Building a Findable Blog - Part 2

Wordpress

- Working with Wordpress

Wordpress is one of the most popular blogging systems online today. It offers easy to use blog setup and maintenance that even the greenest of bloggers can understand and use. Wordpress offers extensive plugins that can be installed onto your blog to increase traffic and make your blog easily found. Most of the things discussed in the post below can be addressed by installing a Wordpress plugin.

Setting up Wordpress is ridiculously fast. You also have two options, you can either host your blog on their server (http://wordpress.com) or download the PHP/MySQL application and upload to your own server (http://wordpress.org/download and install http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress ).The later option gives you more advanced control of the overall blog. For help with Wordpress try http://codex.wordpress.org and for forums http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress

Installing WordPress Plugins

Most Wordpress plugins can be installed following a few simple steps:

1. Download and unzip the desired plugin
2. Upload the plugin to the plugins directory
3. In the Wordpress admin control panel go to section named “plugins”
4. Click “activate” besides the plugin you want to install.

To help you out plugins often come with a read-me file offering instructions before installing. Once installed the plugin will have its own preference panel so you can play with the settings.

Create Your Own Themes

With the help of PHP files, Wordpress can be skinned using themes. It is good blog practice to create your own theme instead of the pre-installed ones. This way you are able to create an identity and get the chance to optimize your code for search engines. For more on themes go to http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development

Making Your Wordpress Blog More Findable

By simply modifying your configuration on your Wordpress blog you can easily make your blog more findable.

Defining Update Services

The first step to findability with a Wordpress blog is to extend the number of update services at get “pinged” when you generate content. Wordpress sends a message, dubbed a ping, to services such as Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com) or Technorati (http://technorati.com) and they then update their indices with your content.

1. Go to Admin control panel, then options, and select writing. There you will see a text box named “Update Services.” To find a list of update services go to http://www.codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services
2. Copy the entire list of URLs and paste them into your update services text box.

Using FeedBurner as an Update Service

Another option is FeedBurner to publish your RSS feeds. (http://www.feedburner.com) . FB is a service that will take your RSS Feeds into new content formats and enhances them with quick subscribe buttons, podcast support, and advertising.

To use you can create a FB account and give them the URL to your Wordpress RSS Feed and they will give you a URL for the same RSS content that has been optimized for a number of different formats such as desktop, web, or mobile devices. Through this service all traffic is tracked. Another service called PingShot (http://feedburner.com/fb/a/publishers/pingshot) is similar to Wordpress’s update services and are useful in handling Podcasts.

Remapping Your Permalinks URLs

Your site’s URLs play a huge role in how well search engines crawl through your site. Wordpress has helpful options to automatically create URLs in your blog that are very search engine friendly. To get Wordpress URL remapping to work using an FTP client visit their helpful tutorial here http://www.codex.wordpress.org/Changing_File_Permissions

If your using the Wordpress admin control panel go to Options -> Permalinks.

A Permalink is a permanent URL for a blog post. Your content on the blog can fall into many different categories with many different links, it is important to have one uniform location for each post.

For example some URLs generated look like this: http://example.com/?p=25

This contains no keywords, can be confusing to the user, and can cause indexing problems for search engines. The best way to change this is to used the “date and named based” URL structure. Http://example.com/2009/06/18/post-title/

You can also create your own custom URL in the “Customized Permalink Structure” in the Wordpress admin. For more information, http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks