Category: bloggersguide.net

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »
December 22nd, 2008

8 Offline Blogging Tasks If the Internet Breaks

Until today, I thought the Internet could only break if my mom sat on it. That’s lame, but I’m sucker for your mom jokes. Turns out, the Internet can break, and this weekend it’s nearly there: Three of four undersea Internet cables connecting North America to Asia have been cut. If it’s not broken, the Internet might slow down a lot, which means our blogging productivity can get knocked down to zero if we’re not careful. So if the Internet breaks, here are a handful of backup blogging tasks to keep us productive (and yes, many of them involve going to a bookstore):

  1. Read a blogging book.
    As bloggers, it’s always a good idea to sharpen your basic blogging skills, many of which are highlighted in books about blogging. Make notes of changes you want to make to your blog, web sites you want to visit, and ideas to try once the Internet is back up and running.
  2. Read a niche book or magazine.
    Keep your skills and knowledge sharp and stay on top of the trends in your field. Again, make notes of posts to write when you get the Internet to make.
  3. Browse magazine covers for headline ideas.
    This is a classic tip from Copyblogger: create a list of headline templates based upon real-life headlines and implement them in your future posts.
  4. Have a drink with a real-life blogger.
    Surely not all your blogger friends are online; surely you know one or two blogger friends in real life. Call them up, have a drink, and trade secrets and stories. Even if your blogs are in totally different niches, you can still learn something from one another.
  5. Practice your quick-writing skills.
    Find a book with writing prompts, whip out your journal or laptop, and start writing. Give yourself five minutes to initially get your ideas on the page, and give yourself another five minutes to revise. Who knows, you might even write some unexpected blog posts!
  6. Brainstorm ideas.
    With all the information you’re taking in, ideas are sure to abound. Don’t let them get away! Write them down in your idea journal and save them for later.
  7. Spend time with your loved ones.
    What a perfect opportunity to unglue yourself from your laptop and your office, soak up some sunshine, and reconnect with your friends and family. And don’t spend all your time talking about blogging to your non-blogging acquaintances. They don’t care that the Interent is broken; they’re just glad you’re hanging out with them.
  8. Work on one of your other hobbies.
    Yes, blogging is a hobby for many of us, but it’s important to pursue offline hobbies that require real-life interactions, too. And I find that when I step away from the computer, my mind is free to wander, and blogging ideas still come to me!

I know that the chances are slim that the Internet will actually break, but if it does, now you have something to do. So tell me, do you have anything up your sleeve if the Internet goes down?

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in bloggersguide.net | No Comments »

December 16th, 2008

BloggersGuide.net Goals 2009

Consider this my attempt at planning. I’m generally a well-organized gal, but that’s when I’m following a leader–someone who is wielding a sword, clearing the path in front of me. I have never been a good president of any of my college or high school clubs, but I make a fine VP. Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.

Here at BGnet, no one is clearing the path for me, and no one is telling me what to do, so I’m just sort of winging this blogging thing. Thankfully, Daily Blog Tips is sponsoring a What Are Your Internet Goals for 2009? Group Writing Project, and I figure participating will at least help me think about what I want to accomplish for BGnet in 2009.

  • Increase RSS subscribers to 500 (2008: about 20, if that)
  • Increase Twitter followers to 500 (2008: about 40)
  • Increase page impressions to 200/day (2008: about 200/month)
  • Increase ad revenue to $5/day (2008: $5/year)
  • Post 3-4 times a week (2008: one post a week, if that)
  • Share 2-3 blogging-related tweets a day (2008: no BGnet Twitter account)
  • Publish one blog carnival post a week (2008: about one a month)
  • Guest blog on one blogging-related blog a month (2008: two guest posts total)
  • Write guidelines for guest bloggers/BGnet contributors
  • Write a BGnet media kit for advertisers
  • Open BGnet to other blogging writers
  • Create a network of blogging bloggers

I’m not sure if these goals are too lofty or too modest, but with them I want to primarily accomplish the tag line that’s currently on BGnet: Read. Learn. Post. I want readers. I want my readers to learn something. I want my readers to contribute so other readers can learn.

I have no idea how I’m going to accomplish these goals. Some of them will be easy because I have sole control over them, while others may or may not pan out depending upon whether I work really hard and have favor with other bloggers.

So here’s to 2009. We’ll see how it goes!

