Helping You Rock Out Your Site Like A Rockstar!

Sitemaps are important because they allow the search engines like Google and Yahoo! to index your entire site and leave it available for other internet users to find. A sitemap is defined:

A site map (or sitemap) is a representation of the architecture of a web site. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion.
From Wikipedia. Original definition by Peter Morville, Information Architecture on the World Wide Web, Feb 1998, pp:58

A sitemap allows search engines to crawl your site more efficiently and index fresh material from any website. If a webmaster has move or deleted material, the search engine would recognize and change the search engine results to reflect the website change. Although having a sitemap eliminates most of the work that a webmasters takes in submitting a website to search, it does not totally eradicate the effort.
Sitemaps accepted by search engines are general coded in XML format, not HTML. However, a webmaster may create a sitemap structure with HTML for their visitors. For WordPress users, this can be easily done with the installation of Dagon Design Sitemap Generator. (Of course there are plenty of other sitemap plugins too.) Currently, the Dagon Design Sitemap Generator plugin is not an accepted sitemap, however, there is a great plugin that Google recognizes, which is the Google XML Sitemaps plug-in. Once one or both of the plug-ins mentioned have been installed, it is best to go to Google Webmaster Tools to inform them where to find the sitemap.

Sitemaps are not another new fad as they have been around for years. It was not until 2006, that search engine moguls like Google, Yahoo!, and MSN got together to create the guidelines behind a proper sitemap. Since then, sitemaps have been used as a vital technique for search engine optimization. Why? Well, as said earlier in the article, a sitemap would tell the search engine how fresh the content of a page is on any website and post it so internet users can find information they need. Sitemaps would recognize new material and direct crawlers to the information for indexing.

Outside Related Links:

• Sitemaps XML format – Sitemaps.org
• Major Search Engines Unite to Support a Common Mechanism for Website Submission

Do you have a sitemap for your site? Any other benefits you can think of when having a sitemap for your site?

Episode 3 of the Blondish.net Podcast is a little over twenty minutes and all on guest blogging basics. This Guest Blogging 101 podcast covers strictly basics as there is a lot more to it that needs to be split into a series. The reason for this is that there are a lot of things to cover for both the blog owner and also the guest writer, so I had to make a decision to start with an intro-like basic episode on the subject.

This podcast on Guest Blogging will cover:

• What is guest blogging?
• Some tips for the blog owner on preparing their site for guest bloggers
• Some tips for the guest author when applying and submitting articles
• A couple ways to find places to guest blog at

This podcast is not for blog owners running a community blog where they have many contributors. This is for the individual blogger that wants to brand themselves and retain blog purity without using guest blogging as a crutch. Some of this can be helpful to community blog owners, but it is not intended for those who are.

Please feel free to ask questions and I hope you enjoy this podcast on Guest Blogging 101.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 22:17 — 25.5MB)

A lot of times when I go to my WordPress administrator panel, I look at the trackbacks. Sometimes it may be someone referenced a post in twitter, or another person’s blog.

According to Wikipedia,

A trackback is one of three types of linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents.

Same can be said of pingbacks. Pingbacks are more of a request to alert sites that you linked to them. It is different at the trackback is not what you send like a pingback, but what you received- an acknowledgement of sorts. In pingbacks there is no content sent, but only an alert. For a better understanding, you can read about it in the Managing Comments section at the WordPress Codex.

This can be great SEO for you and other bloggers who bounce ideas back and forth over similar topics. While you could definitely use the person’s comment system, in blogging about the conversation and sharing your point while including a reference to the original source will allow your visitors to not just respond to you, but also possibly respond to another.

I find that a lot of times when I have written articles filled with opinion based on another’s article, that I often receive feedback. It is in no way an underhanded tactic. As said, it is a way to share the conversation with other people and encourage more interaction on a topic. This is one way to use trackbacks successfully.

However, it can also backfire and seem like an underhanded and obvious search engine optimization tactic if I were to just blab out a bunch of related subject links without tying them together with valuable thoughts. I would just have to make my site some type of robot that published random stories within a certain niche.

Although posting frequently can create more possible pingbacks, it could prove tiresome and also look to be a desperate SEO tactic. The point is to try to entice quality trackbacks. Those will be sites that have people who are looking to give more feedback on a particular subject if the original article only says so much.

Above all, make sure to give appropriate anchor links when credit original sources. Sometimes listing the article’s full name or specific keywords will do, but if those keywords are quite vague. For example, when I blog about Google webmaster tools, I put ‘Google’ in front, instead of just ‘webmaster tools’. Webmaster tools can be quite vague as there are plenty of sites – in fact millons listed in Google when searching for webmaster tools. Although the link it listed at the top, with ‘webmaster tools’ only the first 2 listings on the first page list what I am exactly looking for while the other lists more relevant links.

Do you like to use pingbacks and trackbacks? How do you use this linking method successfully? Got any pointers?

