Hurrey..!! Process, Schedule (tentative) and Scope has been fixed for WordPress’s new release 3.1. Today they posted below list for upcoming release 3.1 on their WP Development Updates Blog.

Features:

1. Polishing features introduced in 3.0 can be one umbrella task. BUT — this means spit and polish ONLY, not adding features to features.
2. New feature: Mark Jaquith is committed to getting in some advanced taxonomy queries stuff, which already has some movement in trac via scribu.
3. New feature: Internal linking. This is my pet user feature for this release. It has been requested from users for years, got the most +1s on the wpdevel post last week, and is a missing piece of true CMS functionality. Since we likely won’t have Andrew Ozz for this release, Daryl Koopersmith is going to take a stab at this, with backup from Austin Matzko if needed.
4. New feature: The ajaxified admin screens that scribu did for GSoC, with some UI cleanup applied. There was also a GSoC project by Matt H on comment moderation that needs to be reviewed for inclusion.
5. New feature: Admin Bar. Connect the back end to the front end. Most useful for people on multisite installs, but still useful for single-site users in providing 1-click access to dashboard, new post form, etc. We’ll be looking at both the original Viper007Bond admin bar plugin and the wordpress.com revised admin bar recently done by Andy Peatling. Note: there was some resistance to this being in core rather than a plugin. A compromise of making it optional was discussed.
6. Cleanup: UX/UI cleanup across the application, including multisite. This could turn into a ton of new dev, so we need to restrain ourselves. The UI group will do a review and come up with a list. Jane Wells and John O’Nolan will manage UI contributions from the group so that approved UI makes it into tickets.
7. Ongoing maintenance: Bug fixes. Peter Westwood is all over bug fixes. Anyone and everyone invited to submit patches for known bugs.
8. New feature: Separate network dashboard from the site dashboards (in multisite). Ryan started on this over the summer, and all agreed it would be great. Needs some UI love. Ryan also looked at doing a personal dashboard to replace the wonky global dashboard you get in multisite when someone has an account but no site. This might be a better 3.2 candidate, but we’ll see if we can get it to a reasonable place in time for 3.1.
9. There are some small fixes to the custom post types API that ought to be made, while staying within the ‘no big API things’ guideline. Nacin is taking charge of this.
10. New feature: Post templates/post styles. Ryan will be handling this one.
11. New feature: Making QuickPress a template tag, so it can be used for front-end posting. Aaron Jorbin will be handling this.

Schedule:

Mid-December, preferably no later than December 15, so that the holidays won’t interfere with the release. To that end, here is the current plan:

1. September 9 – Confirm planned scope.
2. October 15 – Feature freeze; no new features added after this point, so that testing can begin on a stable-ish product (including usabilty testing of new features).
3. November 1 – Primary code freeze; any last adjustments based on testing after feature freeze should be finished by now and the focus shifts to fixing bugs to get to a stable beta.
4. November 15 – Beta period beings; from this point on, no more enhancements, only bug fixes.
5. December 1 – String freeze; translators rejoice.
6. December 15 – Release WordPress 3.1

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to making your website easily accessible to search engines, and helping them understand and read the content so that they can rank it high up in their index.

SEO is a huge topic and I won’t go deep into it. This article is primarily targeted to people who own and operate a WordPress blog. Some of the tips mentioned are of course general SEO methods used on all kinds of sites. Other tips and tools focus on WordPress, which has become the preferred blogging tool in the past few years.

Let me know if I’ve missed something by adding your comments. These tips primarily focus on how to search engine optimize WordPress installations, as opposed to off-site SEO (getting and building backlinks).

SEO Factors

1. Title tag

Title tag or the article title is one of the most important SEO parameters. That is what appears as the title of the post in search engine result pages (SERPs) and hence you should make sure that it’s relevant, has keywords, is neither too long nor too short, and accurately conveys what the content is all about.

2. Meta description

The meta description for your blog or a blog post is a short description that appears below the content title in SERPs. If the description is precise and informative, a user is more likely to click on the post title and hence end up on your site.

3. Content

Content, obviously, is the heart and soul of SEO. Great content can attract attention and links, and hence search engines would prefer showcasing it too. Plus, it is what your readers would like to read, isn’t it?

4. Keywords

Having a general understanding of keywords (words, sentences, or phrases) relevant to the content on your site and how to use them properly always helps.

5. Web host

The web host is what your site calls home and where the Googlebot comes knocking on the door whenever you publish articles. Hence, be careful while choosing a host for your site.

6. Site loading speed

Site loading speed is something bloggers recently started focusing on when Google announced that it would be treated as one of the ranking factors. The faster your site loads, the better.

7. Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a text file on your server that tells search engine bots what to index and what to skip. It’s better to create one and place it in your root directory. Here’s a guide to create a simple robots.txt file.