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in bloggersguide.net | 4 Comments »

December 15th, 2008

Automatic Google Sitemaps for Blogger.com and Wordpress.com

When I wrote “Creating a Google Sitemap for Your Wordpress.org Blog” earlier this month, I said that if you were writing on a Blogger.com or Wordpress.com platform, you didn’t have a sitemap available to submit to Google Web Developer Tools.

I was wrong.

If you’re on Blogger.com, tack on rss.xml to your blog’s URL to access your sitemap. For those of you who are running your RSS feed through Feedburner, you’ll get redirected to another page, but the file is still there. Just use the file name when submitting it.

If you’re on Wordpress.com, tack on sitemap.xml to your blog’s URL to access your sitemap. Use that file name when submitting it to Google Web Developer Tools.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in bloggersguide.net | 1 Comment »

December 13th, 2008

Why I Separated My Twitter Account: Three Reasons to Consider

I found myself and BloggersGuide.net at a crossroad this week: To tweet or not to tweet. That was the question. I’ve had a personal Twitter account for about a year, and I’ve kept it pretty well up to date with personal musings and activities and the feeds from my personal blog and BGnet. But I also use Twitter to keep my Facebook status up to date, so my personal Twitter audience is much larger than the 50 or so followers I have on Twitter; my tweets also go to my 300 or so friends on Facebook.

And that was the problem. By promoting BGnet with my Twitter account (and therefore Facebook), I was publicizing to a whole group of people who a) had no interest in Twitter and b) had no interest in blogging. And as a professional writer, I can tell you that the first thing we’re taught in our professional writing classes is to know and address your audience.

At the same time, I asked myself, Sarah, do you really want to separate your Twitter account? You know yourself. You’ll probably start separating all your other accounts, too. This could get really hairy very quickly.

These thoughts are valid. I’m an all-or-nothing kind of girl, and when I commit to something, I go all out. But there are three reasons I separated my personal Twitter account from my BGnet Twitter account, and they are reasons you should consider as well:

  1. Time. I spend a lot of time online, and it’s very easy to let the line between personal and work activity become gray and fuzzy. By separating my Twitter accounts, I’m ensuring that when I’m working on BGnet, I’m solely working on BGnet. And that makes tracking the time I work on BGnet so much easier.
  2. Audience. My BloggersGuide.net Twitter account is directed primarily to bloggers rather than my miscellany of friends. While I’m sure my friends don’t mind an occassional BGnet plug, they don’t want to be inundated with articles I’m reading or conversations I’m having with other bloggers. At the same time, the Twitter username @bloggers_guide communicates that the account is about blogging whereas @sarahjoaustin only communicates that the account is about me.
  3. Content. My personal Twitter account is filled with all things personal: what I’m doing at work, what I’ve just posted on my personal blog, what I’m doing on a Friday night, etc. I want to do the same thing with my BGnet Twitter account: share what I’m reading that pertains to bloggers, promote BGnet, and network with other bloggers.

So my question is: Did I make the right move? I can think of several bloggers/tweeters off the top of my head who keep their personal and blogging tweets together, but I think there’s validity to keeping them separate. What about you? How are you handling your Twitter account(s)?

Tags: , , ,
Posted in bloggersguide.net, tweeples guide | 3 Comments »

December 11th, 2008

Finding Your Voice: 8 Best Practices to Improving Your Writing Style

For those of you who know me, you know that I hate four-letter words like nice and good because their meanings are entirely subjective, and therefore, they mean nothing. You can imagine how annoyed I get when people say, “So-and-so is a ‘good’ writer,” but I get even more annoyed when people say, “I’m not a ‘good’ writer.”

I say, “Pish posh.”

While some chalk up a “good” writing style to natural ability, I want you to know that even if you have the crappiest writing style in the world, you can get better. And if you do indeed have what is considered the crappiest writing style in the world (which I’d like to read, so send it to me), maybe your readers want to read your crappy writing style. Maybe it’s what they’re looking for. Regardless of what we’re considering “good” and “crappy” today, here is a list of best practices I follow when I write and practices that will help both “good” and “crappy” writers find their voices:

