Part Time Webmaster Blog

Well, I have to admit, I had no idea what the real meaning of dofollow and nofollow meant. So, with a little research, here’s what I found.

When you are coding, you add a link, simple right. Well, you can add a parameter to your link to state whether or not you want search engines to follow the link and crawl the page on the other end. In order to do so, you would add rel=nofollow. If this parameter is at the end of the link, then the search engine would not follow the link. If you want the search engine to crawl the page referenced in the link, you would just leave it alone.

So, what’s the problem. Well, it became an issue a while ago due to sites taking advantage of this linking. So, applications such as WordPress started automatically adding the rel=nofollow to the dynamic links such as comments. Who would know this right?

So, how does it affect you? Well, if you’re using WordPress, your links may have the nofollow attribute on it’s links. So, if someone adds a reference to another site, Google won’t crawl it. This might not be so bad considering the amount of spam that’s out there. But, what if someone posted a link or comment on your site that is valid. Wouldn’t you want to reward them? Of course you would want to reward them. And, as it turns out, people pay attention to this. It’s a matter of time and efficiency. If you want to post a comment to a site, you want some perks. So, those that are knowledgeable will look at your site to see if you “dofollow” exists. If they see this exists, they’ll post to your site. Therefore, you’ll get more links.

In order to make this a dofollow site, we installed the plugin DoFollow.

I figured this out this evening thanks to http://www.awpcp.com/. If you are using this plugin and each time you click on a link to do the following:

• Place an add
• Edit an existing ad
• Browse ads
• Search ads

Or, you are just trying to click on a category and nothing happens. All you have to do is go into The WordPress | Settings | Perma-Links and click “Save Changes” This will refresh the links and everything will work well. Apparently, you have to do this when you install a new version. On the save side, it’s not a bad idea to check this once you add a new plugin. It’s not a good feeling when you find out it hasn’t been working for a while.

With each website we build, we always integrate SEO. With Wordpress, SEO is a lot easier. So, here are the things we did to help this website become more visible.

We integrated the following things to maximize the configuration of this WordPress site.

Installed the XML-Sitemap: This plugin will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.

Installed the Google Integration Toolkit: This allowed us to do the following:

• Configure Google Webmaster Tools by placing our verification code in a meta tag.
• Configure Google Analytics with our ID
• Allowed us to set our RSS/Atom Feeds
• Allowed us to configure Adsense Section targeting
• Allowed us to track 404 errors with Google as well.

Configured our Permalink settings. We set ours to /%postname%/ To change this setting, go to Settings/Permalinks.

Installed Global Translator 1.2.6: This allows us to activate Google Translation Services. Not sure if this will help us, but figured it couldn’t hurt.

Made sure our blog post titles are H1’s and not H2’s

Set our privacy settings to public. You can do this by going to Settings/Privacy. Ours was already set to public. I’m assuming this is the norm now.

Installed Full Text feed: This allows the feeds to display our entire link therefore giving users links back to our site.

Installed Yet Another Related Posts Plugin to give references to related plugins.

Installed Meta SEO Pack: This allows us to add meta tags to our site page.

Enjoy! Let us know how this changed your site!

Well, there are tons of companies now that host WordPress sites. This site uses JoesWebShack.com. With JoesWebShack, we are able to host this site for less than $5 a month. In addition, we bought the domain name for less than $10. So, for less than $100 a year, we can run this site.

IMPORTANT: When you sign up, sign up for Linux hosting.

In addition, there is a service we used to have the hosting company install it. Essentially, you go into your admin to install, here are the instructions on how to install WordPress.

1. Log into your account
2. In the top navigation, choose Web Hosting then My Hosting accounts
3. Click on the Manage Account link next to your hosting listed.
4. Click on the big box stating “My Applications”
5. In the left hand navigation, click on “Blogs” this will open up a list of applications.
6. Click on WordPress
7. Look for the red button titled “Install Now”
8. Follow the instructions and your site will be running within the hour!

I typically try to block out time to write all of my posts. It just doesn’t seem feasible to sit down every couple of hours and write a blog post. So, one of my favorite features of Wordpress is scheduling blog posts.

So, what I’ll do, is block out an hour or two for the posts. I’ll write one, then publish it immediately. On the next post, I’ll use Wordpress’s publish option to choose another time. In order to do this, I look down to the bottom right where it states “Publish Immediately Edit” I’ll click on the edit button and schedule a time in the future. I typically try to have at least 2 blog posts a day, so, I just add 12 hours to the current time. Once that’s complete, hit ok, then hit the schedule button, and voila! Wordpress will publish your article when you want.

What does this do for me? Well, right now, I’m still experimenting. But, it does allow me to show users that this blog is updated often, and it makes me look like I’m working all of the time. My favorite thing about this is that if I’m blog happy, I can write blog posts for several days out. Heck, maybe I’ll take a break.