Blogging « GotChance

Improve Your Wordpress Search Functionality – Why ?And How ?

December 18th, 2008 8 Comments »

Before jumping in to tell you how to improve your Wordpress blog’s search functionality, let me first tell you why you need to do it. If you do a google search for "wordpress search functionality", you’ll find a lot of blogs complaining about it. I knew long back that Wordpress’s poor functionality was poor. But, I didn’t realize how poor it was until I experienced it recently.

Recently, I made a post here on "Saving Drafts". For that post I had to link to one of Darren Rowse’s old post, which he wrote pretending to be his 1 year old son. I knew that he had mentioned about saving drafts, in that post. Also, I vaguely remembered the post title. So I headed over to his blog and searched for "things you know about my dad problogger". Keep in mind that the post’s actual title was "5 Things You Should Know about My Dad the ProBlogger". So, where would you expect the result to be ? The first result ? No.. The first page ? No.. It was the 3rd result on the second page. That is the 12th result.

Now, to experiment, I searched for the exact post title now : "5 Things You Should Know about My Dad the ProBlogger". This time, the result was promoted from 12th position to 9th position. Wow.. What a great improvement ! Kudos to Wordpress. Sorry guys, I don’t mean to insult Wordpress or its developers. But, being the #1 Blogging software, Wordpress should really consider having a good search functionality.

I really wish the Wordpress works on their search functionality. But, till then, there are some ways to enhance your blog’s search functionality :

Search Unleashed – A Wordpress plugin that extends the inbuilt search functionality. Check out the plugin page for more info.
Search Everything – Again a plugin that includes pages, comments, tags and more in your search results.
Google Search Engine – Who can beat Google when it comes to searching ? Adding a Google powered search to your blog is the best solution. Check out : Plugin / Manual Implementation Tutorial.
Sphider – For those who don’t know, Sphider is a search engine that is powered by PHP and MySQL. You can install Sphider on your server that indexes your blog. Trust me, its really good. The only thing is that this runs on your own server and Google CSE runs on Google’s server. Tutorial Link.

Do you know any other method or plugin to enhance Wordpress’s search functionality ? Share with us in the comments.

Which Permalink Structure To Choose ? What the Pros say…

December 13th, 2008 27 Comments »

Permalink is a portmanteau made from permanent link. Wikipedia defines it as "a URL that points to a specific blog or forum entry after it has passed from the front page to the archives." Wordpress offers you different types of permalinks to choose from like :

/year/month/date/post-name/
/post-name/
?p=post-number
/archives/post-number/

Also, you can create your own permalink structures too. Of all these, the first two mentioned above are the most widely used. Permalinks are one of the easily over-looked aspects when building a blog. They are important because, they are permanent links to your posts. You can’t change their structure later without losing your backlinks. Of course, you can set up 301 redirects. But, its beyond the knowledge of most bloggers.

Now coming back to the topic, which permalink structure to choose ? It comes down to the personal preference of the blogger. But, one must think twice before choosing, as it cannot be easily changed later. Almost 90% of the bloggers go for a permalink that has the post title in the URL. So, that has become a standard. But, a variety of opinion exists in whether to have the date in the URL or not. My personal choice is that I’d like to know when a post was made just by looking at the URL. I asked a few popular bloggers out there which structure they prefer. Check out their answers below :

Michael Martin uses /category/post-name/

Out of the two, I would probably go for /post-name/ now. (Simply because the long date isn’t necessary, and makes the URL look too complicated).

I’m using /category/post-name/ because when I set up the structure, I was thinking of categories as folders for the posts. One post went into one folder. It made sense, and showed the hierarchy of the site (domain/category/post).

If I was starting all over again though, I definitely wouldn’t be using /category/post-name/. The categories I set up originally were far too rigid, so I ended up with the majority of the posts being in 2 or 3 categories just. And now I don’t use categories at all because of that.

Garry Conn uses /post-name.php

I use the post-name.php for my permalink on my WordPress blogs. The reason I do that compared to /post-name/ is because a post is actually a file and not a sub directory on a server. I feel like it provides a very good balance in how I structure folders and files on my server (even though these are dynamic and don’t physically exist). Google and other search engines when they crawl my pages, they don’t know that my site is dynamic. They just see logical filing system I have created for my site.

Kevin Muldoon uses /yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/

If I am using WordPress for a static website then I tend to use /post-name/ as the site will not have any more than 50 posts. However, for blogs which I update frequently I usually use /yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/. Although /post-name/ may be slightly better from an SEO point of view, there is a chance you will start duplication post titles after a while (certainly after 1,000 posts). Also, I prefer to include the date in the post URL so that it is clear to readers when the article was posted.

