How To Update Your Readers When You Post A New Blog

If you’re blogging you want readers to be able to keep up with what you’re writing, right? Here’s an overview of some of your options for enabling readers to subscribe, along with pros and cons of both.

Via RSS feed

RSS forms the basis of most updating systems. Every blog has an RSS feed (simply the output of your blog) which automatically updates when you publish new posts. For WordPress blogs, the feed is usually located at: yourdomain.com/feed. Visitors can use a tool like Google Reader to subscribe to many different blog RSS feeds and receive all the updates in one place. Here’s a shot of my overflowing Reader with a few of the sites I subscribe to:
google reader - rss

As a publisher you can use Google’s Feedburner service to manage your RSS feed.

Pros – Feedburner is pretty easy to configure and you can implement it with the help of a plugin. Feedburner also provides copy/paste code to place icons on your site to advertise your feed. Feedburner formats your feed cleanly so that it displays nicely in browsers (try looking at a raw RSS feed in Chrome….it’s unreadable) &  feed readers and the subscribe options are clearly presented. You’ll also be able to get stats on the number of subscribers you have and the click activity on your feed.

Read More

Don’t Leave Your SEO To A Theme or a Plugin

In the WordPress community, especially amongst new users, a lot of emphasis seems to be placed on themes and plugins as crucial factors in SEO. Theme companies compete for bragging rights on whose is the most ‘SEO-friendly’ while website owners are frustrated that they are not getting the search engine traffic they expected despite having such-and-such theme and an SEO plugin.

The reality is that these things are helpful, but only if you have the right content.

Themes and plugins are like well-written directions to a party (your content).  They help your guests (search engine bots) find your site’s content, but whether or the not the party rocks depends on what they find when they arrive, and that responsibility lands squarely in your, the website owner’s, lap.

Even the most SEO-tweaked theme and fine-tuned plugin cannot make your site rank highly if your content is not relevant and targeted for your audience.

Read More

How To Get Rid Of Captions In WordPress

In version 2.6 WordPress introduced the captions feature which meant that when you uploaded an image, the text you entered as the ‘alt’ text, previously only visible to search engines, was now used as a caption under your image, visible to all.
I personally have found this quite annoying and should you agree, here’s a couple of ways to end the madness.

1) Permanent Caption Disabling.
The plugin I use is called, surprisingly enough, ‘Caption Disabler’. At my last check I did not find it when searching in the plugin directory within the WordPress dashboard. So you will have to download it here then upload it to your Plugins directory. It’s a very small, simple php file and will permanently remove the caption feature from future posts. Phew.

Read More

What Are Pingbacks And Trackbacks And How Do I Use Them?

The terms pingbacks and trackbacks are used almost interchangeably, and are pretty much the same thing on the surface. They actually utilize different technologies and originated for different purposes, but these days they are becoming more intertwined. I’m just going to call them trackbacks for the purpose of this post.

What are they?

Essentially both are forms of notifications or communications between blogs.

For example, if I write a blog post and in it I link to a blog post on another site, an excerpt of my post containing the link will show up on that blogger’s site in their Comments section, along with a link back to my post. Since trackbacks are handled through comments, the blogger gets to moderate it like any other comment. So he/she will be able to see that I referenced their blog and if they approve the comment I now have a link from their site to mine. This is a trackback.

Read More

Getting Started With WordPress – Explaining Settings

Once you’ve got your WordPress blog installed, there are a few tweaks you’ll want to make to the default settings. This is a quick overview of  the Settings area of the WP dashboard. You don’t have to tweak, or necessarily understand every single option – you can use this a rough guide as to what to pay attention to.

PERMALINKS

This is a Very Important Section!
I was going to go over each section in the order they appear in the navigation bar, but the permalinks setting is at the bottom and this is one of the most important sections. You are definitely going to want to change the default setting here so that your blog posts will have search-engine friendly urls with words in them, instead of the numbers that come with the default.

Read More
  • 1
  • 2