Url canonization is a bit of a confusing topic, but I wanted to mention it as it use to be a big problem in the past with WordPress.
As long as you are using WordPress 2.3 or higher, canonization will not be a problem for you. All you need to do is upgrade.
I highly suggest you do that!
Please review Video #17 below for a brief explanation. Read the rest of this entry
As you write posts, it is a good idea to point out to your readers other posts that are similar. After all, if someone is reading a post on “dog training”, chances are they would be interested in hearing about other posts that were related. This can be a pain to do, especially as your blog grows in size.
Fortunately there is a plugin that can do this for you automatically, it is called the related posts plugin and can be found here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-23-related-posts-plugin/
Once this plugin is installed, you can configure it to specify however many related posts you like. You also have some say on what is considered “related”. After you have made the proper configurations, the plugin gives you a line of code that you simply place into your template.
To See It In Action Watch Video #18 Below:
From time to time, you may be linking to other sites that are unrelated to yours. Remember, every time you link to someone, you lose a bit of your “link juice”. Whenever a situation arises when you want to give your visitors a link, but not necessarily for SEO purposes, it pays to have the link be “NoFollow”.
Here is an example of a link with the nofollow attribute: link
To learn more about how and when to use a NoFollow link, please review Video #19. Read the rest of this entry
An important part of having an effective navigation is having a sitemap. Unfortunately your blog will be constantly changing, and updating a sitemap sure would be a pain. Fortunately there are plugins that can create the sitemaps for you, and automatically modify them for you every time there is a change. I suggest using the google sitemap plugin.
Once the plugin is installed, just head to “Settings” and then click on the “XML – Sitemap” option. Here you will see a few options for the sitemap. Once you are satisfied with this (the default settings are fine) click to build it. If you experience an error with the build (I did when I tried to create it), you will need to create two files and upload them to the root of your blog directory.
The files you need to create are “sitemap.xml” and “sitemap.xml.gz”. Make sure they are writable. Once you have done this, you should be able to create the sitemap.
Watch the process in video #20 below: Read the rest of this entry