Wordpress is not very SEO friendly “out of the box” and if you have not done anything to optimze your blog then you are really limiting your blog’s potential. I have read countless numbers of posts on various blogs, including one recent entry on John Chow dot Com.

How To SEO Your WordPress Theme | John Chow dot Com

This post was guest blogged by Courtney Tuttle of Court’s Internet Marketing School.

Now Courtney has made some really good points regarding headline tags, and their misuse. I highly recommend reading this post and following the recommendations infact I have found a few details in my theme that I intend to fix right away.

These are definitely a good start and will provide a strong base, but what about all the SEO plugins out there? Most of them work however most require some tedious configuration, and I would rather spend my time writing posts then worrying about my SEO optimization. Which brings me to my list of plugins that I use and fully recommend to everyone running a wordpress blog.

Link roll please…

• Add-Meta: a meta tags plugin.
• Google XML Sitemaps: well I am sure you can guess.
• XHTML Sitemap: Not really a plugin but a page formatted to provide an XHTML 1.0 Strict Sitemap

What you expected more? Ok now for an overview of each plugin and the pros and cons.

Add-Meta:

Add-Meta does exactly what it says it does, it adds the important meta tags to your pages automatically and it does a damn good job in my opinion.

Pros: Using the post title, and tags it creates the description and keyword meta tags for you on autopilot.
Cons: You have to manually add the default description and keywords for the main page only, what I am lazy, sue me.

Quick Note: The authors site seems to be down so you can grab it right here. Download Add-Meta.

Google XML Sitemaps:

Pros: Creates a valid xml sitemap based on Google’s specs, one click setup and automatic updating and notification to search engines upon update.
Cons: None that I can think of.

XHTML Sitemap:

As stated above this is not really a plugin but a page template for Wordpress.

Pros: Creates a basic no frills link page to make sure that the search engine spider doesn’t miss a thing, and provides an interface to your site that is easier for disabled people using text readers like JAWS to navigate.

Cons: Again none really.

If you use these plugins and the suggestions from Courtney you will have a fully SEO optimized theme for your blog.

Technorati Tags: Blogging Tools, Search Engine Optimization, WordPress Themes

Hey all thought I would share this with you. There is a video post over at uberaffiliate.com about the “real” John Chow. Pretty damn funny stuff worth a watch if your up for a good laugh, that is if you have a sense of humor.

The True John Chow

Technorati Tags: Funny Video, John Chow

When attempting to make money online especially through blogging you must get involved in the blogging community. This is another one on my personal list to become more efficient at. Why it is important should be pretty self explanatory but I will share with you my view of it all. When building an audience (which is required to make money online, especially with a blog), one of the most effective but also the most time consuming things to do is build relationships with others through the frequent visiting and commenting on their blogs. Some very bright people realized this and created communities like that of MyBlogLog. Utilization of a community system like MyblogLog makes the process a little easier and completely visible to others which is key. When people see that you are involved, they associate you as being a respectable blogger, and what I mean by that is simply your not some adsense arbitrage spam artist looking to make a quick buck. Furthermore in doing so you get your blog out there, more people will visit your blog just to see what your blabbing about and again more exposure equals more traffic which should unless you just suck, j/k … equal more money.

Technorati Tags: Make Money Online, MyBlogLog

Well, I was gone but not completely absent, while working on some design projects I decided to tinker with a new theme. Why? Well, first the ‘old’ theme I threw together and I could not get it to work correctly in browsers other then IE. Now I am no rookie to CSS, but I also am not a Zeldman, so I put together a much cleaner theme. I hope you like it. Also since my last theme was a total rip off of John Chow’s I figure he would appreciate me changing it just a tad, ;).

Technorati Tags: Wordpress Theme

No Updates … tisk, tisk. Well I was gone working on a project, while I was I did run accross this wonderful tool. ScribeFire is a blog posting addon for FireFox and I do believe it is probably the coolest productivity tools I have run accross in a long time. Blogging is made so much simplier with this tool. An example would be, you are surfing your favorite news sites or blogs and find a great post, article etc, and want to create a post about it, right click on the web page and select blog this page. The editor will then open and allow you to create a draft to immediately post or save for posting later, create notes for review, it will even allow you to set when the post should be displayed based on date. Simply amazing, thank you Finke!

ScribeFire: Fire up your blogging

Chris Finke is also the author of several other projects for FireFox and Wordpress, I highly recommend checking out his blog.

« Previous Entries Next Entries »