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Doing It By The Numbers – Blog Post Engineering

(Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes)

“So what is this ‘Blog Post Engineering’ thing anyway?”

That’s a really good question. Glad you asked.

Blog Post Engineering is a systematic, by the numbers, step-by-step procedure to help you cover all the bases you need to score big with both readers and search engines on any blog post.

You supply the inspiration.

Blog Post Engineering supplies the rest.

Write your blog post as usual. Then, go through each point given in Blog Post Engineering, checking each element of your blog post. How’s that title? Do you have your article tagged properly? What about the post slug, is it SEO friendly?

And your SEO metadata… it’s not that hard, are you getting it right? Find out in Blog Post Engineering.

Here’s the cool part: if you’re always in a hurry like me, you don’t have to work through all 30 points. Work your way from the top down. Especially, get those first 7 blog points handled and you have a huge chunk of your SEO covered.

Then you can go back later and fill in more, as needed.

Or you can be really smart: use Blog Post Engineering as you’re writing.

Blog Post Engineering

Blog Post Engineering

The current release is vastly improved over the initial ebook. Many thanks for encouragement and proofreading help from:

  • Walter Yu for that first challenge: an ebook in a week.
  • Sean Deacon for continual encouragement.
  • Kelly Diels for close reading and many editorial suggestions.
  • Joel Orr for telling me the discount code didn’t work, and purchasing anyway! Visit Joel at Joel Trains Authors.
  • John Elrick for finding more typos.

Pre-release sale almost over

Looking through the transactions, there’s about 5 copies left for the pre-release $10 discount. (Use discount code “Mayday“)

[Update: May 10, 2010] The pre-release sale did well, selling 28 of 30 copies. The launch, notso hotso, but that turned into a great blog post on “unlaunching your ebook.” You can find a purchase link there, or just use this one:

Practical WordPress Tip #9: Use Sitemap page for fast URL

(Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes)

Benefit: Deep linking your articles within your website creates value for readers, and in turn helps you get better search results.

Problem: When deep linking internally in your blog, it can be difficult to find article you need, and to get both the title and the URL of the articles in an easy cut-and-paste form.

Practical WordPress Tip: Use a Sitemap listing articles linked by titles.

Here’s how in 3 simple steps:

  1. Install the Dagon Sitemap Generator Plugin.
  2. Follow the instructions and create a Sitemap page.
  3. When you are deep linking internally in your posts, open the Sitemap page. You will have both the blog post title, and you can right-click to copy the blog post URL.

Why: Creating well-structured blog posts is tedious, and requires quite a bit of time. Every tip or trick you can use to minimize the time to find desired articles allows you to build more links faster, and have more fun doing it! Here’s the Website In A Weekend Sitemap for example.

Note: You do not have to display the Sitemap page in a menu. When you creating deep links, it takes very little time to open the sitemap page directly. Then, just leave it open until you’re finished.

Previous Practical WordPress Tip: Practical WordPress Tip #8: Have your profile URL point to other blog

Next Practical WordPress Tip: Practical WordPress Tip #10: Rename your modified themes


Do you have a Tip? Would you like to write a Practical WordPress Tip? Each Tip is very short, and focuses on a single action that anyone can use right away, no programming required! If you have a Tip that fits into this series, and you’d like to publish it here on Website In A Weekend, send it on!