So I thought this might have been a custom-hack that somebody put together for WordPress, but then I stumbledupon the Referrer Detector WordPress Plugin.

WordPress Referrer Plugin

The plugin allows you complete control over which sites you have referral messages for. And you can even add in new sites, with custom messages. Everything is done in a WYSIWYG manner, making it extremely easy to manage.

By default, it comes with about 11 options, with all of the major providers covered: Digg, Reddit, Google, etc.

Installing the plugin is drop-dead simple, simply download it, put it in your /Plugins/ directory, activate it, and it’s ready to go.

From here, you can customize the text that is displayed and active/deactivate referral messages as you please.

Let me know if you need any help getting it setup.

Nearly 30% of online adults surveyed and said they will immediately leave a website they perceive as “cluttered with ads”, and 75% who stay on those sites say they pay less attention to the ads there.

So too many ads is bad for the publisher, the advertiser, and the visitor. So what is the right number of ads to run?

The Right Number of Ads

Though respondents accept that advertising will appear on websites, the majority (52.6%), say they have low tolerance for any more than two advertising units per page. Another 27.3% say they will tolerate only a single ad per web page, and slightly more than one-quarter (25.3%) will tolerate just two ads per page.

So looking at these numbers, you should be looking to run about 2 ads per page. Looking at this blog, we have a lot more than 2 ads running, and looking at TechCrunch, the #1 blog, they have about 20 ads at any given point.

Too Many Ads Decrease Overall Messaging

The survey also found that ad clutter has a negative impact on consumers’ perceptions of an advertiser’s products and services:

* One out of two (52.4%) respondents has a less favorable opinion of an advertiser when their advertising appears on a web page they perceive as cluttered.
* One-half (56.4%) of women claim clutter negatively impacts their opinion of an advertiser, versus 48.3% of men.
* Women also are more likely than men to abandon a site that appears cluttered (32.1% vs 27.5% of men).

Ad clutter’s negative impact on respondents’ opinions increases with age. Less than half (46.8%) of respondents 18-24 years were impacted negatively by clutter, but nearly two-thirds (63.2%) of respondents age 55+ were unfavorably impacted.

How do you make a link directory? You can pay for the scripts or you can use a free plugin designed for WordPress.

But why would you want to create a web directory? Isn’t it just going to create reciprocal links, which are pretty much worthless? Well, directories are only good for the directory owner, and not the sites listed in the directory.

To create a web directory in WordPress, you need to download the plugin. From there, all you need to do is drop it in your WordPress plugins file, and enable it.

How To Use A Link Directory Effectively

Say you are putting together a health-food related directory. You should solicit webmasters to submit their health-food sites to your directory, and ask them for a reciprocal link.

But you don’t give them the link for your directory. You give them the link for your other site, the one you want to promote. So now you have all of these sites linking back to your main site, and the web directory is filled with a bunch of sites. The sites in the directory don’t do you much good, but over time it can make the directory more useful, and if you put work into it, you can make a useful web directory of health-food related websites.

So now you have a useful web directory, and are getting tons of 1-way links to your main site.

So the next time you see a link directory, realize the guy running it may be a lot smarter thank you think.

I have been using a number of free themes for a long time, and wanted to give back to the open source WordPress community, and am releasing this blog as a free, Premium theme: WiseTheme.

The actual theme is a HEAVILY modified version of Arthemia, a great free magazine theme. I took essentially the core framework of the theme, and created everything else from scratch.

Preview: View Demo
Download: Free Premium WiseTheme

Theme Features

The best way to learn all of the features is to download the theme and install it on your blog. It is designed to be a one-step installation.

