Thesis, Genesis or WooThemes, all are premium WordPress themes. I use Thesis theme for my blog but the most popular option for new bloggers is to use free WordPress themes. Actually there are thousands of free WordPress themes available and this can make newbie bloggers think they don’t need a premium WordPress theme at all.

According to me, you can use the free WordPress themes for personal leisure blogs. All other type of blogs definitely need a premium WordPress theme unless you can do all of the following yourself.

1. Customization

Most free WordPress themes, do not allow very high level of customization without editing the theme PHP files. If you are looking for high level of flexibility with widgets, columns – Premium themes is the right choice. Almost all premium themes provide lots of customization to suite your personal needs.

Thesis theme offers hundreds of Design and Site Options to choose from including how many columns you want in your blog, what font you prefer, how you want the Navigation at the top, What is the preferred width for your sidebars, how you want to display posts on the homepage … etc … etc …

2. Search Engine Optimization

Free WordPress themes are done with SEO in mind but the prime objective of those themes is not SEO. In some free themes, the HTML coding may not be completely SEO-friendly which means you are taking a huge risk at the cost of a premium theme.

Check out my article on How to Make WordPress More SEO Friendly.

3. Professionalism

Many free themes don’t allow you to edit (not remove) footer link or text. Normally this is done by encrypting the content of footer.php in the themes file and if you edit the file, themes becomes unusable. Because free themes fear the removal of the developer links from footer, they don’t allow editing footer part of the theme which can make your entire blog design look unprofessional.

My Thesis license does not compel me to have a link to Thesis in footer yet I have copyright notice because I could edit the link as per my needs aka IMTips.co Runs on Thesis WordPress Theme.

Do you use a premium WordPress theme or prefer the free one? What is the best thing you like about your theme? Share your views in comments below.

More Related Posts:

1. Which is Better – Blogger or WordPress?
2. Thesis Theme Affiliates Move to ShareASale
3. Free WordPress Installation Service

Very detail comparison to understand which is better – Blogger or WordPress.

WordPress Blog as wordpress.com sub-domain

Your blog URL will be on sub-domain of WordPress.com aka shabbirbhimani.wordpress.com and you can get such blog for free at WordPress.com

Advantages

1. Free.
2. The most powerful blogging engine aka WordPress.

Disadvantages

Making money from a wordpress.com blog can be tough because

1. WordPress.com blog don’t allow you to execute any external JavaScript’s in Sidebar or in post content. This means you will not be allowed to put any ad network like Adsense on the blog. Yes you can use direct banners from affiliate advertising for monetizing the blog.
2. WordPress.com blog don’t allow you to add other plugins of your choice and you can use only those that they offer in the admin interface.
3. WordPress.com blog neither allow editing of themes nor allow you to use a custom theme of your choice. I prefer and use Thesis theme and you cannot use such premium themes for your wordpress.com blogs.

Blogger Blog on blogspot.com sub-domain

Your blog URL will be on sub-domain of blogspot.com aka shabbirbhimani.blogspot.com and you can get such blog for free at blogger.com

Having Blogspot blog overcomes one disadvantage of Adsense or external JavaScript we had for wordpress.com Blog but then it adds few other disadvantages. Many Ad networks require that you own the top level domain and not a sub domain. So a Blogspot blog will be eligible for Adsense but you may have tough time to get approved by other premium ad networks especially CPM Ad networks.

Blogger blog on self hosted domain

Having a Blogspot blog on your a self hosted domain is also possible but I have not tried that myself. You can see the instruction on how to move blogger blog to your own domain here. But blogger blog on a self hosted domain has quite a few disadvantages

1. There are no good plugins available for blogger blog even if you host your blog on your own server.
2. There are very few premium themes available for you to use. I am yet to see a theme even close to what Thesis for WordPress.
3. Comments are mainly handled by blogger and you have very little control over them.
4. No control over the permalinks. I don’t prefer the date in the url for my posts and you cannot have a blogger blog without year and month in the url.
5. Blogger can only be used as blog. This means you cannot use it as a complete content management system like WordPress.

WordPress Blog on self hosted domain aka imtips.co

You can download WordPress blog to be installed on your server from WordPress.org. I am offering Free WordPress Installation Service.

WordPress is undoubtedly one of the best blogging platforms available and is very easy to use from multiple view point – SEO, plugins or themes. Apart from that it has all the needed stuff to make it look like a professional website and not just another blog (if you want it that way).

The question which is better Blogger or WordPress is answered. It is all WordPress show.

Share your views in comments below.