8. Sitemaps

A sitemap is basically a list of pages or URLs that the search engine’s crawler can access. Ideally, you should have both XML and HTML sitemaps on your site. WordPress users can use Google XML Sitemaps plugin to create an XML one.

9. Permalinks

The default permalink structure in WordPress isn’t that good. You can customize permalinks according to your preferences and for better search engine optimization.

10. Headings and Post Slugs

Headings and sub-headings in an article are important for readers as well as for search engines. Use them wisely. Regarding post slugs, you should make them short and keyword-rich (don’t overdo it though).

How Much Should You Focus on Search Engine Optimizing?

If you are newbie when it comes to WordPress and SEO, you might find all this a bit overwhelming. Well, SEO is a time-consuming process so I won’t say that you could get it done quickly. But here’s the thing: Don’t consume your days tweaking your site just for the search engines. You should instead focus on producing great content and building relationships.

While SEO is important, it depends on the content and not vice-versa. If the content is good and you can promote it well, it will attract links automatically.

My Other articles on SEO:

1. http://arpitshah.com/top-5-seo-extensions-for-google-chrome/
2. http://arpitshah.com/buzzzy-com-search-engine-for-google-buzz/
3. http://arpitshah.com/all-in-one-seo-pack-vs-platinum-seo-pack-wordpress-plugins/

Read full article here.

WordPress Security:

We all agree that having a secure wordpress weblog should be our first priorities when keeping a successful blog. In this post we’d like you to share your knowledge and help us create the WordPress Security guide to keep the bad guys out.

WordPress is an awesome publishing software and Auttomatic (the company behind WordPress) always tries hard to secure it so that millions of blogs can be safe from hacker threats. Recently TechCrunch the world’s biggest blog, got hacked twice in a short time frame of eight hours.

According to the lead programmer of WordPress, Mark Jaquith, the hack was most probably because of an insecure WordPpress plugin which allowed the hacker to use the method of php injection to hack tech crunch. It wasn’t a server side hacking.

Basic Tips:

1. Don’t install WordPress in the root directory. Install it in some folder with a weird name which is not easy to know. Something like 442dgdsaps. This will save your wordpress installation from bots as well as hackers.
2. Move wp-config.php file: Did you know since WordPress 2.6 you can move your wp-config.php file outside of your root WordPress directory? Most users don’t know this and the ones that do don’t do it. To do this simply move your wp-config.php file up one directory from your WordPress root. WordPress will automatically look for your config file there if it can’t find it in your root directory.
3. Follow this guide on how to open WordPress on the main url after installing it in a sub direcotry.
4. Use secret key: This is probably the most followed security tip on the list, but still I’m amazed at how many people don’t do this. A secret key is a hashing salt that is used against your password to make it even stronger. Secret keys are set in your wp-config.php file. Simply visit https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1 to have a set of randomly generated secret keys created for you.
5. Change the WP prefix of database tables. It will save you from sql injection hacking.
6. Never use the admin account. After installing WordPress, you should change the administrator user name.

Top 10 Security Plugins:

LINK: http://arpitshah.com/top-10-latest-powerful-wordpress-security-plugins-and-tips-tricks/

The web browser is arguably the most important piece of software on your computer. You spend much of your time online inside a browser: When you search, chat, email, shop, bank, read the news, and watch videos online, you often do all this using a browser.

Its very long time I moved to Google Chrome and specially DEV Channel . While working on Chrome I’ve found some very useful SEO extensions which I want to share with you.

1) META SEO inspector: Meta data is not just the usual HTML meta tags, but the XFN tags, various microformats, the recently introduced canonical attribute, the no-follow links and so on.

This extension is mainly aimed at web developers that need to verify the description tag of their site to follow the Webmasters’ Google Guidelines, SEO, or even to who is curious about page contents that are usually not visible, but can reveal interesting site properties.

2) Chrome SEO: The Google Chrome SEO Extension provides easy access to Search Engine Optimization Tools that can help you with Competitive Analysis, Keyword Research, Backlink Checks, PageRank Checks and other daily SEO tasks.

3) iPageRank: Unlike all the other PageRank checkers, this one will tell you, how much PR will be transfered to your site with a dofollow link on that page. It is handy to see if a site would be worth your time of commenting or requesting a backlink.

4) SEO SERP: A simple tool to quickly check the position of a list of sites given a keyword. For example, on the sample image you can see Wikipedia ranking #3 and Amazon ranking 16 for the keyword “lcd”.

5) SEO Site Tools: This tool is the most comprehensive SEO Tool on any browser… not only does it pull more metircs from more sources, including social media reactions, it also enhances common tools like Yahoo Site Explorer and Google Webmaster tools with links anchor text and pagerank.Even nofollow link hilighting, popout ability, color themes, even more.

Bonus Extension (my own extension): Handy Google Shortcuts

What is your favorite SEO extension??