Hey people, for those who follow me through my feed via email, probably noticed at the end of each post a line talking about my birthday contest. This is possible thanks a wordpress plugin called RSS Footer, which let’s you add an extra line of content to articles in your feed, defaulting to “Post from: ” and then a link back to your blog, with your blog’s name as it’s anchor text, but you can edit this with any html code:

How this plugin will help you to monetize your blog?

This plugin is very useful to add a copyright to your feed, also may be to do a contest, you only need to use your imagination to find the way to use it. Thinking on all the possibilities, I found it useful to monetize your blog. How? well you could sell a line at the end of your RSS Feed promoting a website or service by a low cost. Despite the fact that too many people ( all your subscribers ) will read this promotion on every post from your feed, this is something that can’t be expensive for 3 reasons:

1. Is not visible for everyone: unless you be John Chow or Darren Rowse, a handful of your readers will see the promotion instead the totality of your visitors. In my case, about 100 persons will see it daily vs 15k or 40k of Chow and Rowse respectively.
2. It’s just a line: this is a little text backlinking to other website, you can’t charge a lot for it. Unless you place a horizontal banner, you can’t charge more than a text link in your blog.
3. There’s no reason three, it’s just cheap!

Ok once you know how to monetize your blog with an RSS feed line, you need the plugin right? To install it, just download the plugin zip file, unzip it and upload the rss-footer.php file to your plugins folder. Then, go to the plugins panel and enable it, it’s quite simple and it has no complications.

Today someone send me an email asking me for a page which he added to him bookmarks and today he tried to visit it and it was impossible to him. The page was not deleted, I just changed something in the permalink but he got an 404 Error Page. The 404 or Not Found error message is a HTTP standard response code indicating that the client was able to communicate with the server but either the server could not find what was requested, or it was configured not to fulfill the request and not reveal the reason why. 404 errors should not be confused with “server not found” or similar errors, in which a connection to the destination server cannot be made at all.

However this issue was good because it makes me notice that my 404 error page really sucks and I start to think how could I improve it…So I was thinking, in which circumstances someone get an 404 Error Page:

• When the url is written bad.
• When the url is deleted from the site.
• When the permalink is changed.

So I thought that is annoying when someone get a 404 message, the person is waiting to see the content and instead the person need to go back in the browser or verify the url. However that’s boring, so I will give you some tips to improve your 404 error page as I improved mine and give to the user a more pleasant sailing.

1. Be friendly with the user: ok may be this could be considered stupid but not everybody knows what a 404 error is. Normally this kind of pages only show a single message: “404 Error - Not Found” or something like that. The experimented user know what it means, but if you are not an Internet lover, you surely won’t know what to do. In this case, you need to tell them what’s happening, a little message explaining it is sufficient for this.
2. Include a search bar: if the user couldn’t find something, you need to help him to find it! how? if he is interested in something specific, he’ll want to find it, so what’s better than a search bar? a good and simply search bar could solve the problem, adding it to your 404 error page could help the users to find their wants.
3. Offer personal assistance: exist the case that the user simply can’t find what he is looking for. In this case you should offer personal assistance, let them know that you are willing to help them finding what they want. Placing a link to the contact form will be enough in addition of a little note.
4. Offer other posts: may be they can’t find what they want because simply the content does not exist on your blog. What should you do in this cases? offering other posts could be a nice way to attract them to your blog. I used a wordpress plugin called Customizable Post Listings for this, it let you to set random posts where you want with a simple php function: you can set the number of posts, the format of them, the author of them…inclusively you can set categories, so the plugin will only show random posts under these categories.

Building a 404 error page could be simple, but it’s very important for any website because depending of how is it configured, the users can leave or stay in the site when they can’t find what they want.

Happy blogging!

Hello wordpress bloggers, yesterday I was talking about some great plugins for wordpress to improve your search engine optimization. Today I will tell you some tips about how you should set your wordpress to get success on search engines.

WordPress is considered one of best blogging platforms because it allows to perform Search Engine Optimization functions that most of the other blog platforms do not support. This includes elements like title tags, meta descriptions, related posts, optional excerpts, and other easy ways of making the Search Engines clearly aware of your content and what it is about.