Update Nov 29 2011: Now you can make money from your WordPress.com blog. See http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2011/11/29/wordads/

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3. 5 Most Common Blogging Mistakes to Avoid

Last week I released the plugin XenForo Like User Avatars In Thread Listing For vBulletin 4. At that time I had no idea it would be one of the most awaited mod for vBulletin and based on user requests I added few more features like avatar on home page, forum display pages as well as on search results pages. There are many users like me who don’t prefer vBulletin 4 and so this plugin is for vBulletin 3.7 and vBulletin 3.8.

Some technical differences to vBulletin 4 Plugin

To show an avatar for user, vBulletin has function to fetch the avatar based on userid but for vBulletin 3.x we don’t have the threads last poster’s userid. So I have copied the vBulletin’s function to fetch the avatar based on username. This has been done to avoid one necessary database query to fetch the userid from username.

Screenshots

Avatars in Thread bits

Avatars in forum bits

Avatars in Search Bits

Installation Instructions

Note: This plugin like vBulletin 4 plugin requires you edit templates. The edit are very simple but remember to follow the right instructions of editing the template.

Download the zip file. Extract the xml file within the zip file and import the xml file as product into vBulletin.

1. Edit threadbit template as follows

Find

$thread[title_editable]

And add the following code before.

<a href="member.php?$session[sessionurl]u=$thread[postuserid]" rel="nofollow"><img height="32px" style="float:left;margin-right:4px" src="$thread[avatarurl]" border="0" /></a>

Find

<td class="alt2" title="<phrase 1="$thread[replycount]" 2="$thread[views]">$vbphrase[replies_x_views_y]</phrase>">

And add the following code after.

<a href="member.php?$session[sessionurl]find=lastposter&t=$thread[threadid]" rel="nofollow"><img height="32px" style="float:left;margin-right:4px" src="$thread[lastposteravatarurl]" border="0" /></a>

Optionally you can edit the username to be left aligned rather than right aligned. Find

<div class="smallfont" style="text-align:$stylevar[right]; white-space:nowrap">

Replace with

<div class="smallfont" style="text-align:$stylevar[left]; white-space:nowrap;padding-left:32px;">

2. Edit forumhome_forumbit_level1_post and forumhome_forumbit_level2_post as follows

Find

<td class="alt2">$forum[lastpostinfo]</td>

Replace with

<td class="alt2"><a href="member.php?find=lastposter&f=$forum[forumid]" rel="nofollow"><img height="32px" style="float:left;margin-right:4px" src="$forum[avatarurl]" border="0" /></a><div style="padding-left:36px;">$forum[lastpostinfo]</div></td>

3. Edit Search_result_postbit template as follows

Find

<if condition="$show['moderated']">
	<td class="alt2">
	<else />
	<td class="alt1">
	</if>

Add the following code below

<a href="member.php?$session[sessionurl]u=$post[userid]" rel="nofollow"><img height="32px" style="float:left;margin-right:4px" src="$post[avatarurl]" border="0" /></a>

Enjoy the plugin and do share your views, comments or feedback in comments below.

More Related Posts:

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Xenforo has become the benchmark for most of forum design elements and one of them is user avatars in thread listing. One of my clients wanted such functionality in vBulletin. I was surprised not to find anything like this already available and so thought I would get it done myself and release it as vBulletin Mod.

Download vBulletin 3.8 and 3.7 compatible version here

Note: This plugin requires you edit vBulletin templates. The edit are very simple.

Install Instructions

Download the zip file. Extract the xml file within the zip file and import the xml file as product into vBulletin 4.

Edit threadbit template as follows.

Find

<vb:if condition="$show['threadicon']">

And add the following code above it.

<a href="{vb:link member, {vb:raw thread}, null, 'postuserid', 'postusername'}"><img height="32px" width="32px" style="float:left;margin-right:4px" src="{vb:raw thread.avatarurl}" border="0" /></a>

Find

<dt>{vb:rawphrase last_post_by}</dt>

And add the following code above it.

<a href="{vb:link member, {vb:raw thread}, null, 'lastposterid', 'lastposter'}"><img height="32px" width="32px" style="float:left;margin-right:4px" src="{vb:raw thread.lastposteravatarurl}" border="0" /></a>

Edit forumhome_forumbit_level1_post and forumhome_forumbit_level2_post templates as follows.

Find

{vb:raw forum.lastpostinfo}

And add the following code just above it.

