The recent release of WordPress 2.3 with new features and database changes begs the question, how should a webmaster plan and then implement the upgrade. Any upgrade that involves database changes should be undertaken carefully, and preparation is key to a successful upgrade.

Typically, most webmasters install custom themes and additional plugins, and of course they upload extra files such as images to their /wp-content/uploads folder. All of these files need to be backed up and stored off server prior to undertaking the upgrade process. The database itself also needs to be backed up.

Backing up your site is best achieved by installing the BackUpWordpress plugin and selecting the default backup options which will create a compressed file of your complete site including files and database. If anything does go wrong it should be relatively easy to restore this and import your database into MySQL using phpMyAdmin or your host’s preferred database manager.
Once you are certain your site has been backed up, you’re ready to start preparing for the upgrade. Are your plugins and chosen theme compatible with WordPress 2.3? Most modern themes shouldn’t cause any problem except that non v2.3 themes may not include the tags code needed to make use of the new tags feature of WordPress 2.3. This is a relatively simple update to make, and simply involves adding extra php code to the theme’s index.php and single.php.

Open index.php and single.php in your favorite text editor and search for the following code , and simply add the following code before or after depends on where you want the tags will be displayed (before or after your article).

The plugins used in yor site will need to be checked against the list of compatible plugins. Any plugin that isn’t compatible will likely not work correctly or at all. You may need to contact the plugin author for an update or discontinue using that plugin until an update is available.

You should now be ready to upgrade your installation to WordPress 2.3, and if your host provides wget functionality simply copy the zip file to your server then unzip them directly into your WordPress folder. If wget isn’t available to you, then you’ll need to download the zip file and use an ftp client to upload the unzipped files.

Once you’ve uploaded your WordPress files, make sure your WordPress 2.3 compatible theme is uploaded to /wp-content/themes. Did you need updated plugins? Upload these to /wp-content/plugins. You should now be ready to initiate the WordPress update script.

Navigate to the admin section of your site, WordPress will automatically recognize that an upgrade is required. Once completed, and if all has gone to plan, you should be able to login to Dashboard without any difficulty. Good luck.

You have built a website, made it live and it is getting a lot of web traffic each day. Now, you are wondering if using Adsense advertising will lead to some income generation from the site.
To help you decide, here are some advantages and disadvantages of this method of advertising on net.

www.instant-adsense-dollars.com

www.guardadsense.com

Most people view Adsense as some form of miracle from another world and think of it as some quick cure. However Adsense has some disadvantages and you can consider some other options as well. For more detail visit to www.yourgoogleincome.com Adsense is quite beneficial for the webmasters. Many webmasters keep worrying about how to generate revenue for their sites and increase its profitability. Adsense just dispels those worries and helps the webmasters to focus on making great content for their sites. As a matter of fact if you concentrate on the creation of superior content with great paying keywords, it is bound to get quality traffic to your website

Adsense is quite user friendly in the context of customization of position, size and colors. It is also quite compatible with websites and easy to use. All this means that you can really experiment with Adsense to generate the maximum income possible. Another great benefit of Adsense is that it can create a consistent income on your website. All that is required is the creation of good quality content and regular updating of the website. Many people just earn their living through Adsense only and are making it a big business.

Adsense does not need multiple accounts for different pages and a single account is sufficient for all the pages. This is quite beneficial for website owners since they do not have open different accounts.

However, Adsense is not all hunky dory and has some flaws as well. Here are some disadvantages of Adsense. The most prominent disadvantage is that Google can just disable your account if it feels that your site has “click fraud”. Click Fraud simply means that some one is just making artificial clicks on your page.

This can turn really bad because it may not be you who is doing it. It may be your competitors who just want to shut your account down or a competitor of your advertiser who wants to increase their marketing costs. Another disadvantage is that Adsense earnings are not constant or consistent. In fact many a times a mistake may turn really costly. People with Adsense account are often under a great deal of negative pressure due to this reason.

Firstly, you also need to take care that your website is in the search engine spotlight. In other words, your website should be at a prominent place in the search engines when people search for the products you have. If this does not happen, then you will not have any traffic and which in turn will not create any revenue with Adsense. This in fact is quite a normal drawback of Internet advertising. Moreover, for more detail visit to www.adsense-dollar-factory.com the constant updating of your website is important since content makes all the difference. Some sites are naturally apt at this but for other’s this may be a bit difficult depending on the type of content required. Many website owners hire copy writers to generate good content for their website.

