Enabling custom backgrounds is probably one of the easiest things you can do to improve a WordPress theme that you’re building or customizing. It takes one small addition to your theme’s functions.php file:

add_custom_background();

Save that and you’ll get Backgrounds added to the Dashboard >> Appearance menu, as shown here.

This will allow you or others using the theme to easily upload a background image and/or set a background color through the WordPress dashboard:

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Top Search Queries is one of the most useful services provided by Google Webmaster Tools. It provides you with detailed information about when your site pops up in their search engine and what pages are attracting clicks. Specifically, you’ll find out:

• The total number of Google Web Search queries that returned pages from your site results over the given period.
• The top search queries that returned pages from your site.
• Impressions: The number of times pages from your site were viewed in search results.
• Clicks: The number of times your site’s listing was clicked in search results for a particular query.
• CTR (clickthrough rate): The percentage of impressions that resulted in a click to your site.

3 Steps to Maximize Your Google Search Query Traffic and Increase Your Clickthrough Rate

If you don’t have access to Google Webmaster Tools, it’s very easy to set up. Follow our Quick Start Guide to Using Google Webmaster Tools With WordPress and you can activate the free service in under two minutes. Make sure you’re also hooked up to Google Analytics. You’ll now have access to information that will help you to discover what people are looking for when they find your website.

Step 1. Use Google Webmaster Tools to find out what queries are resulting in traffic to your website.

Immediately when you sign into your account you will see your top search queries in the dashboard. Click on “more” just underneath the queries to see a full detailed graph. You’ll be able to sort your traffic by country, date, and search types.

Make note of the impressions (number of times your page is viewed in search results) vs. clicks (number of times your page was clicked for that query).

Step 2. Sift the Data for Valuable Information.

Don’t worry. You won’t need to be an SEO expert to analyze this data. Here’s what a sample looks like:

So, let’s say you’ve got 4600 impressions due to people searching for “lollipop candy” and a 3% clickthrough rate. That’s great if you’re a candy supplier, but it’s not so hot if you’re an investment banking firm who happened to use a lollipop image in a blog post. You can disregard that information, even though it’s brought you a bit of traffic.

Focus on the queries that are the most relevant to your industry, even if they’re not exactly what you’ve determined to be your main focus. For example, you’re operating a store that sells bags, shoes, and other accessories but you’re getting loads of traffic from the query “matching eyeshadow”. If you can find a way to relate this to your industry, then you may have found a small gold mine.

Step 3: Actively promote products and content related to your most relevant top search queries.

• Write more content to establish your business as an industry expert. If your site is getting tons of search queries from terms that your’re not currently focusing on, it may be time to change your focus. Give that hidden market a reason to stay, click through and buy your brand by focusing more on offering what your users are going to your site to find.
• Feature products that are relevant to what people are searching for. There is only so much real estate on your front page but a good look at your queries will tell you exactly what is driving buyers to your catalog of products and services.
• Consider adding new products that may be accessories to your main product line. If your site has solid search engine positioning and a decent clickthrough rate for items related to your main line, it may be profitable to expand your offerings into related areas.

Conclusion:

Google’s top search query results can help you to formulate an aggressive strategy to increase your clickthroughs and bump up your sales with a few tweaks. A thoughtful combination of content creation, product selection and placement will not only improve your traffic but should also make your site more focused and keep you competitive. Reconsider your site’s focus and your social media strategy. Is your content descriptive of the top queries that are leading potential customers to your website? Or is there a possibility that your top sales demographic may be lurking just beneath the surface? Take a little time today to check out your top search queries and see if you can’t find a hidden market just waiting to be tapped.

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Couldn’t make it to WordCamp Savannah? No problem! You can still learn from some of the presentations by checking out slides that speakers have made available on slideshare.net. More slides will probably become available. Follow @wordcampsav on Twitter to get all the latest.

