A light widget advanced version of the WordPress Recent Posts widget allowing increased customization to display recent posts from multiple categories or from custom post types.

Features:

* Display post thumbnails, with customizable size and automatic resizing using timthumb script.
* Display post excerpt, date, comment count, and more.
* Provides option to:
***show the post excerpt and how long the excerpt should be.
***show the post excerpt and how long the excerpt should be.
***show the post date.
***show read more link
***show the comment count.
***override the post order to order by; date, title, random, comment count etc.
***select multiple categories
***select custom post type
* Multiple widgets.

Installation

1. Download the plugin.

2. Upload it to the plugins folder of your blog.

3. Goto the Plugins section of the WordPress admin and activate the plugin.

4. Goto the Widget tab of the Presentation section and configure the widget.

5. Changing the CSS – If you need to configure the CSS style of Advanced Recent Posts Widget, you can copy the ‘advanced-recent-posts-widget.css’ file from the plugin directory to your theme’s directory and make your modifications there. This way, you won’t lose your changes when you update the plugin.

Frequently Asked Questions / Usage

1: Title

Default: Recent Posts

This field sets the title of the widget. It works the same as every other widget.

2: Sort by

Default: Date

Override the post order to order by; date, title, random, comment count

3: Reverse sort order (ascending)

Default: DESC

Change post sort order to ASC

4: Include post excerpt

Default: no

Displays the post excerpt of each post.

5: Excerpt length (in words)

Default: 5

Limits the numbers of words to display of each posts excerpt.

6: Include read more link in excerpt

Default: no

Include read more link in excerpt

7: Excerpt read more text

Default: Read more →

Set the read more link text

8: Include post date

Default: no

Include post date in posts

9: Show number of comments

Default: no

Include number of comments posts

10: Number of posts

Default: 5

Changes how many posts are displayed in the widget.

11: Show post thumbnail

Default: no

Displays the post thumbnails of each post.

12: Thumbnail dimensions

Default: 50 x 50

Sets the size of the post thumbnail in pixels.

13: Categories

Default: all

Sets the categories to display posts from.

14: Show Post Type

Default: post

Sets the post type / custom post type to display

Download Plugin

Advanced Recent Posts Widget

Safiweb Interactive have decided to offer  an EXTREMELY AFFORDABLE SEO package. In this package you’ll get high quality links from Article Directories, Blog Commenting, Social Networking Sites, Social Bookmarking Sites, Forum Profiles, and RSS Feed Sites.

What You Get
(Up to 2 Keywords + 2 URLS)

2 Articles Spun and submitted to over 1000 Article Directories
(Minimum 200 immediate live links)

100 HIGH PR Blog Comments
(PR1-PR5, do-follow and no-follow blogs, Verified Live Links)

250 Additional Low PR Blog Comments for IP Diversity

1 Article Spun and Submitted to 15 Top Social Networking Sites

50 links from Social Bookmarking Sites

250 Forum Profile Links from High PR Domains

RSS Feed Submitted to top 20 RSS Feed Sites

THAT’S A TON OF LINKS FROM A TON OF DIFFERENT SOURCES!!!

For A Limited Time Only

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Turnaround Time: 7-10 Days

New Webmasters often struggle with making SEO work despite all of the information available. There are hundreds of facts you need to know about SEO before you can understand what it really is, and how it can help your website reach its full potential. The following are going to be of great help for a start.

1. Titles!

You may think the titles of each of your web pages are for aesthetic purposes only, but that couldn’t be further from the truth!

The keywords you use on your page titles play a major role in how / where you appear in search engine rankings, for example:

Your company ‘Lovely Websites Inc.’ have designed a great new website, it’s even got ajax on it, yeah, ajax. Now you may feel naming your pages ‘Lovely Website Inc. | Homepage’, ‘Lovely Website Inc. | Portfolio’ etc will look great, and that may be the case. Unfortunately however, this won’t have any affect in helping your site get found for your desired keywords.

If ‘Lovely Websites Inc’ was based in London, UK, it would be far more beneficial to use your services and location as your title, i.e. ‘Website Design London | Lovely Websites Inc’ as this will associate your site with those keywords.

Try and put yourself in the shoes of a customer searching for your services on the internet, and what they’d put into Google when searching for your products.

Using carefully chosen keywords throughout the titles, content and headers will help your rankings for those keywords in search engines.