  1. Read. Read. Read. Don’t scan. Read. Your RSS feeds do not count. You need to be reading books or at the very least, lengthy magazine articles. I don’t care if you’re reading Foucoult or Dr. Suess or anything in between; the act of absorbing the written word will result in that same written word (and by same I don’t mean copied) dissipating in your own writing.
  2. Write. Write. Write. I will never be a world champion snow boarder unless I snowboard snowboard snowboard; likewise, you will never be a good writer unless you write write write. Practice!
  3. Practice perfectly. OK, I admit I have mixed feelings on this point because we all make mistakes, and I’m certainly from the school of Learning From Your Mistakes; however, I had a gymnastics coach when I was a kid who always said, “Practice doesn’t make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect.” Maybe he was just a jerk, but I think there’s some validity in his mantra. When you write, double- and triple-check your work. Are my proper nouns capitalized? Are the common nouns lower-cased? Do the ends of my sentences have punctuation? Are my commas joining complete thoughts? Did I use to, too, and two correctly? How about there, they’re and their? A little rusty on your grammar? Listen to Grammar Girl’s Quick & Dirty Tips for Better Writing or pick up a copy of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style.
  4. Write with an active voice. Avoid sentence structures that contain a to-be verb; you can most easily identify them by looking for sentences that start with there or by gleaning out was, is, were, and being. Get to the heart of your verbs and use them! Using verbs will make your writing come to life.
  5. Get straight to the point. When I was teaching, it drove me crazy when students started all of their sentences with I think or I believe. Because you’re the writer, your readers will automatically assume that what they’re reading is what the author (you) think or believe.
  6. Use all seven coordinating conjunctions. That’s right. There are seven. Most people use three, and only three: and, but, and or. Try using the other four to liven up your writing. For, nor, yet, and so are small but powerful words when you’re connecting two complete thoughts. (And let’s review the rule: When using coordinating conjunctions, you need two complete thoughts, a comma after the first thought, and your coordinating conjunction.)
  7. Punctuate! I love commas and periods as much as the next writer, but if you really want to get me riled up, throw in a semicolon–or even better, a dash! Use a semicolon when you want to join two independent clauses without a coordinating conjunction; use a set of dashes when you want to make a parenthetical statement–like this one–without using parentheses.
  8. Toss out all these best practices. You know the saying, “Rules are meant to be broken”? It’s especially true in writing. But I caution you, don’t break the rules because you don’t know them; break the rules because you made a conscious decision to do so.

So that’s it. The eight best practices above are the ones I use every day to craft the voice and style in my writing. What about you? Do you use these best practices? Or do you have others that work for your style and your writing?

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in bloggersguide.net | 7 Comments »

December 9th, 2008

You Don’t Have to be a Programmer to Hand-Code Your Blog

Last week, in a fit of motivation, I submitted five continuing education class proposals to the local community college; three of the five proposals were for blogging classes. I haven’t heard a yea or nay on my classes yet, but when I looked at my tentative class outlines once more, I realized that I better get my butt in gear and actually think through some of my micro units, which is the impetus of today’s post.

Today I want to talk about XHTML, also known as eXtensible Hyper Text Markup Language. Long before I started seriously blogging, I learned XHTML and CSS (cascading style sheets) in a graduate technical writing/web development class. Now, when I say learned I mean that I learned how to hand-code an entire website without leaning on Dreamweaver or any other web development software. I’ve heard nightmares from web development teachers whose students say they want to learn how to code when they really want to learn how to use Dreamweaver. Not in the class I took. We hand-coded everything. And I loved it!

I can hear you asking, “Sarah, what does this have to do with blogging?” Well, let me ask you, Have you ever wanted to change something–anything–about your blog’s appearance or functionality but you were afraid you’d mess up your template? Here’s the thing: Knowing how to hand-code XHTML can give you greater control over your entire blog template and your individual blog posts, building your confidence as a blogger and as a web developer.

Let’s be clear: I’m not advocating building an entire blog template from scratch. I mean, you can if you want, but there are so many free templates to choose from, why not pick one that’s close and tweak it until it’s exactly what you want? Want that elusive third column? Need to increase the height of your header? Hoping your images will line up on the first try? Hand-code, people!

Hand-coding your XHTML has other benefits, too. When you use a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor in Blogger, Dreamweaver, etc., you’re likely to get “extra” code that is automatically generated. This code can slow down your blog, hinder site performance, and invalidate your blog with the W3C. By hand-coding your blog, your blog will more than likely load fast, perform better, and be search engine friendlier. And who doesn’t want those things?