Current slides available from WordCamp Savannah include:

• Customizing WordPress Themes/ Child Themes
• PHP/CSS For Beginners
• Social Media Plugins for WordPress
• Automating Your Plugin With WP-Cron
• Top Plugins For WordPress Multisite
• WordPress 3.0 and BuddyPress

You’re sure to find some interesting and informative slides among those. Head over to slideshare.net to check out the complete list and sharpen up your WordPress skills.

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There are different levels of keyword research. Surface-level inquiries can help you get noticed, but is that enough to surpass your competitors? If you really want to improve your volume levels, you will have no choice but to initiate a more in-depth investigation. Find a good basic keyword research tool and/or implement the following suggestions.

1 – Compare Data from Three Sources

Focusing on just a single source can create a false impression, as not all results are reliable. Find three online sources for your keyword research and compare the results. If in doubt, I recommend the following sources:

• Google AdWords (keyword tool) – submitting a term or phrase will trigger results for the current average search volume, as well as the volume from the previous month.
• Wordtracker (keyword tool) – Wordtracker’s numbers may not always be as accurate as those produced by Google AdWords and MSN AdCenter, but they can still be accepted as decent estimates, particularly those related to comparative search volume. Regrettably, niche and long tail term volume estimates can be unreliable due to the dwindling share of Wordtracker’s data sources.
• MSN AdCenter (research keywords tool) – It is worth creating an account to use Microsoft’s research keyword tool. The data is concrete, showing actual counts.

2 – Know Your Query Peeks

Knowing when search queries are highest in demand allows you to predict at what times your competition is the strongest. During those periods increase your Search Engine Optimisation efforts, while keeping a close eye on your industry’s market. If demands are declining, it may be time to switch to more effective keywords and phrases, or change your product/service choices.

3 – Identify Your Industry’s Leaders

In order to fully understand your industry’s online market, it is pertinent to know who else is using your keywords and targeting your audience. Study what the top ranking domains are doing so you can improve your strategy and start competing in the big league.

4 - Scout Social Media Sites

Participating in social media activities can help you find the most popular keywords used in content, blog conversations, tweets, forums, feeds, etc. By actively participating in social media circles you will be the first to know when new trends emerge. You will be able to:

1. Adjust your SEO strategy as soon as new concepts, products and keywords surface.
2. Study content that attracted tons of attention around certain keywords in the past. This can be quite useful for viral content development projects.
3. Find social communities or portals keenly interested in your topic. With the right approach you can promote your site, and find opportunities to expand your back links.

5 – Observe Vertical Results and Opportunities

Typically, vertical search engines use a focused crawler to only index Web pages relevant to a pre-defined or set topic, media type, or genre of content. Be aware of their presence, and the fact that your keywords can cross over into vertical search results. Unfortunately, at this time you will have to conduct this type of research manually.

6 – Understand Your Audience

What is the intent of the people searching for your keywords? Are they still browsing, or are they ready to finalise their order? Find the answers and you will have a pretty good idea what keywords/terms draw in high-quality traffic. Remember, the highest volume keywords do not always bring in the highest ROI scores.

7 – Keyword Relevance

How long did visitors surf? How much time did they spend on your site, or a specific page? Did they buy anything? Tests can determine the relevance between your keywords and the products, services and content you offer on your site. By setting up a Pay Per Click campaign, or refining your analytics to only those visitors participating in targeted search queries, you can easily define the relevance of a keyword. Once you know the competence of a keyword, you can pretty much predict how much valuable traffic it will generate.

8 - PPC Advertising Data

Not everyone has the funds for a paid search campaign. Nonetheless, it never hurts to know what your competitors are spending on their promotions, and where. Also, find out if their ad campaigns are successful. To collect such data, check out the following resources:

• MSN adCenter’s Keyword Estimate
• Google’s AdWords Traffice Estimator
• SEMRush

When evaluating potential conversion rates, visitor value and relevance, don’t forget to take competition levels and cost-per-click data into account. Companies spending a significant amount on keyword research and promotional campaigns want to see lots of visitors and conversions. Observe them closely so you can learn from their strategies (and mistakes). The more you know about them, the higher your chances are to find ways to outperform them.

