If you haven’t discovered the Press This (formerly known as Press It) posting shortcut for WordPress yet, now is the time to do it. WordPress 2.7 has moved the bookmark from the Write Post page- to the Tools menu- where it should have been all along.

Here is the official description.

Press This

Press This is a bookmarklet: a little app that runs in your browser and lets you grab bits of the web.

Use Press This to clip text, images and videos from any web page. Then edit and add more straight from Press This before you save or publish it in a post on your blog.

Drag-and-drop the following link to your bookmarks bar or right click it and add it to your favorites for a posting shortcut.

The key to using PressThis is to make sure you have isolated an article to a single URL- and then highlight the text you want to discuss- hit your Press This bookmark that you’ve saved in your Firefox Bookmarks toolbar- and the text you highlighted will be put in a floating window- complete with a link back to the source. Blockquote what you Pressed- and write an open and close- and Voila! Instant high value content with less effort.

Chris Pearson is one of the premier WordPress developers. He understands WordPress as well as anyone- and he has a post on his site that everyone should read, here is an excerpt:

categories are a powerful tool that bloggers can use to exercise precise control over content in a dynamic environment.

Unfortunately, the true power of categorized content has been masked by the one size fits all implementation you see everywhere on the Web—the proverbial long, ugly list of category links now appearing on a blog near you.

As luck would have it, that awful category list also turns out to be a very poor presentational strategy for your site… But why?

Why Your Category List Isn’t Doing You Any Favors

By giving users a list of categories to browse on your site, you are creating a psychological conundrum that usually leaves them with a severe case of analysis paralysis. This is a condition where users, when presented with too many options, end up selecting nothing at all.

Being presented with more choices, even good ones, can hinder effective action. In one study, doctors couldn’t make a decision when a second promising drug showed up.

— Fast Company, November 2007

Counter-intuitive? Maybe. Human nature? Absolutely.

Whether you’re selling products, writing copy, or designing interfaces, you can benefit from playing into basic human psychology. And interestingly, with Website categories, accommodating natural human behavior also turns out to be an excellent SEO strategy

Automated SEO and Content Management with Categories

At first glance, it seems convenient that WordPress automatically creates category pages, tag pages, and just about every other type of page you can imagine1. Dig a little deeper, though, and you’ll find that this form of page bloat is a remarkably poor site-building practice—it’s a condition that should be avoided whenever possible.

As far as blogs are concerned, categories are the single biggest contributor to both page bloat and link dilution, two of the most abominable SEO sins. Ironically, when used properly, these same categories hold the key to efficient, automated site optimization and content management…

The difference, of course, is all in how you use them. Armed with a bit of knowledge and a few lines of code, you’ll be able to use categories to:

display content however you like, wherever you like

link directly to interior pages—not to interstitial “bloat” pages like monthly archives or category archives

provide your users with a smarter, more intuitive way to browse content that may be of interest to them… read the rest at:

What Every Blogger Needs to Know About Categories — Pearsonified.

I like to think of Categories as the table of contents to your site (in this metaphor- tags would be the index)- they are there to help a reader find what they are most interested in, and to group posts of a similar nature.

They are also a powerful tool to refresh old content in Google’s eyes- by collecting old posts with new posts Google sees the category as a new mix of keywords every time you add content to a category.

We can also use categories to present information in different places or in different ways if we want, but for the most part, they are a critical component of navigation. Read Chris’s whole post to learn more.

Some things in WordPress just slip past the experts-and having “blog archive” show up in our page titles was a bit embarrassing. See, it’s not an archive- it’s a post that has value (just because you use WordPress as your Content Management System, doesn’t make the site a blog).

We are showing up as number 1 in Google less than 24 hours after making a post about Firefox 3’s spellchecker not working in WordPress as you type, and the words “blog archive” were showing up in our titles. So- to remove the “blog archive” I did what I recommend to all my students- I googled for answers:

eHowToGuru How to remove “Blog Archive” from your WordPress post title
The Title section in Header.php contains the codes which displays your WordPress title. This is important because search engine listings will display your post title followed by a description of your post. I began to notice that all of my listings had the words Blog Archive in them which was unnecessary and caused part of the titles displayed to be cut off.

To remove the words Blog Archive, do this:

1. Log into your self hosted WordPress blog and click Presentation
2. Click on Theme Editor
3. On the right handside of your browser window, select Header from the list of theme files
4. Look for this line of code just a few lines from the top.

<title><?php bloginfo”name”); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?>  » Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>
5. Remove this section
<?php if ( is_single() ) { ?>  » Blog Archive <?php } ?>

The remaining portion should look like this:
<title><?php bloginfo”name”); ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>
6. Click Update File to save the file.

To tell if you were successful, save a post. Then either look at the top of your browser window once you’ve isolated the post (clicked on it’s headline to only have it showing as a single post)- or try to bookmark it. The new page title should show up without >>blog archive>>

Note- this won’t change your search results or break incoming links- since those are to the URL, not to the title. It’ll just shorten your page titles and get right to the meat of your content.