How do I get it back?

A: The simpliest way to get it back is to reinstall your wordpress installation.

Now if that is outside of your skillset never worry. Shoot me a email via http://www.helpfulgal.com/contact.html and I’ll send a request for $25 and I’ll be happy to correct it for you.

Now go out there and have a great wordpress day!

I did and on a couple of my blogs its been a huge issue – having all those pending comments and it filling up the database on my hosting account – but who in their right mind would want to sit there and delete even 10 at a time?

Not me.

So is there a way to do this quick?

You’ll need CPanel hosting access – because you need to find where your phpMyAdmin so you ca get to the wordpress database where your wordpress software is installed.

Once inside the phpMyAdmin area and where you have your wordpress database installed -

1. click on the SQL tab

2. enter into the text box

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = ’0′

3. click “go”

Then to make sure you did it right – log into the wordpress admin and all those pesky pending comments should now be gone.

If you have questions about this – I can make a video showing you how I did it for one of my blogs for anyone else who needs to see before they do.

And remember if in doubt make a database backup before you or anyone else attempts changes to this data.

But how to keep the page and just not have it show up in the menu?

There’s a great little plug in I found that worked the trick. Its called – Exclude Pages – you can find it by going to the wordpress.org list of plugins – Exclude Pages plug in.

Its simple to use – just install – then while you’re still in the Admin Area – got to PAGES – click on the EDIT if your page already exists, if not make a page. Then scroll down on that ADD NEW PAGE screen and on the lower righthand side you will see a box to check or uncheck depending on if you want or don’t want the page added to the navigational bar in your wordpress theme.

Let me know how this works for you. Happy WordPressing!

I’m a geek, I know it. Information is like oxygen to me, necessary to keep a steady flow at decent levels. Most of the time I am resident geek, my friends and colleagues have a more common response – why should we have to know that? Why should I even bother my brain with that information.

In this case – what’s all the fuss about “title tags”?

Well, take a look at this diagram of a search result below:

1. The title: The first line of any search result is the title of the webpage.

In future posts, I’ll explain about 2 – 4 but for now, #1 is that’s the largest text and if you have one of the search words or keywords in your title – ITS BOLDED.

OK, now if you were searching for RARE BASEBALL CARDS in the results of your search you see big and bold – Rare Baseball Cards – how likely are you to click on that? I’m pretty likely myself to click on that and I don’t think I’m alone.

Guess what most of us put in that place though? Home, home page, our business name are the more likely choices if you take a look at the average site. The business name is the most common.

Straight from the mouth of Google, they say -

“Accurately describe the page’s content – Choose a title that effectively communicates the topic of the page’s content.”

Notice they don’t say – stuff this with your keyword so it doesn’t make sense – remember where it shows up – think of the experience of the person searching for you – make it descriptive – it doesn’t HAVE to be a sentence. AND notice that they reference “the page’s content” – this is just what the content of the page is rather than every possible keyword that could apply to your site and other pages.

Remember while you’ve got a thought to the search engine, the consumers or customers looking for your product or service is the real success here. What they see and read in those results is directly co-related to what action they are likely to take.

If you’re on WordPress, read a brief recommendation on the ALL IN ONE SEO wordpress plugin that will help you set up your title tags.

Its easy to use and you can get it directly from WordPress by downloading it from here.

ALL In ONE SEO

Its free and it will make a huge different in your control over the SEO of your site. It puts the power into your hands.

Well, I found one that I like. I have used Google’s Analytics but with so many sites under my belt, I would like to go to my admin area and get everything there – comments, postings, stats etc. OK so I am feeling a little lazy about not wanting to go over log into Google and tell Google about all my sites in one place. I also like a little privacy – not a lot, just a little.

So what I found was a plugin on wordpress which is easy to install. This plugin is a highly improved variation of StatPress and it shows you real time statistics about your blog or website. It collects information about visitors, spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers, OS etc.

Click here to go to WordPress to download it StatPress Reloaded.

Once the plugin StatPress has been activated it immediately starts to collect information. I just started using it and by the time I installed it and took a phone call, I say that a spider had already “crawled” by. By using StatPress Reloaded you can see your visitors actions while they are surfing your blog or check which are the preferred pages, posts and categories.

In the Dashboard menu you will find the StatPress Reloaded page where you could look up the statistics (overview or detailed). StatPress Reloaded also includes a widget you can add to a sidebar (or easy PHP code if you can’t use widgets!).

Its been a while since this plug was updated but so far it works with the latest WordPress update January 2010.

And in addition to viewing your stats from within your admin area – you also have a little more privacy in case you have a need for it.

Assuming you may not know the benefit of pinging your blog, its how you get word out to the search engines that you have something they haven’t seen before. Now that’s like calling out “you hoo” to a bull while you’re waving a red flag – most likely its going to head your way. While it may not be a good thing with a bull, its a GREAT thing with a search engine and your blog.

And WordPress helps you do it quickly. Once you’re in the ADMIN area of your wordpress site, go to SETTINGS by clicking on it.

Under SETTINGS – look for WRITING and click on that.

Then scroll down for Services and you’ll see a box that probably only contains “http://rpc.pingomatic.com/” – you’re there.

Below here is a list including that first one of a couple of services that will automatically ping your blog. Copy them now and paste them in that box and remember to hit save/update.

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc

http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

To learn how how to set wordpress up to not EXCESSIVELY ping the services, you can read about that here blog and ping the right way.

I have a friend who has had a blog/website for a year – religiously writing posts and articles and making a run for being one of the most prolific contributors to Ezine Articles. She’s one of the more successful “regular people” who is making a living through internet-based training system. And she asked me to look at her blog to find out why it wasn’t racing up the charts of the search engines aka Google.

Since she’s a very generous soul, she didn’t mind if I shared a few tips I found that might help you when it comes to how to seo your blog.

Top Three Mistakes or Oversights

1. Too many title keywords on a post.

The Title is the part of the meta data  that shows up at the very top of the browser bar – if you look up you should see the following How to SEO Blog | How to SEO a blog | SEO for a blog – that’s my title to this post. Its only three sets of keywords and its not everything that I do but this is easier for a search engine to be able to know which words are important.

Well, if its so bad and we shouldn’t do it, why do so many of us put so many keywords in our titles?

My opinion but I think it comes from the mindset that easily slips into the pattern that if  3 or 4 keywords are good, 15 are better.

In actuality, too many keywords will just dilute the impact of your post or page. So pick three related keywords and use those in your title. Your site will have many pages and you can afford to focus since no one page has to do all the talking. Build your table (aka your website) with many legs (keyword specific pages) – not just one.

2. Too many keywords on a post.

Same sort of idea here but this is where you have keywords in the keyword portion of the meta data.

Techie alert – The meta data portion of the keyword section doesn’t show up visually on your site but it is seen by the search engines.

And like keywords in your title data – less is actually more because fewer keywords will increase the weight of importance the search engines assign those words when they see your post. Let me be clear – when you type in 20 or 30 words in as keywords, its not going to help you – and potentially it could be why you’re not higher in the searches for your keywords.

3. Keywords on a post that have no relation to the content of the post.

Just any old keyword will just not do.

The keywords for any particular page or post in order to be effective in their work to rank in search engines, they MUST be closely related to the actual content on the page. While obvious perhaps, most pages or posts that I’ve examined including my some of my own over time are set up using the same keywords as the general site keywords. However, this doesn’t make your site stronger, it makes it weaker.

By not being 100% clear about what your specific content is on that particular page by the use of specific, targeted, relevant keywords, you’re making it easy for search engines to put you on a back burner because they can’t “trust” that your information will be of service to their clients.

Remember search engines understand “a = a” much better than “a = the letter that comes before b.”

So be brave, be relevant, and be precise and choosey when you choose keywords. Using them to SEO your blog will ultimately help those who will be helped by your knowledge and expertise. Make it easy for the search engines to facilitate that through the use of keywords to SEO your blog.

If you’d like to ask me a WordPress Question -  WordPress How To and I’ll do my best to answer it.

Help with WordPress anyone?

If you’re needing help with any aspect of your website that uses WordPress, please let me know if I can help.

Contact Me

You can email me through this site for specific situations – if you just have a question but don’t need a direct response – please put your question below. I’ll be using these questions to develop articles and posts for a general audience.

If you could learn one thing today to do on your WordPress Blog what would it be? I will actually answer your question.

E-Mail Address:

Remember the 1990 movie Hunt for Red October starring Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin?

Just one ping

Captain Ramius: Re-verify our range to target… one ping only.
Capt. Vasili Borodin: Captain, I – I – I just…
Captain Ramius: Give me a ping, Vasili. One ping only, please.
Capt. Vasili Borodin: Aye, Captain.

So if you’ve been blogging for a while you may have heard the term “ping”. But for newbies, hard to know what this really is and what it does and why too much in a short time isn’t good for your blog.

Pinging is what  your blog does behind the scenes goes to notify search engines that something has been updated or added to your blog posts. Its is a very powerful part of blogging and should be used to maximize your blog’s exposure.

Its so powerful that it your blog tells or “pings” too many times in a short period of time, some search engines view this as excessive and may ban your site as a result. Yuck, that’s completely the opposite of what you want.

So most of us initially say, OK I won’t excessively ping.

But what you may not know is that WordPress automatically pings ANYTIME you update or edit a post.

This ping update may happen because of a new post or if you have just edited one of your posts. So if you were to edit 10 blog posts in an hour, WordPress would be pinging all along the way and not only could you be pinging 10 times an hour, if you’re like me and have to go BACK in to edit again, that would be another ping.

And what’s worse, while you are posting a post with a future scheduled date, your blog will ping the search engines that your blog is ready with new information. Why is this not good for your blog?

But when the search engine spiders visit your blog based on that ping they received, they will find nothing new since its a future scheduled post. They will interprete this situtaion that you are sending them unnecessary pings. And doing this thing unknowingly might get your blog banned.

But I’ve found a solution for this excessive pinging. Its an easy to install WordPress Plugin called MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer.

This plugin will automatically notify search engines ONLY when you make a new post.

MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer will limit excessive pinging by not sending any pings while you are editing or saving any scheduled posts. You can also set the minimum pinging duration and can add different pinging services with this. It uses a log system which can tell you the last 20 ping records that have come from your blog. Use this pinging plugin for wordpress for maximum security and to reduce excessive pinging problems.

And the best part, its a free plugin, so just click the link here to learn more about it and download it for yourself.

Happy Blogging -

Carolyn Holzman

Helpgal.com