9 – Find Related Query Keywords

Web users do not always put in the same search queries, because they want options. They increase their search results by typing in main keywords, as well as related keywords. It is a no brainer; you want those related keywords on your potential keyword target list, so you can use them to your advantage. Need some help with this data? Check out the next set of sources:

• Google is quite helpful by showing related searches in their AdWords Tool feature. When searching the web, you can also collect data by clicking the “show options” link at the top of your screen, followed by the “related searches” link located in the sidebar.
• Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, makes it even easier by defaulting related searches right into their web search interface.
• When using Yahoo! Search, you will notice the “also try” list. To find another helpful interface, click on the “more” link just below the search box. In just a few seconds, lots of important and relevant keywords will show up.
• Once you subscribe to Compete.com, you will have access to their Search Analytics feature, and lots of data that is categorized by query and website.

Collect as much pertinent information as you can, thoroughly analyse the data, and start targeting those query related keywords. Making it a constant in your SEO strategy will definitely increase your valuable web traffic.

10 – Do Not Overlook The Legal Issues

Trademark phrases, slogans and terms are often protected. If you do not respect that, you are asking for a fight. Be smart, and stick to allowable keywords. It will help you avoid a lengthy and potentially expensive legal battle.

As you can see, there are many things you can do to broaden your keyword research. Yes, it sounds like an awful lot of work, but think about all the great advantages. If you want that competitive edge, you have no choice but to roll up your sleeves. Get your marketing campaign rolling; you won’t regret it!

About the author: Michael Jenkins is the director of Shout Web Strategy which is a firm in Melbourne specializing in Search, conversion rate optimization and web usability.

Many users have been looking for a way for the site admin to send a private message to all members of a BuddyPress site. A few weeks ago we posted an article called How to Send a Site-wide Notice or a Site-wide Private Message in BuddyPress, highlighting the differences between notices and messages. The BuddyPress Mass Messaging plugin we referred to has been updated by Jeremy Litten and is now in the WordPress repository. I tested it today and it works smoothly with no errors. Great news for the BuddyPress community. Thanks Jeremy!

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WPMU.org recently had the chance to interview James Aldersley of Ayedee.com, a new multisite network that allows users to create simple and attractive one page websites. Though James and his team are not programmers, check out the service they’ve created with a little inspiration from the WordPress community and WPMU DEV Premium plugins and support.

1. What is Ayedee.com and what inspired the creation of this service?

Ayedee.com is a modified framework that makes WordPress themes accessible to first time website owners by using theme options only for content entry/optimization. Simple, easy to use one page business card themes work perfectly on Ayedee.

Without a doubt the inspiration was Tim Van Damme’s Business Card Website. When I saw it, I wanted one. It is an elegant method to control your online message, while offering multiple options for people to contact you. Personally, I’m too lazy to blog so a low maintenance website that links to existing social networks was a good fit.

2. Why did you select WordPress as the platform for this particular business and what experience have you had with WP prior to Ayedee.com?

At first glance WordPress does not seem to be an ideal platform for building a collection of websites which purposefully do not have blog capabilities. Personally though, it was the only platform I was comfortable enough to even attempt such a project. I had used WordPress before on two basic websites. Knowing what you want and being able to find the right plugin to accomplish it really helps when you have minimal coding skills.

Personal requirements aside, WordPress as a framework provided an advantage over similar sites such as Dooid.com, Card.ly and Magntize.com. Those sites are very cool, and likely would have solved my personal needs had they been around a few years back. They have great looking themes that allow you to set up a single page portfolio.

