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Maintain Draft Queue with Practical WordPress Tips 1 – 12

March 10, 2010 By

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

Learn something new about WordPress in 5 minutes. That’s about as long as each of these practical tips take to learn. That’s I call them practical, they are easy to do.

These tips form a series of articles. Note how each one is linked (you will have to click through). As explained in Blog Post Engineering ebook, each tip also has a specific structure allowing you to grab what you need, quickly.

The Practical WordPress Tips series started way back in mid-2009, so it’s likely many new readers haven’t stumbled across one yet.

If this looks like it might be leading up to sales copy for a future product, let’s just keep those suspicions to ourselves.

  1. Practical WordPress Tip #1: Use the “View” link for URL shortcut. Find out how to use the “View” link on your post admin page to rapidly extract URLs useful for linking to your content… which increases search engine ranking!
  2. Practical WordPress Tip #2: Make Your Draft Queue Work For You. Find out an easy way to leverage WordPress built-in post editing work for you.
  3. Practical WordPress Tip #3: Keep A Few Spare Posts Handy. Keeping a few spare posts handy for emergency situations is slightly different than scheduling in advance. Find out how you can use this technique.
  4. Practical WordPress Tip #4: Use inline styling for testing CSS. Use this simple procedure to help you make small changes in your CSS styling… without killing your website.
  5. Practical WordPress Tip #5: Keep rough drafts ready to publish at any time. Use these simple techniques to keep your article queue full of easy-to-publish drafts… save time and never run out of material ever again!
  6. Practical WordPress Tip #6: Limit word count per post to create article series. Here’s an easy procedure for creating series of articles practically compelling people to return again and again to your website.
  7. Practical WordPress Tip #7: Use Redirected URLs to help build traffic. Simple, easy URLs are easy to type and remember, making it easy to promote individual posts and driving traffic. Learn 3 different ways to make simple URLs.
  8. Practical WordPress Tip #8: Have your profile URL point to other blog. Drive traffic from one blog to another using different URL’s in your profile. This easy tip explains all.
  9. Practical WordPress Tip #9: Use Sitemap page for fast URL. Find out how you can speed up your deep linking chores to help improve your SEO results… get more work done faster!
  10. Practical WordPress Tip #10: Rename your modified themes. 4 simple steps to preserve all those little tweaks you put into your customized WordPress theme. It’s easy and you can save your skin with 5 minutes work.
  11. Practical WordPress Tip #11: Spot check your posts. Use this Practical WordPress Tip to improve all of your SEO metadata on your blog for getting better search engine results.
  12. Practical WordPress Tip #12: Use date ranges to control “Edit Posts” page. Here’s an easy and practical 4 step procedure for better blog post scheduling… key for increasing productivity for dedicated and serious bloggers.

Here’s a complete list of all the Practical WordPress Tips. As noted in Blog Post Engineering ebook, each is tagged with “Practical tips,” so each is stored in a virtual index. Click on the tag, you get them all!

Please leave a comment or three on any of these tips you find useful, and I’d love to have your questions or suggestions as well. Please leave a comment here in any case.

Filed Under: Creating Content Tagged With: , , ,

Using Google Webmaster Tools To Ensure Proper Search Engine Indexing

July 18, 2009 By

(Reading time: 3 – 5 minutes)

Google provides a suite of tools for analyzing your website. All of these tools are very easy to use with WordPress, and most are supported with helpful plugins. The benefits of using Google Webmaster Tools are many, here’s the top 3 benefits you need to know starting out:

  1. Free, Google Webmaster tools cost you only the time to learn how to use them.
  2. Very easy to setup when starting out.
  3. All your site information in one handy place.

The devil, of course, in the details, and when you’re ready to dig deep, check out the links below for more detailed information. For now, the most important things as a beginner with a new website is getting verified and getting your sitemap.xml indexed.

Let’s get going!

Once you get a few pages on your site, log into Google Webmaster Tools and follow the procedure for Google to verify your website. The easiest way is to create the suggested file on your computer desktop, upload the file, then verify. The other method of adding code into your meta tag structure is “cleaner,” but you have to understand a little code, and it’s not as maintainable. The file method ensures that Google will always something for verification, whereas using a specific file with meta tag requires keeping track of the file or files with that tag, and making sure Google loads them.

Once your site is verified, you can see the result by clicking on the details link to the right of the page, which will take you to a page like this:

Google Webmaster Tools Site Verification page

Google Webmaster Tools Site Verification page

Next, submit your sitemap.xml file manually. You do have a sitemap plugin installed, right? Website In A Weekend recommends using Arne Brachold’s XML Sitemap plugin. If you haven’t installed it, do that now and come back. We’ll be here.

Once you have your sitemap.xml generated, submit the file to Google Webmaster Tools. It will will take a few minutes, usually no more than an hour for Google to retrieve your new sitemap.xml and display the results. Your initial results should look something like this:

Newly submitted Google sitemap.xml

Newly submitted Google sitemap.xml

Note there is only 12 links on this site, as it’s newly created, consisting of boilerplate such as contact page, FAQ, Terms & Conditions, etc. With so few results on a new site, there should not be any errors in the sitemap.xml.

By now, your interest should be piqued… if you need just a little bit more motivation, check out this really cool Webmaster Tools checklist. I’ve never seen anything quite like this on the web, and I want to implement checklists for you on Website In A Weekend for handling all sorts of chores!

When you really need to dig deep, here’s those links I promised above:

As you can see, these are all excellent articles, and I encourage to read them thoroughly. Look for future articles here on Website In A Weekend which will go into more detailed analysis on specific capabilities of Webmaster Tools, and how you can use them to improve your website immensely.

Using Arne Brachold’s XML Sitemaps plugin has an added benefit of submitting to Microsoft’s new Bing service, Yahoo (with a developer ID), and Ask.com. Each of these search engines holds a small but vital segment of web search, don’t leave them out of your traffic building strategy!

Filed Under: Building Traffic Tagged With:
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