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Search Engine consultants quickly realized how useful these types of links were, sprinkling them throughout links on the page so that some links were weighted more heavily than others. The practice was called page-sculpting and was eventually looked down upon by Google.

I still utilized nofollow on my pagination links (those are the next and previous links) on the site. That way my pages (2, 3, 4, etc.) wouldn’t be included in search results. I did this by a modification I found on Katz Web Services page.

Last week, Google provided an update where pagination links could be coded with rel=”next” and rel=”prev” within the anchor tags. Thankfully, the functions (which should be added to your theme’s functions.php file) are quite easy to edit. Here they are with the update.

Customization for Next Page links:


function mtb_next_posts_link($label='Next Page', $max_page=0) {
global $paged, $wp_query;
if ( !$max_page ) {
$max_page = $wp_query->max_num_pages;
}
if ( !$paged )
$paged = 1;
$nextpage = intval($paged) + 1;
if ( (! is_single()) && (empty($paged) || $nextpage >= $max_page) ) {
echo '>a rel="next" href="';
next_posts($max_page);
echo '" title="Next page – Go to page '.$nextpage.'">'. preg_replace('/&([^#])(?![a-z]{1,8};)/', '&$1', $label) .'>/a>';
}
}

Customization for Previous Page links:


function mtb_previous_posts_link($label='Previous Page') {
global $paged;
if ( (!is_single()) && ($paged > 1) ) {
$prevpage = intval($paged) – 1;
echo '>a rel="prev" href="';
previous_posts();
echo '" title="Previous page – Go to page '.$prevpage.'">'. preg_replace('/&([^#])(?![a-z]{1,8};)/', '&$1', $label) .'>/a>';
}
}

Add those functions to functions.php and then use the function in your index.php and other pages where pagination links are utilized. That’s all it takes to implement this new feature on your WordPress site or blog – something I’d highly recommend! Hopefully, the developers of WordPress will implement this change within the core application. To date, they haven’t paid much attention to search engine optimization, though, so I’m not holding my breath.

People notice. Your audience notices. And they don’t convert. Having a page that takes longer than 2 seconds to load can exponentially increase the number of visitors that abandon your site… or worse… your shopping cart. For that reason, it’s essential that you work on improving your speed.

For WordPress, the savior has come with WP Engine:

• WP Engine serves your blog really fast. First there’s the server stuff: We use only top-of-the line dedicated hardware, we spread your web requests and database queries across multiple boxes, and we’ve hand-built a WordPress-specific caching system that delivers pages in 15 milliseconds.
• Then there’s the stuff inside WordPress itself: WP Engine compresses your content, minify CSS and JS, crunch bytes out of your images, and rewrite the WordPress HTML output to take advantage of more optimizations. And we’re the only WordPress hosting company who includes a fully-managed CDN service, where we serve your static content from “edge” servers all around the world, reducing latency by seconds.
• WP Engine makes use of proxy servers, database and disk caching, file minification, image compression, and content delivery networks for your media. We’ll make sure you’re using plugins that don’t slow down your site.

I spent quite a few hours with the team at WP Engine migrating a very large site (this one) to see how it performed and it was fantastic working with them. We actually have a very large International client moving over to WP Engine in the next week, so we’ll be able to give it a real test drive! I’m excited to see a dedicated platform arise for WordPress to rid bloggers of all the headaches of performance tuning.

And yes – those links are affiliate links! Use CODE WPROCKS and get 10% your WP Engine account. Prices are very affordable – especially to the small, medium and large business markets. This appears to be the best solution I’ve found dedicated to WordPress on the market.

By 2014, the market for social enterprise tools, software and services is predicted to reach $4.6 billion worldwide. This new generation of technologies is rising up to meet a growing demand for connectivity and transforming all aspects of business. Amid the chaos, new markets and leaders will emerge. Journalists will embrace them, and PR pros will manage the process. Let’s dive into the ballooning popularity of social business.

In a fast moving world, it’s important that your site is optimized on all mobile devices, including phones and tablets. According to a recent infographic produced by Microsoft Tag, mobile internet usage will takeover desktop usage by the year 2014. Needless to say, your mobile site is one of your primary marketing assets in today’s world.

WPtouch Pro is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily create and enable a rich mobile theme for your site. The plugin provides a framework where you can create a customized theme that is separate from the site optimized for the desktop. It also has the ability to work with other plugins and utilize most of WordPress’ features.

WPtouch Pro supports themes for iPhones, iPads, Android, Palm OS, Blackberry, and Samsung, with features like full menus, advertising, and statistics. We’ve already experienced a jump in our mobile visits ever since we implemented WPtouch Pro – who doesn’t want that?

We are happy to announce that we will be having Lisa Sabin-Wilson of E.Webscapes Design Studio on our Marketing Tech Blog Radio Show this Friday, June 24, at 3 p.m. EST. On our show, we will be talking all things WordPress, blogging, design, and social media.