I wrote Mastering Pretty Permalinks in WordPress with the intention to introduce the concept of the best permalink structure for WordPress powered websites. This was a call to try to encourage people to organize their website, but beware of how the permalink structure might be overrode if you have a file folder name the same as a post and you are using the post name permalink structure.

It is obvious that I am going to say that the post name (formerly known as pretty permalink) structure or the /%postname%/ option in your WordPress Permalink General settings is the best structure.

However, I am going to go a step further. Search Engine Optimization is fun to play with in regards to your domain’s URL structure. It can be a way to optimize what your article is, other than just organization.

What we know in basic WordPress use for structure purposes are as the following:

Permalink Structure for Posts

We can control how our permalink structure can look whether by post ID, month and date and more. We can even designate tags and categories to these posts and call them to pages using custom WordPress queries. For example you can call a category and show only tags and a certain number of many posts.

The reason why the post name structure (/%postname%/) works best for a post is because it shows the post title closest to the domain, showing how important it is to the site. The structure within the web page itself will also emphasize this using heading tags (h1, h2, h3, h4, and so on.) Now, if you listed by category (and I have seen people recommend that), depending on how your category is labeled, you are telling the search engine that the category is far more important to crawl than the actual title of the post.

WordPress naturally has the base “category” as a name and you can group posts under those categories. It is okay to display your posts on your site in a category. Most people believe including categories makes your posts duplicate content. NO! It is only if you are posting the same thing again on your site or the same exact thing on another site (like if you do guest blogging.) The search engines are not dumb.

Now, here is the fun part as well as the tricky part. What if you do use the category structure? How can you make it clever enough to draw more attention to your title. WPCandy actually exercises this clever way by naming the category’s slug an action. Yes, just the slug as you can designate a different name pointing to a different slug.

Just some examples:

News is reports
Opinion is thinks
Tutorials is teaches

Pretty cool, huh? As a note, the posts do group under the general “category/category-name”.

In this, we are telling (using the WPCandy example) that WPCandy.com reports such and such title, giving it an actual sentence. And you know, it nearly makes this former English major cry happy tears. (Oh I am such a geek!)

Permalink Structure for Pages

Pages are kind of fun and since WordPress 3.0′s menu addition, your control over pages has increased with several options. You can use the older hierarchy structure with parent and child pages. Remember, pages in WordPress are normally known for being used for static content.

The older hierarchy structure adds the slug of the parent page into the URL structure. SO, if you have like a parent page and then three deep into children and grandchildren, your URL structure might get a bit long. That might not be a good idea for search engine optimizing as it takes away the importance of that page.

However, the hierarchy structure is not the only way. You can use the WordPress menu option in your WordPress administration (Under Appearance>Menus) to organize your website and keep your URL structure for your pages simple. You can publish a page without using the hierarchy and use the WordPress 3.0 menu to organize your website without adding more length to your page’s URL structure.

Now, both methods can be used and Google will pick up and group areas of your site that have been optimized as a group. For example, if you have defined that your main sections of your website are your ‘About’, ‘Contact’, and maybe… as an example say ‘Resources’, like I have here in Blondish.net, Google will pick up that structure if you do have a set up pages that are relevant to that main area.

As a note, We can also apply these techniques to custom posts types since WordPress 3.0.

In Summary

Your permalink structure is both a way to organize and help search engines, but can also be great in helping your visitors navigate your website. The best permalink structure to use in WordPress is one that is the most coherent for search engines to deliver the best results to potential visitors. Play around with your site and see what is best for you.

So you have content, but you are not sure you want to go with pages or posts. Well, it really is not that difficult. A lot of people put together a site completely in posts without few pages. Or they make a page and enable comments, depending if their theme has that coded into the page template.

Even you can customize individual pages, since WordPress 3.0, you can customize individual posts. You also have the ability to adjust your menu from your WordPress admin panel to whatever you like if you have the wp_nav_menu php call into the theme itself.

Posts are normally considered an area of your website that will be updated frequently, while pages are more considered to be static. The difference- while both pages and posts are included in a sitemap (if you have a sitemap plugin installed… and you should), only posts are included in your RSS feeds (RSS- really simple syndication.) With the RSS, you can feed it into social network aggregation tools that will publish your posts to your social network handles.

However, you have to ask yourself – do you want comments on a page you will rarely update? What type of content are you putting up and how much of it? Remember for those internet marketers who like to use landing pages, enabling comments on a squeeze page might not be ideal.

If you like to put up mass quantities of items, for example, pixel images where you have a lot of images, you may want to use a page. Or you could release a few at a time in posts.

This is really something you have to decide on how you want to organize your site. If you make a page, you will have to announce the page somehow, especially if you want to drive attention to it.

Navigation is a big part to most sites. It is often the source of a visitor’s problem if your site is confusing to go from one area to the next, and back again with ease. Both posts and pages allow you to implement elements like breadcrumb navigation (a navigation you put at the top that tells you the path from that page you are on, and gives you a way to go back to the home page), links for next and previous post, navigation with numeral navigation (instead of older or newer post links), WP 3.0+ navigation menus, subpage navigation (you can have whole sections as a parent page and then children pages related to that section) and more.

