It’s rather frustrating when you can’t access a website when obviously the website seems to be okay. This is the exact case I’ve experienced with THIS SITE that you’re now viewing! Note the past tense “‘I’ve experienced”, which means good news – I’ve resolved the problem, hurray.

Now you see, previously, I’ve rather occasional (to frequent actually) issue to view my website DesigningWeb.org. Initially, I thought my ISP is bad. But after several follow up with my internet service provider, I realized the website is not exactly down. This can be confirmed when you try to view and access your site via proxy. In my case, I use EatMyBrowser.com which I quite like it as it is one of the fastest proxy browser I’ve used. When I access Designing Web via Eat My Browser, it’s okay! Meaning, the site is not down but somehow I’m unable to access from my desktop.

Since the web site is okay but I’m still getting a Server Not Found on my Firefox, I quickly revert the attention to DNS issue. To determine if it’s DNS issue, you can check using MSDOS command to ping your website. If you’re unable to ping your domain name but able to ping your IP (of your domain name), it is a rather clear sign of DNS issue.

The fix? Go to Control Panel > Network Connection > Properties > TCP/IPv4 > DNS : 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220

The 2 DNS IPs are from OpenDNS.com. They are amongst the fastest free DNS servers available.

Go back to the browser and check the website again and it should be visible. See, website up and running.

The good thing about WordPress is its theme and plugin architectures that make it so versatile and powerful. That is precisely why I’m all into developing WordPress blogs for past years. Even when I need portal that works like a classifieds, or maybe a community site, auction site, Q&A or portfolio style, WordPress can easily be converted to one.

As I’m mostly developing WordPress blogs and portals these days, my focus is building up the effectiveness, especially in search engine perspective. To me, a blog or site must be developed to rank high in the search engines to reap maximum benefits. Thanks to many SEO WordPress plugins, this is an easy task.

So far, the best WordPress plugins for SEO purposes are :

SEO Smart Links – internal linking is an important SEO technique to impress the search engine spiders. This simple and yet effective plugin automatically self-link keywords and phrases to related posts, pages, categories and comments within your blog. This self-linking also entices human visitors to click through to other posts within your blog, increasing stickiness of your blog.

SEO Friendly Images – Other than webpages, images are another entity that can be indexed and ranked in the search engines. This plugin helps to make sure that your images are tagged with appropriate “alt” and “title” tags so that search engines can also index them accordingly.

SEO Slugs – With the permalink of your post following its respective post title, a post title like “What You Can Do To Make Your Website Rank Better” will have a slug like http://yourdomain.com/what-you-can-do-to-make-your-website-rank-better. Kindda long for a slug or keyword right? The SEO Slugs plugin will removes common words like “what”, “the”, “a” etc. (also known as stop words which the search engines will ignore) to be assigned as post slug, hence, making it more search engine friendly.

404 SEO Plugin – This is a simple “don’t-waste-your-traffic” plugin which gives you a smart customized 404 Page Not Found error message which automatically display relevant links to your posts and pages on your blog based on the words in the URL that was not found. With 404 SEO plugin, you’ll retain those traffic that will usually hit the “Back” button on the browser when they come across a page that is not found.

SEO No Duplicate WordPress plugin – As implied, if you have duplicate content on your site for some reason, this plugin allows you to select which version of a post the search engines should index while ignoring the others. With this, you’ll not have any worry of duplicate content penalty that might be imposed by the search engines.

Stay tuned and I’ll reveal to you more plugins power.