RSS

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication.  That probably doesn’t do much for you, as I’m still not even sure what it means.  The principle behind RSS is actually very simple, and incredibly useful.

An RSS is a link coming from your blog.  WordPress blogs generate an external page away from your main blog with either full content or snippets of all your newest posts.  This is generally set to 10 posts.  The RSS link links to this page.

Now that might not seem too impressive, but here’s what you do with that page.  You can do two things.  Submitting your RSS to RSS directories will get your sites content out on the web.  Every time you make a new post, your content is then trasnferred to wherever your RSS link is submitted to.  If your link is submitted to 100 directories, then BAM you have your content on 101 websites with one click.  Perhaps you could think of a few things you could do with this.. (adding links to your site)

The second thing you can do is get an RSS Reader.  This is what RSS is most conventionally used for.  When you subscribe to an RSS feed with a reader it gets information from all of your favorite blogs and puts all the latest and newest posts in one spot and on one page.  Having this is very time saving and easy for many people.  Instead of going to each website and looking at their news page, you can just have the news come to your RSS reader page!

That is the basis of RSS.  To get a great RSS Reader check out Google Reader

Permalinks are the format in which your blog posts are organized.  There are several different options you can choose from in your Settings > Permalinks section and you can also have a custom setting.  This is what your dashboard will look like:

As you can see you have a large list of options to choose from.  The default setting is very messy and for purposes of Search Engine Optimization we don’t want it to be that way, as Google likes things that are nice and organized.  The other choices wordpress gives you are not as bad but they leave things a little less organized than our custom structure.

With Category then Post Name this makes everything in your blog very logical and easy to find and follow.  This is the way Google likes to see your permalinks and we suggest that you do this.  Of course if you are not interested in Google you may put them as you wish, but unless you have a very specific reason to have them otherwise, it would be wise to keep them well organized.

There are many options under the Settings Menu in your WordPress Dashboard and I’d like to go over all of them.  We’ll start with General Settings.  Obviously these are the general settings for your blog.  When you click on general settings you will see this screen:

General Settings

Most of the options are pretty self explanatory but I will go over them anyway in case anyone gets confused.

• Blog Title – This will be the main header for your blog and should be a couple words that either brands your site or shortly describes it.
• Tagline – This is the line of text that will appear just under your blogs title.  You can use this in many ways.  It could be a description of your blog if you decided to use the title for branding.
• Wordpress Address (URL) – This is your domain of your blog.  Setting this will make your “Home’ page go to your domain and as well as clicking on your blog title
• Blog Address (URL) – Set this to a different URL if you want your blog homepage to be different from where you installed your WordPress. That is if you want your homepage to be www.example.com instead of www.example.com/blog/
• E-Mail Address - This is used for admin purposes as stated.
• Membership – You can toggle this option if you would like to allow anyone to register on your blog.  Not recommended.
• New User Default Role – This is the default permission that will be granted for registered users.
• Timezone – What time zone are you in?
• Date Format – The format in which you want the dates to appear on your posts.
• Time Format – The format in which you want the time to appear on your posts.
• Week Starts On - The day in which you want the day of the week to start on for your blog.

There you have it!  Simple enough.

Widgets are probably the most awesome thing to come to blogging since… ever.  When you take a look at this site you’ll see to the right hand side some categories.  If you look to the left you’ll see our newsletter optin, our recent posts, our tag cumulus, and our blogroll.  We can add all these in any order or fashion we want, and we can add any other type of column you can think of.  These are out widgets.

Widgets are part of your WordPress blog’s appearance.  Depending on what theme you have there are multiple places you can put your widgets.  Sometimes you will have a theme with 3 different columns, and sometimes you’ll have a theme with only 1.  This is also something to keep in mind when you’re selecting a theme.  Depending on how many widgets you think you will have, you should pick your theme accordingly.

In your WordPress dashboard click on Appearance > Widgets.  You’ll see a screen similar to this:

Widgets Screen

As you can see for this example we have two sidebars.  To add new widgets or remove them, simply highlight them and drag them over to where you want them and they will be added to your site.  You can see why WordPress and widgets are such a great feature to have.  They are so easy to manage and do so much work for you it’s rediculous.

Also you can change the order of your widgets simply by moving them up or down in order.  To edit the options of the widget simply click on the down arrow of the widget and it will list the available prompts you need to fill in.

Widgets Options

That is the basics of what you need to know about widgets!

Organization of your blog is key to having a site that people will want to visit.  Nobody likes to go to a site they think finally has what they want and then they can never find the information they’re looking for, even if it’s on the site.  Using the Categories option in WordPress will greatly increase the organization of your site for your viewers, and for the search engine bots.  They love organization just as much as we do!

Creating new categories is extremely easy.  Here is where you can easily add some categories for your post:

This is located directly to the right of your text box in your Posts > Add New.  Here you can click + Add New Category if you wish to add a new category, or you can select one in which your post already fits into.

Another great feature of this is that you can add new categories under a parent category.  This means it is a category under a category.  This will help your site become super organized.  This is also very easy to do.  Click +Add New Category and type in you New Category Name and select the parent category you’d like it to be under and click ‘Add’.  Simply select that new category and you’re ready to go.

There are many things you can do with a static page and it is a great feature that has been added to WordPress. Having a static home page means having a home page that never changes. This page changes from being the page that has all your most recent posts to being the page that contains your home page message. As an example, our home page at How to Make Blog is a static home page. This works best for us as we can spread our ebook this way. We then created the Latest Updates page to show all of our latest posts.

