You might have seen star ratings in search results while looking for movie and software reviews in Google. These star ratings are inserted by the particular websites using rich snippets. Google announced the support for rich snippets long back in 2009. Rich snippets are intended to give extra information about an article; like author, publishing date, rating, price, etc. Wonder how you could add it your website? Well, if you are a blogger using WordPress platform you may add rich snippets to your posts using a plugin.

(more…)

We first started our blog in Blogger and later transferred it to WordPress platform. Soon after that we have seen an improvement in web traffic and earnings. However, we noticed a drop in traffic from websites where we had submitted our old .xml feed. As you all might know, the feed URL in a Blogger blog is  blogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml or blogname.com/atom.xml (for custom domain). For a WordPress blog, the full blog feed URL is  blogname.com/feed. There are two major problems that would affect a transferred Blogger blog in this case. It will lose those readers subscribed to old feed address and also the traffic from blog directories where the .xml feed had submitted. Post Feed Redirect URL feature in Blogger is useful only in saving the subscriber list – the location of the atom.xml will remain 404 in WordPress.

(more…)

Speed of a web page is now an important factor for getting better search position in Google.com results. Getting higher speeds is usually impossible for WordPress blogs on a shared web hosting account if there are a lot of static images, files, plugins and streaming media hosted on the server,  and if thousand of people are accessing them at the same time. The concept of CDN is very simple.  A CDN takes copies of CSS,  images, JavaScript, video-audio streams of the blog  in different network locations worldwide and sends it to the users near to that location.  So ultimately, the shared web hosting server handles only the database queries and loading HTML and other important files. Thus the overall experience of the user and the health of the server improves by making use of the CDN network. Recently, we purchased a MAXCDN account to use it with Techknowl.com and a few other WordPress blogs in our network. MAXCDN works perfectly in combination with W3 Total Cache Plugin for WordPress.  Here in this article we will tell how can add a CDN in WordPress blog with MAXCDN step-by step.

(more…)

Recently, we upgraded techknowl to use it with MAXCDN content delivery network. The MAXCDN service has complete compatibility with WordPress and is one of the cheapest CDN available for bloggers. The addition of a CDN to wordpress is pretty much simple. However, it’s simpler with a plugin called W3 total Cache. Apart from the easy CDN integration, W3 total cache includes several features that will improve the speed and response of a WordPress blog. Earlier we were using WP Super Cache plugin -along with a combination of a few other plugins for our caching requirements. Now we have uninstalled all those plugins and migrated to W3 total cache plugin and MAXCDN service.

(more…)

As you might know, the default login page in WordPress is  domain/wp-login.php.  Almost every other person in the world knows that it is the login page of a WordPress blog. So if someone gets your password, it is easy for them to login to your WordPress dashboard and change the default password.  Trial & error and  brute force attacks by bots on a particular page would also lead to password theft. Stealth Login is a WordPress plugin that can be used to change WordPress login URL to custom URL and prevent such incidents.
(more…)

WordPress is one of the best blogging platforms in the world. Since WordPress uses server side scripting languages like PHP to process pages, its little bit slower than websites on Google Blogger platform. But we can speed up WordPress blogs by using optimized themes and plugins like WordPress Super cache. WPsimpy is one such theme that when used can speed up WordPress pages. One of the fastest WordPress themes, WPsimpy uses only valid CSS for its design. It has single sidebar and 3 column footer, both widgetised. WordPress itself is seo optimized. WPsimpy is designed by referring WordPress Codex to maintain the seo friendliness of WordPress pages. Its Blue-Gray color combination and magazine style design is well suited for blogs running Google Adsense ™ and other advertising services.

(more…)