May 11th, 2009 — Library
Pinging is a way of letting search engines know about new content on your website. It’s a great way to bring some attention to new information, and help reinvigorate old information with repinging.
How to Ping with WordPress
Using WordPress, each time you post an article or page your site will ping a small list of default sites. You can later go back to older articles and reping them. The more sites you ping to the merrier, so add the following…
Pinging Additional Sites
You can add more sites to be pinged through your Admin menu under Options and Writing. Simply add the new sites you want to include your pinging here. Find a list of other sites to ping that are relevant by searching Google for ‘topic ping sites’ where topic is the topic of your blog. A few sites I like to add are:
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://www.bloglines.com/ping
The Importance of Pinging
Pinging sites in moderation can help bring more exposure to your site. WordPress is set up to automatically ping Pingomatic. Pingomatic will cover a good number of sites and ensure new posts get some lovin’ too.
May 3rd, 2009 — Library
Getting those pretty addresses for your posts and pages for WordPress is easy as 1-2-3.
Step 1: Set your permalinks structure through your Admin>Settings panel.
Under the Permalinks menu, change your default to a custom. Input %postname% for just the postname. It’s better to include a year or postid in your address if you have a lot of posts, to make it easier on the server. Shorter is ideal, but use what you prefer. Your full list of options is handy for you here.
Note: If you’re using an IIS server for your hosting, you’ll need to include index.php before your permalink (ie: index.php/%postname%). This is because IIS does not support mod_rewrite. Yahoo is one in particular that does not support mod_rewrite. Should you use index.php and your good to go, skip Step 2. More information on Permalink issues with “index.php” at the WordPress Forums.
Step 2: Add a .httaccess to the root directory of your website.
This takes maybe 2 minutes. Open notepad. Copy the following to it and change appropriately:
< IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
Save this file as .httaccess (make sure you select All Files when saving to preserve the file type). Upload this file to the root directory of your WordPress installation.
Step 3: Update your linking throughout the website.
Make sure your site is reflecting the new links you’ve set up. Should you need to see the current structure, check the pageid of the page through your administration panel. When writing posts and pages, include the – between words. Search engines will recognize ‘orlando-campgrounds’ as ‘orlando campgrounds’ and _ will be just _.
Enjoy!
March 4th, 2009 — Library
Quickly being adopted for many websites, WordPress is a flexible system of near infinite possibilities. Using plugins, you can do use WordPress for a magazine, storefront, personal site, or even a content management system. I’ve made a list of the plugins I’m using on this site and explain some of their benefits.
Formatting
- Nextgen Gallery (download)
Put together slideshows using this gallery plug-in. Includes options for text overlays with HTML.
- WP e-Commerce (download)
Not on everyone’s CMS, but some. Turn your WordPress into an online store.
- WP Polls (download)
Interact with traffic on changes, general questions or other polls. Easily edit questions and use anywhere on-site.
SEO
Optimize for Search Engines
- All in One SEO (download)
Automatically optimize for search engines like Ask, Google, MSN and Yahoo. Fine tune titles, keywords and tags.
- Google Sitemap Generator (download)
Generate XML-based sitemaps for search engines to detect your sites pages and posts. Includes robots.txt generator.
- SEO Friendly Images (download)
Automatically generate search engine friendly alt and title tags for your images. Not necessary if All in One SEO is configured properly.
Feed
Site Map
XML