All Entries Tagged With: "wordpress"

Is Your Permalink Structure Helping Or Hurting You?

I read a lot of blogs. One of the things that I look at when I evaluate a blog I’ve never read before is the permalink structure. I ask myself, “Why did the blogger do it this way?”

Sometimes I can ascertain a good reason. Other times I am totally clueless. If I’m not sure why the blogger chose the permalink structure they chose it’s usually either because they are so advanced that I am not aware of a particular tactic they are using or the blogger doesn’t have a good understanding of SEO and isn’t using best practices. Permalink structure does matter and if you are starting a new company blog you should seriously consider what your links and URLs will look like.

First, the definition – a permalink is the URL of a particular blog post. It includes the root domain, the folder on which your blog sits, the blog post title, and anything else you add in there to identify it. Usually, bloggers will incorporate category names, dates, and/or numerical sequencing protocol. By and large, these can be helpful or a hindrance depending on how they are incorporated.

I’d stay away from category names. They can pigeonhole your blog posts in ways that will hurt you. For instance, your blog post could end up ranking for your category name and not for anything related to your blog post itself. That would be a bad thing.

Dates can also have a detrimental effect. Human readers may look at dates in your permalink structure and disregard anything that is beyond 6 months or a year. That will hurt your credibility.

A number sequencing system can distinguish your blog posts from each other, which is good, but if you stick with that alone then you get no SEO benefits. Using these principles, I’d say your best bet for a permalink structure on your blog is like this:

root/blog folder name/blog post title/number sequence

If your blog is a standalone blog, exists on its own domain name apart from a website, then the root and blog folder name should be the same. That will make your permalinks shorter, which is good. You can also add plugins that will shorten your permalinks. One good one is SEO Slugs, which strips away small words like ‘a’, ‘the’, and ‘and’, leaving only your important words and keywords.

You want your permalinks to be as short as possible with all of the relevant information included that will give you the best and most optimal search engine ranking advantages. Otherwise, you could be shooting yourself in the foot.

April 29, 2009 | Allen | Comments 0

Twitter Counter Plugin For WordPress

Do you have a Twitter Counter Plugin for WordPress? This is actually a pretty useful plugin. It displays the number of Twitter followers you have in a little icon that looks a lot like the Feedburner Counter icon. Each time you increase the number of followers you have your counter goes up in number and displays how many current Twitter followers you have. Of course, you have to be a Twitter user.

Among the features included in this plugin are:

That’s one plugin I don’t mind recomming. Get the Twitter Counter plugin for WordPress.

April 14, 2009 | Allen | Comments 11

WordPress Blog Optimization

We talk a lot about blog post optimization, but what you very seldom see, here or elsewhere, are tips on how to optimize your actual blog software. WordPress is an open source blogging platform, the most popular on the market. You should begin your blog optimization efforts by ensuring that the settings in WordPress are set to maximize your search engine optimization. Here are a few tips to help you do that:

Start with your theme. Your first step in blog optimization in choosing a suitable theme. WordPress has thousands of free themes available for download, but not all of them are good themes. You are better off sticking with themes that are proven. Don’t use a theme that is from a first-time developer. They tend to have the most problems. Also, make sure your theme has developer contact information just in case you need it. And don’t choose a theme that has a lot of extemporaneous code. Otherwise, most of your themes should be good. But if you choose a theme and after about three or four weeks you don’t see any blog posts getting indexed at the search engines and you know you have good inbound links then test another theme to see if you get better results.
Move to settings. After picking a theme, click on Settings on the back up administration area of WordPress. Make sure Blog Title and Tagline have eye-catching attention-getting content and that you use your primary keyword in both fields.
Add a ping list. Under Settings again, click on Writing. Scroll down to the bottom and in the Update Services box add as many ping services as you can. Don’t just pick the top ones, but do include Pingomatic, Technorati, Coreblog, Blogstreet, Google Blogsearch, and Blogflux at a minimum. There are other ping services, particularly some foreign ping services, that I’d recommend as well. The reason you want to include foreign language ping services is because some of them will get you indexed through the back door of the search engines more quickly than places like Pingomatic and Technorati. One mistake that many new bloggers make is to stick to Technorati or Pingomatic and that’s it, but by limiting yourself to the larger ping lists you are cutting yourself short.
Use Summary for feeds. Under the Reading tab below Settings, select Summary for your feeds rather than full post. This will force your RSS subscribers to visit your blog in order to read your entire post. Most subscribers will not have a problem doing this if they want to read your blog and getting your readers to your blog will register more traffic with your analytics software, which is measured by the search engines for quality and user experience, factors that may influence your future rankings. This is particularly true if your blog has a low bounce rate.
Permalinks. Click Permalinks under Settings. This is very important. The structure of your blog post URLs, called permalinks, is very important for SEO purposes. You want your primary keyword to appear in your permalink. To make sure that happens, ensure that you write each blog post title to include your keyword, but also set your WordPress setting to Custom, Day and name, or Month and name. I prefer Custom because it allows me to move the date to the very end of the Permalink and put my keyword closer to the beginning.

