Today I installed a plugin that will show the Google rankings for a bunch of keywords over time, straight in the WordPress backend. This is something I’ve wanted for a long time. I would even pay for it, but the plugin called “SEO Rank Reporter” is completely free and can be downloaded from the WordPress plugin directory.

Seo rank reporter plugin

It seems to be a quite fresh plugin, published in January 2011, and has only 3000-something downloads yet. The plugin is made by David Scoville, and I am a little surprised that he gave it away for free, SEO-plugins often cost a little, see the post about the SEO Pressor plugin for example. The seo rank reporter plugin is free if you can live with it checking your ranking every third day. If you want it more often, they will charge you a little. But every third day works very well for me, I do not need updates more often than that, so I will test the free one.

How does the plugin show you the Google rankings?

The plugin has a nice-looking graph that shows you the rankings. You find it from the “rank reporter”-button that the plugin adds to the bottom of the left side menu in your WordPress back end.

Google rankings in WordPress back end

When days goes on the graph will be nice-looking with upgoing curves, of course..

You can also see a list with your rankings, and you can download the results as CSV if you want. You can also add other URL:s than the one where you have the plugins installed, so you can track all your sites from one WordPress back end… I think this plugin can save some time for me.

This was the plugin hint for this week, download it for free from the WordPress plugin directory and start keeping track of your Google rankings in your WordPress back end.

Daniel Tan has made a WordPress plugin called “SeoPressor”. It is a plugin that helps you with onpage optimization on your WordPress blog or website. It does not include any offpage optimization functions, such as link building, keyword research or autosubmitting posts, it is just onpage help for you. No matter if you have made your WordPress template yourself, or if you have a free or premium template, you still need some onpage optimization for getting your posts to show up in Google, right?

Who should use the Seo pressor plugin?

The Seo Pressor plugin is for the people that do not want to bother about onpage optimization when writing blogposts, but still wants to have the onpage factors 100% done before publishing a post. We all know that a good onpage optimization is needed before you start to build links to your site, right?  The Seo Pressor plugin is also for they who wants to save time when writing well optimized posts. It provides a checklist above the “publish” button so that you see right away how well-optimized your site is for the word you are targeting that site for. People that are totally unfamiliar with search engine optimization could very well use the seopressor plugin for taking care of the onpage part of their optimization. You do not need any knowledge about seo for using the plugin, you just input the phrase you want to rank for in the field, and starts writing with assistance from Seo pressor (More about how to use it below). The Onpage optimization is no rocket sciense, but it still takes some time to master, and seopressor could be a great help before you are completely secure with your onpage seo.

So, is the Seopressor plugin only for newbies?

I would say no. I know onpage seo very well, but I still got some valuable help from the plugin when I tested it. It helps you with keeping your posts enough long, and with using the right words as often as you should. It speeds up your writing.

The SEO Pressor plugin dummy proofs your on page SEO.

How does Seo Pressor plugin work?

After installing and activating the plugin, you head over to the place where you adds a new post. The thing you will see now is that there is a new field on the right side of the screen above the “publish” button.

A new field has appeared under the main content box and in the right sidebar with seo pressor plugin activated

Start with adding the keyword to the “SEO Pressor Keyword” box that have appeared under the content field. You also see a SEO Pressor score on the right side, this is the score we want to get as high as possible. (It is the same score that you can see in many online “seo-testers”). The score will be zero until you have added you keyword and started to write. For updating the score, click “save draft”. You will now see a new higher score and some advice what to do for getting a higher score.

Seo Pressor updates the score every time you click "save draft".

When you have been writing some text and clicked the “save draft”-button, you will see a score.  Follow the instructions given under the percentage for making the score higher. The score is updated whenever you hit “save draft”. Try to get as close to 100% as possible, but honestly, there is no idea to be picky with the last few percentages, those are mostly going to be about keyword density anyway, and that is nothing that is very important anymore. If yo get 80% or higher SEO pressor score, publish the post and consider the onpage SEO done for that post. Now you can check some older posts and try to improve the score on them as well and see if your Google rankings are increased.

