*Note: Before editing your template files you need to make a copy of the php file and paste it into notepad, not microsoft word.  Just right click inside the template, click on select all, then right click and copy.  Now just paste into notepad and save them (include the date in the name like ‘singlepost04.23.2008.txt’.  This way you can always refer back to the original file.  Or you can delete the entire template in progress - and paste the old one back in.

Partial VS Full Feeds 

Let’s start with partial vs. full feeds.  Use the full feeds option.  This allows people using google reader and other feed readers to read a blog post without ever coming to your website.  I know, I know – this seems a little scary but just relax.  First of all, let’s bear in mind that the goal of blogging is to influence other people’s lives with your content – not show them how pretty your site is or look at all the amazing google ads you’ve got on there.  Don’t take my word for it, I’m a small timer – read this from the big timers.  Also, I wouldn’t worry about others ripping off your content.  It’s not that big of a deal, even if they do it just means that someone thinks it’s good enough to reprint somewhere else.  In which case….congratulations.

Duplicate Content 

I’m not sure how much of a problem duplicate content is when google crawls a wordpress blog, but I’ve done a few things which will limit the chances.  First of all, on the main index page I only display an ‘excerpt’ of each article – about 50 words.  This is just enough to give a reader a taste for the actual article and decide if they want to read it.  By providing the ‘excerpt’ the entire post is not displayed and therefore not indexed.  I accomplished this by going to Presentation, Theme Editor, Main Index Template, and changed the following line:

After the line that says ‘div class= entry’ you should see one that says ‘php the post’.  Just change the word post to the word ‘excerpt’. Secondly I edited my category page to only display the titles.  Inside my category.php file I removed the following text:

‘php the content’

 My memory is a little fuzzy on this but I believe that’s what it said before I changed it. This doesn’t allow any of the blog post to be displayed on the category page.  My goal in changing the Main Index Template and the Category Template was to enable readers to scan quickly for titles that interested them.  However, this isn’t even really that important since the majority of my traffic comes from search engines.  But once again it does help to limit duplicate content.

Solving Duplicate Content using robots.txt 

At the top right hand corner of this page you’ll see the ‘Email this Post’ link.  This will enable a pop up window so you can email this article.  I’ve read that this ‘email the post plugin’ generates an entire set of new links related to the pop up.  I will deal with this using the robots.txt file in a moment. There’s also duplicate content if you use the ‘archives’ function.  I removed the archives section from my sidebar because it seems pointless to me.  If a reader has ended up at your site and they want to find info, it seems to me that the main index page, categories links, and google search box is more than adequate.  But just in case the google bot finds it’s way to the ‘archives’ somehow, there is a way to disable it using the robots.txt file as well.

Finally, the RSS feeds can also generate duplicate content.  I’ve decided not to block google bot from finding my feeds because I read that if someone posts your content on another site, google is smart enough to determine which site has the original content by following feeds and comparing it to content on the site.  I’m not sure about this but the guy sounded like he knew what he was talking about so hey…….what’s a guy to do.  Lastly is the trackback content, apparently this needs to be blocked as well so I’m blocking it – at least I think so, according to a couple of various sources I’ve gotten the format correct. So, with the robots.txt file I want to block the ‘email this post’ content, archives content, and the trackback content.  The following text comes courtesy from theguru.

User-Agent: *
Disallow: */trackback*
Disallow: /wp-*
Disallow: /20*
User-Agent: MediaPartners-Google
Allow: /

I’m not sure how relevant the format is, but time will tell.  The wp-* is where the email pop up content is stored. Next the trackbacks are blocked.  Since the archives pages are normally something like /2007/04/ the 20* is supposed to block any url with 2007 or 2008 after the slash.  In the example used by theguru, he uses /20* to block archive pages.  But since I use the ‘id number’ in my permalink structure, articles 200 – 209 wouldn’t get indexed, so I left that out of my robots.txt file.

Google Analytics

I use google analytics to show where my traffic is coming from, but also to show how many hits per url, specific keyword searches, and all sorts of other useful information.  Many of the attributes of analytics I have yet to use.  This has been a learning process for me and I only have time for so much ‘learning’ each week.  The two main functions of analytics that impress me are the ability to show where traffic is coming from, and the ability to show specifically what a person types into a search engine that leads them to your site.  This is useful information.  For example, when someone links to me and thus brings me traffic, I email them and thank them for the link.  This often builds into a nice web referral system for both of us. 

The reason I like to review what readers typed into a search engine is because it gives me ideas for new articles.  If I see a trend of similar searches that come to my site, but I know my content is lacking – I will write an article that satisfies these readers.  This is a great way to build search engine traffic.

WordPress and SEO

Most importantly I use ‘pretty permalinks’ and downloaded the ‘All-in-one-SEO-Pack’ for WordPress.  I used to have ugly permalinks – you know the debtprison.net/wordpress/?=42/.  I had to change over to the ‘custom permalink structure’, and I decided to use this one: /%post_id%/%postname%/.  This way I still get the ‘id’ number plus the name is included in the URL.  Having the id number comes in handy when you are setting up a ‘related links’ section or trying to quickly determine where the link you want is located in a list of url’s.  To keep from breaking all my previous links I installed the redirect plugin, which enables readers to find the ‘pretty permalinks’ even if they clicked on one of those ugly ones. 

