Three Sticks — Personal Development for Christians

I know that it’s been 2 days since I’ve written any articles, and that I said in my post, Changes to Postings, that I wanted to post everyday regardless of whether or not I published an article that day. However, I can explain. I’ve been applying some SEO (Search Engine Optimization) techniques for the site. I will soon write an article about the techniques and tools I’ve used to make this site popular, but I was hoping to make it popular first and then publish the article. So you may have to wait a little for that one. I jumped on the SEO train when Marios Alexandrou, the host at Search Grit, got back to me in my request for his free blog SEO review. He had these five SEO suggestions:

1. Pages titles should start with the post title rather than your blog title and URL. I believe there’s a plugin that can help you with this.

2. The H1 and H2 tags are used around text other than the post title. There should be only one H1 tag on a page and it should be around the post title.

3. There’s a bunch of commented HTML code. You should remove this.

4. I would go with snippets for the home page and category pages. This’ll ensure that the actual post pages aren’t considered duplicate content.

5. Your category pages could use a strong title than Archive for XXXX Category. Consider including a keyword rich introductory paragraph for the category too.

To implement his recommendations, I had to find a plugin that worked well with the Simple Tagging Plugin, which I use for tag links, meta keywords and presenting related articles for each post. I tried a few, but their were some conflicts between Simple Tagging and many others that I tried. I also discovered that my Wordpress theme did not include the <?php wp_head(); ?> template tag in the head section of header.php. It took me a little more than an hour to realize that small little fact. I would recommend that any Wordpress newbie compare their theme to the default theme anytime their having a problem with a plugin.

I eventually chose the Head Meta Description Plugin. The challenge of course if that it appears that it hasn’t been updated since March 2006, so I’m concerned about it being supported on future versions of Wordpress, but that’s true with just about any open source / free tool. I read some of the comments some as recent as 1 week ago and some people had a problem making it work with their installation of Wordpress 2.1. I think they wanted meta keywords as well as the meta description. If you simply need meta description added for each post then the Head Meta Description works very well.

However, the seemingly more active community, development and support of Another Wordpress Meta Plugin gives me a greater since of comfort as it relates to updates and support of future releases of Wordpress. As a result I have decided to go with Another Wordpress Meta Plugin. In my setup, the Simple Tagging Plugin is responsible for tags and related posts and Another WordPress Meta Plugin is responsible for displaying the meta keywords and meta description tags. In an ideal world the two project would merge. I am a little concerned about compatibility, I have found that in order to make this work, I have to enter the tags in the tag field of a post which is provided by the Simple Tagging Plugin and then the keywords from Another Wordpress Meta Plugin will automatically fill out the keyword field with the tags that I entered. I’m just a little concerned by the possibility of future conflicts. We shall see.

In addition to implementing the recommendations from Marios, I also decided to implement tags for each of the post. The Simple Tagging Plugin is providing this functionality.

Now that the site has gone through another fairly major tweaking effort. I’ll be spending most of my time on writing articles and submitting them for inclusion in various blog carnivals, planets etc.

Trackback URL for this post.