WordPress 2.3.1 is the most recent version of one of the most popular blogging platforms on the web.  Known for its ease of use, WordPress is designed to be accessible to bloggers of all backgrounds.  Setting it up on a server is designed to be as simple as possible, and maintaining your blog involves little to no knowledge of servers or really any web technology.  It is not just an entry level system, however, as it provides support for plugins that make it a powerful application.  Out of the box, however, it has limited functionality in many ways.  For the purpose of this review I will take into account the core functionality of WordPress, but if plugins do exist to solve issues, I will make note.

AJAX is one of those things that every webmaster needs to know about. In today’s e-commerce world, every move toward making a site easier to navigate and interact with is a big plus, and using AJAX is one method of doing just that.

AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML–in english, that just means that xml and javascript are being used on a page to load content asynchronously with the rest of the page. In other words, a webpage that has an ajax component can fully load and remain static even while the ajax component is still processing data between the user and the server.

Good SEO often takes a lot of effort, but some of the most important parts of SEO best practices are actually quite simple.

Clean & Simple Code

Making your site validate really isn’t that difficult if you code appropriately. And believe it or not, code that validates is good for SEO. By using semantical markers the way they were meant to be used, search engine spiders will be able to better understand your site, and will then crawl it more efficiently.

But what does this mean, exactly?

Robots Exclusion Standard (also known as robots.txt protocol) is the agreement whereby search engines will not read or index certain content on your site, even though it is freely available for the public at large to view. The way it works is that a robots.txt file will instruct search engine spiders on which pages you don’t want it to read, and assuming the search engine is acting in good faith, it won’t crawl those pages. Obviously, this is not a reliable way of hiding data; you must have the cooperation of the search engine for it to work, and even pages that aren’t indexed are still available for viewing by anyone with a web browser. Yet it has its uses.

Today’s article is going to be a little controversial, but in a past article I said that was okay, so I’m not worried. The reason today’s article is controversial is because I’m going to talk about URLs. And despite its innocuous name, the differing uses of URLs tend to create huge disagreements in quite knowledgeable people.

URLs are the web addresses you usually see at the top of your browser–it’s basically the pathname of a given internet document. (This article’s url, for example, might be blog.omnistaretools.com/, omnistaretools.com/blog/, or even omnistaretools.com/blog/ 2007/11/02/should-you-keep-urls-consistent/, since this content is served in multiple locations.) The idea behind URLs is that you can use them to reach specific content at any time. As such, the majority of web developers are in near unanimous agreement that once you put up content at a URL, it should stay at that URL.

Using alt tags on images is an important aspect of web design, for accessibility reasons. When designing a site, you should always take alt tags into account, simply because to not do so is to alienate an entire section of your audience.