Better Blogging Techniques

I feel like I am in school studying for an exam. I have had my nose burried in one book or another for a better part of the day. I finished reading WordPress for Dummies by Lisa Sabin-Wilson. Although I am not a ‘dummy,’ I like the simple presentation found in all of the ‘For Dummies’ books; I was surprised at how much of the material I was already familiar with. But, I did learn a couple of things, too.

• Instead of building PHP functions and modifying code to call pages that I create in WordPress, I can use a ‘php include’ function instead.
• There is a way to modify older WordPress themes to make them widget enabled  WordPress themes if they aren’t already.

Enabling widgets in an older WordPress theme was important to me. When I first installed WordPress, it took me almost two hours to filter through the themes before I found one that I liked. I had to make sure the colors looked OK and there weren’t too many graphics. I might explore graphics in my theme when I learned how to design my own theme or how to work with cascading style sheets.

Once I finished WordPress for Dummies, I jumped right into Search Engine Optimization by Kristopher B. Jones. I haven’t even made it to the first real chapter of the book and I have already learned so much about search engine optimization. For instance, I learned that one of the most important pieces of one’s blog is title of the entry. Search engines and web crawlers look at the permalinks to your entries. For search engine optimization, permalinks should include the title of the entry. In the past, I have used cute titles for my entries, or the first half of the opening sentence to my entry. After reading the first three pages of the foreward from this book, I won’t be doing that any longer. My titles will be descriptive and more than likely contain keywords.

The book also reiterated one point that I have already come to learn through experience, the importance of social networking websites. Sites such as MySpace, Facebook, or LinkedIn can be pivotal in generating traffic to your own site. I learned this early on. On the days I posted a messages through MySpace or Facebook indicating I had posted a new blog entry, my traffic increased significantly.

After finishing the forward of the Search Engine Optimization book, I figured it was time to put a few of the items discussed into practice. In the past couple of hours, I have:

• Updated my MySpace profile with current information
• Updated my Facebook profile with current information
• Updated my YouTube account with current information
• Registered with del.icio.us
• Registered Technorati

Another traffic increasing technique that is discussed is to become a more collaborative member of the blogging community and to start leaving relevant comments on others’ blogs. I think this particular trick will be a little more time consuming than the others, but at this point, I am whoring myself out to any method that will get people to look at my site. I am deterimined to make money from all of this!