Unilyzer » Wordpress

WordPress Tip: Don’t Forget to Ping

Rebecca — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 22:07:31 +0000

Pings are a simple way to tell other sites to check your blog for the new content that you’ve posted. Each time you hit publish it sends out a ping to the sites you define in your WordPress settings.

How to Automate Your WordPress to Ping:

Login to your WordPress site
Select ‘Settings’ and on the sub-menu select ‘Writing’
Scroll to the bottom where it says ‘Update Services’
In the ‘Update Services’ box copy and paste the following, then click save.

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

With these settings saved, WordPress will automatically notify these sites that you’ve updated your blog. Now people browsing sites like Technorati or Sphere can find your most recent posts automatically!

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Permalinks Are Your Friends

Rebecca — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:03:46 +0000

Permalinks are the ‘secret sauce’ to successful referral linking, and the more people linking to you, the higher your rank on Google. A permalink is the permanent identifier to a specific weblog post or article. Because blogs tend to be frequently updated, articles you find on a weblog’s homepage one day may not be there the next. A permalink is the permanent identifier to a specific weblog post or article.

Bloggers love permalinks — they provide an easy way to capture specific references to posts or articles about which bloggers are writing. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to link to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. The URL to each post should be permanent, and never change — hence permalink.

By default, WordPress and popular blog software publish your pages like this:
http://www.unilyzer.com/p=119

Permalinks transform your URLs to look like this:
http://www.unilyzer.com/internet-marketing/wordpress/

The second example with the permalink is superior for two reasons:

Permanent – When you update your article or make changes to it, the link will not change. In the first example, each time you update your post the number will change. The result is that all your incoming links will see the error message page can not be found.
Search Engine Optimized SEO – Look how the second example uses keyword phrases in the link structure, this is important when it comes to getting indexed in Google.

I recommend the following permalink structure for WordPress. Using the category name and post name is the best way to search engine optimize your links.

In the Settings → Permalinks panel (Options → Permalinks before WordPress 2.5), you can choose one of the “common structures” or enter your own in the “Custom structure” field using the structure tags. In the “Custom structure” field type: /%category%/%postname%/

Set-up screen for WordPress Permalinks

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What is Social Bookmarking?

Rebecca — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 22:35:57 +0000

What is social bookmarking? It is tagging a website and saving it for later. Instead of saving them to your local web browser, you are saving them to the web where they can easily be shared with friends. The real power behind social bookmarking is being able to view your friends’ bookmarked sites. It’s the equivalent of recommending a restaurant to a friend, if people you know trust a website or blog, it’s worth your time to check it out.

As an Internet marketer one can see a value to participating in online referral and bookmarking activity. The key is to get others to recommend or bookmark your blog posts or website pages. Not only is this a popular technique to build a sites rankings in search engine result pages, but it also helps new pages of your site get indexed quickly. The first step is to make it easy for website visitors to socially bookmark you. This is little more than the old school ‘bookmark this site’ link. Because there are about 16 major social bookmarking services out there, which one will that specific visitor want to use?

If your smart, and built your website using WordPress the answer is easy. Install a social bookmarking plug in, and in minutes it adds the functionality of social bookmarking to all your pages and posts. There are quite a few social bookmarking plug-ins for Wordpress, the one I recommend is ‘Sexy Bookmarks’. I love how the plug-in adds the hand-written ‘Sharing is Sexy’ – very eye catching and engaging. They also have a PG version ‘Sharing is Caring’ option for those that don’t like the word sexy.

See a sample of Sexy Bookmarks in action below and on all our blog posts. And while you’re trying out the feature, don’t forget to bookmark us!

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Website vs. Blogs – Which one is Better?

Rebecca — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 22:35:46 +0000

Blogs started showing up about 5 years ago, thanks to services like blogger, making it easy for individuals to have an online diary or journal. It was easy for novice users to update their blog because it was simple: enter a title and write a post. This shattered the barrier to creating content on the web. Search engines like Google took notice that good content came from blogs and began to optimize their algorithms to rank blog content higher than static websites.

One of the most powerful features of a blog over a website is RSS (Real Simple Syndication). RSS feeds let bloggers syndicate their content automatically. Readers can then subscribe to the feed to automatically receive updates. Other websites and blogs can feed your articles onto their website, further promoting your brand. Think of the AP news service. They write one article and it is printed in hundreds of newspapers across the world. See the RSS feed diagram below to see how RSS feeds can drive traffic to your website.

The line between blogs and websites is blurring with tools like WordPress. WordPress is a free, open-source content management system and blog tool all rolled into one. That means you can manage your entire website and blog in one easy to use tool. WordPress takes all the ease of blogging and allows you to create posts and pages. Pages are for content that is not date dependent like, about us, products, services, contact us, etc. Posts are blog or journal entries where you can post articles, photos, and videos. Pages and posts can be RSS feed for powerful content distribution, a must have for any serious Internet Marketer.

From personal experience, and working with my website clients, I have found that websites I build in WordPress get indexed almost instantly in Google. The pinging feature of WordPress notifies the Google spiders to crawl and index the site. My clients love how easy it is to publish new content to their sites and, as a result, keep their websites fresh and up-to-date.

So to answer the question, should I build a website or a blog?
The answer is: use WordPress and do both!

RSS Feed Diagram

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