Lisa Sabin-Wilson is the founder of E.Webscapes Design Studio (founded in 2000), a blog and web site design and development company specializing in premium WordPress themes, made to order to your specifications. She has designed and developed over 1,000 personal and professional WordPress web sites.

Lisa is the For Dummies brand (Wiley Pub) franchise author on all things WordPress and is the author of WordPress For Dummies and 3 other WordPress-related titles for Wiley Publishing; having worked with WordPress since 2003, she has extensive experience and knowledge on the platform and shares it in her several WordPress-related books. She is also a regular public speaker on topics such as: WordPress, blogging, design and social media.

You can also join us in the DK New Media office on Friday for the show by registering on Eventbrite. We are offering 10 tickets, so get your ticket before it is too late!

WordPress continues to enhance its platform with many features that don’t get a lot of attention. However, with the release of WordPress 3, they added theme support for automated feed links in your header. This means you can remove any RSS/feed link from your header.php file and simply add the following code to your functions.php file in your theme:

if(function_exists('add_theme_support')) {
add_theme_support('automatic-feed-links');
}

What this accomplishes is putting a dynamically generated RSS link in your header that is automatically detected by external feed applications or other platforms that consume your feed(s). This is a really great feature for your audience.

Now you can simply read a feed specific to the blog category:

• Analytics – Analytics Feed
• Content – Content Marketing Feed
• Email Marketing – Email Marketing Feed
• Mobile Marketing – Mobile Marketing Feed
• Search Engine Marketing – Search Engine Marketing Feed
• Social Media Marketing – Social Media Marketing Feed
• Technology – Technology Feed

Combined with the specific category feed, the entire blog feed is also listed in the header.

I’m sure many folks would cringe – why would you provide less content to your audience… won’t that result in less traffic? It might… but providing more options in this world where everyone is a content provider is a nice thing to do for your audience. It’s now live on the Marketing Technology Blog! Click on any of the category navigation links – and you can add the feed you want to your feed reader.

PageLine is changing this with their product, PlatformPro. Platform’s front-end design is based on a brand-new concept called sections. In short, sections are similar to WordPress widgets (drag-and-drop sidebar content) only they work much better for creating great designs and for use with templates. Here are some of the reasons why sections are awesome:

1. Plug-and-Play Sections are pre-designed pieces of web design, which can be very complex (e.g. a feature slider, navigation, carousel, etc..). All the code remains contained and managed by the section API; so all you ever see is a simple drag and drop interface and options.
2. Control Sections can be toggled on or off on a page-by-page basis and add their own post- types and options. This means total control of every page on your site.
3. Performance Sections load their code (for example, Javascript), only on pages where they are used and according to best-practices. This greatly improves performance.
4. Development Can be created and modified by designers in the Base child theme. This means designers can add or alter the drag & drop sections in seconds.
5. Simple Sections add standard html markup and custom hooks (for extending functionality). This cuts down on a lot of code while giving you more functionality at the same time.

More Features You’ll Love

• Layout Builder – On top of the new drag&drop sections, Platform also has draggable layout builder for configuring the dimensions of your site. You can select a new site width, or configure each of 5 different sidebar layouts; then select a layout on a page-by-page basis.
• bbPress and BuddyPress – Platform also supports integrations with BuddyPress and has a matching bbPress forum theme (developer edition). The integration is seamless and gives Platform users a really professional and dynamic presence.
• Full-Width and Fixed-Width Modes – PageLine has also accounted for different design modes. There are two ways to build your site with Platform. Full-width mode allows you to have full-width content elements (such as background images), and fixed-width mode gives you fixed-width content and background elements.
• Base Child Theme – The Base child theme was built to help you customize Platform easily and with best- practices for building a website. Use it to throw in some custom CSS design, or use ‘hooks’ to add code like HTML or PHP to places throughout the theme. They have also built in an easy way for you to add custom sections of your own!
• Pricing – The cost for a single pro license will cost $95. A multi use developer license will be sold for $175, which also includes compatibility with bbPress forum, graphics and links removed.

If you’ve followed the blog for a while, you know that I’ve struggled with WordPress. Out of the box, WordPress is a fairly fast content management system. However, once you fully customize the site and get it where you need it for users, it’s often a dog. Our pageload times on the new template were exceeding 10 seconds – terrible, terrible performance.

We’ve done a number of things to help speed up WordPress:

• We moved hosts to MediaTemple. Often, when you sign up for a hosting platform you wind up on their fastest servers. As their system grows, though, they don’t replace the servers with faster ones – you wind up being left behind.
• We added a database server. When WordPress is running on a simple hosting package, the server is translating code, serving images and running the database. If you can add a database server to your hosting package, you can significantly speed up the site.
• To make another split, we put all of the images on Amazon as a content delivery network. We were using an Amazon S3 plugin for WordPress but have since stopped. The plugin required you to load images on Amazon and didn’t synchronize the images – not good.
• We’ve recently implemented W3 Total Cache from W3Edge. While incredibly robust, the plugin is not for the weak of heart or the non-technical. I’d recommend hiring a professional to implement it.

