Analogies are like your history professor…

…They can get long winded and boring. Getting relevant ads from any automated ad provider service starts with your writing style. Do you sculpt your posts or pages with heavy analogies? If you do, you might be your own worst enemy. The analogy, while very useful in getting a human to understand your context, is essentially a site crawler’s nightmare. It has no clue that your post is about your actual topic and instead notices a large amount of time spent on the topic that is your analogy. If you are going to try and use analogies to get your point across, do it quickly and concisely.

Google’s Section Targeting

You can also get Google’s AdSense crawlers to take note of or ignore specific content by wrapping it with the following tags:
To use this content:
[html]
Your content here

[/html]

To ignore this content:
[html]
Your content here

[/html]

Some hints on using this, tell AdSense to ignore your comments (some of those can be quite off topic), related posts (these can carry titles that don’t relate to your content), and possibly your sidebar if you have aggregated content from twitter or other social networks. More can be found about Section Targeting over at the AdSense Help Documentation

Update: I failed to link a plug-in that will help you out with adding these tags for WordPress called Auto Google Ad Section

Make inserting ads easier

Tired of coping and pasting that AdSense JavaScript section into your posts? I was too. Go download the AdSense Manager plug-in for WordPress. After you have it properly configured all you need to add into your post is an identifying bit of text that looks like:
[text][ad-1][/text]
The plug-in makes an identifying text string in the [ and ], then wherever you post it, it replaces that string with your AdSense code. Remember though, only 3 ad impressions are allowed per page with Google AdSense, so don’t go overboard.

Image Ads vs. Text Ads

This debate could go on forever, there are plenty of people who say that image ads get more clicks and text ads have higher payouts. I don’t know for sure, but what I do know is that so much of that depends on your target audience. Geared at teenagers? They will probably be attracted to image based ads that are moving. Inline text ads that match the design scheme of your blog might work for other groups of visitors. The truth is, you have to find that exact match for your visitors so make sure you use your Google Analytics to keep track of clicks and traffic.

Hopefully those few things will help you integrate AdSense into your WordPress site quicker and with less agony of configuration. I know it made my life much easier.

Finding the 404s

Most hosting providers will give you some sort of coarse statistics, but they don’t typically cover 404′s. To find this, we must manually look at the logs to get a better sense of the traffic seeing these unsightly errors. For this section, I’m working with a Linux based hosting environment in which I have SSH access.

Locate your log files
Mine happen to be in a folder named logs of my root hosting account. Your’s may be somewhere else but we need to get into that folder via a command line.

cd html/stats/logs

Locate lines in the logs with 404s
Once in this log files folder we’re going to use the Linux command ‘grep’ to search all files for the string ’404′.

grep 404 *.*

You will now see a large printout that contains many lines of stuff that looks like the following:

html/stats/logs/ex20100727000001-97.74.24.35.log:208.115.111.249 – - [26/Jul/2010:22:43:16 -0700] “GET www.chriskdesigns.com/2009/04/08/death-of-a-medium/ HTTP/1.1″ 404 16804 “-” “Mozilla/5.0 (com
patible; DotBot/1.1; http://www.dotnetdotcom.org/, crawler@dotnetdotcom.org)”

That’s a request to your site that ended in a 404 – File Not found. The important parts are:
The URL the person tried to visit

www.chriskdesigns.com/2009/04/08/death-of-a-medium/

The HTTP Request version and the result (a 404 here)

HTTP/1.1″ 404

So now I know that this page is missing…was I aware of this before? If you have been to my site before you might recognize this as a valid post called ‘Death of a Medium‘. So why the 404? I had changed my Permalink structure at one point in time. If someone links to your previous Permalink Structure, after you change it will result in a 404. This is why I suggest setting your Permalink structure upon setup, and not changing. I learned my lesson the hard way.

Why is it good to know these 404′s? If you have change anything about your Permalinks, spelling in a title after it’s published, or a tag/category has been removed, you can use your 404 errors to see where the problems are and possibly correct them with a .htaccess redirect.

The Solution

So now we know how to see our 404 errors, but how do we correct them? If you are using an Apache based web server, you can use a .htaccess file to redirect people accordingly. Here are a few common .htaccess redirects that I find useful for WordPress users.

Redirect from domain.com/blog to just domain.com

rewriterule ^previous-folder-name(.*)$ “http\:\/\/your-domain-here\/$1″ [R=301,L]

Modified a Post/Page Title (note: only pertains to what is after domain.com/

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /.*mispelled-url-without-domain.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)helicoper(.*)$ /$1correctly-spelled-url-without=domain$2 [R=301,L]

Monetize
Something else you can do with your 404 page is monetize it. I know, sounds a little odd but it’s becoming more common in this world of backlinks. If you blog on a specific topic or a series of topics, you can setup an Amazon Associates Store and paste that code into the 404.php file of your theme. This will allow you to possibly make some money from those missed pages, and hopefully keep your visitors engaged in your site.

Humor
One of my favorite use of the 404 is humor. Here’s an article that someone wrote, listing their favorite 100 examples of humor used in a 404 page.

WordPress Comments Checker – Install Comments Checker
I hate getting emails that I have new comments. Just seems annoying. I also hate missing a comment left by someone looking for support on the Updated Today Plugin. Yeah, it’s a contradiction, I get that. Well, this plugin solves the issues. You give it a blog URL and a refresh interval, and It’ll notify you of comments. Downfall is, it only works for 1 WordPress install.

Diggio Web Highlighter and Bookmark – Install Diggio
This great extension allows you to highlight test on a site, and find it quickly at a later time. Have a great quote in a huge document you found? Perfect, just highlight it, and a little tooltip will say “Highlight”. Now, when you go back to this page later, you’ll have this highlight already available to find. Also, this can sync with the Diggio website, so by using your Google login credentials, you’ll be able to see a list of all your highlights in one spot. Great for finding that long lost bit of information you know you read somewhere.

