I was kindly invited by the SoCal WordPress Meetup group, run by Natalie MacLees, to give a presentation at their next meeting in Los Angeles on November 19th. It's free, but you must RSVP at Meetup.com. I'll be talking about…
A Guide To Online Marketing Terms – Part 2
This is the second part of my developing series on online marketing terms explained. This time we focus on some basic SEO-related terms you might come across.
SEO
Search Engine Optimization is the process of fine tuning your website so that when your target internet surfer types a phrase into the search engines, your website is deemed to be among the most relevant for that phrase, and is displayed at the top of those results. Lately SEO has also come to refer to a person that performs SEO services, or a ‘search engine optimizer’.
Why You Should Care:
SEO can provide your site with lots of free, targeted traffic. What could be better?!
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.
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.
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.
I attended my first WordCamp this weekend and had a great time listening to some info-filled presentations and mingling with my fellow nerds. :)
Here’s some nuggets I gleaned from the day….enjoy.
WordPress will soon run the world. Their other products include:
bbPress – lightweight, WP-style forum
BuddyPress – social network in a box
BackPress – shared code library for WordPress and bbPress
WordPress MU – allows for multi-blog management i.e. you can allow users of your site set up their own WP blogs on your site. A common misconception is that MU is designed for those who have several of their own blogs they’d like to manage from one dashboard – not true! If this is your situation you need a plugin like WP-Hive to make your life easier. WP MU currently uses a lot of server resources so it’s probably not great for shared hosting accounts.
