Web Design Discussion

6. How To Customize Your Permalinks

Permalinks are permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink should be a link that does not change in its appearance because other bloggers may link to your post or your article.

The default links that come with your Word Press theme will end in something like this:


/index.php?p=423


This kind of link is not easily spidered by the search engines therefore you will lose precious search engine traffic. You therefore need to customize your permalinks. Here is one of my articles which shows the keyword-rich title I used:

http://www.drostdesigns.com/blog-seo-how-to-optimize-your-blog-for-the-search-engines/

How to create a customized permalink

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Creating and customizing your blog does not guarantee you will get web traffic. You need to optimize your blog for the search engines to maximize the potential it has to make sales, boost AdSense earnings or gain subscribers to your newsletter.

Methods to Optimize Your Blog.
I use Word Press as my blogging software so not all these methods may not apply if you use other software.

1. Keyword Research.

Before you start writing you should choose keywords that people are actively searching on. You can do this by inserting words into the keyword selector tool

If the words that you enter don’t display any results this means that no one uses those words when searching for that topic
and therefore it would be useless to have them on your blog. A high number of searches indicates that word or phrase is very popular.

2. Insert researched keywords.

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Adding Feed Icons to the sidebar of your blog provides another great option for visitors to easily subscribe to your RSS Feeds. An RSS feed is automatically produced by your Word Press Blog. If they use Google, Yahoo, MSN or already have an RSS Reader then they can easily subscribe to your RSS feeds by clicking on any one of the feed icons on your sidebar.

How to add feed icons

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If you new to blogging, you may be puzzled by all the links that are displayed on the sidebar of your blog.
Well, you don’t need them all and you can also customize the sidebar to suit your own purposes.

Here is the sidebar order of my Web Design Blog and why I arranged it this way:

1. About the author.
I chose to have my photo displayed at the top with a link to more information about myself so visitors can immediately establish a rapport with the author. It also helps build trust as people want to know who is behind the site. If I visit a site where I can’t find the author, I’m out of there in a second….I do the same on the phone:-)

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You may have seen many blogs with “recent comment” or recent posts” added to the sidebar, however many templates don’t have this feature, including mine.

What’s the purpose of adding “recent posts” to your blog?

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This is the first of a number of posts on “What I did to customize my Word Press Blog“…DrostDesigns.com. I initially searched through hundreds of templates (including the ones that come with the default installation) but was not impressed enough to use any of them Finally I decided to grab the laila theme and customize it to suit my needs. It appealed to me because of its elegant design.

Upgrade your installation

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If you are eager to create a blog there are many kinds of blogging software to get you going easily and quickly. One of most popular is Blogger.com. However if you are serious about growing a professional business, I’d suggest getting a real domain name and hosting account.

This could be compared to the days when many companies offered free hosting so you could set up your own web site. After a few years these companies went belly up and so did your site. It therefore makes better sense to start correctly otherwise you will only regret it later.

Here’s some of the major benefits of using Word Press Blogging Software:

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I postponed creating a blog for my business because I
thought there was no marketing value in it and the ones I’d
seen were primarily news blogs or personal blogs. Well,
that was some time ago for now many businesses are creating
blogs to attract more visitors and make more sales.

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