Theme Lab

With the online video industry taking off, you may want to know some easy ways to add video to your WordPress sites. There are several great WordPress plugins for adding video content to your blogs. In this guide I’ll go over:

• Adding your own hosted .flv videos to WordPress
• How to embed videos from video sites such as YouTube

Start adding videos to your WordPress sites today and read on…

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Ever since Adsense updated their terms and conditions, requiring publishers to display a privacy policy on their website(s), webmasters and bloggers alike have been scrambling to comply with the new TOS. Fortunately for WordPress users, there is a quick and easy way to generate an Adsense-compliant privacy policy with just a few clicks.

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This is just a quick message to anyone using FeedWordPress, the subject of my previous article: Put your dormant domains to use with WordPress. It is not compatible with WordPress 2.5.1. The feed syndication will still work, but you won’t be able to edit any settings in the backend since a necessary WordPress function has been removed since version 2.5. I’ll be sure to post again when an update from the developer has been released.

This should really go without saying, but backing up your any website (not just a WordPress site) on a regular basis is extremely important. Although a lot of web hosts may offer free backups, it is still your responsibility to keep recent backups yourself, preferably hosted on a local hard drive. So many things can go wrong, I’m not going to get into specifics. In this tutorial I’ll go over several methods of backing up your WordPress sites.

• The difference of a database backup and a “full” backup
• How to manually backup your WordPress database
• How to manually backup your WordPress files
• How to backup your WordPress site with WordPress plugins

If you want to have peace of mind and start taking backups regularly, read on to learn how.

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For those of you domainers who have a lot of unused domain names earning nominal revenue at old-fashioned domain parking services or simply collecting dust and not doing anything, read on. Developed domains will almost always outperform one-click landers at parking sites. One of the easiest ways to do quickly develop a domain is to set up an automated WordPress blog. In this tutorial I’ll go over:

• Where to host your WordPress auto blogs
• How to install WordPress and configure it with SEO in mind
• A free WordPress plugin you can use to set up an auto blog
• How to use use RSS feeds to generate relevant content
• How to monetize your website with Adsense and other revenue streams

Now is the time to dump those stagnant parked pages and start developing your unused domains into dynamic and content-rich websites.

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With web 2.0 in full swing, social networking sites have played an ever increasing role in the evolution of the internet. Sharing, creativity, and collaboration are all vital factors in this web 2.0 trend. Sites such as Facebook, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Digg, Mixx, Del.icio.us, Reddit, and the like have changed the way content is distributed online. These sites can turn into valuable marketing tools for your website if used correctly.

In this tutorial I’ll go over a few things to make your WordPress blog more social-networking-friendly:

• How to use the Sociable plugin to add icons to your posts and pages.
• How to use the ShareThis plugin to combine all these icons into one.
• How to add a dynamic Digg button to your posts.

If you’ve been wondering how to add those social bookmarking icons to your posts, read the rest of this tutorial.

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This isn’t a SEO blog, and I am by no means a SEO expert (whatever that means), but in this tutorial I’ll go over a few tips for optimizing your WordPress site for search engines. I’ll go over some well known SEO plugins for WordPress as well as basic page optimization. After reading this tutorial you’ll learn:

• What SEO (search engine optimization) is
• How to rewrite your URL’s for SEO-friendliness
• How to generate a sitemap and submit it to Google and other search engines
• How to use the All-in-one SEO Pack plugin to generate meta info
• How to get your site to the top of the SERPs for your targeted keywords GUARANTEED

If you want to learn how to do all of the above (especially the last one) read on.

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If you’re still using mailto: links on your WordPress site, I urge you to read this tutorial. Having an e-mail exposed like that on any website is asking for mass amounts of spam. The sad truth is, bots or e-mail harvesters scour the internet for e-mail addresses like this 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Not to mention it’s really annoying to click on a mailto: link when you don’t have a default e-mail application set up.

The good news with WordPress is: there are a many easy to use plugins available to reduce spam with contact forms. These contact forms will effectively hide your e-mail address from robots and humans alike, thus greatly reducing your e-mail spam. The even better news is: you can do all of this without making it excessively difficult for a legitimate message to get through.

In this guide I’ll go over two plugins which I personally use myself on this very blog, cforms II and WP-ContactForm Akismet Edition.

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Chances are you’ve heard the term Akismet before in the context of preventing WordPress blog spam. So what is Akismet exactly? Akismet is a powerful tool in the fight WAR against comment spam and trackback spam. This isn’t your ordinary anti-spam plugin that just adds a simple image code which supposedly verifies if the commentor is a “human” or not. The truth is, spam bots are getting more and more sophisticated by the day, and who knows? They may even be able to circumvent your CAPTCHA code and spam you like crazy. What Akismet does is different.

In this tutorial we’ll go over how to set up Akismet on your WordPress blog, step by step. This quick guide will show you how to activate the plugin and sign up for an API key to use it. Start experiencing the benefits of Akismet and read on.

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I’m sure while browsing for WordPress themes, you’ve come across some that are advertised as being Adsense ready. What does this mean exactly? Basically this means the WordPress theme has been designed to have space for Adsense ads in the available dimensions. In reality, nearly every WordPress theme is potentially “Adsense ready” as any theme can have ads placed, wherever you want. In this tutorial, we’ll go over several ways on how to insert ads into your WordPress themes. You can do this through:

• A variety of WordPress plugins
• Inserting raw ad code directly into the post
• Inserting ad code directly into your template files

If you want valuable tips in inserting ads into your WordPress themes, read on.

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