Today, you can get the chance to test a SEO plugin, still in Beta but with lots of impressive features already!

Basically the plugin will gather already existing functionalities into one place. Thus, you will be able to control meta tags, meta robots, breadcrumbs, XML sitemaps, and a few other features.

Interested in testing all these features? Head to the announcement post straight away!

WordPress SEO Plugin beta – Yoast.

If you remember well we have been talking about another theme framework a few weeks ago: it was WP Framework, an initiative launched by Ptah Dunbar. Well it seems that Justin Tadlock brought the concept further. I guess both of them have been working on this idea for long so none should be blamed for stealing the idea. Would be pointless anyway, the idea is great. What is apparent is that this will be interesting to WP web hosting providers and enthusiasts. 
Here is the concept:

Hybrid is more than just a WordPress theme. It’s about pushing the limits with what WordPress can do. It’s a framework. Something you can use to build anything from the smallest family blog to a powerful site that handles thousands of visitors a day.

Sounds good to me! But what does that mean in practice? The Theme Demo is already a good start to see what can be done, and then I invite you to have a look at the announcement Justin has just made and at the theme description.

Here below are the key points of this theme:

A theme fully compatible with WordPress 2.7 and 2.6

Yes, Justin has worked with the new functionalities of the latest WordPress release and this theme includes threaded comments and other cool features of WordPress 2.7

A theme easy to update

Hybrid WordPress theme framework has been built to fit with child themes.

It was made so that you could customize your site in any way without touching any of Hybrid’s files. This way, you can get updates and bug fixes without breaking your modifications.

Moreover Justin has put together some tutorials to help you manage and develop your own child theme.

13 page templates

The theme is packed with 13 template pages already created. I bet you will find something that fits to your needs in there. It goes from a Login and register template to a Prologue style template for twitter addicts.

A theme SEO optimized

You used All In One SEO plugin in order to set up a correct SEO website? No need for it anymore, Hybrid Framework is already SEO optimized!

What else? How much?

Well, you may be surprised but the theme is free and distributed under GPL license. Some of the options, page templates and child themes are only available to club members though, but that seems fair enough to me according to all what you could do with such a theme!

Why haven’t you downloaded the theme yet?

View Demo / Download

For more WordPress news do not hesitate to subscribe to my RSS feed!

Indeed, as RSS is also a content page and collecting links, it also takes part in your pagerank. If your RSS URL has a different name than  your website root then it is possible that it gets a different pagerank than your website.

Let’s take the example of CNN. If you check the pagerank of http://www.cnn.com you will find out that its pagerank rates 9.

However the RSS page for CNN has a different URL, which is http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss. As you can see the pagerank is different. The search engines manage the RSS page as different page and assign them a different pagerank.

Now what happens if your RSS feed has a higher pagerank than your website? You would dream of a Pagerank 6 or 7 and that is your RSS feed that gets it instead of the website. In that case you can implement a simple solution in order to avoid search engines to index your RSS feed.

In order to do that you need to assign No follow attributes to all your links to your RSS address, or even better, disallow search engine browsing for your RSS feeds. You can do it by adding the following line to your robots.txt file:

Disallow: /URL_RSS_Feed/

You should of course replace “URL_RSS_Feed” by your RSS URL.

That makes another line to add to our robots.txt file! Do you have any other suggestions? Do not hesitate to leave a comment!

However there are a few plugins that I always install at first. I believe them to be the core of WordPress. Who knows, maybe one day we will find them included in every WordPress installation!

So what is important for a website and for its webmaster? At first I’d say monitoring, don’t you think?

1. Monitoring

Knowing who comes, when and from which browser is something important to me. And of course, what feels better than seeing your number of visitors growing after an interesting post? For that reason I always install two monitoring plugins with every WordPress installation.

Feedburner

Yes, RSS feed is important. Even more if you have a blog. Of course you could let it as it is and check the amount of subscribers in Google reader, but FeedBurner will tell you so much more about your readers. So I always set up a Feedburner account, and then I install Feedburner Feedsmith, the plugin by Feedburner.

Google Analytics

For the rest of the monitoring, Google analytics does a great job for me! Clear, complete, it offers varieties of settings to know everything about your readers. The last update the google team offered us brings again more functionalities to a good web stat software.