If you’re ready to learn how to hand-code XHTML, so you can have tighter control over your blog’s appearance and functionality, check out the list of resources below to get you started:

Even with these resources, you’re not going to be whipping out mind-blowing site designs immediately; however, learning XHTML, its tags, and its rules is pretty simple. Concentrate on it during a long Saturday or with a series of evenings at a coffee house, and you’ll be a hand-coding expert! Happy coding!

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in bloggersguide.net | No Comments »

December 7th, 2008

Fixing a Broken Link Snafu

I had a broken link snafu in September. It was horrible. I had over 300 broken links on the website I manage at work, all of which were my own fault. That’s the worst kind of snafu, folks, but thankfully, they were fixable, and that’s what I’m going to talk about today.

First of all, let’s ask the obvious question: How did I let 300 broken links go unnoticed? Easy, really. I mashed all three of my work blogs into one, so all of my posts had new URLs. Aside from ruining many of my posts’ search engine rankings, this broke all of the internal links I had created on each individual post. I thought I fixed many of these broken links when the site was in beta, but then I changed the URL again, and the links were once again broken.

Lesson Learned: When you’re importing and exporting blogs or changing file structures, don’t assume that broken links will magically fix themselves.

The broken links were on my site for a few weeks before I found the bulk of them. Many of my readers were complaining that when they clicked on links from their emails, which are sent through Feedburner, they were being sent to 404 pages. About this time, I was playing with Google Webmaster Tools, which has a broken link report and which informed me that I had over 300 broken links on my site. I went into panic mode and frantically searched for a WordPress plugin to find and fix all my broken links for me. I found the Broken Link Checker plugin and installed it, hoping it would solve the problem for me. But it didn’t. The plugin slowed down the page load time on my site to minutes and made my WP dashboard practically inaccessible because it was working overtime to find all my broken links.

I uninstalled the Broken Link Checker by accessing the site through FTP and deleting the plugin files, which fixed the page load time problem, but I was still stuck with broken links. What do I do now, I asked myself? There’s no way I can go through every post, check for, and fix every broken link. There’s too much room for error, and I’ll miss something for sure.

Lesson Learned: There are no quick fixes or easy solutions when you have 300 broken links. Fixing the problem requires time and patience.

I didn’t let myself spiral into broken-link depression. I pushed up my sleeves and got to work. On my site, there were about 50 posts that solely linked to other posts and that didn’t have any original content on them. Since these posts were only necessary for the day they were originally posted, I justified that it would be easier to delete these posts rather than fixing every link in them. Once that was done, the majority of the broken links were gone, but there were still too many to install Broken Link Checker. I remembered that our friends at the W3C have a link validator and that this validator is built into Firefox’s Web Developer Toolbar plugin. Even though I’d have to fix all the links manually, I wouldn’t have to locate them on my own!

My plan was simple: First, I would check all my static pages. Then, I would send the W3C link validator through every blog page*, fix the links as they were identified, and double-check my work by sending the validator through the site again, only this time through category pages instead of blog pages.

*By blog page, I mean the page that lists all of the site’s blog posts in chronological order. For many blogs, this is the home page, but on my work website, it wasn’t. These pages usually have “Older Posts” and “Newer Posts” links at the top and/or bottom of every page.

Lesson Learned: Panicking solves nothing. Use the tools at your disposal to create a methodical plan for finding and fixing broken links and for double-checking your work.

Problem: The link validator took 10-15 minutes to check one page’s links. I don’t know why it’s so slow, but I accepted it and tweaked my plan. Turns out you can run multiple pages through the validator at once by checking each page in a separate tab or window. Bingo! At work, I have two PCs that I rarely use, so I opened Firefox on each computer and had each computer validating about 15 blog pages at a time (I needed to get through about 70 blog pages). While pages were validating, I went about my usual work day. Once validation was finished for the set, I went through the results and fixed the links. Once I went through all the blog pages, I validated all the pages again using the site’s category pages. It took me about one full work day to validate twice, fix links, and do my regularly-scheduled work tasks.

Confident that I had found and fixed at least 99% of the broken links, I installed the Broken Link Checker again, and it worked without slowing down my site! And it found zero broken links! Problem solved!

But the work wasn’t over. Webmaster Tools still said that all those links were broken and that the links in my sitemap.xml file from those 50 posts I had deleted were now broken. Not a problem for me because I knew for certain those broken links were gone; I just needed to let Google know. First, I recreated my sitemap.xml file and resubmitted it to Google. Google didn’t remove those broken links immediately; it took a few weeks, but eventually they were unlisted.

