My blog in this form is now a little bit over 40 hours old and I already made several mistakes with regards to our friends: the search engines. There are several good articles and presentations that I would recommend for reading: try this, this and this. So here are some of the basic rules you should follow when creating a blog:

1. Keep the link to the articles simple and nice. With Wordpress this is called Permalink and you can choose different formats. There is only one format that really makes sense: /%postname%/ This is just the title of your post (no dates, categories etc. needed). Important: Once your blog has been online for a certain while never change the link format again!
2. Get your titles optimized! The standard titles of most blogs are something like “My new blog >> Article title”. This is just not good when looking at your article as the result of a search request on Google or some other search engine. If you are using Wordpress you can use this plugin to change the way titles are presented and even specify unique titles for each blog entry.
3. Change the main title of your blog… “Tobman’s Blog” doesn’t tell Googlebot or other spiders much about the content to expect. When you go to my homepage and have a look at the title you will see that I have changed it in order to more clear on what to expect on this blog. You can use the plugin mentioned above for this task as well.
4. Get a Sitemap and submit it to Google! I used this plugin to create an XML sitemap and also to automatically submit the sitemap to Google and MSN.

As a sidenote: I have not followed those rule from the beginning - unfortunately. I thought to have content first is more important and then do the search engine optimization. Well, I would say this was a mistake, as I had to change the paths to my blog entries and this will definitely lead to some 404 errors…

Another thing that really annoyed me was the fact that I had linked from one of my blog entries to some others several times - all those links were broken after changing the permalink layout of course. So I was wondering - is there a better way to link within blog entries? Well, no not really. As described in the docs you can either use peramlinks or linking to the id of the blog entries. When you link to the id’s it does not matter when the permalinks change, but it’s not very pretty:

<a href="index.php?p=123">Post Title</a>

And also you have to look up the id number of the post… So basically I would suggest sticking to permalinks and just not changing them once their structure is set! But if anyone knows a more elegant solution (e.g. a plugin) I’d be really interested to know!

Blogging, Search Engine Optimization Permalink, Search engine optimization, WordPress

When you want to display code, i.e. syntax of some programming language like PHP, C, Java or whatever on your blog you could just copy and past it. This doesn’t look very nice though and is most likely not enjoyable for your readers. A better approach would be to use the <pre></pre> tag which means that the included content is preformatted and which looks quite good with WordPress for example.

But there is even a more elegant alternative: use one of the freely available syntax highlighers around. For WordPress e.g. there is this great plugin called Syntax Highlighter. Getting this to work is really easy:

• Download the plugin
• Extract the content of the archive and place it in your wp-content/plugins folder
• Activate the plugin in your WordPress administration
• Highlight code by using: [source code language='css']code here[/source code] (without the blanks between source and code!)
• Caution: change the language setting to your appropriate requirements (e.g. mysql, java, php, etc.). You will find a list of supported languages at the plugin link from above.
• That’s it - it should work. If it doesn’t work (which happened to me…) read the FAQ where it says to make sure that your theme has the <?php wp_footer(); ?> line somewhere.

If you are wondering how this line of code would look like with the Synatx Highlighter… well, tattaaaa:

<?php wp_footer(); ?>

Blogging Blogging, highlight, Source code, Syntax, WordPress

So one thing about Project WebMoney is the documentation part. The whole project and its progress has to be documented… why you may ask? Well for two reasons: first because I want to know for myself how things come along (and keep track of it at one neat place) and second (and that’s maybe more important) because writing about the whole project itself will help to reach the goal of the entire project!

This is because blogs are a good way to increase page ranks and drive traffic. If you plan to do such a project yourself it might be a good idea to start blogging yourself. And that’s actually quite easy.

1. Get a blog system - I use WordPress You can either get a hosted blog there for free o r download the PHP software and install it on your webserver (really really easy).
2. Get Zemanta. Zemanta is a great tool that makes blogging life much easier. It automatically recommends links, pictures and articles to you as you write. For example I just got the nice WordPress logo recommended that I pasted above! The great thing is that Zemanta checks for copyright with the images, so you don’t have to worry about this being an issue. You can read more about Zemanta at this short review.

   

Blogging Blog, Weblogs, WordPress, Zemanta