<a href="{vb:link member, {vb:raw forum}, null, 'real_lastposterid', 'real_lastposter'}"><img height="48px" width="48px" style="float:left;margin-right:4px" src="{vb:raw forum.avatarurl}" border="0" /></a>

Edit search_threadbit

Find the first occurrence of

<div class="inner">

And add after that

<a href="{vb:link member, {vb:raw thread}, null, 'postuserid', 'postusername'}"><img height="32px" width="32px" style="float:left;margin:7px 4px 0 0" src="{vb:raw thread.avatarurl}" border="0" /></a>

Find

<dl class="threadlastpost td">

And add after that

<a href="{vb:link member, {vb:raw thread}, null, 'lastposterid', 'lastposter'}"><img height="32px" width="32px" style="float:left;margin-right:4px" src="{vb:raw thread.lastposteravatarurl}" border="0" /></a>

Edit search_results_postbit

Find

<div class="contact">

And add after that

<a href="{vb:link member, {vb:raw post}, null, 'userid', 'username'}"><img height="32px" width="32px" style="float:left;margin-left:4px" src="{vb:raw post.avatarurl}" border="0" /></a>

Upgrading Instructions

If you are upgrading the plugin, just import the new plugin file and overwrite the existing plugins. Once done make the necessary edits to the search templates.

Enjoy the plugin and do share your views, comments or feedback in comments below.

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In my complete guide to WordPress SEO an important setting is of permalinks and you can opt for many different permalinks options in WordPress very easily. Let me discuss what permalinks options we have in WordPress for SEO and which one is voted as the most SEO friendly. You can see some of the default options in the permalinks settings.

But let us look at what other options we can opt for.

Directory Structure Permalinks

Use the following in the Custom Structure

/%postname%/

I use it on my Stock Market Blog

Static pages Permalinks

Use the following in the Custom Structure

/%postname%.html

I use the same here at IMTips

Hierarchy Permalinks with category

Use the following in the Custom Structure

/%category%/%postname%.html

In my opinion, it is the best permalinks structure but if you have multiple categories for a post, only one can show up, the one with the lowest category id and the post will be accessible through each category in urls which can create issues with duplicate content.

Hierarchy Permalinks with Tags

Use the following in the Custom Structure

/%tag%/%postname%.html

Remember if you have more than one tag per post you can have the same issues as above.

Hierarchy permalinks for Multi-Author Blog

Use the following in the Custom Structure

/%author%/%postname%.html

Unless you have more than one blog author it is very useful or else it does not make much sense to be using this Permalinks.

Finally your Vote

For more refer official WordPress permalinks documentation.

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Being a die hard fan of vBulletin for almost 5 years (See here) I am yet to upgrade any of my forums to vBulletin 4 and it is not that I have not tried but I just could not get it working the way I wanted it to be.

I did order vBulletin 4 in pre order offer on Oct 17, 2009 and have not used it till date on my MBA Forum

In my opinion, the new vBulletin team (Remember vBulletin is not owned by Jelsoft now but by Internet Brands) is just putting out a horrible product. Being a developer I can understand that when the original developers of the product are not working on it anymore, there are bound to be a difference in the product development approaches but the actual problem is new vB Team is not accepting that there even is a problem.

Horrible Front End Design Control

They have just too many issues when it comes to front end template system. Creating new templates with Style Generator does not even generate a theme using the color selected (Needless to say selecting the color in the Style generator can be an issue for even experts). You are left to modify lot of style vars to match the color code especially member pages and other login forms. Editing each of those is a hell of a task where you have to find thousands of variables at various places and update them. vB team does not consider this as a bug which should be fixed on priority basis.

I can write paragraphs after paragraphs for vBulletin 4 templates issues like rounded corner issues, navbar menus … but I don’t think they even deserve it and so let us move on.

Horrible Backend Code

PHP coding is way below par but let us see issues which any common CMS can have for day to day management and not being very technical about server and load. Normally vBulletin coding is such that you can identify each page with a variable THIS_SCRIPT but when it comes to CMS that variable is same for all CMS pages. So you cannot identify if your user is viewing category page or content page and so it becomes that much more difficult to get simple functionality like insert ads on only content pages.

Shift of focus

vBulletin for last year or so is focusing more on Integrating new products to generate revenue but not working heavily on bugs to make forum script better. I don’t see a single reason to be coming up with new product integration like skimlinks, VerticalResponse, CKEditor … when you have more than 2000 open bugs. Some of them are just too serious to be ignored unless you are only worried about only profits and not about your customers who are using it.

I remember they did stop allowing users to upgrade to latest version of vBulletin 3 but were forcing people to buy vBulletin 4. They finally realized that trying to force existing users to adopt 4.x wasn’t going to happen and now they have given the ability to update to latest vBulletin 3.

Most IB sites don’t use vB4

This tells me that even management is not happy with the product. If they themselves don’t put their money with their product, why would I?