The problem is their theme potential is limited by the centralized system options, which leads to an emphasis on internally developed themes. WordPress themes however can pretty much do anything the developer wants them do to, and since Ayedee users interface directly with the theme, potential theme styles/functions are unlimited.

Content is king on the internet. WordPress has a huge following from developers. If Ayedee had been developed as a custom Rails application for example, it would mean either creating the content internally, or hoping talented designers would be willing to learn our codex/API. The former sounded far to expensive for this project, and the later was simply unimaginable. It is unlikely anyone wants to learn the API of a site with no themes/users.

The bonus with WordPress was there were already a few theme options only landing page themes that the designers were nice enough to let us use. Plus we were able to modify Curt Zigler’s Coming Soon theme that allowed for displaying a blurb and some social icons to create different looking themes.

3. What tools have helped your team of non-programmers to be able to create this multiuser setup?

Dribbble
WordPress Community
Colourlovers
Smashing Magazine
Cufon
DaFont.com
WPMU.org
Twitter bursts from the worlds best designers

The sharing of knowledge and content within the design community is fantastic. Every profession in the world could benefit from this type of collective knowledge. The key was to stick with what I do best. Research and recognizing talent. Find people who are exceptional at something, read what they have to say, see how others react, adopt what you can.

4. Which plugins, both free and premium, are essential to how ayedee.com operates?

This site could not run without WPMU.org and WPMU DEV. In fact it was still a sketched out flowchart until checking them out. We use their Supporter plugin as the foundation of our site. Domain Mapping in the Premium section. The Support plugin for direct support tickets. A few Custom Dashboard Widgets. Soon we will also add Affiliate to the collection. There are a ton of other ones that help us hide menu’s the user does not need, allow for password creation on signup, rebrand WPMU, etc.

We also modified a version of Ozh’s Admin drop down menu for our backend, and use YD Network-wide Options to integrate these mod’s on every site. It was important for us that the admin menu be clean and simple. WordPress has a great admin menu, but if you are only using a few of the functions it is necessary to simplify the look.

5. Any plugins you wish existed?

Something that streamlined domain purchasing and integration with the domain mapping plugin. Or at the very least issue a one use coupon for a free domain with registration. That would really make Ayedee a one stop solution for first time website owners.

6. Please tell us about your different account options. What advantages does a premium user receive on ayedee.com?

Pretty simple stuff:

Free – access to all free themes. Site at ayedee.com/yourname

Premium – Domain mapping (www.yourname.com), Premium Themes

$9 per month. Sign up for a year at $90 and get a free .com/.ca/.net/me domain.

Premium themes will always be unbranded and have SEO options and Google Analytics. Plus some themes will be for Premium users only.

7. What kind of user is Ayedee.com geared towards and how do you hope to help them interface with social networking platforms?

Ayedee could be used by anyone wanting a quick and easy solution for a simple “Here I am. This is where else you can find me” website.

First time website owners will love how simple it is to have access to multiple website styles at a low monthly price. With the current theme selection Ayedee provides a nice “gateway” website for small business and individuals who feel they need a site, but are still unsure if they require one. Testing us out for a month/year makes for an inexpensive

Currently all themes have a big selection of social icons which users display on their site so visitors can easily travel to their Facebook/Twitter/Linkedin/etc.

Future themes will integrate even better with social media. Add videos, a lifestream, Twitter, etc.

8. How can users get involved with theming for ayedee.com?

It is very simple to get involved creating themes for Ayedee…

• Upload a unique theme via http://ayedee.com/ayeMake
• Or just grab our Notepad theme off there and style the CSS , etc
• Offer a skinned down version of an existing theme you sell elsewhere as a teaser.
• Only stipulation is that everything the user enters, edits, etc must operate through a theme options menu.
• Make money per month based on how many Premium users activate your theme
• Become an Affiliate. Put the link on your site, offer a hosted version of your theme.