There are other ways that you can optimize WordPress for better search engine results. Some plugins can be of great assistance here. But you can also tweak some of the code in your templates to ensure better results. That is more advanced than what this blog post needs. For now, as a bare minimum, use these strategies to optimize your WordPress blog before you start writing.

March 24, 2009 | Allen | Comments 0

How To Ruin Good Blogging Advice

I found a great article about blogging online. I agreed with every word. Up until the last paragraph. It really was a beautiful article. Clear, sound advice. Then, the author made one huge mistake. I mean, HUGE. Here’s the article minus the mistake:

Blogging For Small Business – How to Build Your Reputation

By Barry Deen

Blogs have taken the internet by storm. More and more people are setting up blogs, and in the most part they die off within their first year, before they pick up any momentum. Most people set up blogs to build their reputation, sell products and get traffic to sell ads.

Although blogs have been around for a while, many small businesses are still not taking advantage of all the benefits a small business blog can provide to your bottom line.

* Creates awareness about your service / product

Many businesses have great, innovative products – especially in the technology sector. A major problem small businesses run into is getting the word out about their product on a small marketing budget. Creating a blog will create awareness about your product and ultimately drive sales.

* Builds your reputation as a subject matter expert

If you are an expert in your field, it is very beneficial to write about what you do and how you do it. The quality of your content is key. It may seem counter-intuitive to give away your “secrets” – however most people will find your articles because they are not the experts and are looking to learn.

* Strengthens your Search Engine Optimization strategy

The better quality articles you write, the more likely it is that other people will link to your articles. Link popularity is one of the most important aspects of SEO. Additionally, with correct code structure, you can create an internal cross linking strategy that will drive your PageRank higher.

This is all great advice. I don’t disagree with a single word. A blog is perhaps the most powerful marketing tool any small business owner can employ. If you can write then it’s a great free tool. If you can’t write and you need to hire a ghostwriter then it’s a low-cost tool that you can work to your advantage.

But the writer of this great article then went on to give some very poor advice. What was that? Here it is in all its pristine glory:

These are some of the benefits of blogging for small business. Setting up a blog is very cheap, often times free (www.blogspot.com or www.wordpress.com) and all you have to risk is your time.

Folks, I would not set up a business blog on a free host. You lose all control of your content that way. I have seen people set up 10 blogs at WordPress.com and lose it all overnight because one person made a spam report. It doesn’t matter if you think it’s spam. If WordPress or Blogger executives think it is spam then they can, and will, take it down. You lose it all.

Instead, spend $10 to buy a domain name that you have control over. Set up a WordPress blog on your domain name and write to it every day. That is the best SEO you will ever have and it will only cost you $10 plus the cost of hosting, which is usually no more than $60 per year.

The above article was written by:

Barry Deen is President & CEO of Web Strategy Canada and one of the top affiliate marketing specialists in Canada. For information on how to make money online, checkout http://www.makemillionsathome.ca For information on Barry Deen and his company, Web Strategy Canada, visit http://www.web-strategy.ca

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Barry_Deen

To learn more about business blogging contact a qualified blog consultant today.

March 06, 2009 | Allen | Comments 2