WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and publishing platform powered by PHP and MySQL. It is often customized into a content management system (CMS). And in 2011 WordPress has dominated the landscape of blogging. There are a number of reasons why WordPress is so good quality coding, highly customizable, works well for SEO, friendly user interface, and a lot more.

Wordpress Plugins

Media is also incorporated artistically and effortlessly by thousands of different WordPress themes around the internet, and SEO comes just as easily. One very popular feature of WordPress is its rich plugin architecture which allows users and developers to extend its functionality beyond the features that come as part of the base install. Let’s take a look at the top 5 best SEO plugins for WordPress this year.

1. Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps a must have for getting your domains indexed and crawled. One of the primary ways to get your site indexed and hitting the SERPs quickly is to send in a sitemap for Google, Yahoo, and Bing. This allows the search engine to have dedicated mapping of your domain, allowing the bots to spider your URL structure more accurately and leaving no chance for missed content. Also, you’ll be able to see which of your pages/posts are being indexed and are ranking for various keywords much sooner.

2. WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is plugin utility that creates a cache for faster loading times. This is another important aspect of on-page SEO that many websites fail at, load times. Google, Yahoo, and Bing are concerned with how fast or slow a website loading time is. If a site is taking 10+ seconds or more for the average visitor, than many users are not going to be able to access the pages/posts effectively. Having your webpages cached will greatly reduce the loading time and get your around the 1-3 second mark, adding more trust/authority to your site for clean coding and quality CSS.

3. CBNet Ping Optimizer

CBNet Ping Optimizer is very simple pinging tool. The main focus of this plugin is to regulate the pings for only new content that you release, this way your are not spamming the search engines every time you make 10 or 20 post edits. But, CBNet Ping Optimizer is excellent for utilizing the best leverage any website has for Google SEO, unique content. When you post really quality content to your blog/website, your going to want to notify the search engines to send their robots to come check out your new url and it’s content. The pinger can be turned off if you do not want to ping a new domain or site before content creation and then turned on for automatic mode, which will only ping your new posts/pages. Very useful and really helps get your site indexed much faster.

4. SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links interlinking between pages on keywords. This plugin creates interlinking between your pages/posts and keywords throughout your website. Having your domain interlinked properly will greatly increase your indexing speed of newly created content and share the page rank nicely between your most popular pages. I highly recommend using a inter-linking plugin of some sort and SEO smart links is what I choose to use. You can also set it for more or less linking per page, linking on specific keywords AND pointing the links to specific pages/posts. Very customizable and you can really build a quality architecture for your website.

5. All in One SEO Pack

All in One SEO Pack constantly updated & very reliable plugin. All in one SEO pack is by far the most useful search engine optimization plugin for any WordPress installation. You will use this plugin with any theme to help you customize your meta html easily and quickly. The plugin will give you a shortcut menu to edit various meta tags on every post, page, and for your home domain, including the title, description, image tags, and keywords. This will help you provide a basic foundation for your on-page SEO efforts, loading times and sitemaps will come from your other SEO plugins listed lower down.

Whole of the above plugins are on the Top 5 SEO Plugins ranks this year. All of you must have on your website. Hopefully this helps.

If data is stored in multiple tables, how can you retrieve that data with a single SELECT statement?

The answer is to use a join. Simply put, a join is a mechanism used to associate tables within a SELECT statement (and thus the name join). Using a special syntax, multiple tables can be joined so a single set of output is returned, and the join associates the correct rows in each table on-the-fly.

Example on Creating a Join

Creating a join is very simple. You must specify all the tables to be included and how they are related to each other. Look at the following example:

Input
Before Use Join
SELECT cust_name, cust_contact
FROM customers
WHERE cust_id IN (SELECT cust_id
FROM orders
WHERE order_num IN (SELECT order_num
FROM orderitems
WHERE prod_id = 'TNT2'));

Using Join
SELECT cust_name, cust_contact
FROM customers, orders, orderitems
WHERE customers.cust_id = orders.cust_id
AND orderitems.order_num = orders.order_num
AND prod_id = 'TNT2';

Output
+----------------+--------------+
| cust_name | cust_contact |
+----------------+--------------+
| Coyote Inc. | Y Lee |
| Yosemite Place | Y Sam |
+----------------+--------------+


Tip

It Pays to Experiment As you can see, there is often more than one way to perform any given SQL operation. And there is rarely a definitive right or wrong way. Performance can be affected by the type of operation, the amount of data in the tables, whether indexes and keys are present, and a whole slew of other criteria. Therefore, it is often worth experimenting with different selection mechanisms to find the one that works best for you.

Joins are one of the most important and powerful features in SQL, and using them effectively requires a basic understanding of relational database design. In this chapter, you learned some of the basics of relational database design as an introduction to learning about joins. You also learned how to create an equijoin (also known as an inner join), which is the most commonly used form of join. In the next chapter you’ll learn how to create other types of joins.

Book: MySQL Crash Course