?Social-Bookmarking—Lets-Tag&id=864666

Popularity: 4% [?]

By Dennis McAdams

If you are an online entrepreneur then it is imperative that you promote your site well. And no internet marketing or online promotion strategy is completely successful without a high ranking in the search engines, especially Google. One of the most effective ways to boost traffic to your site is to get into social bookmarking.

It is now a revealed wisdom that in order to get high rankings in search engines, a website must have lots of quality inbound links. And social bookmarking is one of the most effective ways to do just that. It is a web-based service that allows users to store or save lists of links to various web pages that they find useful. Other people with related interests can view the links by subject, category, tags, or even by chance.

These social bookmarking sites have the potential to direct hundreds or thousands of targeted visitors to your site within a very short time.  It is also evident that higher and more successful Google Ranking might be done on the basis of those pages that users find interesting on social bookmark sites.

To promote your website or business to a specific targeted audience, you must begin publishing articles to the social bookmarking sites as quickly as you can. Make sure it has good content also, so that others will want to link up with you, and you will be listed on many other pages as well.

Page rank is a statistical assessment used by Google that signifies how popular a site is on the web. Search engines presume that when one site links to a different site, it is casting a vote for the site. More votes imply more popularity of the site. Also, the ranking of the site that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a site’s importance from the number of votes cast for it.

The fundamental concept behind social bookmarking is that when thousands of people get together, bookmark their desired sites, and employ explicatory tags to each page that they bookmark, some websites will ascend to the top as being more popular. Other users in the network then refer to those pages. Consequently the posting of the links multiply. This will boost the page ranking.

Successful social bookmarking is a definite way to get a high Google ranking. Hence it is just not enough to get the URL of your site into the pages of social bookmarking sites. You need to take care of proper content and avoid spamming. You have to focus on getting more traffic by following some essential tips.

-Quality content: Since users are the determiners in the case of link referrals it is extremely essential to have proper content. Interesting topics that can attract a lot of targeted users is what you should aim for. Make sure that your information resources have high visibility on your site.

-Search engine Optimization: You must follow the search engine optimization tips to make your article accessible to a user. Keyword optimization and target ranking are some of them.

-Social bookmarking buttons: You must make it easier for users to bookmark you. It means that you should create links that keep the number of clicks to a minimum while guiding the user to your page.

I hope that you enjoyed and learned something from my article. I have gained from my experience and I hope to give someone a little help from what I have learned and make their road a little less bumpy. [http://summitpromotion.com]Friends Win

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dennis_McAdams http://EzineArticles.com/?Using-Social-Bookmarking-To-Increase-Page-Rank&id=727480

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