• Akismet
  I use and love FeedBurner, even though it goes awry every once in a while, and the best way of using it is with FeedSmith, which I’ve been using since before it was “acquired” by FeedBurner. Just install, enter your FeedBurner ID and activate. That’s it, you’re done.
• All in One SEO Pack
  All in One SEO Pack now supports multiple methods of utilizing the CMS features in WordPress. Whether you use a PHP custom page template for your home and/or static page, a custom loop, or any other method, All in One SEO Pack now supports all of these configurations and customizations.
• Lighter Menus
  The WP 2.5 and 2.6 backend is a bit “heavy”, lighter menus turns the menu into a drop down and saves a LOT of space in the top part of the interface. Check out how cool my admin looks now (click for larger image):
• pageMash
  My site uses a lot of pages, and sometimes you want to move around some pages. The default WordPress way of doing that is hard (you have to give each page a menu order by hand) but pageMash is excellent for that, with a nice Ajaxy interface in which you can just drag and drop pages. Have a look (click for larger image):
• Redirection
  WordPress doesn’t do any 301 redirections by itself when you, for instance, change the slug of a page (the part of the URL that identifies the post). Redirection does do that for you though. You can also add your own redirects in the very user friendly admin panel, that’s why it takes care of all my redirections, and does so wonderfully.
• Search Excerpt
  WordPress Search by default sucks. Fixing it takes a bit of work, but the heavy lifting is done by this plugin. If you want to know what I’ve done with this blogs search pages, read my post on improving the WordPress search function. The results are very cool, as you can see in this search, for instance.
• Wordpress Automatic Upgrade
  WordPress upgrades quite often. Which is both a good thing, and a pain in the backside because of all the work involved. This plugin takes care of that, and even though I’ve heard of people having problems with this one, for me, it has always worked amazingly well. I’ve used it to upgrade all of my WordPress blogs and sites to the latest version for at least 6 months now.
• WP-DBManager
  Not only is this plugin perfect for doing automated backups, it can also do things like database optimization and the admin pages for it allow you to do the occasional query from within WordPress!
• WP Security Scan
  Even when you update to the latest version all the time, there’s still this slight chance of you getting hacked. WP Security Scan helps you minimize this chance by pointing you right at all the vulnerabilities in your blog.
• WP Super Cache
  I can’t imagine running this site without caching, although I have it turned of 98% of the time, I do turn it on whenever I’m about to hit Digg / Reddit / StumbleUpon, and it has saved my “life” a couple of times. WordPress has a tendency of becoming slower when you make your themes more complex, and when you add a lot of plugins. This plugin allows me to still have both and keep my readers happy.

Creating a new category

A new category can be created from the Posts menu > Categories.

Change the category of a post

In order to move a post from one category to another, you should click on Edit in the Posts menu, hover over the post you wish to edit and click Quick Edit.

From the Categories section select the new category (in our case the Test category) and click Update Post to save the change.

Delete a category

Note that deleting a category does not delete posts from that category. It will just set them back to the default category Uncategorized.

WordPress comes with a preinstalled antispam solution – Akismet.

In order to use Akismet, you should have a WordPress API key. To receive a WordPress API key, you should register at the official WordPress website. The key will be included in your welcome mail.

If you already have a registration at WordPress.org, you can see your API key by visiting the WP dashboard.

To enable Akismet for your blog, follow the steps below:

Step 1. Go to your WordPress admin area > Plugins > Installed.

Step 2. Click Activate.

The Akismet plugin will be activated.

Step 3. Click “enter your WordPress.com API key” (you can also click Akismet Configuration in the Plugins section)

Step 4. Enter your WordPress API key.

Step 5. Click Update options>>.

Step 6. If you have entered a correct API key, it will be verified.

From now on your blog will be protected from spam by Akismet. You will be able to check the comments in your blog for spam, as well as manually mark comments as spam from the blog admin area > Comments.

You can also display on your blog’s front page how many spam posts have been stopped by Akismet. To show this information, you should add the Akismet widget to your sidebar. More information how to do this can be found in our article on how to add a widget to the WordPress sidebar.