It boils down how you want to organize your site. In fact, your sites organization has pull on your SEO. If search engines see that you have sections of your site that are grouped, they will list those under you
I usually put posts for what I am going to talk about and pages for things I may not update a lot.

Here is a good example of what I was talking about:

How have you organized your site by using pages and posts in WordPress?

Episode 2 of the Blondish.net Podcast is a little beginner coverage on blogging and SEO. I wanted to cover basics on SEO for the content and design. I do recommend in this post the plugin WordPress SEO by Yoast.

I go over some advice for writing the title and the content of a post as well as a few tips for designers. As a reminder, this is a basic SEO. I will cover some advance SEO in future podcasts.

The episode is a little over 15 minutes.

Blogging and SEO

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 17:52 — 10.2MB)

Google+ quite recently launched a new feature called Google+ brand pages. This was quite similar to the Facebook pages. The feature also provided certain other perks to the companies as their profile could be searched directly from the Google search bar by adding a ‘+’ before the brand name. Also, the brands can use the Google+ brand badge, which can be put up at the main site to directly connect to the brand page.

Though these are still early days, these brand pages have already had some impact on the search engine’s result pages. Here is quick look at how companies have used these brand pages and how it has affected their internet marketing campaign.

Brands present on Google+

Brightedge recently conducted a research and found out that the number of companies present on Google+ through brand pages was 77 in December 2011 and this number has increased from 61 in November 2011. The number of people who add these brand pages circles has also been increasing considerable at the rate of 50% per month. As of December 2011, there were 222,000 people who had added at least a single brand to their pages.

The picture is a bit bleak when you compare it with Facebook but that is due to the fact that Google+ has not had enough time in the market. When all the top brands were compared on both Facebook and Google+ it was found that Facebook brands had 300 million fans, and the same brands on Google+ had 148,000 people who had added these brands to their circles. There were a few companies like Google, IBM, and Vodafone that were not present on Facebook but had their page on Google+.

Combining the social and search elements

When Facebook launched the Open Graph, its main aim was to combine sites, search and social networks. Google is trying to do the same thing by incorporating various features of its social networking platform into its other services. Many of the brands have realized that Google in fact may offer them something completely different in terms of internet marketing as it has control over internet search like no other company.

The impact is visible already, as a lot of Google+ brand pages have started coming up in the search engine result pages because of search engine optimization. One such example is T-mobile. This gives companies an extra incentive to join Google+ and spend more time on making the brand pages. The move also makes a lot of sense when you consider the fact that 34% of Facebook’s traffic comes from Google, Bing and Yahoo searches.

Legal aspects

Some people are of the opinion that by including the brand pages in search engines Google is acting a bit like Microsoft when they included Internet Explorer in Windows during the 90′s. In fact, two US senators have asked the Federal trade Commission (FTC) to carry out an investigation on Google as they believe the company is taking unfair advantage of the dominant position it has on the web today.

What are your thoughts on Google+ Brand Pages?

What is pretty permalinks? Well for a brief explanation that is not difficult, it is changing the settings in your WordPress URL structure from yoursite.com/?p=2 , title ‘About’ to yoursite.com/about/ ( /%postname%/ ). To use this ‘pretty’ permalink structure and incorporate both pages and posts, you need to remember your hierarchy structure of your site.

For example, if you used (as a generic example) Webmistress, Domain, Contact, Sitemap as your the parent pages, you cannot name a blog post after these as it would interfere. Yes, each post and page is naturally numbered when it is created, but in the pretty permalinks structure, it could interfere with each other. You would be trying to call two pages at once. While I created yoursite.com/?p=2 that was titled ‘About’ and then later on in yoursite.com/?p=48 also blogged in a post with the title ‘About’, the structure would both be yoursite.com/about/

So for short:

Parent Pages MUST be differently titled from your blog posts.

I hope not to boggle anyone, but I am not completely done with this especially if you self host your WordPress blog.

So, now with the scenario of your pages now having the ‘pretty permalinks’, you decided to store images and information into your public html folder (in cPanel, or for Plesk users- your httpdocs folder), and you made a subfolder named ‘about’. The same rules come into play. You cannot make a subfolder OR even a subdomain that is named like your parent pages.

So, as I said, when you are using pretty permalinks, you need to recall the names of your pages hierarchy. Some like this style. I have come to like it for the past year. Some argue that it bloats that database. Others says pretty permalinks are great for search engine optimization. However, I think of it as a personal choice. I kind of like the ability to see the title of my post or page in the URL.

What do you use for your site structure while using WordPress (for those who do use it)? Have you had issues with the pretty permalinks technique? I am including a few articles to help you read more on the issue as I might talk more about pretty permalinks as another topic in the future.

Related/ Recommended Links:

• Efficient permalink strategies for WordPress
• Using Permalinks – WordPress Codex
• Pretty Permalinks and Pagerank by David Bradley
• Pretty Permalinks Can Help You in the Search Engines by Kevin D. Hendricks