I usually have a select of 10-20 themes which I use on most of my niche websites mostly because I have heavily modified them myself or find them to be perfectly coded for Search Engines. This is my list of 10 Search engine friendly wordpress themes.

1. Green Park 2 -

2. PlainTxt -

3. A Dream to Host -

4. Dateless Sniper 1.0

5. Free web 2.0 Theme

5 SEO Friendly WordPress Themes
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

Author Avatars List – This plugin makes it easy to display lists of user avatars on your (multiuser) blog. It also allows to insert single avatars for blog users or any email address into a post or page. I was able to hack it with the help of Ben Jacob and Niju Mohan to make it display random users with at least 1 post in rotation in the sidebar.

Capability Manager – Manage user capabilities and roles to allow contributors to upload images and much more.

Co-Authors Plus – Allows multiple authors to be assigned to a post. Co-authored posts appear on a co-author’s posts page and feed. New template tags allow listing of co-authors.

EmailUserX – A very simple plugin to email your users. Useful to contact all your authors with a single email.

Gravatar – This plugin allows you to generate a gravatar URL complete with rating, size, default, and border options. A must-have! Add faces to usernames easily with Globally Recognized Avatars.

New User Email Setup – A Plugin to setup the registration email sent to new users. This is useful for a blog where some of the authors might not be familiar with the wordpress way of life.

Peter’s Collaboration E-mails – Enhance the “Submit for Review” feature for Contributor users. This plugin enables automatic e-mails to the relevant users when posts are pending, when they are approved, and when their statuses are changed from “pending” back to “draft”. Lets your contributors keep track of their submissions.

Photo Dropper – Lets you add Creative commons licensed Photos to Your Posts from Flickr.

Top WordPress Plugins for a multi-author blog
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

WordPress wins hands down as the best CMS platform ever built. I build all my sites using wordpress and then customize them to become SEO powerhouses. I can confidently assure you that – I eat SEO for wordpress!

If you are looking for some basic SEO tips, I suggest reading my post – Free Search Engine Optimization Tips to get a head start. For those looking for some wordpress seo tips, lets start!

1. Permalinks – The most important and the most power SEO tip for wordpress. It basically changes your links from sitename/page_id=12 to a more human readable format as sitename/postname. You can find it under Settings>Permalinks. Simple huh?
2. Title Tags - WordPress combined with the All-In-One SEO Plugin lets you do this. Customize every page in your site with your target keyword. If you have doubts on how many keywords to target for?  Read this.
3. Related Posts – I cannot tell you how important this is for internal linking for the search spiders and the visitors on your blog. You do not want them to leave, you want to them to do something.
4. Design Titles – If you are trying to SEO every page on your site, then use h1/h2 tags on titles and make sure you link them to the same page with the post title. Most of the common themes do this already, but if you are on a custom theme, you might want to check that out.
5. Permanent Links – If you notice that some of your posts get good exposure on search engines, put them on your sidebar or your footer with your keywords as title so that reader and the spiders can find them and assign appropriate importance to them.

Bonus Tip! Who does not like bonus points, hands up?!

Anticipate search keywords. People looking for a new model of a car might be more interested in reviews, price and features than the car itself. Keep this in mind with every article you write.

Thats about it on SEO turbo-charging your wordpress site! Do let me know your best SEO tip for wordpress.

5 Tips to SEO for WordPress
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

“WordPress PHP exec” is a plugin that lets you execute dynamic PHP code in posts. It masks PHP code before balanceTags, and unmask them afterwards, so it should be safe to use PHP code that has literal HTML tags in it, for example: code which print out HTML.

For example, you can put you PHP codes like

<phpcode>
<?php
echo “Current date and time: “;
echo date(“l dS of F Y h:i:s A”);
?>
</phpcode>

and get your output inside your page/post.

Download PHP Exec Plugin for Wordress here.

Use PHP in WordPress
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

WordPress sent me a whole lot of goodies so that I can keep enlightening the world about how wonderful they are! Thanks guys, you rock!

P.S: Thanks Arun at MillionClues for letting me know about this schwag.

WordPress Sends a Schwag!
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

WordPress.tv is Your Visual Resource for All Things WordPress

They have video tutorials for a lot of things to do in wordpress like adding a about me page, or writing and publishing a post. Must visit for all wordpress newbies and gurus alike. I hope to contribute to the site some day with my own little hacks and breaks on wordpress. It will help all those people who love how-to videos for doing new and unfamilier stuff with wordpress. Good thinking on the video site from wordpress. Life just became easier!!