How to SEO optimize WordPress

• Permalinks – WordPress’ tool for customizing your blog links;
• SEO optimize your descriptions – set a correct meta description for each page/post you make to improve your ranking in the search results;
• SEO optimize your images – allow search engines to correctly index your images;
• Use Headings – the proper structure of your articles will rank your content higher;

How to use Permalinks to SEO optimize your WordPress website

WordPress gives you the freedom to set your links the way you want them to look like. In the administrative area of WordPress go to Settings -> Permalinks. On this page you can choose from several predefined options or use a custom structure for your links.

You can choose the Custom Structure option and enter /%postname%/ for example. This will make your links look like http://yourdomain.com/the-name-of-your-post/. Or you can enter /%category%/%postname%/ if you want to include the name of your category in the URL. You can also add custom text or other WordPress variables. The full list of available variables that you can use in your permalinks can be found at the WordPress official website.

How to SEO optimize your meta descriptions

You should enter the meta description for each one of your pages. Use simple but informative sentences. The search engines will check how relevant your description is to the actual content of your page so  make sure that you describe only the current page and avoid adding irrelevant information in this description.

It is a good practice to categorize your posts in articles. Once you go to the Posts -> Categories page in your admin area, note the description field available for each category. WordPress will take what you enter in this field and insert it as meta description for the category.

How to SEO optimize your images

It is essential to have the “title” and “alt” tags specified for each one of the images you use in your posts. The search engines will then know what this image is supposed to represent. Typing the title and alt tags for each image you use, however, can be a time-consuming task. Instead, you can use the handy SEO Friendly Images plugin. For more information on how to install this plugin, you can check our tutorial on How to install WordPress plugins.

Once you install the plugin, go to Settings -> SEO Friendly Images in your WordPress admin area. On this page you can specify the ALT and TITLE tags for your images. The plugin gives you the option to use internal variables such as %title, %name and %category. With them you can set the ALT and TITLE tags of your images to the title of your post for example. The plugin does the rest. This saves you a lot of time  and keeps your images SEO-friendly .

How to use Headings to SEO optimize your WordPress website

You should make sure that you use the <h1> tag only for the titles of your posts.

You should use a few <h2> tags and as many <h3> tags as you need for the other headings in your posts. Doing this will allow the search engines to index the important information from your website better. A good document has headings and subheadings, because headings make it easier to determine the subject of the page.

For blog websites the best SEO practice is to set the title of your post in a heading1 tag. Most of the good WordPress templates do that. If not, you should modify the theme in order to achieve a correct output of your pages.

Middle eastern languages such as Hebrew and Arabic are written predominantly right-to-left. Numbers are written with the most significant digit left-most, just as in European or other left-to-right text. Languages written in left-to-right scripts are often mixed in, so the complete document is bidirectional in nature, a mix of both right-to-left (RTL) and left-to-right (LTR) writing. Text written in the Hebrew and Arabic languages is often referred to as bidirectional, or “bidi” for short.

RTL in HTML, XHTML, CSS2, CSS3

HTML, XHTML

The HTML DIR attribute specifies the base direction (LTR, RTL) of text, or sections of text. The base direction can influence the ordering of the display of runs of text of different directions, and the display of directionally neutral text (i.e., characters or sequences of characters that do not have inherent directionality, as defined in the Unicode Character Standard).

Examples Using The DIR Attribute

Demonstration of DIR Attribute On Bidirectional Text

Here is a sentence, set first in a paragraph with left-to-right direction by the HTML DIR attribute (<p DIR=”LTR”>) and then repeated without change in a paragraph with right-to-left direction (<p DIR=”RTL”>).
Note the use of an opening parenthesis “(” and closing square bracket “]” is intentional to demonstrate a point.

(This example requires a browser that supports bidirectional text rendering. Microsoft IE supports bidirectional text rendering. Display this page in different browsers to compare. Here is a graphic image of this example you can use for comparison or to see the expected results: Demonstration of DIR Attribute On Bidirectional Text)

This example shows how browsers that support bidirectional text behave with different DIR attribute settings.

