Dave Naffziger's Blog

I spent most of last week at Pubcon. While I was mostly speaking with people about problems they’ve had with trademark abuse, I also walked away with several valuable blog-related tips:

• Import your RSS feed into Facebook as Notes
  While my RSS readers dwarf my Facebook friends, the additional visibility can’t hurt.

• Use SEO Title Tag. I’d made SEO friendly changes to my titles before, but the control this plugin gives you is very impressive. For example, I wrote the SEO unfriendly (but humorous to me at least) post title “I can has Elvii” and used the plugin to make the title tag “Running the 2007 Las Vegas Marathon as Elvis”

• List Related Posts. This helps drive increased pageviews per visit (mine went up by 11%) and increases your single-post to single-post links. I installed the WASABI Related Posts plugin, and then added this code to my index.php:
  

  < ?php if(function_exists('related_posts') && (is_single())) { ?>
    <h4 class="relposts">Related Posts</h4>
    <ul class="relposts">
    < ?php related_posts(); ?>
  </ul>
  < ?php } ?>
  

• Reduce Duplicate content . You want single post pages, not archive pages appearing in Google:
  • Write summaries for each post and display those summaries on your category and archive pages instead of the full text of each post. or
  • Noindex your archive and paged pages (maybe category and tag also). Joost deValk’s Meta Robots plugin provides functionality to address this.

• Disable your archive links . Make sure your page has a crawl path (category and tags). Noindexed pages retain pagerank. You don’t want to pass pagerank to noindexed pages. I chose to
  • Also consider nofollowing your category and tags links. I chose to nofollow category and archive links on my single post pages, while retaining follow on other pages. Joost’s plugin addresses these issues as well. One note, you need to update your theme to use the WordPress template tags wp_list_categories and wp_get_archives and not the deprecated list_cats, wp_list_cats or get_archives.

There was certainly a lot more related content, but these were a few tips that triggered me to make changes to my blog.