Part one, Optimize RSS and Atom Feeds for Wordpress, focused on Feed optimization. Part two, Optimize Your WordPress Blog as a Whole, focused on overall Blog optimization. This article focuses on WordPress platform-specific guidelines for optimizing Your Individual Blog Posts.
Note: These tips assume you are using WordPress as an installed application on your own dedicated or shared server, and not as a free hosted blog on wordpress.com. These tips do not take into account any WordPress upgrades in the recently released version 2.3.
1. Add Social Networking Links
Adding a few links to popular sites like StumbleUpon, Digg and del.icio.us makes it very easy for readers to share your posts with the rest of the world. Pick a few of your favorite sites, or sites that you think would be the most receptive to your content.
There is a plugin called Gregarious that can help automate this. I’ve heard good things about it, however we decided to go the custom route which involved a little hand coding.
If you want to follow suit, you will need to edit the single.php file for your current theme. This file resides here:
blog-root-directory/wp-content/themes/your-current-theme/single.php
It will depend on your theme, but you should see some code like:
You’ll want to insert the code for your networking links after this so they show up at the bottom of your post. Again, it will depend on your theme and design as to exactly how you do this, but here is the linking code for StumbleUpon, Digg and del.icio.us:
StumbleUponhttp://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=&title=
Digghttp://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=&title=
del.icio.ushttp://del.icio.us/post?url=&title=
If you are displaying your full posts on your blog’s home page, category pages, or any other pages that display more than one post, then you will need to make the same additions to the index.php file found in the same directory as the single.php file.
blog-root-directory/wp-content/themes/your-current-theme/index.php
(Yes, you could write a php method to alleviate having duplicate code.)
2. Add an ‘Email This’ Link
Add a link that will allow your users to easily email your post to a friend.
We use FeedBurner to facilitate this. Because our feed goes through FeedBurner, we can just use the proper linking code and FeedBurner handles the rest. There are a couple of options when using FeedBurner for this functionality, but we manually inserted the code in the same location as the Social Networking example above. Here is the linking code:
Email Link Code for FeedBurnerhttp://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailFlare?itemTitle=&uri=
3. Add tags
Your WordPress blog has built-in categories, but categories should be used as an organizational tool specific to your blog. Tags allow you to attach universal meta data to your posts, and can be used by sites like Technorati, which will increase your blog’s visibility. A great plugin for this is the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin.
This plugin works well in conjunction with the SEO Title Tag plugin. I talk about the SEO Title Tag plugin in my article Optimize Your WordPress Blog as a Whole.
Note: WordPress 2.3 has native support for tags, but my experimentation so far has shown that the new tag functionality is very limited. I recommend using the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin even if you’re using WordPress 2.3.
4. Show Related Posts
Provide links to other posts on your blog that are related to the post the user is reading. This will make it very easy for them to find more information, and it will increase the chances they will pass your articles onto friends and colleagues.
A great plugin for this is the Related Posts plugin.
5. Consider Using Sticky Posts
A ’sticky’ post is one that always remains at the top of a page regardless of whether or not it is the most recent post. If you have a page that has ranked well because of a keyword rich post, you might want to consider making that post sticky so it remains at the top of the page. This could keep that page ranked well for a longer period of time. You also might want to utilize sticky posts if you have a particular article that represents a page very well.
The Adhesive plugin can create sticky posts. It doesn’t seem to be highly configurable, but you can make a post sticky for all pages, or just for Category pages.
That’s All Folks
There are other obvious optimization techniques for your blog posts like including targeted keywords in your titles and body copy, and using ‘alt’ attributes in your tags, but this article has focused on WordPress specific solutions. Check out Complete Blog Optimization Guidelines and Increase Your Blog Traffic - 8 Important Steps for more general optimization techniques.
This article concludes my series on WordPress specific optimization techniques. I hope you’ve found this information as useful as I have while trying to optimize your WordPress blog.
No comments:
Post a Comment