First of all, you constantly need to make sure your site is in the spotlight of search engines when people are searching for whatever it is your site is about. A website owner can write original content by researching a topic in detail and then writing in their own words. Here they can also give their own opinion as well. Hence these are the advantages and disadvantages of using an Adsense Marketing network for internet advertising. You need to now decide if this is the way forward.

What is search engine optimization? Have you heard of this term before? SEO or search engine optimization is the process of enhancing your website through following various tips and tricks so that people who are searching in the internet search engines will be able to find your site on the top of the search results. The most popular search engines right now are MSN, Google, and Yahoo. Search engine optimization makes your website easily accessed and viewed by thousands or even millions of people around the world. With this kind of technological breakthrough, doing business in the internet has never been this lucrative and exciting.

Gone are the days when we have to do a door to door promotion of our products which could be extremely stressful and yielded little results. Search engine optimization can take us to outcomes we never experienced before. As long we see to it that our product is worth the buy and possesses remarkable and lasting quality, we can be assured of great profits arising from search engine optimization. The investment we put up in our business is costly. We can’t just afford to throw away our money for something that does not give us a good return. We cannot just be confident that our website will certainly be viewed by many in the sense that of the millions of people in every little corner of the world a part of them will surely view our site.

People these days want instant results so that they cannot spend very long hours in the internet searching for their needed websites down to the bottom of the list. Doing so would mean that the searcher is not doing anything else in life other than searching and searching. Search engine optimization can offer you the success that you want if you can only bring out the best in the process and in your business.
Normally, people who search in the internet want to know something about a certain field of business or expertise. In other words they have a lot of questions about something. In this case, the searcher wants a website that can explain everything in the shortest possible time and not do otherwise.

Therefore it is best to fill your site with the most likely titles, phrases, and keywords that people will look for. In this way there is really a better chance for your website to appear in the first page of the results, giving your site the exposure it needs. But doing such a thing requires an intensive knowledge and research on the demands and complexities of the market.

Trusting in your own knowledge and business techniques is good but the fact is you may not know everything as everybody else may not know everything. Doing more intensive SEO study on your own or attending search engine optimization workshops can take your business to a longer stretch. It is essential that you know the traits and the tendencies of the internet searchers in your business field. Another common option is getting the services of a search engine optimization company that is if you can afford it.

You are about to discover the secret predictions of search engine optimization experts for 2006 and beyond! You’re going to want to start making plans NOW to capitalize on this information.

Are you making fatal mistakes on your niche websites?  Are you afraid of being tossed out of both Google and Yahoo?

I want to start off by telling you that I am not an SEO expert. I am just a full time entrepreneur and marketer.

I do, however, know that when you are not comfortable about a subject, like I was with search engine optimization, you need to ask experts.

•    You don’t get on forums and ask other marketers.

•    You don’t ask the lady who bags your groceries.

•    You also don’t ask your wife who would rather be shopping  (Sorry Anna – you

Know it’s true)

I interviewed people who lived and breathed search engine optimization. 

And you know what? I also didn’t care what the search engines were doing today. 

I wanted to hear what they were going to do next month, next year, and even years     down the road.

Many marketers would hear that something was working and would jump on the bandwagon. Then they’d find out the hard way that Google and Yahoo were already finding ways to prevent this “new” technique or process and ban it.

Why would you want to spend your valuable time and money doing something such as using generated page software only to find out each of your pages are being targeted by the search engine?  And if they’re found, they will be penalized or all out banned!

This is your chance to really find out what will or won’t possibly work in the future. Start

making plans now to capitalize on this information.

You are about to discover the predictions from the SEO Experts that were brave enough to go out on a limb and answer my tough questions.

In this ebook you will find out the inside scoop when SEO

Experts reveal their secret predictions about…

•    …the changes Google will make in 2006 that will impact your site and your

search engine ranking.

• What new technology the search engines introduce in the next year that will affect your ranking

•Inside predictions on duplicate content and how Google and Yahoo will handle this problem in the future.

•What you will have to concentrate on to have your websites either stay or become highly ranked in the search engines in the next year.

SEO Expert #1 

1.  What changes do you see Google making in the next year or two and its impact on

Website owners and their search engine ranking?

Google will do a lot of things that seem random, like opening a video store… none of this

Has any real impact on those concerned with search engines.  For more details go to www.sitemap-makers.com .The main changes we can expect from Google are greater refinements in link analysis

And spam filtering, as they lead the way among search engines in creating a new map of

the web. 