• Adsense tags pre-configured into posts at the beginning and end of stories
• Custom Navbar, with mouse-over effect for a Professional appearance
• RSS subscribe icon prominently displayed next to the blog logo
• Multiple ad units available (12 Total) for maximum monetization
• Image previews on search and archive listings
• SEO-Optimized to the max, with H1, H2, and H3 headers
• Custom CSS stylesheets for IE optimization
• Floating column widths, to accommodate big and small monitors
• Note guides in the code to help you learn, and optimize the blog for your uses

Installation Guide

1. Download the theme, and install it in your WordPress directory: wp-content/themes/
2. Change the Adsense code in the Adsense_singlepost_top_square.php & Adsense_singlepost_bottom_square.php files. There are two pieces of Adsense that need to be changed, a 300×250 and a 728×90.
3. Sign up for an account at BuySellAds.com and replace the code in the sidebar_right_125x125.php, sidebar_left_125x125.php, and sidebar_top_300x250.php.
4. Replace the logo.gif (found in /images) file with your own graphic for your blog
5. Install the following plugins: All In One SEO, Disqus Comments System, Related Posts Plugin, FavIcon Head.
6. When writing a post, to ensure that the thumbnail generator works correctly, go to the custom fields area in the post-editor section. Create a new custom field name, called ‘Image’. For the value, you will use an image you have already uploaded to your blog (as in during a post). Copy down only the part of the URL that begins with wp-content/, ie ‘wp-content/uploads/2008/12/parking-boot.jpg’ Hit add custom field to complete. You should make sure the image is at least 125×125 and should be a jpg or gif.

Notes & Questions

I am happy to provide support for the theme, please send any emails to Andrew UFL at Gm@il d0t com.

This area will be updated as users pose questions, and for general troubleshooting. Enjoy!

I wanted to add an additional touch to my blog’s listing elements, as I didn’t really like the standard bullet points that come with WordPress.

Tweaking Your WordPress Bullets

I used a standard star tool in Photoshop to make little stars, and if you look closely you can see them below this line. You can use mine if you want, but you may want to customize the colors based on your site theme.

What you need to do is go into your style.css sheet and edit the UL image settings. You want to add this line “background: url(images/sidebarli.png) no-repeat 0 0px;”. This will replace the standard bullet points with the sidebarli star (which is the smaller of the two).

You want to then go into your main UL structure and add the line “background: url(images/ul-marker.png) no-repeat 0 0px;”. This is going to be the larger of the images, so you want to use it for your standard LI elements.

If you look at my sidebar to the right and then the suggested reading section below, you can see the bullet points updated.

This was a nice touch I made to by WordPress blog, and it took me about 30 minutes. So if you’re looking for a way to tweak your WordPress theme, this is a great place to start.

But one of the most fundamental elements of any SEO-ed blog is having your header tags organized and placed in the right position.

I having been working very hard to get my blog ranked highly for startup blog but I’ve been missing these crucial tags on my own site.

Check Your Blog For Header Tags

The first step in determining if your blog has the correct tags is to check your source code. To do this, go “view->view source” or hit control+U on your PC or command+U on your Mac.

This is going to bring up the HTML view of your webpage, and you don’t have to know what any of this really means, you’re only looking for the H1 H2 H3 information.

To do this, pull up find on the source code, and search for H1, and H2. If you find them, you’re on the right track, if not, you need to insert them in manually.

Where To Put H1, H2 Tags?

Now that you know where your site does or does not have H1 or H2 tags, you should look for the best place to insert them.

The H1 tag is meant to identify the main title of the page, so your site name or the title of your article should be inserted into the HTML code. Looking at the screenshot above, you can see where my H2 tags were inserted.

For the H2 tags, this is information that subordinate to the main content. For my main homepage, the H1 tags are on my “Headline” story and all of the featured stories have the H2 tags. Depending on your site structure, you may or may not to insert these manually.

If you look at this story in particular, you can see that I’ve used H2 tags while writing it, which will avoid me having to insert H2 tags on my own.

Be Careful of Abuse

Don’t think that inserting H1 and H2 tags all over the site will max out your Google search rankings. You have to me careful when placing them and only make sure they relate to the actual content of your site, because Google will penalize you or even ban you if there are too many of the H1 and H2 tags.

Just making sure they’re in the correct spot will go a long way to getting your blog optimized, and on the frontpage of Google.

Good luck!

Webmasters either make money via CPM (cost per thousand) advertising, CPC (cost per click) ads or some other combination of link-placement, CPA (cost per action) advertising networks.

So for the majority of webmasters, unless they’re on CPM networks, they’re not making much money from your visit. So for me, being a webmaster, I know the time and energy that goes into a site, so when I’m on their site, I make sure to subscribe to their feed and also check out their sponsors.

