This is the Targeted Ads Approach

Wouldn’t it be great if you could plop a targeted message in front of visitors eyes, and increase conversions??

SEE HOW EASY IT IS TO DELIVER TARGETED ADS!

Do you have a site with a broad central topic, and lots of sub-categories, where you display ads? Sometimes you wish you could deliver an ad based on the category, tag, or even the sidebar. It’s pretty easy to do, and in this scenario it involved a bit of HTML and some PHP conditional statements.

First, the PHP. Let’s begin by displaying an ad on a post by categories.

<?php if (is_category('Copywriting Basics')) { ?>
Replace this text with the html to display the product for Copywriting Basics
<?php } elseif (is_category('Copywriting Creativity')) { ?>
Replace this text with the html to display the product for Copywriting Creativity
<?php } elseif (is_category('Copywriting Freelancing')) { ?>
Replace this text with the html to display the product for Copywriting Freelancing
<?php } else { ?>
Place the html code for the product you want to display on all other categories. Leave this blank to display nothing on all other categories.
<?php } ?>

In the “Replace the html…” sections, we will do just that. Let’s put together some code to do that.

Sample HTML:

<div style="width:590px; height:180px; background:#fef7cd; padding:5px; margin:0 0 10px 0; border-top:1px solid #efe9b0; border-bottom:1px solid #efe9b0;">
 <img src="http://www.freelancecopywritingblog.com/wp-content/themes/premiumnews/images/hotcopyfast.gif" width="116" height="168" hspace="20" align="left"> 
 <h2 style="font-size:22px; line-height:24px; color:#CC3300; letter-spacing:-1px; margin-bottom:5px;">This is the Targeted Ads Approach</h2>
 <p style="line-height:1.4em; color:#000000; font-size:16px; font-family: Trebucher MS, Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin-bottom:5px;">Wouldn't it be great if you could plop a targeted message in front of visitors eyes, and increase conversions??</p>
 
<p align="center" style="line-height:1.4em; color:#000000; font-size:16px; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin-top:15px; font-weight:bold;text-decoration:underline;"><a href="youraffiliatelinkgoeshere" style="color:#000; font-weight:bold; text-transform:upppercase;">SEE HOW EASY IT IS TO DELIVER TARGETED ADS!</a></p>
</div>

Of course, I’d recommend flushing that inline CSS out and attaching it to a div class, but you get the idea. You can change up the wording, affiliate link, and image for each snippet you insert.

But wait, there’s more. Here’s an example of how to do the same things, only using your sidebar:

 
<? php if (is_home()  ) { ?> 
<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/sidebar.php'); ?> 
<?php } elseif ( is_category('3') ) { ?> <?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/sidebar3.php'); ?> 
<?php } elseif ( is_category('6') ) { ?> <?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/sidebar6.php'); ?> 
<?php } else { ?> 
<?php } ?>

The above example is more or less using the same code as what I outlined in a previous post, creating multiple sidebars.

In this case, you would insert the HTML snippet wherever wanted it to appear on each sidebar file. Once you have a sidebar you can load it by the category name/id.

Conditional PHP statements can be your best friend when developing for WordPress. They allow you to display information based on certain conditions. We can use WordPress’ internal meta data, such as tags and categories, to determine what to display in certain cases. In this case, we want to simply display a unique heading for various categories.

In your category.php page you’ll want to paste this code snippet:

Here’s a quick snippet of code that allows you to include any number of different headings using one category page. Of course, adjust the category id to your own.

<h1>Classifieds</h1>
<?php } elseif is_category('4')) { ?>
<h1>Environment & Real Estate</h1>
<?php } elseif is_category('18')) { ?>
<h1>Hot Buzz</h1>
<?php } elseif is_category('16')) { ?>
<h1>Product Plaza</h1>
<?php } elseif is_category('7')) { ?>
<h1>Menu Development</h1>
<?php } else { ?>

This is a basic, but powerful idea. You can use “elseif has_tag(’tagname here’))” to do the same thing with tags instead of categories for instance.

WordPress is the best platform to develop a site on for many reasons. It’s simple interface allows you to easily manage your site, and a worldwide community of developers have created some amazing plugins that build off the inherently awesome SEO foundation of WordPress. I consider the list below some of the most “essential” plugins that I install on every site to greatly enhance SEO and boost traffic.

Platinum SEO Pack – What more can I say about this, other than it should be required and used by anyone who’s faintly interested in optimizing their site. It lets you optimize every page AND post’s title, description, and keywords.

Google XML Sitemap generator – Does what it says. Generates a site map on the fly and submits it to the major search engines, including Google. Helps attract those search engine spiders.

SEO Smartlinks – Internal link juice is great, and this plugin finds related keywords and phrases from other stories or posts on your site, and automatically links to them.

A good ping list – Go to “Settings – Writing” and check what services are notified when you update your blog. If you’ve never been there before, chances are there’s only one. I’ve compiled a list of well over a hundred sites to notify when you update your site. Download it here!

Auto Social Poster or Wicked WP Poster – Don’t you have having to go to Twitter and announce your last blog post, or trying to bookmark your site in delicious to bump some traffic? These do all that and more for you; automated social bookmarking made easy.

SEO Super Comments – Now you can have each comment become an individual indexed page on your site. Brilliant!