Apart from DigitalPoint (Shawn has completely changed vBulletin core and has even helped vBulletin team fix some major issue) I am yet to see one large forum running in vBulletin 4.

So what’s Next?

Time to move on to Xenforo or IPB for upcoming forums and use vBulletin 3.8 for existing ones. What about you?

Update: It’s not only me who is not with vBulletin 4. See other articles on poor quality of vBulletin 4.

• Internet Brands + vBulletin = fail!
• Why I Do Not Support VB 4.x
• 79 Days, 14 Hours, 30 Minutes Since vBulletin 4

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This guest post is by Sadik of Oracle Forum.

SEO is a term which is thrown around a lot. Most new site owners are spending considerable time and effort into optimizing their sites for search engines and specifically for Google. Some unlucky souls also end up hiring one of the hundreds of scam SEO experts shelling out several hundred dollars. I am going to talk about Search Engine Optimization in general in this three part series and vBulletin 4 in particular.

Why vBulletin 4?

I own and administer several vBulletin forums. I could also talk about WordPress or Joomla but vBulletin 4 is a good case in point. Good case in point because, although being the forum system which powers most of internet communities, the vBulletin 4 series is a SEO nightmare. The fault is not really within the vBulletin application framework, but the lack of Search Engines consideration in the view (frontend) layer, meaning, the templates.

vBulletin 4 Suite consists of the forums, the CMS and the Blogs. Before we delve into the technical details of search engine optimization for VB4, let us take a moment and understand the nature of SEO itself.

What is SEO?

I am not going to present you any rocket science here. Search Engine optimization, quite simply, means ensuring that,

1. Search Engines find your site’s pages
2. Search Engine can make out from your HTML output, what the page is about, and what the content is.

Let us look at Point 1.

Why can’t search engines find my site?

Search Engines follow real life methodology of making someone famous. If I was to be known, someone needs to mention me. The more famous a person who mentions me, the more famous I will get. So my chances at fame are much higher if Angelina and Brad Pitt were to mention me, compared to Jane and Joe (whoever they are).

So Search Engines will find you, quite simply, if people link you. SE will give you more importance if well established, highly ranked sites such as New York Times or BBC were to link you compared to smaller sites. But each reference counts and the more the better. This point is entirely about Off-Site SEO. We are however going to talk more about On-Site / On-Page SEO.

Beginners will obviously find it difficult getting other people to link them. So it helps if you are a multi-site owner. You can link your new site from your established site(s). Also adequate care should be taken to have good inter-linking of pages on your site itself.

Now Let us turn our attention to Point 2, the main subject of these posts.

vBulletin 4 and On-Page SEO

Assume that you are writing a simple program to automatically read a web page. What will you need to do?

Two things,

1. Find out what the page is about, that is, topic of the page.
2. Find content within the HTML code written on the Topic.

That is what every search engine aims to do, no matter how complex the search engine algorithm. Since we have taken the example of vBulletin 4, let us get into a little specific detail about the two points above with respect to vBulletin 4. I am specifically talking about,

1. Optimizing the title of the article / thread / Blog for search engines to know for sure the topic.
2. Ensuring as semantic HTML output as possible remaining within the boundaries of vBulletin. Like replacing LI elements with DIV, and removing fluff, which is useless bloat which comes with vBulletin, like Forum Jump, post icons, permissions on showthread / forumdisplay pages
3. Presenting the cream content of the article / thread / blog to the search engine in an easily identifiable manner instead of it being buried deep into a crapload of html like hover menus, navbar etc.
4. The Extras, measuring and increasing the forum speed through pagespeed, proper interlinking etc.

In my second post, I am going to talk about all the points above and some more with respect to vBulletin 4 specifically mentioning how you can perform the optimizations on your own vBulletin powered sites.

So stay tuned…

This guest post is by Sadik of Oracle Forum.

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If you are trying to optimize vBulletin for better user experience, content delivery network can definitely help especially MaxCDN which can help make your site load faster and boost your SEO effort.

MaxCDN plugin for vBulletin is for vBulletin 4+. If you are using vBulletin 3.8 or lesser and have no plans to move to vBulletin 4, you can still use MaxCDN.

If you have any issues you can always post in comments and I will be more than happy to help or else you can even hire me at Elance to get it done for you.

1. Creating Pull Zone in MaxCDN

We will create two pull zones in MaxCDN – One for images and the second for clientscripts.

Images will be pulled from your forumroot/images folder and clienscripts will be pulled from forumroot/clienscripts. Once you have created both the pull zone verify that you are able to browse through the images as well as the CSS files

As an example:

www.mbaguys.net/images/misc/mbaguyslogo.gif

Becomes

mbaguys1.g4estatic.com/misc/mbaguyslogo.gif

Make sure both the URLs are working.