How do you set a static home page?  It’s very easy.  You’re first going to want to create a new page and title it ‘Home’.  This will be the page that appears when you type in your domain.  On this page you’re going to want to have a introduction to what you’re site is and put anything else here you want your readers to immediately know.

Once you have created this page go into your WordPress dashboard.  Once you’re there look at the ‘Settings’ tab on the left and click on the down arrow to drop the list of options down.  Click on ‘Reading’ and select the ‘Static Page’ option and set it to your ‘Home’ page.

Static Home Page Settings

You now have a static home page!  When you do this you’ll also want to have a place for all your posts to go.  We suggest doing something similar to what we have done and create a Latest Updates page that will host them.

There are literally hundres of WordPress plugins that you can choose to use in your WordPress blog.  A lot of them are extremely useful and I wouldn’t want to blog without, and a lot of them are junk.  Plugins can save so much time for you and can do so many things that you might never thought possible with a blog.  If you are not using them, you should be!  I’d like to give you a list of some of the plugins that I find very helpful.

All In One SEO Pack

This is an absolutely crucial plugin if you are looking to rank your blog in the search engines to generate traffic. It adds a convenient little prompt box just below your text area where you can input the page Title, Description, and Keywords.  This should be standard on all blogs.

Google XML Sitemaps

Again if you are going to generate organic traffic for your blog from search engines you’ll be needing a sitemap to submit to Google, Bing, and Yahoo so they will know when you add new pages and will be able to crawl all of the pages of your site.  Crucial for getting ranked.  It’s very simple to use, just activate the plugin and it will generate a great XML plugin file.

AdSense Manager

If you’re looking to monetize your blog to bring in a little extra cash, this is how you should go about doing it.  You create ad units and put the code into the ad manager and it will create easy input codes to easily, and I mean real easily, input your adsense ad anywhere you want it to.  It also includes this in a widget for easily adding adsense to all your pages.

Google Analytics for Wordpress

This adds the ability to very easily add your google analytics code into your blog without having to edit your theme to put in the code, or having to redo it every time you change themes.

TinyMCE Advanced

This is one of my favorite plugins that I have found for WordPress.  Just like all the rest this one takes WordPress for what it is and makes it ten times better.  This adds a whole slew of options for your posting toolbar.  It adds features such as font size, font family, paragrah, styles, copy and paste, superscript and subscript, table editing, smily faces , and much more.  This plugin for me is a definite must.

That is the end of my list, but don’t let it be the end of yours.  There are hundres to choose from and while the ones I listed are mostly used to create much more efficient usage with wordpress, if that’s a word, but there are many more out there that are lots of fun.  Check out my tag cloud, that’s a pretty cool plugin.

How to Make Blog

What is the difference between a page and a post in your wordpress blog?  Which one do you want for your blog?  The two are very similar but there are a few differences that will help you decide which one is right for you.

Posts appear in reverse chronological order.  The newest posts appear on top of the older posts so all the newest information is at the very front.  If your site is about the newest and latest news then you would most definitely post this type of information in a post.

A page tends to be more of a static (non-changing) informative article.  As you can see on our site we have a home page, latest updates page (which contain our posts), a contact page, and a privacy policy page.  These are put there to be permanent so they can be accessed at all times as they are very important.

So in reality you will not have to choose between the two at all, but put information that you want to always be seen in a page, and put information that will change frequently as you add new updates as posts.

There IS the possiblity that you can create an entire WordPress blog with pages, using parent categories to do this, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

How to Make Blog

A Blog Roll is a list of links that the web owner likes.  These links point to other blogs.  The blogroll is usually included in the blogs sidebar as a widget, which is the standard way to do it.  It is possible to split your blogroll up into categories if you so desire.  One could have their list of blogs related to their blog, then a miscellaneous list of blogs that they just like but are not related to their blog.  The blogroll is based on the bloggers personal preference and it can be changed at any time.

Standard Blogroll Operating Procedure

When a blogger links to your blog it is standard practice to do the same thing back.  You should add a link back to their blog as well.  While this is the standard thing to do it is not always done.  Perhaps one of the bloggers does not like the other bloggers blog and does not want to be associated with it.  That is fine and you should never feel you NEED to link to someone elses blog just because they link to yours, but if you don’t mind their blog or even like it then you should link to it.

Blogroll Benefits

Other than just pleasing the other blogger with a reciprocol link there are a couple of benefits to this.  Every time another site links to your site you get what is called a backlink.  The search engines work like this:  the more powerful and relevent sites that link to your site, the more relevent and valuable your content must be.  This gives you a boost in the search engines and makes your blog stand out more than others.  Also you can get traffic from people clicking on your link from the other persons blog.

How to Make Blog

For a while I wasn’t even aware of this feature, and when I found it I was amazed how well it was organized.  Not only does it do the uploading for you and put it on your server but it gives you a giant range of options on what you can do with the image.  Once uploaded you can resize it to fit into your post and have it open in another window if clicked on.  You can have wordpress center the image or wrap around text or doing anything you like.  Since I know we all like pictures, I’ll how you how it’s done!

Right in your text box there is an Upload/Insert option.  Click on the first symbol next to it called Add an Image.

Insert Image

Once you select your file and upload it you’ll be hit with a huge list of options.  While this can be confusing, take a minute to look at all the options you have.  They all come in handy.

You can add a Title, Caption, Description, Link URL, Alignment, and Size.

The first three are very basic and self descriptive, but what is the Link URL?  This is where people will go if they click on the image.  I put it so when someone clicks on the image they will be taken to the full size image in another window.

Those are the basics of adding an image into wordpress.  Oh yeah, to insert it into your post simply hit “Insert into Post”

How to Make Blog