2. HTML document names

It’s tempting to give your html documents straightforward names, such as your portfolio page ‘portfolio.htm’ but that doesn’t help search engines all that much. Try and use your keywords in the name of the document, so for example if it’s your portfolio page, why not name your document ‘your-name-portfolio.htm’ and this should help you rank a little higher for your name if it is also used elsewhere in your site.

The same applies to blog posts, some blogs are set up to display their dynamic URL’s as ‘journal.php?post=28′, this again doesnt help Google. If you’re using WordPress make sure your permalinks are configured correctly to aid the search engines in crawling your website.

3. In-Links

the links into your website have began to play a major part in search engine rankings, the more popular and trusted the site that is linking to your site then the more important it is.

Gone are the days when simply placing your website on link farms and directory sites would get your site higher in the rankings, they will probably now have the opposite effect and rank your site lower in search results.

Try and get high quality, contextual links into your site and don’t forget the anchor text. If the anchor text of the link to your website is one of your keyword phrases then Google etc will associate your website with that phrase if enough high quality websites do the same i.e. Instead of a link to your site being ‘lovely website Inc’ use ‘web design London’ or other desired keywords.

As well as links to your site from other websites, take a look at links pointing to your site from the rest of your own web pages. For example, if you haven’t got additional navigation in your footer pointing back to the homepage, about us page etc, insert these on every page and that is instanly a lot more in-pointing links for your site.

4. Your content

Getting links from other websites, which I mentioned above, is one of the hardest and most important aspects of SEO, as you have to have some content that people will find interesting enough to want to link to or pass on.

This is why the content on your site must be fresh, original and above all, linkable! Make sure if you write content and it links in to other peoples content, then let them know and they may just return the favour!

Look at what people are writing about, what’s on the front page of digg, delicious etc and write about these popular topics. Writing link-bait is one of the hardest, but most profitable things an author can do.

5. Sitemaps

As I mentioned previously, in-pointing links can also aid SEO. Having a sitemap on your site can provide an index of all of your webpages, this will not just aid in search engine terms, but it will also help a user navigate your site when looking for low-level pages in your website.

As well as a ‘physical’ sitemap that a user can use on your site, it’s important that you submit a sitemap.XML to Google so they can thoroughly crawl and index it. Take a look at Webmaster tools for more information on this.

6. Out-links

There is a lot of debate in the SEO world that having a lot of links out of your website can have a detremental effect on your own. I tend to think that without links pointing out, you dont have much chance of getting links from other sites unless you’re constantly writing new content.

Don’t go overboard but by all means, provide your readers with plenty of outgoing links, preferably to great, interesting websites!

7. H1, H2, H3….

If you have the ability to edit the headings on your page then it’s certainly beneficial to do so, these hold more rank the ‘bigger’ the heading, H1 ranks first, then H2, then H3 etc.

Try and use your keywords as many times as possible in your headings, but don’t spam or the search engines will punish you!

8. Having a standards-friendly website

Although this doesn’t directly affect rankings (i.e. If you alter your website to be standards efficient you won’t suddenly be top of page 1 for your chosen keyword), you can still benefit from having a website that meets standards. If your site isn’t, you risk Google not being able to crawl certain parts, or even all of your website!

9. Unique Wording On Every Page

Google’s main method of differentiating pages from one another on the Internet is by the wording that is used on them. Include 300-500 words of unique wording on each page and Google will see your site as valuable, informative and unique from any other site on the Internet.

If you simply copy wording form another website (even your own) Google will not give your new site any value at all. Google actively checks for content that is duplicated across the internet, and penalizes the sites that it is found on.

10. Add and Update Meta Tags and Meta Descriptions

While they aren’t heavily weighted in Google’s ranking algorithm, they do affect how many people click on your website in the SEO rankings.

Use your Meta descriptions to really sell the ‘click’ by giving users a reason to click through to your site. Look at what your competitors are saying and try to say something different that really speaks to your prospects.

Ensure that the Meta description tags on each page are different to avoid duplicate content.

Conclusion

Those were the 10 things I thought any aspiring SEO Webmasters should know. Got any feedback or further suggestions for SEO beginners? Feel free to add some hints and tips in the comments below!

Some of the websites that can offer a lot of training material and can help you learn about SEO are:

• SEOBook.com
• SEOMoz.org
• SearchEngineLand.com
• SearchEngineWatch.com
• SEObytheSea.com
• SearchEngineJournal.com

Web designers and developers have many responsibilities when it comes to building websites. From creating a solid layout for the front-end, to writing clean code so that the site runs bug free – there’s a lot involved. However, one thing that is often neglected and should fall on both the designer and developer is search engine optimization. Here are six ways designers and developers can practice better SEO.

