3 Reasons You Should Be Using a Related Posts Plug In
SEO is a term that is overused in the world of blogging and it's usually done so by people who have absolutely NO idea of what good SEO is compared to bad SEO. The truth is that 95% of bloggers probably don't have to do much more than use a good SEO plug in like All in One SEO and change your permalinks and you will be in good shape.
If you do want to take it a step further then there is a great little plugin called Related Posts that will benefit your blog in a number of ways.
Benefits of Related Posts
Internal Linking - Internal linking has a number of benefits and which is more important is up to you. If you make it a habit to build a number of links that link to your other posts then this will allow the Google Bot to more easily traverse your website and will allow more of your content to be indexed quickly.
Free Advertising - Using the related posts plug in will place a series of "related" posts at the end of your article. If a reader completes one article and liked it, sees a few more with interesting titles, then they are much more likely to click on them and read your content. Using this plugin is like free advertising for your older content.
Page Views - One "stat" that shows a readers interest in your blog and allows you to measure how compelling your content is to readers, is the number of page views for your site. The higher the number then the better, readers are enjoying your content and checking out other articles as well.
Tread Cautiously
The Plug In that I use is a "tag" plug in that uses the tag function of Wordpress. It is simple and very easy to install. As you search for RP plugins you will find about a dozen of them, tread lightly and be careful, they range from a snap to install to fairly complicated for a new blogger.
Take advantage of a simple way to advertise your content, if you are just starting out then you need all the help you can get. To find the plugin that I use simply click here . It couldn't be a simpler install, you just need WP 2.3 or higher since it uses the tags to associate posts.
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Permalinks for Newbies
If you are launching a new blog then you no doubt have your work cut out for you. It seems like no matter how hard and long you work at it, the site is never the way you want it to be. Rest assured this is perfectly normal and you aren't alone.
This article is intended for those who are just starting out with Wordpress as we will discuss some of the basic steps you should take once you have your blog set up. I am not going to cover anything to do with uploading, installing etc but rather the things you need to do to get your blog "ready" to be on the worldwide web.
Time spent early in this stage will pay off for you in the long run.
First thing right out of the gate....change your permalink structure. If you look at your "links" that show up in your browser window you will see see that Wordpress defaults to a funky looking link, this is awful for SEO (search engines) purposes and will make your blog difficult to navigate and difficult for search engines to categorize. Take a look at the example below.
What you want to do is go to your Dashboard, click on the "Options" Link, click on the "Permalinks" link and then review.
You can see what I have done; click the Custom box at the bottom and type /%postname% in the field and save your update. What this will do is create a permanent link to each of your posts that contains the postname. You have other options that will include the date, postnumber, etc, but it seems to be pretty widely accepted to use the postname as the permalink.
It is much more user friendly to both readers and more importantly Search Engines. This is what that ugly link above will turn into.
Much prettier....and again, much more search engine friendly. If you wait until your blog is established and has a lot of content, then making this change becomes a major pain in the butt....so set it up correctly right on day one.
My next article will discuss the plugins that you should install when starting a new blog so make sure you grab my feed - it's an article you won't want to miss!
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Newbies Guide to PageRank
If you listen to some bloggers you would think PageRank was like the Holy Grail but in reality, PageRank is a numeric value that is assigned by Google as a measure of how important a page is on the web.
Google calculates this rank using the number of your sites inbound and outbound links (an inbound link is another site linking to yours, and an outbound link is one that you are linking to yourself).
Google figures that these links are in essence casting a vote for that other page, as they figure that if the page had no relevance then why would you be linking to it? The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be, at least in the eyes of Google. It isn't quite that simple and we will discuss it further, but this is the definition in a nutshell.
The links are not all created equal in the eyes of Google. An inbound link from a PR5 site carries more "weight" or "influence" than an inbound link would from a PR2 site. The higher the value of the opposite page, then the more value the link carries.
You should also be aware that not all links are even counted by Google as they have a fairly sophisticated system for filtering out links from known link farms or link directories. They have recently become very stringent in regards to paid links as well.
Paid links were a pretty common practice in prior times, if a new blogger wanted a higher PR then all they had to do was buy a few links on a higher PR site and voila. This is a practice that Google frowns on these days and they often dole out penalties for those who partake in this practice. I have heard of PR5 sites being reduced all the way to PR0 overnight.
How is PageRank calculated?
The only formula that I have been able to find on the web to calculate pagerank is shown below and it is quite complicated. I am not sure that the average blogger gives a rip as to how, they just care more about what to do and what not to do to make it happen.
PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn))
This is the original equation that Google published back when they first started using PageRank and I have not been able to find anything different. The formula could very well have changed but you can get the basic premise of it here if you are a bit on the sadistic side.
In the equation above 't1 - tn' are pages linking to page A, 'C' is the number of outbound links that a page has, and 'd' is a dampening factor, usually set to 0.85; but again this may have changed since the time this formula was published.
A simpler way of looking at it:
PageRank = 0.15 + 0.85 * (a "share" of the PageRank of all pages linked to it)
"Share" = the linking page's PageRank divided by the number of outbound links on the page. So in theory a PR6 site with 100 outbound links might not give you the same value that a PR3 would give with only say 2 outbound links.
This is another reason to avoid link farms and directories; even though they have high PRs, they have hundreds if not thousands of outbound links. You don't get as much juice as you might elsewhere.
Very few topics get as much heat going on the blogosphere as PR and I am sure some have different theories than , but now you have a pretty decent understanding of how PR is calculated and what is involved. It's pretty simple - write good content, write a lot of content, drive traffic to your site, comment on other people's blogs, and you will likely see your rank raise in no time.
If you want to know where you stand right now then this site has a lot of great tools to monitor the health and well being of your site. You can check your backlinks, current pagerank, predicted pagerank etc.
What's in YOUR PageRank?
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Blogging Essentials is launched
A short post simply to kickoff of my 2nd blog. This blog will discuss "blogging" and will be geared towards those who are learning to blog or who are interested in becoming better bloggers.
I am not planning on promoting the blog much in the first month as I need to get my pillar content written and some of the asthetics of the theme worked out but if you do stumble across my humble little site I would love to hear from you.
I would welcome guest posters as well so feel free to shoot me an email through my contact form or just post a comment on the threads, I will be following them regularly.
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