Remember you need to create the CName record for your domain.

Once you have the images being pulled into MaxCDN create the second pull zone for the Clienscripts folder. Nomenclature I follow is <SomeName>1 for Images and <SomeName>2 for clientscripts i.e. mbaguys1.g4estatic.com for Images and mbaguys2.g4estatic.com

Once you have the pull zone part done, we will make changes in vBulletin to use the new image and CSS paths.

2. vBulletin Image Paths

Admin CP > Styles & Templates > Style Manager > and select StyleVars from combobox. Edit the Image Paths to the new URLs

• images/buttons becomes http://mbaguys1.g4estatic.com/buttons
• images/misc becomes http://mbaguys1.g4estatic.com/misc

And so on for all the image paths.

3. vBulletin Replacement Variable

We will need few replacement variables to be configured to change the other Image paths like Post Icons. Visit Admin CP > Styles & Templates > Replacement Variable Manager and create the following Replacement Variables.

Search for Text : src="images/
Replace with Text : src="http://New_Images_CName_Path/

For me it becomes

src="images/ to src="http://mbaguys1.g4estatic.com/

Similarly for Clienscripts Create 3 more replacement variables.

1. href="clientscript to href="http://New_Clientscript_CName_Path
2. src="clientscript to src="http://New_Clientscript_CName_Path
3. url("clientscript to url("http://New_Clientscript_CName_Path

Once you have the above replacement variables in place browse through your forum to see everything is working fine. You can check the source of you HTML webpage to see all the images and clientscripts are being fetched from the new URLs or can wait for few seconds to see the hit reports in MaxCDN as well.

If everything is working fine we will move to custom avatars and other images which needs to be moved to the images folder for it to be using MaxCDN.

4. Custom Avatars and Images

To Move the custom avatars and other user images to be served from CDN all you have to do is move them under the images folder and everything will be taken care of automatically by the replacement variable. Make sure you have the URLs Relative to your forum home.

Visit Admin CP > Avatars > User Picture Storage Type and change the

1. Avatars to be served from the filesystem at ./images/customavatars and URL is images/customavatars relative to forumhome
2. Profile pictures to be served from the filesystem at ./images/customprofilepics and URL is images/customprofilepics relative to forumhome
3. Signature pictures to be served from the filesystem at ./images/signaturepics and URL is images/signaturepics relative to forumhome

Similarly change the Social Groups > Social Group Icon Storage Type and User Albums > Album Picture Storage Type under the forumroot/images folder

Hope this helps fellow forum admin’s. Share your views and feedback in comments below.

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WordPress is the best CMS but there is lot of misconception about SEO for WordPress. Many people think that Installing WordPress is all they need for SEO. Though it is true to some extent you can still improve a lot in WordPress for SEO and convert your blog into an SEO Powerhouse.

If you have just installed your WordPress blog make sure you have your blog privacy settings correct. Under the Settings > Privacy make sure you have visible to everyone, including search engines option selected.

The Theme

The choice of your theme can impact SEO to a great extent so choose your theme wisely. I personally prefer Thesis theme for my blog because it is one of the best WordPress theme from an SEO point of view but you can use any good theme of your choice.

Once you are done with your theme installation, we will move on to get right WordPress settings to help in SEO.

Permalink Settings

Search engines and especially Google prefer better user experience. By default WordPress URLs look like http://imtips.co/?p=123 but as your can see URL of this post is http://imtips.co/wordpress-seo.html. You can get this done by editing the Permalink Settings for your blog.

This not only makes your blog URL’s user friendly but also makes URLs search engine friendly.

Anchor text in Backlinks is still one of the key factors in Google ranking and so anybody copying URLs will also have the keywords in the anchor text.

People when linking to your content may not always link like

WordPress SEO

But more likely will use

http://imtips.co/wordpress-seo.html

And this still has the needed keywords to your liking.

Many people even prefer to add category in the URLs. For using category you need to use the following permalinks structure

/%category%/%postname%.html

Or

/%category%/%postname%/

Caution: If your blog categories are such that your post can have multiple categories for a single post avoid using category in the URL.

All in one SEO Pack

All in one SEO is one of the most used plugin for WordPress SEO but if you are using Thesis Theme you can avoid this plugin but if you are using any other theme this plugin is a must. This plugin helps you customize your home page title, post page title to add your blog title to your post.

Apart from titles this plugin can also add Meta description and keywords to your posts.

