I’ve decided to do a little search engine optimization on some of my blogs. I found a lot of information but very little information that told me where to go and what to do. Because of this I decided to start a list of some of the things I’ve done and how I went about doing them. The blog I’m using is WordPress.
If you log into WordPress and click on options, then click on Permalinks you will be taken to a page that allows you to change the way your url’s are shown. It’s best to do this in the beginning stages of starting your blog because once you change the way your url’s are shown, you will loose all incoming links going to your current pages.
You have three chooses, the first is the default setting, the second shows the date and title name and the third is a custom setting. I used the third and placed /%postname%/, this shows the title of my post in all the url’s and nothing else. I’m not sure if this was the best way, if I duplicate a post title I’m not sure what will happen. The second option might have been the better option but I did not want the dates in my url.
Next problem I saw was with the title of my pages, I downloaded the blog and went to the wp-content folder, then to the themes folder and then picked the template I was using. From here I went to the header.php page and changed the title to only show the title of my post but later found a post by bj that had this code
So I changed it to this.
After this I downloaded a plugin called SH-Autolink, I’m still playing with this but it looks like a pretty neat tool. Lets say I want certain keywords to link to information about those keywords. I can tell the blog that every time it sees the keyword PageRank it needs to link to an article that explains PageRank.
I cheated a little and made it link to my website design site every time it sees the words website design but that does seem to be the most important site for someone looking for a website design company to me. (-:
I’m still playing but these are the changes I’ve made so far and I thought someone might be able to use this, so I posted it here.
I’ve been playing around a little with some blogs and trying to figure out how to go about making a blog work for me and one of the things that really makes a blog stand out is pictures. I was playing with a blog about lawn mowers and placed a picture in the text and I think it makes it look really nice.
The picture is in black and white and I’m not sure if it’s because of the blog having the black background or if black and white cartoon pictures just look good but it made a big difference when I added the picture. I’m going to play around with the pictures some more but if it helps as much as this one seems to have helped I’m going to hire me an artist to come in and draw pictures for each of my blog post. But before I do that I’m going to play around a little with this blog and see how the pictures look here.
If the black and white cartoon pictures don’t look as good here then I’ll have to figure out something else for the pictures on this blog. At this time I do feel that pictures along with the text is a good thing but I would like to have the pictures uniformed with all the same look and feel to them. Another words if I’m going to use black and white cartoon pictures then I want all the pictures to be black and white cartoon pictures.
I know there is a lot more to a successful blog then a cartoon picture but I’m trying to make my blog work for me and it’s like a giant puzzle and I’m having to put it together one piece at a time.
A blog is a website where entries are made like a journal and displayed in a reverse order.
Blogs are a type of social media because they have a new generation of tools that are able to bring companies, clients, visitors and potential customers into a dynamic, ongoing conversation.
Blogs can provide information or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. Most blogs are primarily textual although some focus on photographs (photoblog), videos (vlog), or audio (podcasting), and are part of a wider network of social media.
The website you are currently looking at is a blog.
The reason I decided to go with a blog for this website;
1. Blogs are easy to update, the information on this site changes daily and the blog makes it easy for me to do that.
2. Blogs use a pinging feature that allows me to ping other sites and search engines each time the blog is updated.
3. Blogs allow visitors to become part of the website by giving them the opportunity to post and make comments on topic that the site owner starts.
If you take a minute and look in the top right hand corner of the header on this blog your notice some links that allow you to change the size of text and also move the navigation to were it feels most comfortable to you.
