Wordpress-How-To.net

If you want to track the performance of your blog e.g. where your visitors are coming from or which part of your blog are doing well etc, you may want to consider using Google Analytics.

Google Analytics is a free service provided by Google which allow website or blog owners to track their site’s visitors (including search engines) through detailed generated statistics.

Below are the steps to set up your Google Analytics tracking:

Step 1: Go here to sign up for the Google Analytics service (you would need to have a Google Account (email account)).

Step 2: Once you have opened a Google Analytics Account for your domain, you will be provided with an Analytics Account ID. See example: ” http://yourdomain.com UA-xxxxxxxx-x“. Copy the Analytics Account ID into your Clipboard. Note: You can ignore the tracking code (ga.js) given to you which is supposed to be copied into the individual posts or pages for tracking purposes as you will be using a plugin instead (see below).

Step 3: Download the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin here.

Step 4: Unzip the plugin. FTP the unzipped plugin to your WordPress plugin folder and  activate the plugin.

Step 5: In your WordPress Dashboard, click “Settings” / “Google Analytics”. Paste your Analytics Account ID from your Clipboard to the Google Analytics Settings page. Indicate your setting preference and click  the “Update Google Analytics Settings” button.

Step 6: Go to the Google’s Google Analytics (step 2) screen and view the status of your domain.

You should be able to view the analytics report of your domain once Google Analytics has completed its update.

Akismet is a spam filtering plugin that aims to pick up blog comments spams and trackback spams. The Akismet filter rely on information collected on spams captured from blogs using the Akismet plugin.  The Akismet plugin is a default WordPress plugin.

Below are the steps to activate your Akismet Plugin:

Step 1: In your WordPress plugin folder, click the “Activate” button

Step 2: Sign up for a WordPress.com blog here in order to get your WordPress.com API key.

Step 3: Log into your WordPress.com blog. Go to your Dashboard and click “Users” / “YourProfile”. The top left hand corner of the screen will display your API Key as follows: “Your WordPress.com API key is: xxxxxxxxxxxx”. Copy the API key.

Step 4: Toggle back to your Plugin folder and insert the API Key.

This should complete the activation of your Akismet plugin.

If you have a website or blog and you want to tell the major search engines about all your posts or pages, you would need to submit a Google (XML) Sitemap (an index of your site’s URLs and other information) in order for them to check your sitemap (for their indexing) for updates regularly using their spiders. In fact, Google, Yahoo, Bing (formerly Microsoft LiveSearch) and Ask.com have been using the same Sitemaps protocol to index sites around the web.

To set up your Google (XML) Sitemap on your WordPress blog,  you can use the Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress plugin by Arne Brachhold.

Download and unzip the plugin. FTP the unzipped plugin to your WordPress Plugin folder and activate the plugin. In your WordPress Dashboard, click the Settings/XML-Sitemap. In the screen displayed, indicate your sitemap options.

The benefits of using this Google Sitemap Generator plugin is that the above specified search engines will automatically be notified of any  changes you make to your WordPress blog.  This will help these search engines index and spider your blog better, resulting in a more complete index of your blog.

The Google Sitemap Generator for WordPress plugin is a must if you want the major search engines to immediately know of any updates on your blog.

If you have a large blog, it would be easier for your visitors to locate and view the posts or pages (listed by categories) that interest them if you have a sitemap on your blog.

The Dragon Design Sitemap Generator plugin for WordPress is simple to install and use. It has features for multi-level post and page categories, category exclusion, multiple-page post and page listing with navigation links plus what order to list items in, post dates and comment counts etc. You can see an example here.

Step 1: Download the plugin here.

Step 2: FTP the plugin to your WordPress Plugin folder and activate the same.

Step 3: Go to the WordPress Dashboard Settings and click the DD SitemapGen link. In the Options screen, indicate your sitemap display preference.

Step 4: Create a page with a title of your choice e.g. Site Map. Paste this code: <!– ddsitemapgen –> to your Sitemap page (top) and click Publish or Update Settings.  Preview your Sitemap page and you would see your posts and pages arranged in categories according to your earlier indicated display preference.

You can choose to have your Sitemap link display either in your blog header,  sidebar or other places on your blog.

You would have noticed that having the Akismet plugin would not completely solve your spam problem. While the plugin does a good job of identifying spams and prevent them from being displayed, it will still show up on your comments listing together with the genuine comments. You will have a hard time going through all the comments and identifying and deleting the spam comments.

As most of the spam comments comes from automated comment  bots, using reCAPTCHA would be effective in stopping them as it needs a human hand to type and match the two words that are displayed in the CAPTCHA box (see the reCAPTCHA image above) before comments can be made on your blog.

Here are the steps to install the reCAPTCHA plugin on your blog:

Step 1: Download the reCAPTCHA plugin and unzip the file. FTP the unzipped file to your WordPress plugin folder and activate it.

Step 2: Go to the reCAPTCHA site to sign up for an account and you will be given a  Public key and Private key for your site.

