This week’s links:

• Add Translation Links to your Web Site or Blog at CreativeTechs Tips. This is a great tutorial on how to give your users the ability to translate your WordPress blog in their native language using Google’s translation services.
• Google AJAX Search API at the Google Code Blog. This one talks about how to add a custom google search to your blog.
• Separate Trackbacks from Comments on Your WordPress Blog at Daily Blog Tips. A great way to set up your comments to separate the trackbacks from the real comments on your WordPress Blog.
• 10 Things That Bloggers Tend to Forget, But Shouldn’t! also at Daily Blog Tips. A good overview of things for new and old blogers to remember.

Hope you find the links helpful. If you do drop, me a comment. If you did not, also drop me a comment and tell me why.

As always thanks for reading.

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We talk a lot about the next five things or five things you did not know. With that in mind I want to talk about the FIRST five things you should do on your WordPress blog to help out with Findability / SEO.

1) Write New and Unique content.

This is where it all starts. If you have strong, well written and unique content, then you will get people to come and read your blog. I know that sounds simplistic, and yes it is, but it is the truth!

2) Add new content often and regularly.

The more often you post the more people will come to your site. Why? Well the more you post, or if you hold yourself to a regular schedule, then search engines will spider your site more often. Therefor, you will have more information in the search engines. This allows people to find you a much more easily when they are searching.

3) Have a great key word phrase that is popular, but not too popular.

One of the first things you should do when setting up your site for Findability / SEO is to come up with a good keyword that works for your blog and the subject you write about. Then think of five more that do the same thing but are not as well known. Why? Well if you use a very popular keyword like coffee you will never get to the top of Google list because a company like Starbucks will have that all tied up. Instead of coffee use Whole bean coffee or cup of coffee. This way you can find a place in a bigger segment of readers.

4) Make sure your site is as accessible as it can be.

Having a well coded accessible site not only will allow the largest group of people to read it, but it will allow the search engines to make it through the site with little or no problems. This will allow them to index more of your content and return a better search result.

5) Use your keywords in your titles, domain name and your url.

This gives you a bunch of new places to put keywords that will not only help you with your search engine rankings, but also to give the people searching for things a new set of keywords to find in their search.

I hope this helps out those of you that are just starting your blog and even with people that have long time blogs that are just now starting to do the Findability / SEO thing to it.

Please drop me a comment if you have any questions. Also drop me a comment if you have tried any of these and let me know what kind of results you had with them.

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Once you have it up and going, then most of the upgrades and add-ons you want are with plugins or just changing the default settings built into your WordPress blog.

So why would you ever want to pay someone good money to work on your blog? Lots of reasons. You want a custom template / Layout and you are not a coder or a graphic designer. In the course of implementing the Findability / SEO things I talk about on this blog, you realize that you do not have the skill set to dive into the code that is sometimes necessary to implement some of the tricks that I bring up.

Because of the ease of setup and use of the WordPress system, anyone with little or no web skills can set it up and make it look and work great. That is part of what I love about this system.

If you are the kind of person that is happy with things that come right out of the box and just work for you, then you will probably never need anyone to look at or touch it. Now, if you are the kind of person that wants to get 110% out of your install but do not think you have the skills, then you might just be the kind that wants to contact a WordPress professional.

A WordPress professional is someone that works with and is intimately knowledgeable on how WordPress works and ticks. With them doing it for you (or teaching you how to do it), you can really crank up what this blogging system can do for you.

All of that said, I believe that almost all of the tips I talk about on this blog can be used by anyone no matter what level of knowledge they have. Just remember that there are good people out there who know this system, and for a reasonable amount of money they will help you out and work on your blog.

In my next post I will talk about where to find a WordPress Pro and, what to expect when you work with them.

Have you ever hired some one to work on your blog? Would you ever hire some one to work on your WordPress blog? Drop me a comment and let me know.

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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!

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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?

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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.

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This is not only really bad Findability and SEO, but it is just plain confusing to the people that read your blog and subscribe to your RSS feeds. Why is this bad you ask? If there is not an easy to read structure, then search engines will get confused and not have a set of key words ( well a 2nd set after the ones in the content), and when some one searches for your post on Google Analytic they will have a harder time finding yours. Isn’t this what we are trying to avoid?

When it comes to your readers, on the site or RSS, then you want to make a structure that will allow them to see at a glance what the post name is about and the date it was posted.

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.

There can be a little bit of getting your hands dirty with code on all of this, and as I have said before, if you do not think you can do this then do not. Please get someone that can (I am available to help on this, It is my job).

So let me know. Are you using a well thought out structure for your permalinks? Did you do it from the beginning or add it after, and if so, what problem ( if any ) did you have? Drop me a comment and let me know.

Thanks for reading!

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What that means for us is that we write the content for someone with a 9th grade reading level.

My question for you all is this.  When you write your WordPress blog do you give any thought to the reading level of your content? Should you? Do you even care?

Part of me (a very small part) says that I should not care at all and just write what I want without worrying if I am writing over the readers’ head. That said, the reason I write this blog is to help you all to make your WordPress blog  have the best Findability it can.

With that in mind, part of good Findability is to have the content of the site  be as accessible to the largest audience as it can be. I think you should write your content in a way that allows everyone to understand and use the information you are writing about. This is easier said then done.

My plan? Just write what I know in the way that I would  explain it to my Mother. She is a smart woman but does not know much about my topic.  Therefore,  if I can get her to understand what I am writing about then there is a good chance that the people that I am writing for will understand it also.

But it needs to be said that unless the subject matter you are writing about is geared to an entry level group, you need to be careful to not dumb it down so much that the more advanced users will feel insulted and walk away from your blog and then you have lost a reader.

So the question is does the readers’ reading level matter at all? Do you even think about it at all? Drop me a comment and let me know your thoughts on all of this.

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