Some other essential plugins:
Maxblogpress ping optimizer – Save your site from becoming a ping spammer with this plugin.
YARRP – Yet another related posts plugin. Helps boost internal page links by pointing users to related articles and posts.

A better “Read more” link – You can see my previous post for more on this, but the point is to generate a keyword-rich internal link by using the post title as the “Read more” link.

<?php the_content('Continue Reading' get_the_title()); ?>

I’m going to share a simple snippet of code that will help optimize the “Read more” link for your WordPress site.

First, you should always begin by writing a concise title that contains targeted keywords. Your post titles should also always be contained in

tags. I mention this because the “read more” link will pull the text from your post title and display it as a link. As we know, the more links you include on your site, the better. And it’s much better if those links contain the same targeted keywords you chose for your title. This helps boost your onsite keyword density and links at the same time. This tip you’re using the <-more-> tag to cut your post content. If you use the excerpt option, simply replace “the_content” with “the_excerpt”.

Within your WordPress loop, look for the following code:

<?php the_content('Continue Reading' ()); ?>

Here’s the snippet you will use:

<?php the_content('Continue Reading' get_the_title()); ?>

The Google team recently took some time to address a common question. How can I improve my search engine rankings? To wit they created several small, concise guides about search engine optimization for you to download. These guides are easy to understand, and include lots of images for us visual-minded folks. I suggest downloading and reading them over when you have a chance. Many of the techniques are already known, but the explanations and visuals about how and why they improve your search results help greatly.

Google SEO guide

The Problem

I’ve enounterd the need for this on several projects and thought it might help. In this case, I didn’t want the featured slider to appear on every page, as it was located in the header. You too, may want to display page-specific headers based on certain conditions. Well, it’s not that hard with the “if” and “else” statements. Get ready to learn some very basic PHP!

Read the rest of this entry »

I recently came across a few interesting sites that offer tips and tricks on how to tweak Firefox; if you’re like me and want your nine tabs of data-heavy websites to run at hyper speed, check out these links. Most notable were the speed tweaks, which I can say increased this things effectiveness. Having used it for a few days, I can tell it helps speed things up, plus it’s interesting to know about these kinds of things.

How to turbocharge Firefox

Visit

21 Firefox hacks and tweaks

Visit

Speed up Firefox

Visit

Bonus speed hacks

I figured I’d post up the best speed improvement hacks for Firefox right here, since that’s what you want, right?

To switch Firefox from a six banger to a v8, type “about:config” in your address bar and hit return. Then modify these lines as shown:

network.http.max-connections 30 to 96
network.http.max-connections-per-server 15 to 32
network.http.max-persistent-connections-per-server 6 to 8
network.http.pipelining false to true
network.http.proxy.pipelining false to true
network.http.pipelining.maxrequests 30 to 8
network.http.pipelining.ssl false to true
network.http.proxy.pipelining false to true

In case you have been wishing and looking for a way to nicely flip and slide objects to reveal content using jQuery, here are two options. The first lets you flip an object up, down, left and right and it can contain HTML content as well. I can think of several cool things to do with this; an “e business card” or as a link to some small amount of html such as pricing or services, availability, etc.

Visit Flip – A jQuery Plugin

The second option is a little different. It animates a hover and slides the top portion off to reveal some HTML below. Take a look. Again, I can think of multiple uses for these excellent plugins.

Visit Animate a Hover with jQuery

Many premium themes feature cool featured content sliding areas, where the latest posts appear. There is one such plugin, built around the Mootools library, but I wanted to use jQuery, as I prefer it over the other libraries. I also wanted it to automatically scroll. Of course, this can easily be modified to use the navigation buttons as well.

To begin, you will need a few things:

Read the rest of this entry »

Since I’ve started using Wordpress as my choice platform for web development, I’ve been “modularizing” my development system. What does this mean? In the past, I would haphazardly make a half-cocked plan of action and get to work immediately.

Now I load the chamber with strategic bullets that allow me to get going…faster.

Frameworks and Modules

Modularize your CSS by using a framework (I like Blueprint), a reset.css, and make a general CSS file where you keep commonly used snippets. I often found myself referencing code from a site I built because I remember a technique I used there. Now I have a “cssmodules.css” file that holds neatly commented snippets to style bullets, link, comments and much more.

Keep the best, ditch the rest

Download and keep the best plugins and scripts; the ones you use the most. I suggest “Ultimate Google Analytics”, “Google XML Sitemap Generator”, “All in one SEO Pack”, “Sociable”, and any others that you use and find yourself returning to their webpage to download again. I also suggest doing the same for javascripts, fla. files, etc. Anything you use a lot.

All graphics are not icons

Modularize popular files and their types. All graphics are not the same type. For instance, keep all icons in a folder called “Icons” and all textures in a folder called “textures”; all patterns in a folder called patterns. I have an entire folder of “working .PSDs”. You get it.

Smart CSS

Take a moment to define the color classes in your CSS file, somewhere near the top. Chances are you will be using these for a lot of things – rollover colors, borders, fonts, etc. Not all of us can remember the hex code for light blue after all. It’s much easier to remember a class name of “ltblue” however.

Use Subversion

Just do it. I don’t but I should (and will). It would really save a lot of time and frustration.

That’s all I can think of for now. Do you have any tips you want to share about how to streamline your development process?