A very important point to note is that by default this plugin has Noindex option checked for category, archive and tag pages. The main reason for this setting is many WordPress themes show full post content on those pages and so having those pages noindex can help you save from duplicate content but if your theme does not display full post content on those pages you can uncheck Noindex option. If you want you can even edit your theme to show only few lines of content from your post on those pages and enable this option.

XML Sitemap

XML Sitemap Plugin helps search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engine’s crawl website much more efficiently. XML Sitemap WordPress plugin helps you create complete XML sitemap for your WordPress including posts, pages, categories, tags and other custom URLs.

Internal Linking Structure

Better internal linking structure can help a lot in SEO and so we will use few plugins to enhance the internal linking structure of our WordPress site.

1. SEO Smart Link – As your blog grows it becomes almost impossible to link to old posts. SEO Smart Links automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts as well as comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog and helps internal linking for your blog.

2. Related Post – Many people argue how related posts can help in SEO but a better interlinking always help in SEO and related posts is a way to link to other related articles from your blog post. When it comes to related posts plug-in there are quite a few of them for WordPress but my personal favorite is Yet Another Related Posts Plugin because it has very intelligent algorithm for finding related posts.

3. Breadcrumbs – Google is integrating breadcrumbs navigation in SERPs and so having breadcrumb for your posts can help your SERP listing look more trustworthy.

Caution: I personally try to avoid breadcrumbs on blog where I have posts falling into multiple categories. As an example this post is under CMS and SEO category.

4. Pagination – As blog grows it contains tons of posts and if you use the default WordPress navigation, Most of your posts can be buried few clicks from home page. Using page navigation means each of your post is just couple of clicks from the home page.

SEO and Speed

WP-Super Cache – We know site speed is a part of Google’s ranking algorithm and WP-Super Cache can help speed up your website considerably. It generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog and then uses html files intelligently to show to your guests.

SEO For Images

SEO Images – Whenever you add Images to your post you always miss ALT and TITLE tag for images and SEO Images plugin adds both of them automatically.

Optimize Category Pages

Category pages are the most overlooked pages SEO in your WordPress blog and you should always do SEO for those pages. With the Thesis Theme, you can easily add custom information to the top of your category pages but for your other themes I will recommend to add category description at the top of the page. See what I do for my blog categories like Make Money.

Backlinks

I have quite a few articles on how to generate backlinks but today I am going to discuss ways to generate more links to your Wordpres blog.

1. Follow Readers – Follow your blog reader’s and visit their blog and comment on it. I always visit the site of person leaving comment on my blog to the extent I can and see if I can share some of my views on some their articles as well.
2. Use Ping backs – You can use pingbacks to notify other blogs that you have linked to them and sooner or later they’re going to return the favour. Edit Settings > Discussion and have the option Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article checked.

Final Thoughts

Feel free to ignore anything you think is not right for your blog. I myself don’t use all of them on all my blogs but they have worked for me or for my clients.

Don’t forget to leave your comments or suggestion for anything you think I have missed and I hope this helps all fellow WordPress bloggers.

More Related Posts:

1. SEO for WordPress Categories
2. Which is Better – Blogger or WordPress?
3. Free or Premium WordPress Theme?

A client of mine wanted to have alternating colored rows (and not columns) in vBulletin 4 forums. As I searched, I saw the problem is talked a lot in forums without any solution for vBulletin 4 and so I decided to put together a solution. See my article on Go4Expert on How to have Alternating Colored Rows in vBulletin 4 Without a plugin.

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2. vBulletin Blog Does not Display Ads From Ad Templates
3. vBulletin or xenForo

Couple of month’s back I started working for one of my clients who had more than two million posts in his vBulletin forum and had issues of very slow forum experience. I did a long list of things and couple of months down the line he has no complaints about the forum speed now. Let me share the same list in details here. This not only will help others but will also help me in making list of things to be done for optimizing large forums.

1. Move Attachments and Images to File System

By Default vBulletin have Attachments / Images / Avatars all are stored into Database. You need to make sure you move them to files.

1. Admin CP > Attachments > Attachment Storage Type
2. Admin CP > User Albums > Album Picture Storage Type
3. Admin CP > Avatars > User Picture Storage Type

2. Store CSS StyleSheets as Files

vBulletin by default renders the CSS in head part of HTML and this in turn increases the size of each page. Just storing CSS as a file not only reduces the code from each page but also allows caching of the CSS file. Apart from the editable CSS vBulletin also adds an extra CSS file clientscript/vbulletin_important.css and you can copy the content of the file into your vBulletin CSS editor to make sure you have only one CSS file to save an additional server query. You can even go one step forward and copy the content of the CSS file generated from your vBulletin interface and minimize CSS and then upload to your server and link it. Go4Expert.comI have done exactly the same.

3. Reduce HTML for guest (or otherwise)

Lot of HTML can be avoided to render your pages much faster and reduce server load. Let me get into each of them one by one. 1. Disable Forum Jump Menu – I have Forum Jump Menu disabled for guests using vbSEO (See my vBSEO Review) but if you are not using vbSEO you can disable forum jump completely from Admin CP. I am sure not many of your forum users use forum jump menu. The best thing is to try and turn it off and see if any body reports that they are missing it. If no one reports, you can safely assume no one cared about using it either. Forum jump actually causes the server to work harder to generate the menu and then uses the bandwidth to display it on each page load. You can change forum jump options from Admin CP > vBulletin Options -> General Settings -> Use Forum Jump Menu. 2. Disable Posting Rules – Posting rules at the bottom of every thread and forum pages does not help much and adds mainly to the final HTML. There is no option in vBulletin to disable it and so you need to edit one single template to disable the posting rules. I have disabled it for guests only on Go4Expert.com but you can even disable it completely. To disable posting rules for guests edit the forumrules template and add the following at the top. <if condition=”$show[member]“> And at the end of the template add </if> Posting rules will only show to members and not to guests. You can completely empty the template and it will not show. 3. Disable username menu for guests on showthread pages – Showthread page shows post and each post has a username but when you click on those username it loads a popup menu and ideally that menu is rarely of any use to guests because by default users have the email to members off and PM is only for members and so if you want you can turn those menu off for guests. vBSEO provides that as an option. 4. Disable who is online for guests – Edit the usergroup ( Admin CP > Usergroups > Usergroup Manager ) called “Unregistered / Not Logged In” and Set “Can View Who’s Online” to off. 5. Disable Template Name in HTML Comments- More comments in HTML means more time browser will need to download the html and render to user and so ideally on your live server you should have template name in html comments turned off. Admin CP > vBulletin Options > vBulletin options > General Settings > and select No for Add Template Name in HTML Comments.

4. Limit Spider Activity

If you want to save on your bandwidth you should have robots.txt file to restrict areas of forums you don’t have much for spiders. User-agent: * Disallow: /admincp/ Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /modcp/ Disallow: /attachment.php Disallow: /search.php Disallow: /newreply.php Disallow: /newthread.php Disallow: /editpost.php Disallow: /profile.php Disallow: /register.php Disallow: /login.php Disallow: /subscription.php Disallow: /private.php Disallow: /report.php Disallow: /sendmessage.php Disallow: /memberlist.php Disallow: /misc.php Disallow: /moderator.php Disallow: /postings.php Disallow: /sendtofriend.php Disallow: /threadrate.php Disallow: /usercp.php Disallow: /showgroups.php You can see the robots.txt file of Go4Expert.

5. Compress Output (GZIP)

vBulletin provides compression for HTML output but I prefer to get it done through Apache via mod_deflate. Disable Zipped output in vBulletin. vBulletin Options -> Cookies and HTTP Header Options -> GZIP HTML Output And add the following lines to your httpd.conf file in Apache.

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
	SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
	# file-types indicated will not be compressed
	SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png|rar|zip|pdf)$ no-gzip dont-vary
	<IfModule mod_headers.c>
		Header append Vary User-Agent
	</IfModule>
</IfModule>

Restart Apache web server. Additionally you should also use Apache to cache static content. Refer article by coderzone on How to Decrease Web Page Loading Timeespecially caching of static content.

6. Install APC/XCache/eAccelerator on your server

I prefer CentOS on my server and vBulletin recommends APC for CentOS vBulletin combo. Refer an article my Floris about how to install APC on CentOS

7. Full Text Search Type

If you have MySQL 4.0.x you can use this option to greatly reduce server load when a search query is used on your server. Admin CP > vBulletin Options > Search Type Remember that the change itself is a heavy process as it needs to alter the vBulletin post and thread table. If you don’t have many searches avoid such a heavy query right at this moment.

8. Optimal vBulletin Options

• Enable All AJAX features – Make sure that this is set to allow all AJAX Features. Ajax helps reduce server load by not reloading a page where AJAX can be used. (Quick Reply for instance) > General Settings -> Disable AJAX Features and select Enable All Ajax Features.
• Cookies and HTTP Header Options > Remove Redirection Message Pages – I personally have not disabled it for Go4Expert.com but for my client I had to put this off to save on an unneeded page load and bandwidth.
• Cookies and HTTP Header Options > Add No-Cache HTTP Headers – Make sure you don’t opt for No-Cache setting and so set this to No.
• Server Settings and Optimization Options > Cached Posts Lifespan – If you have no issues with space on your server setting this to higher value is recommended. I have this set to 10 days and once you turn this on rebuild your Post Cache under Maintenance > Update Counters
• Server Settings and Optimization Options > Update Thread Views Immediately – Set this to No. This will update thread views via a cron every 1 hour by default. If you wish to change this you can do so by editing the Scheduled Task for Thread Views to a different time.
• Server Settings and Optimization Options > Update Attachment Views Immediately – Set to No.
• User Listing & Profile Viewing > Show Last Post on Profile Page – This is very server intensive process and so set this to No.
• Message Posting and Editing Options > Quick Reply – Not only does this make posting faster which leads to more posts being made this also uses Ajax which means you do not have to load another page to make a post.
• Message Posting and Editing Options > Quick Edit – Turn this on to reduce the need for a new page reload when someone simply wants to edit a post.
• Message Searching Options > Minimum Time Between Searches – Set this to some value mainly to avoid an attempt to use the search to harm your server.
• Forums Home Page Options > Display Logged in Users? – I have mine set to Yes but if you have issues with server load you can turn this feature off.
• Forum Display Options > Show Users Browsing Forums – I have mine set to No and if you have issues with server load you can turn this feature off.
• Thread Display Options > Show Users Browsing Threads – I have mine set to No for similar reasons as above.
• Forum Display Options > Maximum Displayed Threads Before Page Split – Having too many threads on a single page makes the page load slowly and so ideally you should have the value 20 or 40. I have this set to 20.

9. Use vbOptimize

I personally have not used vbOptimize Pro because it is untested on 3.7.x/3.6.x but have experienced lot of good things about vbOptimize when it was a free mod at vbulletin.org

10. Use CDN

You can move static content like images, CSS and JavaScript’s over to CDN and reduce your server load and speed up your vBulletin performance. See How to Integrate MAXCDN With vBulletin

11. More …

If you still have issues with your server ideally you should hire me . Opt for MySQL post table partitioning. Partitioning your post table should be based on the threadid. Partition is introduced in MySQL version 5.1+ and you cannot use vBulletin’s FULLTEXT Search option on a partitioned table. Check out how to Partition MySQL table based on Range. Before you opt for partition do read the Limitations.

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I stumbled upon The Power of WordPress and found the info-graphics really informative.

Click on Image to Enlarge.

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I always preferred vBulletin for my forums but after I purchased the upgrade for vBulletin 4.0 for couple of my forums I never upgraded them to vBulletin 4 because I never liked it.

I will mention few reasons why I do not prefer vBulletin 4.0 any more

1. Theme development were (and may be is) a headache. If you want a single color change you may first have to search it using vBulletin’s awful front end for CSS and then make changes at so many places. I do not prefer to do that. They have plans to better that in vBulletin 4.1.
2. vBulletin 4 is not very stable and has so many bugs. One of them was as simple as Ads in vbblog does not work. I know this is simple but if you are releasing a stable product which is late by 2 years I expect less bugs. This bug I reported was even in vBulletin 3.7+
3. I am not sure why but now vBulletin copyright in the footer is linked to vBulletin.com and not just plain text. I do not see a reason to do that.
4. vBulletin 4 intentions as I could sense was concentrating on SEO and so I expected better SEO on it but apart from just URL’s everything for SEO was is crap.
5. I need brand new theme for vBulletin 4 as old theme becomes almost obsolete.
6. vBulletin is not only a forum but includes vBulletin CMS which is again complete piece of crap coding with tons of error. SQL are also not well written to say the least. Apart from that index.php file is not the default one for CMS and you are redirected to content.php and I could not understand why.
7. Pricing of vBulletin as a whole is crap. They used to charge same (Not anymore) amount for old version upgrade as a new license. Why on earth would I upgrade if I could get a new license. I raised the concern in the support and it took several months to get it sorted and now I do not plan to go either with upgrade or with a new purchase.

As we had no better alternatives than vBulletin I was certainly thinking what after vBulletin 3.8 reaches end of life which is nearing soon.

Now I have the answer.

xenForo

It is being developed by the vBulletin lead developer(s) and though it is still in alpha phase looks really promising to me. As I can see from the community it has all I want just in the alpha phase itself.

What are your views on the same? Share your views in comments.

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I have done a very detailed comparison of blog and forum and which one is better in various situations. Check out my article at Go4Expert.com and do share your view and feedback in comments.

Blog Versus Forum

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I just made the post about 20 Essential WordPress Plugins at Go4Expert.com

Do let me know your views on the same.

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