Step 3: In your WordPress Settings, click the reCAPTCHA link (will appear once the plugin is activated) to go to the reCAPTCHA Options screen. Input the Public key and Private key into the boxes provided. You can also select the reCAPTCHA format to suit the color of your blog.

Once this is done, the reCAPTCHA should appear on your comments’ section.

Do you want your Twitter followers to be notified each time you post a new blog entry? If yes, you can use TwitterFeed to sychronise your blog with Twitter in order to automate your Twitter posts.

Here are the steps to set it up:

Step 1: Login to the Twitter account that you want to link your blog with TwitterFeed.

Step 2: Go to Twitterfeed.com tosignup for an account. Once you have successfully create an account, create a new feed with the following screen:

Click the  “Create new feed” link.

Step 3: In the Create new Twitter screen, click “Authenticate at Twitter” to display the following screen:

Click the “Allow” button.

Step 4: The screen will indicate that you have successfully linked TwitterFeed with  your Twitter account. In the screen below, type in your blog’s FeedBurner Feed URL. Get your feedburner url here:

Click “test rss feed” hyperlink on the right side of the screen You will be notified by the message “Feed passed OK” if you have successfully linked TwitterFeed with your Twitter account.

Lastly, remember to activate your TwitterFeed by clicking the “Create” button.

To check whether your TwitterFeed is working, create a post in your blog and see whether your blog title and description shows up in your Twitter post.

I hope this article on” How to automate your Twitter post with TwitterFeed” is useful.

Adding a Youtube video to a blog is very easy. You can either choose to add the Youtube video to your content page or sidebar.

Add YouTube videos to side bar:

Step 1: Go to the Youtube site to play the video that you want to embed into your blog.You should see the following when the video is playing:

Copy the video codes displayed in the “Embed” box

Step 2: Go to your WP admin/Apperarance/Widget and Add a Text widget to your sidebar. Paste the video codes onto the Text widget and click Save Changes.

Add YouTube videos to post:

Step 1: As per step 1 above

Step 2: In your post, switch to HTML format and paste the video codes onto your post. Click Publish or Update Post as the case may be.

You can change the video width and height by adjusting the video codes.

A favicon is a small image (16 x 16 pixels) that appears alongside the url address of the browser’s address bar.

Favicons will also appear beside a browser’s “favourite” url listing when a site with favicon is bookmarked as show below:

Creating a favicon

You can create a small image (16 x 16 pixels) using Fireworks,  Photoshop or GIMP and then use IrfanView to convert the image to .ico format. In this case, you must save the file as favicon.ico or it will not work.

Add favicon to your blog

Upload your favicon.ico file to your site’s root web directory using your FTP program or your cpanel’s File Manager. For example, if your site name is “abcsite.com, you need to place the favison.ico file inside this folder in your server.

Next, you need to place the following code between the <head></head> in your header.php file (access via WP Appearance/Editor):

<link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”http://www.yoursitenamehere.com/favicon.ico” mce_href=”http://www.yoursitenamehere.com/favicon.ico”/>

Another way to add a favicon to your blog would be to download the MaxBlogPress plugin. This plugin has several ready made favicon images for you to choose from. If  you do not like any of the ready made favicons, you can replace them with your own favicon. This can be done after you have downloaded and unzipped the plugin. You just need to  replace one of the ready-made images (in the icon folder) with your own favicon prior to FTP the plugin to your WordPress plugin folder. Remember to  change your favicon file name to match the name of the file that you are replacing.

Gravatar stands for “Globally Recognized Avatar” where an avatar can be a picture of yourself or a cartoon/logo/image which represents you or your business as shown on the left. By now, you would have noticed pictures or cartoons alongside blog comments. These are the avatars of blog visitors who maker their comments on gravatar enabled blogs

How does it work?
For avatars to appear beside a visitor’s comments, the WordPress blog must have a Gravatar plugin installed or are gravatar enabled.

If you want to place your own avatar alongside your comments in blogs that are gravatar enabled, you need to sign up for a free account at Gravatar.com.

During the sign up process, you would be required to provide an email address and upload a picture (avatar) to the site. The size of the avatar image would normally be 80px by 80px. The picture will be stored on the Gravatar.com server and associated with your email address.

Thereafter, when you make comments on any gravatar enable blogs by providing your email address which matches the one stored on gravatar.com server, your avatar will appear beside your comments.

If you love to see your picture to appear on blogs around the world wide web, all you need to do is to sign up for a gravatar.com account and make comments on any gravatar enabled blogs.

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When you have enabled your sidebar widget to include pages, the page titles of any pages that you have created will be automatically listed as a link on the sidebar.

There are times, however, that you may not want your pages to be listed as such. In this case, it is very simple to exclude such pages by following the procedures:

1. Logon to your WordPress admin screen

2. Get the IDs of the pages to be excluded. Click here to see how it is done.

3.  On your WP Dashboard, click the Appearance/Widgets

4. Locate and show the relevant widget where the page(s) to be excluded is listed. The following screen should appear:

5. In the “Exclude” rectangular box, insert the IDs of the pages to be excluded.

6.  Click “Done” and the “Save Changes” button

This process should enable you to exclude pages from the navigation sidebar.

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