Best format for Permalinks

The permalinks or permanent links are one of best ways to improve your seo. By activating them, you will have links permanently for every post you write, so if you have them deactivated just go to Options -> Permalinks in the admin panel and activate them. For this permanent url, you can set different formats: Date and name based, Numeric and Default. Also there is an option to customize this format, so you should check that and set the structure /%postname%/ and nothing else. This is best because your URLs to your articles should never change. Try to avoid using dates as subfolders, this ties your post to an specific date, limiting your ability to update old posts. Also, using dates as subfolders may result wrong in search engines because your post will be ranked with less weight and this will reduce the crawl rate. If you noticed, my blog has dates as subfolders. I changed the structure just like I recommend here but the problem is that wordpress change automatically every url’s post, so this mean that every oldest post linked in my newest posts won’t be find, redirecting you to the 404 error page. I’m thinking a solution for this, don’t worry .

Use your keywords on slugs

Post slugs allow you to insert a topic or keyword phrase into your URL. For example, you can use www.yourdomain.com/blog-setup-basics.php instead of something like www.yourdomain.com/?p=140. If you don’t set a slug ( you can find this at the right of the posting screen ), wordpress automatically will set as slug the title of your post with a “-” between words. Try to avoid “the”, “or” and “and” in your posts slug, and use some of your blog keywords on it to get success in search engines indexing.

Enable Pinging

This is a little out of place but it’s good to mention it, what is a ping? pinging sends a signal to the Search Engines to come take a look at your blog every time new content is added or changes are made. This gives you a big SEO advantage, as it ensures your content is seen immediately by search engines and indexed quickly. This can help your posts rank right away for less-competitive keywords.

Following this tips, you will be optimizing your blog for search engines, google, yahoo, msn, ask etc etc…The implementation of your keywords on your permanent links is very very important and it’s something that you should have in mind when you are setting a post tittle and slug.

There are too many plugins for wordpress which help you to improve your search engine optimization, but you can eventually download and install a couple of them and test which one work best for you, because in the blogsphere there are many plugins which do exactly the same.

Now I’m going to share with you a couple of plugins excellent for SEO, but also you can check the wordpress plugins data base for other plugins.

SEO Title Tag

As you now the page titles are very powerful in the Search Engines, so this plugin really helps your WordPress blog’s optimization allowing you to give to each post its own unique title tag – one that is uncoupled from the title of the post. This enables you to write a title tag what is good for the Search Engines while keeping a post title that will appeal to humans. If you want to improve your SEO, you should start by downloading this plugin .

All in One SEO Pack

This plugin is streamlined for some best practices for Wordpress SEO. While it gives you many options the defaults reflect the settings I recommend using. It have too many useful options as for example, add a description of the post for the meta tag, so when a potential reader find your post in a search engine it will see that description you wrote. Download this great plugin, I recommend it !.

Related Posts

Related Posts Plugin will generate a related posts list based on your tags, and also it add the related posts to your feed. You can set the mount of related posts you want to show plus another features like showing a comment counter.

Ultimate Tag Warrior

This plugin creates a tag cloud for your blog by enabling you to group posts together based on “tags” you include when you write your posts. Tag clouds help your SEO by creating internal links to relevant pages using good keywords. Ultimate Tag Warrior is not compatible with WordPress 2.0 by itself, so be sure you download the Compatibility Thing. This plugin may be a bit difficult for non-coders to get working right.

Lucia’s Linky Love

This is a variety of “dofollow” plugin. It’s main function is to strip “nofollow” tags from links in comments. The purpose is to encourage comments by rewarding commenters with “dofollow” links which boosts their rank in search engine. However, this particular plugin also has features that thwart human’s who are paid to visit blogs and leave insipid comments simply to boost their companies back links.

Social Bookmarking

I personally dislike this plugin, I don’t like to see all those many little icons at the bottom of my posts. Instead, I prefer to use the feedflares of feeburner, with them you can see a couple of links which I previous selected them.

If you use another plugin and you consider it’s very useful, please comment on this post to share it with all the community. In the following days I will be talking about search engine optimization on wordpress, stay closer !.