I have been looking for a good end user video explaining how to add a post to wordpress and its been difficult finding one…
but my luck is in and here is the perfect tutorial for that ‘end user client’ you have, who needs hand holding
http://edublogs.org/eduvideos/postsandpages/postsandpages.html
Im writing this as a reminder as much as anything.
There are a couple of plugins that are ‘must have’ for title tag optimsiation
Reordering the tag so that the name of the post comes 1st and your site title comes second. the ideas is that the words at the front of the tag more more important than at the end.
http://elasticdog.com/2004/09/optimal-title/
And then taking th etitle tag optimisation thing to another level there is http://www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin/
This allows you to edit title tags so they can deviate from teh title of the post you are writing. I hav’nt used this one yet, but i expect i will in time.
Ive been looking for a way of adding a piece of static content at the top of each category in a wordpress archive. The problem with wordpress is that there is too much content curn on any given category page, so as a result the search engines don’t know what content to hang from when it comes to keywords. Its been a pain in the ass finding a decent solution this, so im sharing with you now !
ref this page for the original advice : http://codex.wordpress.org/Category_Templates and go half way down the page for this.
Instructions : (wordpress version 2.1)
in the Archive template just above…
<?php $post = $posts[0]; // Hack. Set $post so that the_date() works. ?>
Use this code
<?php if ( $paged < 2 ) { // Do stuff specific to first page?>
<?php if ( is_category() ) : ?>
<h2 id=”category-name-header”><?php echo $cache_categories[$cat]->cat_name ?></h2>
<?php add_filter(’category_description’, ‘wpautop’); ?>
<?php add_filter(’category_description’, ‘wptexturize’); ?>
<div id=”category-description”>
<?php echo category_description(); ?>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php } else { // Do stuff specific to non-first page ?>
<?php } ?>
To be able to use HTML go to :
wp-admin/admin-db.php
and edit out
//$category_description = apply_filters(’pre_category_description’, $category_description);
As I have done
then go into your category editor and edit whatever category you like and add the relevant HTML into the description and save
and now you have fixed content for a linked to category page !
Nice
Ive been at a ‘marketing bootcamp’ today. this is where 55 marketeers form the same company get together and go through how we can get more business for our employers.
So I explained myself as an SEO guy and i was about getting us up the search engine rankings - pretty simple, but really a fairly inadequate description
So here is what I said in the bar afterwards
there are 2 parts - the 20 % part which is actual search engine optimisation (tec stuff all done before and definable)
and the 80% part - getting links, and building buzz. (not teccy, undefinable, impossible to accurately predict)
I explained that to understand search engines, you need to understand human behaviour as expressed online. From that you begin to understand where to go and how to get links. (have a look at the map showing a social network of a blogger - you will notice how its very similar to how websites connect with each other)
I also explained that engines have customers they have to please, (you the searcher) and to understand what their customer wants, i.e. great content with great site usability, you will be at the point of enlightment.
The you give yourself a leg up with a bit of black hat (clean-ish style) - some clever paid for link acquisition and site content manipulation and mix it with a genuinely great content site you will rank.
Sounds simple enough and in a sense it is, but of course the devil is in the detail as is the complexity.
I really like Todd Malicott and his site stuntdubl, so much so hes on my RSS list. Anyway hes done the most awesome post on the core issues surrounding SEO - you should read it
Ugh ! my head hurts ! - but ive got a fix for the problem of duplicate content wordpress.
My test site is www.anorak.co.uk
As you may know, in a typical install for wordpress you assign stories to categories and if you have lots of stories, then you probably would set up subcategories for those stories. BUT the problem is that folder ‘maincategory’ will also show subcategory stories. = duplicate content.
So i’ve found a plugin HERE which only shows stories actually assigned to that particular story - so each category home page only shows stories from that category.
for example :
http://www.anorak.co.uk/reality-tv/ only shows reality TV stuff and no big brother stories
and http://www.anorak.co.uk/reality-tv/big-brother/ only shows big brother stories
I’ve also worked the anorak robots.txt file so I stop indexing of the RSS pages (im sure you have seen these around the place on searches) and im blocking the archive pages from the engines idea being i funnel them to category home pages
I’ve also manipulated the footer pagination, so the spiders will crawl deeper via the category pages as opposed to the index page - ive added a no follow there.
The strategy is to get the category home pages ranked along with the main index page - so its all about diverting the bots in the right way and overcoming the issues associated with link churn
My next task is to do a script which presents a static include on the category home pages, which does not repeat in the archive pages