The all in one seo pack enabled me to easily add specific keywords to the header of individual articles.  It also allows you to set up your titles so that when google displays them in search results it looks like this ‘WordPress SEO and Google Adsense / Debt Prison.  This was a huge breakthrough for me.  Before I installed this all in one – all of my links were displayed by google as ‘Debt Prison / Blog Archive / WordPress SEO and Google Adsense’.  Hell, no one could even see the title of the article.  Since I’ve made these two changes my search engine traffic has doubled.  This post has had 25 unique visitors from search engines within 24 hours of publishing, and my page rank is ‘low’ according to google webmaster tools.

Encourage readers to use the comment section at the end of a post.  Here’s why.  As google bot crawls your posts it will include the comments in the post index.  Using google analytics I often go to google and type in the exact phrase that the search engine user did, that brought them to my site.  I do this to see where my site was ranked for certain phrases.  Often the text that google search displays about my site is something from the comments.  This is a way for us to add valuable content and discussion to a post by letting our readers perform the work.  Often when I read a post about implementing a plugin or using ads, I read the comments.  So many times the comment section of a post will have content more valuable than the actual post.  So encorage readers to add their comments.  I would like for you to add comments to the bottom of this post.  Tell me what you like or dislike about the changes I’ve made and give me some of your best ideas for WordPress.  Thanks!

I try and respond to comments very quickly.  My average response time is probably two hours and I think this helps alot when it comes to reader retention.  First of all, I think readers are pleasantly surprised when a website administrator responds to their comments.  Even more so if the response is fast.  But this also encourages more readers to leave comments because they feel confident that you will give them your opinion – and quickly.  So more comments leads to more comments.

Having made the above important changes to my blog set up, something should be said about content.  Once you get your blog in good shape for search engines, you should focus all of your attention on providing valuable, unique content.  By writing useful information that is both value rich and unique, you increase your chances of other websites linking to yours.  This is how you dramatically increase your search engine traffic.  The number of ‘highly ranked’ websites that point to yours, is the difference in 500 hits per day and 50,000.  It’s just that important.  So once you get the title layout, tags, keywords, and all that jazz squared away…..focus on content. 

Before publishing a post, copy and paste it from the view screen into microsoft word.  Use word to check for spelling and grammatical errors.  Having misspelled words is extremely negative.  Think of this from a readers perspective.  You are either too dumb or in too much of hurry to write correctly.  This perception obviously bleeds over into the content.  Readers are likely to decide that perhaps your content is also dumb or hastily thrown together.  In which case they are more apt to leave your site and search out more thoughtful material.

Google Adsense

There’s a lot of good articles out there about google adsense and wordpress.  First of all, about one hour ago I read a comment from a reader that said something like “When I see ads on a blog I immediately leave, because I know the content is no good.”  Well……I’ve heard all of that before and – I think it’s about the stupidest thing that’s ever came out of anyone’s mouth.  I’ve seen people complain on digg.com because someone posted an article from their blog……..and their blog had ads on it and they were like “You’re just using digg to make money from ads” and immediately someone posted “Yeah just like digg is doing – placing ads on their site to make money……moron!!!”  To all of these folks I just have to say “Get over yourself already…….”  If you have a problem with advertising then no problem, just leave!  I suppose these same people don’t watch CNN, or Fox News, or MSNBC, or any other news program because every ten minutes or so they have one of those damn commercials.  Ahhhhhh, just more silly self righteous attitudes from silly people.  Ignore them.  I’ll stop using ads when they stop paying.  Besides, providing your readers with additional opportunities to obtain useful information from their visit to your blog is a good thing.

Google’s best profit ad is the large rectangle, with a white background and no border.  If your article is short, place ads near the beginning.  If the article is long, place ads near the end.  I have all but one of my ads built into the php so I don’t have to add them to each individual post.  Only at the end of the post do I change the type of ad.  It just depends on the look and feel of the post. 

Until recently I only had three ads on a page.  A small image ad banner at the top of the article.  And then a small banner text ad in the beginning, and at the end.  Two weeks ago I added the wide skyscraper to the sidebar on the left.  I replaced the image banner ad at the top with a ‘links’ ad.  *NOTE, I’ve already removed the text link ad from the top of my posts.  I didn’t like the way it looked when viewed with Firefox instead of Explorer.  I’m going to place a text ad in the middle somewhere. This ad looks a lot like a menu bar and I made the text blue to match the other links on my pages. I also added the medium rectangle text ad to the beginning of each post.  I’ve definitely seen improvements in my revenue.  When I first started blogging I said that I didn’t want to be one of those web pages with a bunch of ads surrounding the article.  Now I have a bunch of ads surrounding my articles, at least at the beginning.  Personally, I think it makes my articles look a lot more professional because of all the relevant links on the page. 

Google has a policy about blocking any more than three ads on one page.  But there is a way to get more than three ads on a page.  I discovered this when I placed the link menu at the top of my articles.  I was able to have a links ad at the top, a square at the beginning, a text/image link banner at the end, and the wide skyscraper on the left.  Inside the single post template I put the links ad above the title of the post.  I’m not sure why exactly this works but it does.

Yes, I’m one of those evil bloggers who wants to blog and get paid.  But seriously, bear in mind that the content is free.  I call these proximity dollar links.  I brought the links within my readers’ proximity and they clicked on them.  Everybody wins, even those self righteous elitists who’ve already left…..

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