Web Design Discussion

Wordpress has a built-in feature which allows you to automatically ping all the RSS and blog feed directories every time you make a post. This is a very powerful feature if you want your blog to get a lot of web traffic immediately. You automatically gain backlinks to your blog.

What are pingbacks?

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If you have started a new blog or had one running for some
time, you may have noticed you’re receiving comment spam.
Before I put a stop to it, I was getting medical product
and gambling offers which have absolutely no relevance to
my web design blog.

Spammers notice new blogs via back links to wordpress.org
and once you’re noticed they will always be able to spam
you. You may soon end up with 100s of spam comments. This
not only clutters up your blog but will also eat up your
hosting space and bandwidth and therefore cost you more
money to run your blog.

How to prevent blog comment spam

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If you ever had to add AdSense Ads to a static (not
database driven) web site, you know it requires a number of
steps ie

-Download the web page from the server to your computer.

-Copy and paste the AdSense code into your page.

-Save the the page and upload it to your server. Word Press
makes it very easy because you can use the

AdSense Deluxe Plug-in

Features and Benefits

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7. How To Create a Google Site Map

Adding a Google Site Map to your blog helps the Google Search Engine to spider all your pages on a regular basis.
Your Word Press Template does not generate a Google Site Map automatically, therefore you need the Google Site Map Plug-in.

This plug-in generates a sitemap for the homepage, posts, static pages, categories and archive pages. It provides a static XML file in your Blog directory. This XML file gets automatically rebuilt every time you change, edit, create, or publish a post.

Installation

Simply download the Zip-Archive and extract all files into your wp-content/plugins/ directory. Then go into your WordPress administration page, click on Plugins and activate it. After that you will have a new menu point called “Sitemap” under the “Options” menu. You can alter the default change frequencies, filename and other options there. Click once on “Rebuild Sitemap” to create your sitemap the first time.

TIP
Create a normal Site Map Page as well and organize your posts into their appropriate categories. Thiis will help visitors to quickly find topics of interest. More navigation tools on your site helps the visitor to find information quickly. Now they have at their disposal: Site Map, Search Bar, Category Lists, and RSS Feeds.

Resource
Read more about Google Site Map

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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