About Sherry Dedman

Google Search Improvements Make SEO For WordPress Even Easier

January 12, 2012 By Sherry Dedman Leave a Comment

Fresh content is easy with WordPress

Google’s recent changes to improve the quality of search results include several changes that illustrate why SEO for WordPress is so easy! One of the things search engines want, in a big way, is fresh content. Easy to do with WordPress, right? Just blog it!

These are the items that illustrate why sites that use WordPress have an advantage over straight HTML web sites:

FROM GOOGLE:

“Fresher and more complete blog search results: We made a change to our blog search index to get coverage that is both fresher and more comprehensive.

“Image result freshness: We made a change to how we determine image freshness for news queries. This will help us find the freshest images more often.”

So you can see that if you have blogging capability, which is so easy with WordPress, and blog regularly, you are going to have a distinct advantage over static sites that just sit there displaying the same content month in and month out. Add images to your posts and you have an even better chance!

So thank you, Google, for making SEO For WordPress even easier. Now stop reading and go write a blog post! But leave me a comment first.

-Sherry
Blog Solace – WordPress Help

Filed Under: Blog, Why WordPress Rocks for SEO

How To Create Descriptive Permalinks for SEO with WordPress

December 13, 2011 By Sherry Dedman 2 Comments

What Search Engines Want

Descriptive URLs (Permalinks)

A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is just a web address, i.e. http://blogsolace.com. In WordPress and other CMS/blogging applications, this is also called a permalink.

Why Search Engines Want This Info

Helps Describe Content

One of the things search engines use to determine the relevancy of your web site is your URL. URL SEO is easy with WordPress. As long as you have things set up correctly, creating descriptive permalinks with WordPress is something you almost never have to think about.

Where They Look
For It

Address bar of the web browser

URL In Browser

How To Give It To Them With WordPress

Adjust Permalinks Settings

This is easily done via the WordPress dashboard. See below for illustrated, step-by-step instructions on how to do this easy, but important, step!

HOW TO CREATE DESCRIPTIVE URLs WITH WORDPRESS

Set permalinks to /%postname%/

1. Go to “Settings”
2. Click on “Permalinks”

3. Click on “Custom” and type /%postname%/
4. Click on “Save Changes”

Write descriptive titles to achieve descriptive URLs

– Go to “Posts”
– Click on “Add New”

1. Type your post title in the the title field (screen shot with arrow)
2. Click on the “body” portion of the write post page
3. Within moments, a descriptive URL will appear

– If you wish to edit the URL to be slightly different than it was rendered by WordPress, click the small “edit” button near the rendered URL under the title

– Change it to your desired URL (must be lower case, have no spaces, and have a dash between each word)
– Click “OK”

– Create your post as you normally would, and click “Publish”

Your post will now be published with a DESCRIPTIVE SEO URL.

This also works for pages, and you can also go in and edit the URLs of previously published posts with this same technique.

Filed Under: Easy SEO For WordPress

My Recommended WordPress Plugins

August 21, 2011 By Sherry Dedman Leave a Comment

These are the plugins I usually start with when developing a new WordPress site. If it’s a static site with no blogging involved, some of these don’t apply. But more often than not, these are the “staples” in my WordPress cupboard, so to speack!

COMMENTS
- Akismet (anti-spam – loads with WordPress Installation)
- Block Spam by Math (basically a math “Captcha” system)
- Subscribe to Comments

SOCIAL
- Tweet, Like and Share, GooglePlus1 (this is an all-in-one plugin, not 3 plugins)
- Facebook Like Thumbnail (Let’s you set a default thumbnail that will be displayed when people “Like” your post/page/site)
- Sociable (adds a wide variety of share buttons to the end of each of your blog posts – highly configurable)
- Twitter Tools (if blogging – A few tools to connect your blog to Twitter, mainly used to automatically “Tweet” to your followers that a new blog post has been made)

IF BLOGGING:
- FD Feedburner plugin (Redirects your blog’s RSS feed URL to your Feedburner URL)
- YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – Lists additional posts related to the post you just published)

SEO:
- All In One SEO Pack (makes automatic optimizations to your posts based on your settings – also allows for individual optimization of posts)
- Google Analyticator (adds the Google Analyticator code to your site and allows you to optimize its settings from within your WordPress Dashboard)
- Google Sitemap Generator (creates an xml sitemap for your site and automatically updates it and pings Google each time you add a new post or make a change)
- Headspace2 (if blogging, to customize the “read more…” text – also has a wide variety of SEO tools similar to ‘All In One SEO’)
- Robots Meta (Let’s you keep very tight control over what does and does not get indexed, followed and archived by the search engines – also includes “verbose explanations” to help you make smart decisions)

MAINTENANCE:
- WP DB-Backup (for easy manual and automated database backups of your WordPress database)

Filed Under: Blog, WordPress plugins

Easy Blog Help for WordPress

August 8, 2011 By Sherry Dedman Leave a Comment

Welcome to the re-launch of EasyBlogHelp.com! I started this site a few years back as mostly a community-driven site, and it didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped. So I am re-launching it as an article/blog site with how-to’s on things you can do with WordPress!

The how-to’s will definitely include tips and tricks, nifty plug-ins, etc. But there will also be how-to’s on troubleshooting and learning out how to maintain and troubleshoot your own blog issues and keep it in good health!

There is not much here yet, but look for new articles a few times a week, increasing to daily after my son goes back to school in September.

If you have any ideas for things you’d like to see here, please leave a comment or contact me personally! Be sure to sign up for RSS by Email to get new articles delivered right to your inbox!

~Sherry – Easy Blog Help!

Filed Under: Blog