1) Add the title tag to all the links on the page.

The reason for this is to add more information for the search engine spiders to find and read. When you do this it will add more keywords and information about the page / post into their search results. What that means to the person searching is that the words they type into the search engines have a greater chance of finding the article that you have written.

2) Proper placement of the H1, H2, H3 tags on titles on the page.

The reason to do this is to let the search engine spiders know what the most important information on your WordPress blog is, and then you tell it the 2nd and the 3rd most important. The reason you want to do this is so that the spiders will rank this information and use it to help the users to search for the most important and relevant information on your blog.

3) Have the web site verified as W3C compliant (w3c.org).

The reason to do this is that a WordPress blog that is written with W3C compliant code not only makes it easier to optimize for Findability / SEO, but also, compliant code lets a search engine read the whole blog without any problems. If the search engines can do that then there is a more complete picture and record of your blog in the log, and this will help the searchers return more complete and higher placed search results.

4) Add and fill in the atl attribute to all images.

Again, the reason to do this is it gives the search engine spiders more information about the content in the blog. This will not only show up more in searches for keywords, but also in image searches. Google is saying that more and more people are searching for written content that includes images. I have not added images to this blog because I do not think they add anything to the content I write.

5) Add an XML site map (if one does note exist).

The reason for this is to give the search engine spiders a clear road map in the format that they like and will use. With this information the spiders will crawl and index your blog quicker and more efficiently. This will help get time sensitive information in to them sooner, and it will show up in searches faster. With WordPress it is easy to do this with this plugin Google (XML) Sitemap Generator. After set up of the plugin you can rerun it every now and then so that if you have made changes to your blog you can inform Google of the changes.

Hope this helps. If it did drop me a comment. If you all liked this let me know and I will write up 5 more tips.

Thanks for reading

a

As the article above says, please be careful to remember that if you change the permalink structure on your blog in WordPress it will change all the links that you have already published, and that could screw you up if you or someone else has linked to them. I am sorry to say that there is no way to not have this problem. So you can remember to do this from the time you set up your blog, or you can bite the bullet and just change for the better and forget the past.

After posting this I got a great comment from David LaFerney correcting and saying that yes you can change your permalink information and use a 301 redirect to not have the links get lost.

Actually, if you change your permalink structure you can 301(permanent redirect) the old addresses to the new ones using your htaccess file.

So that got me thinking that if you could do that, then why not use a plugin to help with this process. You would normally have to manually edit your .htaccess file to do a 301 redirect. While this is not a hard thing to do, not everyone is cool with mucking around with the code associated with their blog. Besides, sometimes the .htaccess files is a hidden file and can be hard to find.

So I did some looking and found this plugin Permalink Redirect WordPress Plugin by Scott Yang. With this plugin, all you have to do is install it and activate, and then when you are up and going the instructions on the site and the interface on your blog will walk you through the rest of the work.

Just remember that you should take the time to set up your permalinks the way you want them before you activate and set up this plugin. Why? As I was reminded by David, if you change the redirect too many times in a row this could hurt your Google ranking / search engines listings.

Also remember that changing the permalink structure of your WordPress blog is one of the easiest SEO / Findability steps you can take.

I hope this helps to clear up my little mistake form the earlier post. Will this make you all more likely to try and change your permalink structure? Drop me a comment and let me know.

Thanks for Reading!

a

With that in mind, I thought I would take a second and walk you through the process of installing and activating a plugin on your WordPress blog.

As with anything else I tell you all about, if you do not feel like you have the skills to do any of this, please hire someone that is qualified to do so.

Now on to the steps:

1. Download the plugin. Normally it’s in a zip file. That means you will need to uncompress the files before you can use them.

2. Using the FTP client of your choice, upload the file to the plugin directory on your webserver. That is usually located at /wp-content/plugins. There are times that you’ll need to upload the entire directory into the plugin directory.

3. Then login to the WP admin dashboard of your blog, click on the Plugins tab to find and activate the plugin that you just uploaded to your server.

4. Keep in mind that there are some plugins that may need some customization. You can find the options located either under the Plugins tab or the Options tab – just look around.

Also please be sure to read the README file that comes with each plugin for installation details.

I hope this has been helpful information for you. Now that we have talked about installing them what is your favorite plugin? Why?

a

The first reason being that with no email address on the page there is a much smaller chance of getting random spam email from a bott that farmed my email address off the the site.

Now that more and more people are using web based email as there only email, a mailto link is not as practical. As the code is written, it cannot open up a browser and then launch the web mail site you use like it can with a desktop based mail application.

The last reason is with a form that is accessible, usable, and well thought out, the reader can narrow the question and just zip you off a quick note. That is part of what Findability is, giving the readers a well thought out way to complete a task on your site.

So I decided to add the page, and then I got to thinking. I could hand write the HTML / PHP to make the form work and come up with a safety to keep spam out of it, but this is WordPress and we have a community of developers that have written some great plug-ins. So, there must be one for this also.

And there was. After some short searching I came across a plugin on Beast-Blog.com . A great secure and accessible form plugin for WordPress written by Mike Cherim (http://green-beast.com/) and Mike Jolley (http://www.blue-anvil.com/) . If you can install a plug-in on your blog, then you can by all means do the install for this one.

A great install guide is on the site that walks you through the set up once you have uploaded the files to your server. You can even add custom CSS to it if you like. I started with the default style and it looked good in my template. If it does not look the way you want with yours, you can fix it by hand or there is a list of styles that come with it for a whole lot of popular WordPress themes.

So did I make the right choice to not include my email address on the site? Do you like a form or a mailto link? Drop me a coment and let me know what you think.

As always thanks for reading.

a

It installed easily and worked right out of the box with little to no problems at all. What it does is add a little check box that
sends readers an email when the comments have been updated.

They can do this if they have made a comment or even if they haven’t, and they just want to be notified when others have posted a comment. The plugin also remembers if you have already signed up and clicked to be informed, and it displays a different screen asking them if they want to manage their subscriptions.

After I installed the plug-in I went to go and test it. I took a look at my comment section. I highly recommend that if you have not taken the time to do this, you should go and do it right now. I found it hard to understand and some errors in the way it asks for information.

This is an often overlooked section of your blog, one that should be important to you. We are trying to build a community and the best way to do this is with comments. If your readers come to make a comment and find problems, then there is a good chance that they will not make one and possibly just leave the site.

So what do you all think? Is it important to get comments, or is it just ok for people to come to the site and read and go away?

a