Is SEO pressor plugin something I must have?

You do not need to have it, but it fastens you onpage SEO, and makes it “dummy proof”, you will not be publish any posts that are “unoptimized” anymore if you install it..

Where can I get the SEO Pressor plugin?

The SEO Pressor plugin is a “premium plugin”, which means that you have to pay for it, just like how it is with premium themes. The plugin is made by Daniel Tan, “the SEO guy“. He sells it on his website seopressor.com, single site license costs $47, and if you want to use it on unlimited sites it costs $97. You can also get a 7 day trial for $7.

Download the SEO Pressor plugin here.

You are building your first WordPress sites, and really starting to enjoy it. You want to build more sites, and continue to make them better over the time. Sooner or later you will come to the question, what is a good web host for WordPress? I recommend Bluehost, because they have a very good price/quality ratio. The things a web host has to  has to support for being good is the following:

• It should be a Linux server.
• It needs to support PHP version 4.3 or greater. For WordPress 3.x you will need PHP 5, so that’s the new minimum.
• It needs MySQL 4.1.2 or greater
• It should run Apache
• It needs the mod_rewrite Apache module (For Clean URL:s).
• You should be able to register new domains straight from the dashboard.
• It should support auto-installing WordPress from the dashboard. That will save you time when you start to make a lot of WordPress pages.
• It should be able to have different WordPress websites in different folders in your web space, and you should be able to automatically install WordPress into as many sub-folders you want, all from the daschboard, with no coding or file transfers. This will speed up the time of making new WordPress sites a lot when you have a few. (or just two).
• It should be safe and have a high up-time.
• It should respond quite fast.
• A great customer service is good if you ever have any problems.
• The price / quality relation should be the best possible.

This website and a lot of others are hosted on Bluehost. They fulfilled all of the requirements and more as well. I really recommen Bluehost. It costs 6,95 a month, and you can put almost as many sites as you can on their server without paying more!

What is a good web host for WordPress? I would say Bluehost!

So how to register for a good web host for WordPress?

You just go to The front page, you sign up for the account, you chose a domain name, you choose the billing period, (1 year for example), you pay for the hosting, and log in to the dashboard, or control panel. You scroll down to the area where you find “simple scripts” and you click “WordPress”. Then WordPress will be installed automatically to your chosen domain, and you can start creating content right away!

And when you want to make another WordPress site, you just log int to the control panel, click on “domain manager” and chose a new domain. (domains costs 10$ a year). Then you go to simple scripts again, and let’s that install WordPress on the new domain. Now you have TWO WordPress sites on the same server! Repeat this process and make as many WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla sites you want, everything from the simple scripts on the control panel! And you do not need to pay for any more hosting, you can add as many new sites you want to the 6,95$ hosting you bought in the beginning! The first domain you chose will be a “primary domain”, but that does not affect the other sites at all. You only need to chose one the first time that will be called primary.

So good luck, and start to make a lot of great WordPress sites already today!

Click here to go to the Bluehost frontpage, and continue with signing up!

A new theme for the new company Nordic ground engineering were made a week ago.  This one is with a big image slider in top, created with the vSlider plugin. It is a really fresh and modern looking theme that suits the green-energy business that they are working in. Our company Genero got the task to make a website for them, and we felt that wordpress suited well for the kind of website that they wanted.

Since this is a template for a company, (like the comboboats template), I can’t give it away. But you could always make your own template by following my guide. //Jonathan

Today I am going to tell you how to make a user- and search engine friendly sitemap for wordpress that updates itself automatically whenever you add a post. First I have to explain a little about sitemaps. There are two types of sitemaps (at least):

1. Sitemap.xml, this one you can submit to google for fastening your site’s indexing. This is ONLY for search engines, not for users. For this one there is a plugin that automatically creates the sitemap and submits it to Google everytime you update or write a post. The plugin is called google xml sitemap and can be downloaded from here. You only need to activate it, then it keeps your sitemap.xml up to date all the time.
2. The sitemap page, this is just a page on your site where you list every single page that you have, like this one that I have on my site: The sitemap. This is good for users that wants an overview of your site, but also for search engines, because this works like an internal link-directory, this page contains a link to every page you have on your site. So even if a blogpost is two years old, there will be a link to it just one click away from the front page.