Thus for your website you will need a Google account and a Google analytics plugin. There are many and I personally use a simple one, but you can have a look at the other possibilities, it looks like some of them have real advanced settings.

For stats fans there are other possibilities than Google analytics out there. For more information check the 8 super sexy Web statistic software presented by OutlawDesignBlog.

So you can now see who is coming to check your website, who is subscribing to check the updates. Nobody came yet? Why not spread the word about your new great website?

2. Spreading your website

Once your website is ready, you may want the whole world to know about it. A few plugins will help you to do that.

Google sitemaps

Creating a sitemap of your website will obviously help the search engines to crawl the whole website content. Google XML Sitemaps WordPress plugin does more: every time you create a post or edit an existing one your sitemap is changed and all major search engines are informed about it. That will definitely help your website to appear among Google results faster.

To finish with Google, there is one last thing I do on Google pages when I set up a blog: I sign it on Google Webmaster tools. There you can set all Google results preferences and see when and how Google bot crawls your website.

Sociable

Nowadays another way to look for information or to browse good articles is social bookmarking. Digg, Delicious, Technorati and many other social bookmarking websites allow every user to “vote” for articles and websites they like. If they appreciate browsing through your websites content, why not helping them to share it with the other members of their favourite social bookmarking network?

With Sociable you can choose between dozens of different bookmarking websites to display at the bottom of your posts or everywhere on your website. I personally install it on all blogs as it is a useful service to offer to your readers at the bottom of the posts. I also install WP related posts on some blogs, as it is again a useful tool to propose to your readers after they read a post entry. It is important to remember that a lot of your readers arrive to your blog on a post page and not on the welcome page. Consequently it is always better to propose them something else to do after they read your post; sharing it with others, go read another post or comment are three different choices for different readers. You can also add a link to your RSS feed as it can be a third opportunity!

All In One SEO

As you are at it, why not optimizing your website for all search engines? The first thing I do after setting up a WordPress installation is changing the permalink structure to something more “pretty”: I personally use the following structure: /%category%/%postname%/ You can check the codex for more information about permalinks.

Then I always install the very same SEO plugin, All In One SEO Pack. It helps you optimizing your titles, your META tags, …

So it is done, you are now ready to welcome visitors!

3. Security

It is great to be well known but it also has its consequences. If you don’t pay attention you will quickly find out that a successful website attracts all kinds of spammers, hackers, … Luckily WordPress can protect us (knock on wood!) with regular updates to avoid any possible hack.

But as you can never be too careful, a few plugins help you look after your website.

Akismet

Installed by default on every WordPress installation, it has worked great for me so far. You can find some others around but Akismet does the job I am sure. I always activate it with my WordPress installations.

Database Backup

You never know what can happen to your blog. Backup your database every day is a must i my opinion. It can avoid you many problems the day your website goes down.

WP-DB Backup does the job by proposing either an immediate backup or scheduled backup that can be sent by mail or stocked on the FTP.

WP Super Cache

On high traffic pages or in cases when there can be some high dugg pages, I always install WP super cache. It is in my opinion a good insurance that the reader will never suffer from low speed loading pages. After all, isn’t it the main reason for all of us to leave a page?

WP Security Scan

Another great tool to protect yourself from hackers is WP Security Scan. This great and indispensable plugin will scan your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions. That is another “Must” for every WordPress installation.

Now you know what are the mandatory plugins to me? Have I missed something? Let me know your opinion!

The robots.txt file is used to allow or block crawling by search engine bots on your website. When you install your WordPress blog this file is not created by default. However it has a real importance for the Page ranking further on. Here are a few tricks for WordPress users.

First things first, as it is not created by default you will have to create it manually and add it to the root of your website.

However you can create it automatically by choosing the “I would like to block search engines, but allow normal visitors” option in the admin panel. It will then create the robots.txt file and block your website against search engines crawling. If you would like to change this option later on you can do it from your admin panel, but it will not change the robots.txt file. This bug is known to happen with the latest version of WordPress 1.6.2, so you will have to edit the file manually to allow robots to crawl your website again.

For instance if you want all robots to be able to crawl the website again, you will have to edit the file with the following lines:

User-Agent: *
Allow: /

 You can have more information about the robots.txt file on the web robots page. Thus you will be able to hide some parts of your website or select which search engines you want to allow and the ones you do not want.