Building a Findable Blog - Part 3

Using Categories to Archive by Topic

Wordpress allows you to display your posts by categories or a chronological archive. A topic-ordered archive is better because it contains keywords and is better suited for a user.

Each post you write in Wordpress can be assigned to categories, defined by you. For more info, http://www.codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_list_categories

Summarizing Posts to Direct Traffic Better

To funnel traffic through your blog and to keep content all in one place create a summary of each post on your homepage.

Refer to page. 141 of Building Findable Websites by Aarron Walker for the code snippet.

In the Wordpress admin control panel in the “Write” section there is a field “Optional Excerpt” there you can summarize your post in your own words and have it displayed on the homepage.

Displaying Your Most Popular Posts

In Wordpress, Alex King’s Popularity Content plugin (http://alexking.org/projects/wordpress/readme?project-popularity-contest) will keep track of your post, archive, categorize views, trackbacks, and comments. This helps you determine which posts are most popular. Continue on with similar content as your most popular posts to gain more traffic. See page 142 in Building Findable Websites by Aarron Walker for code snippets.

Displaying Your Most Recent Posts

To help repeat visitors determine what posts are new since their last visit is a great way to show them new content quickly. See code snippet on page 143 of Building Findable Websites by Aarron Walker.

Promoting and Tracking RSS Subscriptions with FeedBurner

Your Wordpress publishes RSS feeds by default but allowing FeedBurner to distribute your feeds gives you more features. FB offers Subscription tracking, automatic update service notification, and advertising.

Encouraging Social Exchanges of Your Content

Social bookmarking and news system like Delicious, Digg, and Magnolia help to build site traffic. Another Wordpress plugin called Sociable (http://push.cx/sociable ), encourages users to bookmark or digg your site. Another plugin called Socialist (http://johnlawrence.net/index.php/2007/02/12/socialist-for-wordpress ) will tell you how many people are book marking or Digging your site.

Displaying Related Posts

Showing posts related to other posts on your blog is a great way to keep users on your blog longer and stops old posts from disappearing into your archives. A good plugin for this is called Similar Post (http://marsh.com/plugins/similar-post/).

Automatically Generating an XML Sitemap

Google, Yahoo, and MSN have collaborated on the development of a standard XML sitemap format (http://sitemaps.org). There are tools that can either build an XML sitemap for your or you can do it yourself. An XML sitemap will help communicate the structure of their blog or site to search engines for fast and complete indexing. Google Sitemap Generator (http://arnebrachold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final) is creates the sitemap for you and even pings Google with the location of the file that has been updated.

Other Handy SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Plugins for Wordpress

Most SEO plugins change your title tags or meta tags they can also change the content in your http://wp.uberdose.com/2007/03/24/all-in-one-seo-pack) features meta tags for your home, archive, categories and permalink pages.

Care must be taken not to rely solely on the meta keywords as they have little weight in SEO.

Tagging Your Posts

A tag is a keyword that serves as meta data used to describe blog posts or other website content. The more description put into the meta data the easier it is to be found. The more you tag the more convenient it is for users to explore large amounts of content by topic and get an understanding for what content you blog may contain. A tag cloud is a collection of all the tags throughout the site, each tag’s popularity is shown by the word’s text size. The bigger the more popular and smaller the least.

Displaying Post Tags

In Wordpress you can tag your posts directly as you create them but there are other coding strategies to do the same thing. Learn more about this at http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/the_tags

Showing a tag cloud offers a visual look at what tags are more popular by the size of the text. To help you create a tag cloud go to http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_tag_cloud

Optimizing Content Delivery with Caching

If perhaps you suddenly get a high volume of traffic on your blog Wordpress can help your site not “go down” and become unavailable by using this plugin called WP-Cache (http://mnm.uib.es/gallir/wp-cache-2) Before installing this plugin you must disable another that is default by Wordpress called Gzip Compression, go to Options à Reading. Upload and install WP-Cache then go to Options à and select WP-Cache you will be guided the rest of the way.