For the most part, you can find some quality advertisers, providing services that you may be interested in (you are, after all, reading the content on their site).

So the next time you’re on a site you like, will you courtesy click?

When selecting a WordPress theme, you should have two major concerns. The WordPress theme should be among the best in SEO ranking, that is it allows your stories and articles to have the highest search engine ranking position (SERP) and also allows you the maximum design aesthetics. You want your blog to be ranking highest in Google’s search algorithms and ranking highest in terms of web-design for user preferences.

I’ve been looking to start some small vertical blogs to help bolster my tiny web empire village and am looking for great WordPress themes that are going to rank well in Google and provide little-to-no-maintenance issues for me.

After searching the net, I’ve found 5 themes that I personally consider for my own sites, and wanted to share them with you.

Best WordPress Themes for SEO

PassionDuo Blue
This is actually my favorite, since it has the big placement of the 125 buttons on the side, and although it doesn’t look like much from the screenshot, is a quality building block.

GreenOrnament 1.0

iTheme Clear Blue 1.1

Logi 1.0

MarlexSystems 2.0

The best themes for WordPress are judged by two main levels. How well they rank you in Google and the subsequent SERP they give you, and also the best web design in regards to overall SEO-effect.

The top SEO themes have all of their site structures being very clean, and readable by Google. They will include all of your categories, tags, and stories in easy to read format for the robots on Google including all of the meta and header tags.

Additionally, I would suggest you check out our 50 tips for a high traffic blog, to get you started on your blog marketing and grab the all-in-one SEO plugin as well.

Now I’ll be prepared for the next Digg I get …all assuming I do get another front-page Digg

I put together a few test projects, Gainesville Delivery, just to test out the template, and it was really easy to setup, and after a few tweaks, my keywords were optimized to the kilt. When getting everything setup, you must ensure that you change out the Adsense Publisher-ID otherwise you won’t get paid!

For full details on all of the features, as well as a plugin link,

Be sure to head to the author’s page. Download ProSense.

Here are some of the theme features, some of which are currently exclusive to ProSense:

• Separate and Distinct Ad Blocks. The use of distinct theme files for ad codes allows for easy editing and insertion of Adsense units. These ad blocks can also be used to insert other types of advertisements as well and are not solely limited to Adsense use.
• Multiple Ad Display Options. Unlike other Adsense Ready themes, ProSense allows you to choose between either banner or rectangle ads for the single post page, thus allowing you more flexibility when it comes to ad blending.
• Hassle-free convenience and ease of use. You’ll only have to insert your Adsense publisher ID in the default ad units and you’re done. It should only take a minute or two to set up ProSense perfectly.
• Integrated Ad placement on the homepage. Unlike most Adsense ready themes currently available, ProSense blends a 468 x 60 banner unit between the second and third post on the blog homepage.

  This enables you to display relevant ads to search visitors who arrive at your homepage, as they are more likely to scroll and scan through your posts.The inclusion of a well-blended horizontal link unit near the top of the homepage also attracts navigational-style visitor clicks.

• Highly Optimized Ad units on post pages. There are two types of ad blocks on both the top and bottom of the single post page. You can choose between using a 468 x 60 banner and 300 x 250 rectangle at the top of the post or a 468 x 60 banner and 336 x 280 large rectangle at the bottom of the post.

The ability to designate and match different ad units is exclusive to ProSense and is currently not available for other Adsense Ready themes.

• Pre-blended Adsense unit colors. All Adsense unit colors are tweaked to match the blog’s link and background colors. There is absolutely no need for you to spend time picking the appropriate ad colors.
• Search Engine Optimized site structure. ProSense is built from good, clean code that validates well. The CSS positioning is written so that your blog content is prioritized in the source code as this may help to improve search engine crawling and ranking. Dynamic and descriptive title tags are also used for each blog page.
• Compatible with WordPress 2.0+. ProSense has been tested with the latest 2.2 Getz version of WordPress and no problems were experienced.
• Widget-Ready. If you’re a widget lover, you’ll be happy to know that Prosense allows you to easily install and use widgets to complement your content and advertising scheme.