Second, I manually told Google to remove those broken link URLs from its index using the Remove URLs tool. This took a lot of copying and pasting links from the broken link page to the remove URLs page, and it took a few weeks for Google to get rid of the majority of those URLs. Today, 33 are still on the list, and I’m not sure why. For some reason or another they remain in Google’s index; however, there are no broken links identified in Broken Link Checker in WP.

One more thing: Before I found the link problem, the website lost pages of its search engine ranking. Where it had once been on the front page of some our most important keywords, it wasn’t coming up at all. Shortly after fixing my link snafu and submitting a sitemap, our search engine ranking returned to normal.

Lesson Learned: Search engines care about broken links. If you have too many on your site, you’re going to lose your spot in search engine rankings.

I pray that no other blogger ever has to go through such a mess. It was stressful, time consuming, and mind taxing. To make sure it doesn’t happen to you, here are some things to consider:

  • When importing or exporting your blog or changing your blog file structure, allow time to methodically check and fix all the links on your blog: internal and external links + image, audio, and video links.
  • Once all your links have been validated, keep them that way. Use a tool to regularly check the links on your site. Once identified, fix them as soon as possible.
  • When linking, use absolute links that include the full URL (http://www.website.com/images/me.gif) rather than using relative links (../images/me.gif). This assures that if your posts are being published somewhere besides your blog (i.e. in a Feedburner subscription email) that the links still work.

So tell me, have you ever had a broken link snafu? How did you fix it?

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Posted in bloggersguide.net | No Comments »

December 6th, 2008

Would You Use a Dynamic Liturgical Theme for Your Church Blog?

I seriously thought this was a joke when it was posted on Weblog Tools Collection, but it’s for real: A WordPress theme that follows the liturgical calendar and adjusts the colors of your blog accordingly. The Liturgical Year Theme, by Scott Lenger, is for churches (and I guess, individuals) who follow the liturgical calendar and decorate their sanctuaries accordingly. The rationale is, if you change your church’s physical decor, why not change the website’s?

As a church web developer, I have mixed feelings. For full disclosure, I’ve never attended a church that followed the liturgical calendar, so I have no personal experience with liturgically-decorated santuaries. On one hand, I think it’s a great idea, in theory. I like websites that are dynamic in content and design, and when design decisions are made for a reason–in this case, to acknowledge the liturgical calendar on the Web–I’m more likely to agree with those decisions. On the other hand, a website is part of a church’s overall brand identity, and I’m afraid messing with the colors will conflict with that brand. Or the website might start looking like clown pants.

So I won’t be using this theme at work, but if you are using or know of a site that is using it, will you post the link in a comment? I’d love to at least see this theme at work!

Tags: , , ,
Posted in bloggersguide.net | No Comments »

December 3rd, 2008

Creating a Google Sitemap for Your Wordpress.org Blog

In case you don’t read my other blog, this month I’m participating in NaBloPoMo, and instead of posting entirely on my personal blog, I’m splitting my posts between BloggersGuide.net and SarahJoAustin.com. Today, I want to talk about sitemaps.

“Sitemap” is one of those web developer buzz words that won’t mean anything to you–or that will simply frustrate you–until you can create one for your own site. Essentially, a sitemap is web file that contains links to every page on your site, and they’re important because they allow spiders to get to every page of your site–pages that they might not get to crawl ordinarily. (Remember search engine spiders can only crawl to a web page if it’s been linked to from another page. And if you don’t have many links to your site, your site might not get crawled much, if at all.)

If you have a small, static site, creating a sitemap in XHTML is pretty easy, but if you have a complex site or blog, creating a sitemap can be a nightmare because every time you update your site, you have to update your sitemap. What’s even more frustrating is that search engines, especially Google, like sitemaps to be written in XML, which is incredibly unforgiving. You make one mistake, and the whole file goes to crap. (Kinda like a knitting project.) What’s a blogger to do?

If you’re using Blogger or using Wordpress.com, you’re SOL, but if you’re using Wordpress.org, the handy dandy Google XML Sitemaps plugin is exactly what you need. This plugin generates a sitemap.xml file and notifies search engines when your file has been updated. I won’t go over the settings in detail, but essentially you should set the plugin to build your sitemap automatically, to notify all search engines, to include all pages and content, to build the file in the background, and to automatically detect your file. Once set, the plugin will create your sitemap and leave it in your main directory.