The W3 Total Cache plugin has allowed us to implement Amazon as our Content Delivery Network but the plugin synchronizes and rewrites image paths. This is a fantastic means of implementing it because if you ever decide to stop using the plugin or CDN, you’re not left out in the cold. Turn this plugin off, and you’re good to go!

The plugin also allows you to cache pages and database queries along with a number of other settings. Don’t know what caching is? For a page to load, the page reads the code, executes the database queries, and dynamically generates your page. When caching is implemented, the first time the page is opened, it displays the page and writes the contents to a cache file. The next time the page is opened, it simply opens the cache file.

Speeding up your site has a much larger impact on your readership than you might think. In fact, your site is slowest when you need it to perform the best – when thousands of visitors are on it. If you don’t have it finely tuned (and we’re still working on ours), visitors are often met with a blank screen, a time-out error, or they simply bounce on you after waiting for the page to load a couple of seconds.

Speeding up your site makes your site friendlier to Google as well. Google has confirmed that they do rank high-performing sites higher. Beyond these tips above, you can also work to reduce your image sizes on your site, implement page compression, implement EC2 or Akamai geographic-based content delivery networks… and even move to load balancing and synchronization. That’s getting into the big bucks, though!

The feature may or may not have been around for a while, but Disqus is now cleanly integrated with Twitter and Facebook to promote blog posts socially. Today, I noticed that when I clicked “Like” on a post, it provided me with the option of sending that message to both Twitter or Facebook. I could do that before when submitting a comment – but now it’s cool that they’ve added the feature to their like button.

The social integration of their comments plugin, the customization abilities, the fact that it synchronizes seamlessly with WordPress… and the continued improvements, all while keeping the system simple, makes this the best commenting system on the market.

I am interested to see if there’s a means for Disqus to integrate Facebook Comments – perhaps on a tab? I feel like that’s the one social piece missing from their platform… do you agree?

Using WordPress as a content management system, we can design, professional looking, simple to use websites for our small business clients.  The ever growing list of plugins has allowed us to create more and more robust sites, with features comparable to custom-designed sites available at significantly higher price points.  - So to put it mildly, I am a WordPress Fan.

With each update, there are more and more features which make my job easier and simplify the lives of our clients.   And now, WordPress 3.0 is scheduled for release on Monday.    How much better will this new version be?   The early reports from the Beta testers hints at some terrific new features:

• Custom Post Types: In the old version you could create posts and pages, now you can create additional formats for specific types of information, testimonials, FAQ’s, customer or employee profiles, the list of possiblities is as long as the types of companies who might use it.
• Author Posts: On multi author blogs like this one, each author can have their own “style” .  While site owners should still control over all look and feel to maintain brand integrity, this should allow for a bit more personality to come through.   I am really excited about this particular feature for the roundpeg blog as each member of my team begins to write more and more content.
• Menu Management: In the older version, ordering pages and sub pages had to be managed within each post.  Adding a page was easy, but getting it into the correct spot on the navigation could be a pain, especially if you had multiple pages.  Having one main
• Sidebar Footer Widgets: We frequently use Studio press themes because of this feature which allows us to create content rich  footers which appear on each page.  I am excited to see this included into 3.0 as a standard.
• Merging Single User and MultiUser: While my clients won’t care, this is going to be a huge improvement for us, as we add more and more sites.  Switching to a MU format will allow us to update plugins and content once, not over and over again!

There are so many other exciting features with this upgrade!  I can’t wait to try them all.  Would love to know what you like best as you begin to work with the newest version.

<?php query_posts('order=ASC&cat=3&post_status=future,publish');
if(have_posts()) :
while(have_posts()) : the_post();
if(strtotime(get_the_time("F jS Y")) > time()) :
continue;
else: echo $post->id; ?>
<li><p class="right">
<small>
<?php echo get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), 'location', true); ?>
</small>
<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>">
<?php the_title(); ?></a>
</p>
<p class="left"><strong>
<?php the_time("M"); ?></strong>
<?php the_time("d"); ?>
</p>
<div class="clear">
</div>
</li>
<?php endif;
endwhile;
else:
echo "Check back soon!";
endif; ?>

The query_posts method is placed just before the WordPress loop to limit the posts published to the query used. Since these are future scheduled blog posts (on the event date), you don’t have to worry about them being displayed on your core blog in your template. You may want to hide the categories from your category list, though. This can be accomplished by editing your category list in your WordPress template using the exclude option:

<ul><?php wp_list_categories('orderby=name&exclude=3'); ?></ul>

We also added metadata for the post to display a location for the event. This is accomplished using WordPress’ Custom Fields section. Simply type in location for the field name and your location for the value… then retrieve the location for display using the get_post_meta command above.

The resulting site is pretty cool, with a very unique design and layout that has all the elements necessary to promote the book: