Posts categorized: SEO

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The Difference Between Taxonomies, Categories, and Tags (Oh My!)

A common question for new WordPress users is, “what’s the difference between categories and tags?” Like everyone knows what a “category” is, but the idea of “tags” can seem very similar. And then you throw in related WordPress concepts like “taxonomy”, and things can get confusing very quickly. But no worries, it’s really not that complicated. Let’s break it down..

DIY WordPress Popular Posts

Over at my code snippets site, I keep track of the most popular posts and display a list in the sidebar. It’s an easy way to highlight the site’s best content and share top snippets with visitors. There are numerous plugins available for displaying your site’s popular posts, but they tend to be overkill and/or employ weird algorithms that are just unnecessary and not always accurate.

For example, a lot of plugins and techniques calculate popular posts based on number of comments. These days I’m just not sure if that’s a relevant measure of popularity. Some sites have comments disabled, and other sites receive very few comments in general, so going the comment-count route just doesn’t work.

What I wanted was a simple way of counting hits and displaying a simple list of the most popular posts. This DigWP tutorial explains how to do it with two easy steps. Sound good? Let’s dig in..

DIY Alternative to WordPress SEO Plugins

Most SEO plugins have way too many bells and whistles for my simple needs, so I wrote a little snippet that’s meant as a drop-in, DIY replacement for the big WordPress SEO plugins. If you want a lot of features and options, then try Yoast’s awesome SEO plugin or the great All in One SEO; otherwise, if you just want something simple that works, check out Basic WP SEO — a simple slab of code that you add to your functions.php file and done.

5+ Ways to Add Google Analytics to WordPress

Delivered on Google’s “world-class platform,” Google Analytics is a powerful way to monitor your site’s statistics. As flexible content-publishing software, WordPress provides a variety of ways to add Google Analytics (GA) to your web pages. These techniques range from including the GA tracking code directly to using plugins that are easy to customize from within the WP Admin area. In this DigWP post, we cover it all with 5+ ways to add Google Analytics to your WordPress-powered site.

WordPress CMS Plugins

To make room for new content for the DigWP 3.3 update, we’re “excerpting” this section into its own blog post. Here you’ll find an extensive round-up of CMS plugins for WordPress. This includes CMS plugins for better admin functionality, user-role management, custom content display, e-commerce and shopping carts, forums, newsletters, and a whole lot more. This isn’t a comprehensive list, so be sure to let us know of any awesome CMS plugins that we might have missed.

Optimizing WordPress Permalinks

Configuring your WordPress permalinks is simple and only takes a second, but understanding what they are and how they work is key to setting up the best permalink structure possible. Your site’s permalinks are like the street address for your site’s web pages. They help both people and robots understand your site’s structure and navigate its contents. There is no “one magic permalink recipe to rule them all,” but keeping a few tips in mind makes it easy to optimize your WordPress permalinks. This DiW article shows you how..

Custom Page Titles from Scratch

The titles of pages are controlled by the <title></title> tag in the <head></head> section of a website. They are important for all kinds of reasons. Telling the user where they are. The name of the page when bookmarked both locally and socially. They are important for SEO.