I expect Google to launch something comparable to Yahoo stores, get into the auction

business, and try more experiments like Google Base.  Some of these things will have an

impact on search marketing because Google will integrate them into the search tools and

portal as they did with Froogle.

2.  What changes do you see Yahoo making in the next year or two and its impact on

website owners and their search engine ranking?

Yahoo will have to switch their pay-per-click bidding system to match what Google has

been doing with Adwords. For more information logon to www.keyword-swipe.com This will make Yahoo’s PPC platform more competitive, and

drive a great deal more profit into their search engine. This in turn will enable them to

promote the value of their search engine. 

To become more important in the SEO world, Yahoo must attract more users to their

search engine, but even with a large increase in the user base, the search results are still

formatted to favor the paid listings. 

Yahoo will need to catch up with Google in the area of link analysis, but there’s no reason

why they can’t. At this point, Yahoo’s researchers appear to have a fairly naive view of

spam, and if this doesn’t change, it will remain fairly easy to manipulate Y! search results.

We decided to make a quick list of SEO Tips for new webmasters or website owners to help eliminate all the confusion and outrageous claims of secrets and backdoor methods. Make no mistake about it, there are what are termed “blackhat” SEO techniques. But they rarely provide any long term value since they are quickly found and eliminated by the search engines, and punishment is swift.

A lot of people want to make search engine optimization appear to be highly technical and secretive. If you go to any of the popular search engines information pages, they give you the basic guidelines and even provide some good ways to check your website for potential problems. There are no secrets, the exact method search engines use to rank and index pages is proprietary to protect against people who would use that information to corrupt the integrity of the search results.

So to cut through some of the long and less than exciting information available on SEO, we compiled a simple list of necessary procedures to follow when creating any new website page. Which brings up another issue that may be misunderstood. Search engines rank website pages, not the entire website. Each website page stands on it’s own in being ranked and indexed.

SEO can be split into two areas. One is on page, which deals with how you present and format any information. The other is off page, which deals with links that point to your website pages. Another key point is not to sacrifice user-friendly aspects for SEO methods. The visitor experience should always be considered when trying to create a search engine friendly website page.

SEO on page factors are:

Meta Tags – Your title, description, keywords, should match the content. Using your keyword phrases in each in a logical and accurate manner for both search engines and vistors is important.

File Names – The page file name, graphics alt text, and any associated files should be named using the keyword phrases or related terms as they apply.

Theme – Keyword phrases should be used in natural way a long with associated and related terms. Don’t over do the keyword phrase (called “stuffing” keywords), use where necessary but don’t over use. Use H1-H6 HTML tags to indicate important titles (H1 being the most important, H6 being the least). You can also use other font attributes to indicate importance like bold, italics, or even colors.

Navigation – All navigation links should use descriptive anchor text to make it easy for both the search engines and the visitors to understand the content. If you use pull down menu graphics as element of design, make sure you also include anchor text equivalents somewhere on the website page.

SEO off page factors:

Links – Off page SEO is primarily all about links to your website page from other website pages. The authority or what Google calls Pagerank, is a point of consideration, since Pagerank can flow downwards to your website page (i.e. a Pagerank is between 1-10, the higher the number the more value). The perfect link, if there is one, would be from a high Pagerank website page of similar or like content that uses anchor text that accurately describes the content of the page being linked too.

There are many opinions on the amount of Pagerank that flows down, the weighting of the content, and the accuracy of the anchor text. Your best bet is to go with the basics of all three and be done with it.

Too many new webmasters get caught up in all the nuances and details of every specific aspect of off and on page SEO. You can easily drive yourself crazy with all the different opinions and the latest tricks or trends. The search engines constantly update the mathematical algorithms they use to rank and index website pages. The search engine’s goal is to produce the most accurate search results and to eliminate any attempts at beating the system.

The best SEO tip I can give is to follow the search engine guidelines, provide high value content, and always keep the visitor in mind while doing any SEO. Once a visitor arrives, you need to make sure that the information you present does its intended job, whatever that might involve. If direct sales, convert them to a buyer. Or maybe sign up for your newsletter, or additional information.

Getting tightly targeted search engine traffic is great, but always keep the visitor experience in mind when doing search engine optimization. Try not to get lost in the weeds and forget the main purpose of your website, whatever your goals. Sometimes the best SEO tips for new webmasters are to keep it simple and effective for both the search engines and the website page visitors.