Archive for the ‘wordpress’ Category

Essential Wordpress Plugins: Google XML Sitemaps

Written by Brandon on February 3, 2008 – 7:15 am -

One of the first key items that builds traffic to your Wordpress blog is to have the major search engines index your web pages. It may seem as simple as writing pages and the search engines will find you, but there is so much more to the nuances of search engine visibility. Google, for instance, allows you to build a sitemap that reports the title and location of each web page of your site directly to Google on a daily basis. Fortunately for Wordpress users, there is a powerful Google sitemap plugin that you can install that will almost immediately increase your traffic by drastic amounts. This plugin is aptly called: Google XML sitemaps. The XML in the name refers to the data format which is the standard for all Google sitemaps. But fortunately for less technical people, you don’t need to know what XML is or how this data format works. You simply have to install the Wordpress plugin and report the plugin to Google. Here’s a more detailed explanation of the process:

  • First, download the Google XML Sitemaps.
  • Then, upload the plugin into your plugins folder on your site as you normally would. More detailed instructions can be found HERE.
  • Configure the plugin and generate the sitemap. There are tons of options on the sitemap. Most of the sitemap options you don’t need to touch, but I’d read through the options anyway.
  • Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools. These tools allow you to point your sitemap directly at Google which assures they will index new content. Webmaster tools also does so much more such as tell you what the most popular search terms for your site are, which in turn help you decide what type of content to focus on. You will need to prove to Google that the site you are adding a sitemap to is actually yours by adding a line of code to your template, but the setup is relatively painless.

Admittedly, these steps can be complicated for someone who is completely non-technical, but the traffic increas you will experience is going to be great which will hopefully build your revenue.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Building Web Traffic, SEO, wordpress | No Comments »

Blog Titles and Meta Data: What Benefit’s Do You Get from Optimization?

Written by Brandon on December 30, 2007 – 5:48 pm -

Back when I started my very first blog in 2004, I was not terribly happy with the amount of traffic I was getting from Google. I had set up my sitemap and done all of the things that I thought I should do. Then one day, I realized that I had never created meta data in the head of my blog template. After I changed this data to properly describe my site, I got double the amount of traffic from Google the very next day. Recently though, I’ve wondered how much optimizing meta data really matters on a site that is already popular. The answer I’ve come up with is it does not matter one bit. But before I tell you why it doesn’t matter, let’s get back to basics.

library card: An Early Form of Metadata

The Library Card: An Early Form of Metadata 

If you don’t know what meta data is, then read this awesome article on searchenginewatch.com to get an understanding. In its simplest form, meta data is just data that quickly describes what is on a particular web page. This meta data can describe a number of things on your site, but for the purposes of this article, let’s focus on three tags found within the head of every web page: <meta name=”keywords” content=”some,keywords,here” /> , <meta name=”description” content=”some description here” />, and <title>The title of the page</title>.

What each tag does is pretty self explanitory. Good Search Engine Optimization practice tell us that:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”some,keywords,here” /> = You would write about 20 keywords that best describes your web page.

<meta name=”description” content=”some description here” /> = You would write a small paragraph describing your site’s content using multiple keywords distinct to your site.

<title>The title of the page</title> = You would write a short title that might be the blog name and a less than one sentence description.

If you have small amounts of traffic, and you have not done what I’ve subscribed above, then you will double your traffic pretty quickly once you’ve done this.

Optimizing blog titles and meta data in Wordpress, for instance, becomes more tricky. You should consider getting one of the SEO plugins for wordpress that I list at the end of the article or visiting the Wordpress.org web page on SEO. Also, check out this link on Meta Tags in Wordpress. Remember that in a wordpress blog you have 4 types of pages that you have to optimize: the homepage, the archive, the single post, and the page. Rather than going on about this, let’s just say the end goal: Every page in your site should have different meta data tailored to that page. Most sites that have been lazy about meta data use the same meta data throughout the site and only change the titles. This is not what you want. You want to use Wordpress’ flexible Template Tags to build just the right data. (If you want more specifics, you’ll have to hire me).

If you remember at the beginning of the article, though, I said meta data does not matter one bit for very popular sites. Then why did I spend so much time on this subject? We’ll most sites aren’t really popular, so I think you’ll benefit from considering meta data on your site. But, how do I know that meta data isn’t all that important for popular sites? From an experiment I conducted in my blog sector. I write a design blog, so I took ten of the most popular design blogs as defined by Alexa, and I viewed their source to see what their meta data looked like. I thought I would find some meta data oracle that would show me the way to instant popularity, but I found the exact opposite. And, here is what I found:

  • None of the five blogs had any consistency with keywords or descriptions between them. They were all completely different even though the subject matter was quite similar.
  • A couple of the blogs did not have meta data at all. There was nothing to speak of to describe their data, and yet they remain amazingly popular.
  • Most of the blogs had no consistency between the home page meta data and the single post meta data.
  • One site even did not have meta data related to their subject and it seemed that it was a placeholder that was meant to be changed.

What should all this mean to you? There are other much more major areas where you should spend your time increasing traffic for your site. At the very least, you should definitely go to all the major search engines to see what your page results look like. If they quickly describe the results well, then you’re done. If they don’t describe what the page is about then go back to the boards immediately because either your title or your meta data needs work. Now, for a list of SEO Plugins:

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Blogs, Building Blog Revenue, Building Web Traffic, Fundamentals, SEO, wordpress | 1 Comment »

Essential Wordpress Plugins: Subscribe to Comments

Written by Brandon on November 3, 2007 – 3:56 am -

There are several essential items missing from Wordpress that you will want to add if you want to build a strong audience and revenue stream. Today, I want to discuss what’s missing with blog comments. Blog comments have no simple way for commentors to keep track of any responses to comments they’ve made. That’s where the Subscribe to Comments plugin comes in extremely handy. What this plugin provides is a simple check box below the comment form that allows commentors to receive email updates on any future comments. In a sense, this plugin creates a miniature forum where everyone in the conversation is updated.

From a business perspective, this plugin becomes a way to maintain a long lasting contact with readers that may not visit your site again.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in Blogs, Building Web Traffic, wordpress | No Comments »