1. Avoid image heavy designs

It’s no secret that images often lead to heavy designs that can cause longer than desired load times. More and more data points to Google emphasizing page speed in their ranking factors. If you aren’t able to cut back on images, design images so that they can be repeated in CSS. With modern CSS, effects such as gradients and drop shadows can be achieved without using images as required in the past.

2. Don’t design navigation links in images

One of the easiest ways for Google to determine what a page is about is through the anchor text of a link. Navigation does just that, while also adding a medium of organization as well. With tools such as type kit available, the excuse of image based navigation is non-existent anymore.

3. Condense CSS and JS files into one document

As noted above, page speed is becoming a big player in the ranking factors. A quick and easy way to get a small win is by condensing CSS and JS files into one document each. For every document that is listed in the code a new call from the server is required, therefore increasing the load time. By decreasing that to just one call for each file type, you decrease the number of calls, therefore decreasing load time.

4. Keep header tag near top of code

Header tags often indicate the title of a piece of content. Frequently, this is where SEOs place keyword phrases that they are trying to rank for. Theories are that content near the top of an HTML document carries more weight than that of content in areas such as the footer. H1 tags should be used for titles of content.

5. Use CSS Sprites

At Pubcon South 2011, Aaron Shear, the SEO for Zappos talked about the importance of CSS sprites, a savvy way of combining images using CSS to decrease load time. While the concept of doing it manually can be daunting, Google recommends a great tool called SpriteMe, which I’ve seen great results with personally.

6. Keep the tag lines away from the top

One of the first things you want Google to see in your code is the keywords related to that page. Often designers put slogans and tag lines in the header of a design. This isn’t ideal as the first piece of content Google will see on each page is that slogan or tag line which won’t be related to that page. If you aren’t able to migrate this to another part of the site, it’s best to put it in an image.

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For the past few weeks, thousands of WordPress sites(including our client site)  have been infected and spam links injected into the sites databases.  You can read more about it here….Link injection, basicpills dot com and Blackhat SEO spam

To prevent the injection: Change your WordPress database username and password, and move your WordPress site wp-config.php to a non public folder

Looking for new Ideas and inspiration in the design industry? Here is a list of 6 great web design blogs to subscribe to. Whether you are looking for some creative inspiration, trying to stay up on the current trends, or are seeking the latest buttons, textures, or graphics, you can find them. If you simply want to sharpen your skills – or learn new ones – you can do that as well.

The web design industry is always changing, so as a web designer, it is important to always be ahead of the curve. I have compiled a list of 6 web design/ development blogs I think you should follow and read often.

In this article, I am going to cover some of the best web design blogs to follow. Whether you are into web design and development or not, there is a little something useful for everyone on this list.

Webdesigner Depot

Webdesigner Depot is a well-designed blog that takes more of real-life into account through their blog posts. Some of their most popular posts are about things like airline logos, comics, snowboards, and architecture. It’s certainly a good place to go for design ideas, but they do also cover vector icons and things of that nature.

Smashing Magazine

First up on the list is Smashing Magazine. They cover everything about graphics, inspiration, coding, and design. As an insanely popular blog, they have an endless supply of resources about WordPress, CSS, Photoshop, and design elements like wallpapers, icons, and photos. If you only check out one website on this list, make it this one.

Think Vitamin

Think Vitamin is one of my personal favorites. They focus more on the coding aspect of web design than the artsy part of it. They have some great articles and video tutorials on HTML, CSS, Ruby on Rails, jQuery, etc. You can learn a lot about marketing and business from this site, but mainly about the design and development process as a whole.

Six Revisions

Six Revisions contains “useful information for web developers and designers”. This blog details everything from web design tools and tips to project management and web standards. I love how comprehensive they are with their guides and choice of topics. They will tell you what you are doing wrong in their posts, as well as help you do it right.

Web Design Ledger

WDL is another blog that incorporates all the aspects of web design. They cover lists of things like logos and popular templates, as well as coding with HTML5 and textures. Like a lot of the blogs on this list, they are part of the Smashing Network, which explains why they have such good content and therefore a large readership.

Onextrapixel

Onextrapixel rounds up this list. Their topics include inspiration, design, development, tutorials, freebies, CSS, WordPress, articles, and resources. They put out large lists of how to do things in their posts and as you can see, they cover a wide range of topics.

Conclusion

What do you think of the list? Did I forget your favorite design blog? Leave your thoughts, ideas, and comments below. If you found this article useful, share it with your friends/followers!

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