After the Deadline – Install After the Deadline
Browsers these days all have built in spell check. I know that we all don’t care that much about our spelling, but it’s nice to have a post go out with no errors…every once and a while. Well, After the Deadline is a pretty full featured spell check and grammar check. The authors go as far as to say it’s “An intelligent spell, style, and grammar checker.” My favorite feature is that it will prompt you prior to submitting a post, or any form data for that matter, when errors are found. If you are ok with the “errors” just click OK, and your post is on the way, or you can cancel and go back and fix the problems.

Categories

WordPress includes Categories and Tags, which you can think of a type of folder system for your posts. When you file your documents away, you typically do so in a format that makes it easier to find things later. To ease this you try and keep as few folders as possible, while still allowing there to be an even break down. It might look something like the following:

This would be a pretty typical folder structure. Now within that folder you will have files. These files are what WordPress would consider Posts. Having a well defined category list is like having a good filing system, when someone wants to find something they will have a very good idea where to look. Since your product is your writing, making it easy to find will help increase your visitors.

A great way to build a good subset of categories is to, before you do a large number of posts, head on over to the ‘Categories’  option of the Posts menu of the WordPress administration area. From here you can create your primary categories and create subcategories (like folders within folders) to better narrow down your content placement.

Tags

So what are these tags I mentioned in the title? Tags are a great way to get users to explore your site. While a post should only have one category assigned to it, you should apply as many tags as are relevant (within reason of course). Tags allow WordPress to create a ‘Related Posts’ section on some themes. This will put a list of posts, with the same tags as the currently viewed article, that contain the same tags. These posts may not have the same category assigned, but their tag can link them together. Sound confusing? Let me break it down a little:

Let’s say you are a food blogger (very common recently). You have 3 categories of Recipes, How-To, and Restaurants. You just wrote a post about a local Italian restaurant that had an excellent wine selection. You also just wrote another post about how to pair wine with your food. In this case, one of these will be under ‘Restaurants’ and the other under ‘How-To’ but wouldn’t these be somewhat related to wine? That’s right, tag it with ‘Wine’. Now, visitors can see your restaurant review, find your tags, click on the ‘Wine’ tag and see all posts (no matter what the category) related to wine. It’s a broader view of your content than just Categories. You’ll see this often used on my blog and how it will help visitors explore your content further.

Essentially Tags are ‘meta’ data. Meta is data about data. Redundant as it may seem, you are used to this. It’s the same as your artist, song, genre, album and other tags for your music. The tags help define, in a short method, the content of your post. To achieve the related posts section of my pages, I use the WordPress Related Posts plugin.

I hope that will shed some light on the difference between Categories and Tags.

For some good reading over at WordPress.com about Categories vs. Tags, follow the link.

So you’ve got an idea and you are going to start a blog. You’ve dug through the different blog platforms and landed upon WordPress. Once you either get your WordPress.com blog running, or you have installed WordPress on your server, you will no doubt be ready to start typing away. That’s great! Before you start publishing your award winning content there may be a few things you will want to take a look at to get your WordPress site looking like it’s a step above the rest.

Setup your user profile
By default a WordPress installation uses the name ‘admin’ and that crazy password that get’s emailed to the address you provided. If you don’t change this, all of our future posts will be attributed to ‘admin’. Once you get logged in with that password, you will want to go to the ‘Users’ menu from the left bar in your Dashboard and select ‘Your Profile’. Here you can change your username to start.

Using ‘admin’ can be a security danger as well since it’s the default username and will no doubt be what people attempting to gain access to your site will try. The next section that I recommend you customize is the ‘Nickname’ field. Yeah I know it’s required, but what you type here can be used in the next section of ‘Display name publicly as’ can use your nickname. This is what will show when you publish a post.

Past this change, I only recommend 2 more alterations on this settings page. The ‘Biographical info’ and update the password so you don’t have to remember that crazy one. The Biographical info will be used on some themes that include this at the bottom of a blog post written by you. A note on the password, keep it secure. A combination of case sensitive letters, numbers, and at least one special character (the ones above the numbers) should be sufficient as long as it’s no shorter than 8 characters long.

Define your categories
Your categories are what is used to help a visitor filter out what they would like to read about. Using descriptive and relevant categories will help not only your visitor but you as well. In my opinion it’s best to keep posts attributed to only a single category.

To help you keep your categories list minimal and clean, before you even write your first post, create a list of 3-5 categories that you will likely be writing about. Remember, you aren’t limiting yourself because you can add categories later. By adding some categories now, you won’t get caught making a huge list of categories without realizing it. It’s easy to do this if you add new categories with every new post. If you want to somehow relate posts, use ‘Tags’ instead. Categories are defined within the ‘Posts’ menu in the Dashboard.

Determine your Permalink Structure
We have all been to a blog that, when visiting a page, the address bar looked something like http://somedomain.com/?p=34. Not only is this not descriptive, but it’s not user friendly, and not SEO friendly.

I prefer to use WordPress’ built in ‘Day and Name’ or ‘Month and Name’ however some people will use the ‘Custom Structure’ and only use the post name as the structure. This is all fine and well, but my reason for including the date in the permalink structure is for usability. If someone finds my posts via search, I would prefer they know when the post was published before visiting and since the search will show this URL, the will know if this content may possibly not be relevant anymore. You can update this by going to the ‘Settings’ menu and choosing ‘Permalinks’.

So these tips should help you get your site configured the way you want it from the start. These are not only important to help your viewers but it’s important to do this before the search engines start crawling your site. I hope these help and good luck with your new WordPress site!