9. Any advice you’d like to offer small business owners who are considering WordPress?

You would be hard pressed to find a better solution for your small business. WordPress is updated regularly, used and tested by millions of people, supported by a robust community, and improved by great theme designers and plugin developers daily. Only a few companies on the planet could afford to match those fundamentals.

10. What are your plans for for the future of ayedee.com and where do you see it headed in the next few months?

Long Term – Improve the business model of the WordPress premium theme market. Too easy to pirate themes. Hosted with monthly fees prevents that. Making WordPress theme usage more accessible for non developers makes such a business model more profitable for all parties involved. (Or at least inspire the company who does achieve this)

Short Term – Attract new users to WordPress themes. Integrate a few amazing apps into themes (Why doesn’t every hairdresser have a simple website with Setster on it?).

Above all, have some fun pushing the boundaries of what can be accomplished with WordPress as a framework.

Ayedee:
Website – http://ayedee.com
Twitter – http://www.twitter.com/ayedeeWP

James:
Website – http://JamesAldersley.com
Twitter – http://www.twitter.com/JamesAldersley

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If you receive an error with your WordPress network, chances are that it is due to a failure that happens when WordPress cannot find one or more of the global tables for the network in the database. There are three major steps to walk through in the debugging process. This will help you to cover all your bases before seeking further help.

Step 1: Check with your host to make sure that your account fulfills the technical requirements for a Multisite network.

If your account is not equipped to run multisite, then your host may have disabled the functionality from running, which will result in errors. Check with your host to see if you need to upgrade your account.

Step 2: Inspect your wp-config.php file.

Check wp-config.php for the following:

• correct database details
• SUBDOMAIN_INSTALL constant
• MULTISITE constant
• $base variable
• table prefix

If you have any code after this line, then it needs to be moved up above the “stop editing line”:

require_once(ABSPATH . 'wp-settings.php');

Step 3: Check your database.

Check to make sure that all of the extra network tables have been created:

• wp_blogs
• wp_blog_versions
• wp_registration_log
• wp_signups
• wp_site
• wp_sitemeta

For a complete overview and description of all Multisite database tables, check out the breakdown in the WordPress codex.

Another unusual reason that site creation might stop working on your network is that the location of the database server may have changed. In that case you’ll need to update your wp-config.php file. After covering all these bases, then you’re sure to hit the forums with the full knowledge that you’ve done a thorough check through all the usual suspects.

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Do you want your users to be immediately directed to their profile page upon logging in? BP Profile as Homepage will help you do just that. Users who are not logged in will see your regular homepage. After a user has logged in, he will see his profile. Upon logging out, the user will be redirected to the site’s homepage. This plugin works with WordPress 3.0, BuddyPress 1.2.5+ and is Multisite compatible. One thing to note is that the home button will redirect to the user’s profile every time with this plugin. If you don’t like how that works, you can grab Brajesh Singh’s BP Redirect to Profile plugin which will only redirect upon logging in.

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Do you want your users to be immediately directed to their profile page upon logging in? BP Profile as Homepage will help you do just that. Users who are not logged in will see your regular homepage. After a user has logged in, he will see his profile. Upon logging out, the user will be redirected to the site’s homepage. This plugin works with WordPress 3.0, BuddyPress 1.2.5+ and is Multisite compatible. One thing to note is that the home button will redirect to the user’s profile every time with this plugin. If you don’t like how that works, you can grab Brajesh Singh’s BP Redirect to Profile plugin which will only redirect upon logging in.

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A really useful plugin for WordPress 3.0 came out this week that allows you to set up custom post type permalinks for non-hierarchical permalinks which have the flexibility of blog post permalinks. If you’re already rocking custom post types in WordPress 3.0 then you’ll want to check out Custom Post Permalinks. Install and activate it and then you’ll find extra menu items available under the Permalinks Settings page.

Now you can have post type specific archives with all the same flexibility that you have with blog posts. This one is a must have!

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