WordPressTV – WordPress Video Resources
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

The new URL with feedproxy disrupted their awareness API which was used for calling the subscriber numbers. Yoast yesterday found a fix/hack for this problem and it really works like a charm for my blog now. For an example, see the top sidebar, it says “Join my 1070 Subscribers” now. The code for showing this on your wordpress blog is:

$fb = get_option("feedburnersubscribecount");
if ($fb['lastcheck'] < ( mktime() - 600 ) )
{
$url = "https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=theanand";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
if ($data) {
preg_match('/circulation="([0-9]+)"/',$data, $matches);
if ($matches[1] != 0)
$fb['count'] = $matches[1];
$fb['lastcheck'] = mktime();
update_option("feedburnersubscribecount",$fb);
$nulll='N/a';
if($fb['count']==0) $fb['count']=$nulll;
}
}
echo 'Join my '.$fb['count'].'Subscribers';
I have added the cache code into the original code for easy implementation, again, thanks to Yoast!Remember to add the php hooks into the code before you save it.

If you, like me, migrated to google subdomain of feedburner and had your awareness API, check out this post by Yoast which explains what has changed with the feedburner API.

Display Feedburner Subscriber Count
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

Binny is now on a mission to challenge himself by creating one plugin a day all this week. Thats about 5 plugins in this week, considering the fact that he does not like working on Saturday and Sunday.The contest already started off and so far he has given us these plugins

• Eventr – a plugin which you can use to manage a event and its registrations. It is currently in use at our BarCamp Kerala blog.
• Autofields plugin
• Pollin WordPress plugin

Be sure to follow his blog for the rest of plugins and in case you are looking for some premium plugin to be made, Binny is the person you are looking for! Also, I am sure if you have any plugin requirement ideas, he will look into it too depending on how many people will find the plugin useful.

A Plugin A Day!
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

Until recently my hompage was a php page with only page! I did not really bother with converting my homepage into wordpress since I did not have much of a content to post there anyways. But my tastes keep changing all the time and individual php files were of no use if I had to change the design. So I posted that exact php into a wordpress theme in less than 60 seconds. How?

Introducing the is_home() tag:

The design I wanted to use was my previous theme and hence the only thing I wanted to change the way the homepage looked. Hence I add this peice of code in the top of index.php file of my theme:

?<?php

if (is_home()) { ?>

Paste the source of my static php/html page.

<?php }
else
{ ?>

leave the real index.php content here. untouched.

<?php
} ?>

What is_home does is to check if the page currently req. page is the homepage of the blog. If it is, it serves the php/html page I want to show as homepage. Else it serves the theme code! Simple.

With this you can have even your old html page as the homepage! Or better, rename it to php and put in codes to show recent posts, recent comments or even posts from your sub domain blog as I did with my TheAnand home. Hope this helps! If you are looknig for a way to learn what a wordpress theme is all about check this heirarchy by Sajith. He has a excellent post to help you get started with creating a wordpress theme.

Create WordPress Magazine Style Theme easy!
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.

Though wordpress is considered to be a efficient script, having 50 of them at the same place can be a problem, or so I learnt! Going through the “ways to speed up wordpress tips” across the google results on the blogosphere, I noticed the regular tips like

1. Upgrade wordpress to the latest edition
2. Delete unused and unwanted  plugins
3. Use Cache plugins for wordpress
4. Yada yada blah blah!

One particular practical tip I liked was the one to reduce server requests. If you use a free wordpress theme, it is highly possible that you are violating this rule. Following are the places which you might want to check and replace if you are looking for ways to reduce load times and server overloads.

If you open up your header.php in wordpress theme editor, you will see something like the above. Each time your page is requested, there is about 7 php queries requested already in the header.php! It might not be very intensive, but if you get a lot of traffic, they can quickly add up.

To speed up load times, simply replace the above requests to absolute destinations and you just saved some micro seconds of load times! What other tips do you have on speeding up your scripts? Thanks to Lorelle.

Speed Up Your WordPress Blog
Anand Subramanian, co-founder of ayruz web holdings is an Internet Marketing Consultant based in India.