Building your sitemap for WordPress

We are going to concentrate on number two, because number one takes care of itself if you just install the plugin.

1. Download Exec-php plugin. This plugin lets you run php-code in your posts. Do not worry if you don’t know php, I will tell you what to write. Activate that plugin.
2. Download the WP_category_posts plugin. I have a modifyed (better) copy here (zip-file). Activate that plugin also.
3. Create a new page on your WordPress blog. You can make a post also, but for this i suggest a page. Name it sitemap.
4. Now we are going to use the two new plugins for making this page automatically show links to every page on the site. We will group the links by their categories. Create a heading for each category on the new page.
5. Copy and paste this code under each heading: <ul><?php wp_cat_posts(9); ?></ul> . The number has to be changed to the ID of that category (9 is just an example).
6. Open a new tab and go to admin panel –> posts –> categories, and check your category ID:s. Click on a category and you will see the ID in the adress field (example: ID=17). Make a list of the ID for every category.
7. Go back to the sitemap page and put the right ID numbers in every place you have pasted the code <?php wp_cat_posts(9); ?>. This code will list all the posts in each category and output it as a link to that post.
8. The sitemap is ready! Put a link to the sitemap in the footer, in the main menu, or in a widget, the important thing is that you can access the sitemap from the first page (or all pages) on your site. No matter how old your blogposts are, you will still find a link to them one click away from the front page!

The php code in the source will show the posts on the sitemap page (from my personal blog jonathanbjorkskog.com)

Additional things you could do with the sitemap

If you have a lot of posts, you could consider to make the sitemaps for the different categories on different pages for keeping the sitemap page shorter.

If you have pages (about, contact, and so on) on your site, put a link to all of them also on your sitemap page.

If you make a new category, go to your category page and add that to your sitemap manually, include the code that pulls the ID, and that category will also be updated with posts.

Important! Do not edit the sitemap page through the “Edit”-button that some themes show under the content when you are logged in, this will make the php code unusable. Edit the sitemap page through the “admin panel –> pages” instead.

Combo boats is making houseboats with sauna, they needed a more fresh look for their website now when they are launching a new boat, the Combo 38 houseboat. I freshened up their old theme and made a picture slider for the header in it.

I am interested in boats and sea, so this project that I am working with in our company Genero is really interesting! You can check the website about The houseboat here.

I am going to write a couple of articles abot making your wordpress theme and installation more search engine friendly. In this first post I will talk about the URL of the site, the part that you see in your browsers adress-field. By default, wordpress presents your posts with URL:s containing question marks (?) and numbers, and that is not user friendly, neither search engine friendly.

Here is no difference if you have a paid or premium theme, a free theme, or a theme that you have made yourself, the permalink-structure has to be fixed anyway.

Fix the permalinks

This is a easy step, and a very important one. This step does not belong to the theme, but it is so important so i had to mention it. Log in to the administration-interface of your blog, click on Settings down in the left corner. Then click on “Permalinks“. In the view that now appear you see a list of settings for your permalinks. The first one is checked by default. That makes the URL of your blog posts look ugly, like this professionalwthemes.com/?p=123. This does not tell the visitor or the search engine anything about what they can find on the site. Instead you should activate the last one, the Custom structure. In this field you can decide yourself how the URL should look. Paste or write /%postname% in that field.

fill in /%postname% in the custom field

This will take the name of your posts and automatically make an URL of that. So if you write a post about permalinks for wordpress, the blog url will automatically become yoursite.com/permalinks-for-wordpress.