The changes due to the DIR attribute in this example, are:

• changes the alignment of the paragraph from left-aligned to right-aligned.
• reorders the relative placement of runs of text of different direction. The first run (“He said”) is placed right-aligned as expected in the RTL paragraph. The next run of RTL text (the Hebrew word shalom) is placed to the left of the first run, continuing the right to left sequencing. It seems wrong to English speakers but is correct from the view that moving leftward is advancing in a right-to-left writing system. For the same reason, the period appears left-most.
• Parentheses and square brackets do not have an inherent direction. The open parenthesis is between LTR and RTL text runs and so cannot “inherit” the direction of the surrounding text. It therefore defaults to the RTL base direction of the paragraph and is placed to the left of the Hebrew word shalom. Note the closing square bracket is embedded in a single run of left-to-right text. It therefore adopts the direction of its surrounding text and is placed to the right of the English word shalom.
• Note that the open parenthesis is rendered “mirror-imaged”. That is, it looks like a closing parenthesis in English. Parentheses and Square Brackets, and some other characters, are displayed as mirror-images (i.e. reversed) when the text direction is right-to-left. This is because the characters have the semantics of open and close, not the graphically left and right. An open parenthesis or square bracket, in right-to-left text, is rendered as a mirror-image so that it visually encloses the text to its left. Similarly, closing parentheses and brackets are also mirror-imaged, so they face the text to their right.

DIR also specifies the directionality of tables.

For example, if DIR=”RTL” is added to the <TABLE> element in the table above displaying the European and Arabic digits, the table is changed to look like this:

Authors can turn off the bidirectional algorithm for selected fragments of text with the BDO Element. It is useful for special situations, such as representing part numbers, where the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm may not apply.

CSS2

CSS2 has a direction property analogous to the HTML DIR atribute. It also introduced a unicode-bidi property for additional control of the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (UAX9).

CSS3 Text Module

CSS3 has a direction property for specification of left-to-right and right-to-left “in-line flow”. It also has a unicode-bidi property for control of the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (UAX9).

CSS3 has a property for specifying block-progression flow and orientation. The block-progression property can specify vertical flow of top-to-bottom or horizontal flow of left-to-right or right-to-left.

The writing-mode property is a short-hand way to specify both direction and block-progression.

CSS3 also provides a way to turn characters 90, 180, and 270 degrees: Glyph orientation within a text run.

CSS3 has a feature that influences rendering of Arabic text, the ‘text-kashida-space property‘. Although Kashida is an Arabic character, in this context “Kashida is a typographic effect used in Arabic writing systems that allows glyph elongation at some carefully chosen points”.

Tips For Representing Right-To-Left Text In Markup Languages

• Set the overall document direction on the HTML element, not the BODY element.
• Use character encodings that employ logical not visual ordering, such as Unicode, Windows-1255, Windows-1256, ISO-8859-6-i, ISO 8859-8-i.
  Don’t use the visually ordered: ISO 8859-6, ISO 8859-8, ISO-8859-6-e, ISO-8859-8-e. See RFC 1555.
• Use markup instead of Unicode bidirectional control characters.
  

  Unicode Character Name	Scalar Value	Function	Equivalent Markup
  LRE	U+202A	Left-to-Right Embedding	DIR attribute e.g. DIR=”LTR”
  RLE	U+202B	Right-to-Left Embedding	DIR attribute e.g. DIR=”RTL”
  PDF	U+202C	Pop Directional Format	No Equivalent </BDO> ends override
  LRO	U+202D	Left-to-Right Override	BDO Element e.g. <BDO dir=”LTR”>
  RLO	U+202E	Right-to-Left Override	BDO Element e.g. <BDO dir=”RTL”>

See Unicode in XML and other Markup Languages (UTR 20)

.

Naming Conventions

The W3C Internationalization Group is now recommending to specification writers that terms such as “property-left” and “property-right” be avoided in favor of terms such as “property-before” and “property-after“. When the writing direction changes, for example from left-to-right to either top-to-bottom or right-to-left, “before” and “after” are still correct and do not need to be modified. (This is true for most W3C specifications purposes. Your functionality may vary.)

Links

• User Interfaces for Right-to-Left Languages
• Example Hebrew Web Page – Shema Yisrael
• W3C International WG GEO FAQ: Script Direction and Languages
• Hebrew Characters And Their Unicode Values
• Hebrew Numbers
• HTML 4.01
• CSS3 Text Module
• CSS 2.1
• CSS 2
• Unicode Consortium FAQ on Middle Eastern Scripts and Languages
• Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (UAX9)
• Unicode in XML and other Markup Languages (UTR 20)