Search on your Blog Part 3

For the third and final part of the articles on searching and your WordPress blog.

I came across this post Have you SEO’ed your search feature? on Marketing Hub. A lot of good information about rewriting the code on your search.

They have written a great post that talks about ways to improve the default code on the search section of your WordPress blog. The reason you would want to do this is to help Google index the search results of your blog, and that way you have a chance of get more pages index into the search engine. More pages index means a better chance of getting a good results when some one is trying to find your blog.

I will say that the things that are described in the post are a bit advanced. As I have said before, if you do not feel like this is something you can handle or are just plain scared to play around in the code, then do not try it. Find someone (like me) that knows what they are doing and hire them.

If you want to try this then I suggest reading through the post two or three times and making a copy of the page you are working on before you try it out.

The post has all of the code snippets you need and some good directions on where to put them.

Having done this to my WordPress blog, I have seen an increase in Google information about the searches, and I know this will increase the SEO / Findability of my blog. I am fairly sure it will do the same to yours.

Let me know if this was easy or hard for you to do. If you did it, how has it worked out for you?

Thanks for Reading

Search on your Blog Part 2

Part two of the three part series on Search and your WordPress blog.

This time I want to talk to you about a great little plugin on Addicted to New blog called the WordPress live search plugin.

This plugin does all of its work by letting your readers do a search on your blog without having to refresh the page. It can do this with the use of Ajax. Your readers can save a lot of time when they are performing searches on your blog. This is also a great way to increase not only the interactivity between the users and the blog, but also it will help make your WordPress blog have a richer Findability added to it. The reason it achieves this is because the search responses come to the reader instantly without loading a new page.

A thing to note is that this plugin needs the default WordPress search form still on your blog. If you have changed it all, especially the id attribute of the search form (searchform) or the search input box, this plugin will just not work. If you have changed it and you want to still use this, I suggest you add the code back for the original search.

It should be noted that to test this out, I had to install it on a default template that comes with WordPress to get it to work.

Search on your Blog Part 1

Lets talk about search and the search function on your WordPress blog. Almost all themes you can use will have a search function built in, and it will work well for you 99% of the time.

I was having problems getting the results I thought I should have from the searches that I conducted. With that in mind, I went looking for a new on site search. I came across the google custom search. As with everything else that is Google it works well, and there is a free option for you to use.

The problem is that with the free version Google brands the search box on your website. Not something I was excited about. Also I found the results were not any different than the ones I was getting with the default built in search.

That lead me to think about the way I was searching. I was just asking for a word to be found in a whole lot of words. Is that the right way? Does it matter? How can we as the developers of our WordPress blog help our readers search more effectively?

We all know that part of the core of having good Findability is the ability for your readers to be able to find what they are looking for on your blog in as many ways as you can offer.

This is something I will be looking at for the next couple of posts. I would love to get your thoughts on this and any tips or things you do to help your users use search more effectively.

Thanks for reading

WordPress SEO Tips from Matt Cutts

I was looking through some old notes and found one about WordCamp 2007. WordCamp is a two day conference held in San Fransico thrown by WordPress. To be fair, they are not the only Wordcamp, but they are the original and the biggest.

So my notes talked about a session given by Matt Cutts about white hat SEO and WordPress. Matt is the head of Google’s Webspam team and many say an expert on SEO when it involves Google.

I re-watched the presentation today, and wow it is just full of tips and tricks and just a bunch of good information coming right from the guy that can tell you if it matters to Google at all.

The link above has an embedded video which plays just fine, but if you go to Matt’s blog (one you should be reading any way) he has provided the PowerPoint Deck and links to the video and a synopsis if you do not want to watch the whole thing.

I know this is kind of old information, but the stuff he talks about is still relevant and we all can learn alot form it.

MY question for you all is are these kind of conference videos helpful or is it a poor substitute for the event and a waste of time? Drop me a comment and let me know what you think.

Thanks for reading.

Fun with 301 Redirect and Permalinks

In my post on Permalinks I made the following statement:

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!

PlugIns 101

A lot of the tips I pass on to you all involve the installing and using of plugins. Plugins are part of what makes WordPress such a great platform to blog on. They not only help you with SEO / Findability, but also almost anything you could think of.

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 WordPress Read Contact Form

I decided I want to add a contact form to Findability Today instead of just adding a mailto link with my email address. The reason I made this choice is three fold.

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.

Permalinks 101

Came across this post on Weblog Tool Collection about permalinks. I cannot tell you how many WordPress blogs I come across that do not have a well thought out permalink structure.

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!

Virtual Blogging Conference

I found a virtual conference today at Blogging Conference.

The definition they give for themselves is a good summation of why they are doing this and what they want you to get out of it.

BlogOnExpo is a free digital conference covering the topic of blogging. For many bloggers, attending a real world conference can be far too expensive and time consuming; so, we have attempted to bring the conference experience online. According to the latest State of the Blogosphere from Blog Tracking Search Engine Technorati, there are over 70,000,000 blogs on the web with 120,000 new blogs being added each day. With those kind of numbers, its no surprise that many blogs fail. Our conference will help bloggers improve their chances for success.

I spent some time looking at some of the sessions, and there was a lot of good information to be had. A lot of the information is geared towards how to make money with your blog and not 100% about WordPress or Findability, but there is still a nugget or two you can get out of it if you take the time to look and read the sessions.

The sessions run from the Jan 15th to the 18th and will stay up until the next BlogOnExpo happens in May

Do we like the idea of all online conferences? Can there be the same (or any) level of networking like a face to face one? Drop me a comment and let me know what you think.

A WordPress SEO Beginner’s Guide

I was told about a post over on Joost de Valk’s SEO blog that has a good starting point on what someone who is a beginner in SEO and who uses WordPress should do to their blog.

I won’t spend time going into all of the points made, but I will say that the things that are recommended are really great tips, and everyone should do them to their template / blog.

I even found some things I have over looked on my blog, and I am now taking the time to go in and make the changes and see what happens with my SEO numbers.

I like that with most of the recommendations that are made, all you need to do is install a plug-in and you are up and going. That said, there are some tips that involve you digging into the code to make some changes. I still recommend that they get done, so if you do not feel like you have the skills to do them, please do not try it. There is a chance that if you try it and delete or change things that you should not you could break your install of WordPress.

So as I have said before on this subject, if you do not feel like you can dig into the code, then please hire someone who is qualified to do it. So please contact me or someone else before you try it.

As I go through and add the things from this into my blog, I will be writing more and more posts that talk about not only the things in the guide, but also more SEO techniques that everyone should be doing to their blog.