If you want another url, just click the edit-button that you see in the picture above. Then you can write your own url for that specific article, post, or page. Now you automatically tells Google, Yahoo, Bing and your visitors what the post is about, even if they just see a link to it they will know. Good luck!

Next post will be about changing the headings of your posts to h1, then we´ll cover the plugins you need for fixing the titles of your posts, after that we will go over the sitemaps for your wordpress blog, and so on. Stay tuned and keep up making fantastic websites!

I made a fresh blue theme suitable for Health and Lifestyle blogs, it could also be used on a lot of more types, like business, fashion, technical blogs and so on. It has two sidebars and support for dropdown menu’s.

Clean blue wordpress template

It has two widget-areas so that you easily can put every widget you want on our blog. The left sidebar is a little thinner than the right one, for making it look more sophisticated. The template have a horisontal menu supporting dropdown menu’s for you that wants to have a lot of pages on your blog. Click here for downloading the Clean blue WordPress theme

The Green / Orange sporty theme is a Free one. It is good for you that have a sporty blog, or if you’re writing about lifestyles and health. It has a orange background, a green header, and a light green backround for the articles. The template have a horisontal menu, and also support for dropdown menus.

Green Sporty wordpress theme

It looks very fresh and modern, and can for sure be a great choice for you that wants a colorful blog. So feel free to download this free template here and use it as much as you want! Download Green Sporty Theme

Traction is a really flexible and visually attractive theme. It works good for corporate use, for blogging, for product presentation sites and for internetmarketers. There is both a free version and a paid version of Traction. Maybe you could start with the free version, but I strongly recommend that you pick the paid version. Then you have the possibility to chose color schemas, you can easily change the three pictures flashing on the top of the front page, there is more sidebar and ad-options and you get support if you need any. Basically, if you want to, you could do almost the same with the free version, but that requires a lot of coding, propably costing you much more in time then the paid version would cost you in money. Your blog or website gets a fresh and clean appearance with this theme, and the best thing, I think, is the following: If you just have a little content, this theme still makes your website look like a big expensive one. And, if you have a lot of content, with this theme your site will still be very easy to navigate. It has both a meny for categories, and one for pages, it has four widget areas and differenth frontside look than the other pages. The Traction template is very well search engine optimized, with differenth heading one on every page, and not the sitename as heading one on any other page than the front page.  Click here for getting to the site where you can get the Traction theme.

Traction theme overwiev

Who should go with the Traction theme?

• Those who are new to WordPress, this theme needs no previous knowledge at all (if you get the paid version).
• Small companies that wants a very cheap website that still looks professional. A website with the traction theme makes your company look big and fancy.
• Bloggers that wants a theme that is both search engine optimized and nice-looking. Themes usually just fulfill one of these criterias.
• The more experienced wordpress users that has got enough of the free themes that promise a lot but does not do anything without you tweaking it and recoding it and wasting a lot of valuable time.
• Internetmarketers that wants one theme that they can use on sites in many different niches, by changing images in the big picture area on the frontpage, this  theme looks good in almost every niche.

Plugins I like to activate on pages with this theme:

• Headspace 2: For making your own titles and descriptions for improving the search engine optimization for your page.
• Wp title 2: For people that uses the theme on a website, not just for blogging. This lets you have different meny-links and page headings for every page on your site. Actually, it works for posts also.
• Google XML sitemap. I always install this one. It fastens the site’s indexation in Google. In addition to this one, you should also make an own sitemap fro your wordpress blog.

You can of course activate all the plugins you want for your wordpress installation, or just go without plugins. The Traction theme works for almost every purpose that you can use wordpress. (that’s a lot). For example, this site, professionalwpthemes is built on the traction theme. The customization of the theme just took me a few minutes from the built-in controlpanel that comes with Traction. Traction Theme is built by The Theme Foundry.  Click here for getting to the site where you can buy the Traction theme.