Once you have your sitemap.xml file, you’re not quite finished. Because the plugin’s title references Google, you need to tell Google about your sitemap. By doing this, you’ll essentially tell Google, “Hey! Here’s a map of my website so your spider will know how to find all my pages. Check it out!” To submit your sitemap to Google, you must have a Google account and be signed up for Webmaster Tools. Essentially, Webmaster Tools allow you to see what the Googlebot sees when crawling your site. You’ll see broken links, incoming links, and outgoing links, plus you’ll have access to a handful of tools that tell Google your preferences in how your site is filed.

To add your sitemap to Webmaster Tools, you’ll need to add your site’s URL in your dashboard. This creates an “account” for your site, and you can add as many sites to your dashboard as you like. (Yes, I wish Webmaster Tools, Analytics, Feedburner, AdSense, and AdWords all worked from the same dashboard, too. Santa, this is my Christmas wish.) Once you’ve added your site, you can verify it by adding a meta tag to your site’s <head></head> tags or by uploading a file to your site. Verification isn’t required, but it is recommended.

Next, click Sitemaps in the Webmaster Tools navigation, and click Add Sitemap. Select Add General Web Sitemap from the dropdown menu, and then type ’sitemap.xml’ in the textbox under #3. Click the Add General Web Sitemap button, and you’re ready to go. It can take a few hours for Google to crawl your sitemap, but in any case, it doesn’t take too long.

And there you have it. As long as you keep your Google XML Sitemaps plugin updated, every time you make a change to your site’s files, Google (and anyone else you submit your sitemap to) will be notified of those site changes. Easy peasy!

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in bloggersguide.net | 5 Comments »

November 18th, 2008

Five More WordPress Plugins to Simplify Your Blogging

When I finally bought my own domain and hosting, I knew that I was going to use Wordpress.org as my blogging software. As a regular reader of Blogger’s Guide, the first thing I did once WordPress was installed was check and install the “Five WordPress Plugins That Make Blogging Life Easier.” Since then, I’ve downloaded and installed several other plugins, and these five have are just as helpful as the first five. They aren’t as vital as WordPress Database Backup and WordPress Automatic Upgrade, but they certainly make blogging life easier.

  1. Subscribe to Comments: This plugin gives your readers the option to subscribe to comments via email by placing a button below the comment form. Once logged into a post, readers can easily change their notification settings if they decide they don’t want to get any more updates. Plus, Subscribe to Comments lets you choose the default wording your readers will see or lets you write your own.
  2. Unreplied Comment NotificationComment Remix: If you want to build loyal readers, have a conversation. When the blog author responds to comments, readers know they are being heard. Subscribe to Comments emails your readers your replies and the replies of any other commentser, and Comment Remix makes it easy peasy for you to respond, right from your WordPress dashboard. My favorite feature of this full-featured plugin is the unreplied comment notifier: an unobtrusive red speech bubble. Comment Remix also provides widgets that display top commenters, posts with the most comments, recent trackbacks, and more. You also have control over how trackbacks are displayed, the order in which comments are sorted, and whether or not you want to use comment tags. With a combination of Subscribe to Comments and Comment Remix, your readers and you can easily carry on meaningful conversations.
  3. Add to Any: One of the easiest ways to promote your blog is to let your readers do it! By installing the Add to Any plugin, users can choose which social networking site they want to share your post on. You can choose how large the Add to Any button is (you can even create your own), and whether it is also appended to your feed.
  4. Google XML Sitemaps: In order for search engines to crawl your site (more accurately/better), you should have an XML sitemap saved on your domain. This plugin automatically creates one for you and updates it each time you write a new post, while notifying Google, MSN, and Ask at the same time. These features and many more make Google XML Sitemaps a must-have if you are trying to build your SEO.
  5. Ultimate Google Analytics: If you’re like me, you love combing over your analytics and Ultimate Google Analytics helps to show you exactly how your readers are using your site. This plugin inserts the Google Analytics tracking code into every post page, tracks outbound links (including mailto:), and tracks downloads. All you have to do to get started is to enter your Google Analytics account ID.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in bloggersguide.net | No Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »
 

You need to log in to vote

The blog owner requires users to be logged in to be able to vote for this post.

Alternatively, if you do not have an account yet you can create one here.

Powered by Vote It Up