Aibek uses /tag/post-name/

I think it depends on the type of blog. If it’s a news site, I’d go with /yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/. If it’s reviews/tips or anything that doesn’t really depend on time too much I’d go with 2nd one

Michael Castilla

I prefer to use /post-name/ as it’s simple, easy to remember, and cleaner. /yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/ is too complicated and has all the unnecessary junk!

Daniel Scocco uses /post-name/

/post-name/. Because it is shorter.

Now that you’ve read what they say, what is your personal choice of permalink structure ? Which one do you use now ? And, if you were starting over again, which one will you go for ? Share your opinions in the comments.

Saving Drafts – A Way To Remain Motivated

December 11th, 2008 12 Comments »

I’ve read that the Problogger Darren Rowse has a folder called "posts in progress", which is filled with text files of half finished posts. In the past, I never followed the practice and thought it wasn’t just worth it. But, after I started using Windows Live Writer, I started saving a lot (really, a lot) of drafts. Sometimes a new idea for a post comes to my mind when browsing some site, chatting with friends, writing another post, eating snacks and even during the middle of a sleep. Whenever it does, I just open my Windows Live Writer and jot down my ideas into a post and press the "Save Draft" button. As its the case with Darren, some of these are just the post titles. Others have few points that need to be expanded.

The result ? I now have a large list of ideas for posts in the coming weeks. Just that I’ve to spend some time in expanding each into an actual post. :) But, that doesn’t take as much time as it takes to think an idea for a new post.

Also, whenever I open my Windows Live Writer (it happens often), this list of drafts stand right in front of my eyes. So, I’m tempted to open them, motivated to write them. The serve as my goals. And also provide some real motivation. After all, that is what all bloggers need. So, if you are not already drafting, start doing from today. :)

PS : Even when writing this post, an idea to write a post about "Left align or Right align Images for Blog Posts". So, I’ve saved a draft for that. You can expect it sometime soon.

Taste Wordpress 2.7, Get Used To It

December 10th, 2008 25 Comments »

The entire blogosphere is talking about Wordpress 2.7. Every day I see one blog or the other posting about Wordpress 2.7. Now, today its release candidate 2 has been released. The total hype is about the very much redesigned Dashboard. With the vertical navigation, dashboard widgets etc. it is going to be notably different from the current versions. It does take some time to get used to it.

Most of you will not be upgrading your blog until the stable version is released. (yeah, me too). You don’t want to be stranded when you upgrade. So, it is nice to try it out before hand. Now that all Wordpress.com blogs have been upgraded, you can try it out for free over there. Thats what I’m doing now. Getting used to WP 2.7. What about you ? Have you already tried WP 2.7 ?

Comment Consistently For Loyal Readers

December 9th, 2008 31 Comments »

Commenting on other related blogs is one of the best methods of driving traffic to your blog. Not to mention, it also brings some link juice if the host blog has Do Follow enabled, or has the Top Commentators plugin installed. But getting traffic from commenting is something uncertain. For example, blogs like John Chow and Problogger get over 100 comments on every post. So, it is very unlikely that a visitor will go through all the comments. And even if one does, it is even more unlikely that he will click through to your blog, unless you have something extremely nice to say.

But there is some other secret in commenting, that can bring you loyal readers and not just lurkers. The secret is to comment on fairly new blogs in your niche instead of on the big boys. When you do this, you’ll be one among a few who comment on that blog. So, this grabs the special attention of the blog owner and with interesting content on your blog, you can easily turn them into loyal readers at about 80% conversion ( :P hehe, my rough estimate).

The catch here is what I mean by fairly new blogs. When implementing this strategy, you do have to ask yourselves a few questions:

Is the blog that you are targeting, in the same niche ? Will the blog owner will be interested in your content ?
Content is king. Is your blog content good enough to convert our curious visitors into loyal readers ?
On the other end, are there too many commentators ? Too many subscribers ? Any chance your comment may go unnoticed ?
Is the blog owner paying attention to comments ? Is he responding to them ?
Do a little research about the blog owner ? Is he just blogging as a hobby ? Or, will he have time to check out your blog ?

Now, Where Do I Find Such Blogs ?

Now, the real question is where to find such blogs ? My first advice here, is to check out the list of competitors for Blogging Idol 2. There are many good, not-so-popular blogs in the list. You can catch up some friends there.

The other option is to go for the hunt on the bigger blogs’ comments section. For example, if you go through the comments section of John Chow’s blog, you’ll find a lot of new blogs in the same "make money online" niche. You can find some good friends there.

And I am saying all these with proof. Recently here, George Manty from Can I Make Big Money Online, used to comment on many posts. By comments, I mean comments that add value to the original post. Not just "Oh ! thats a great post" comments. Now I am an RSS Reader of his blog. And similar is the case with Flyer. I’m an RSS Reader of his blog and we even chatted. So, can I call you my friend, Flyer ?

This strategy gets you not just loyal readers. But may also lead to friendship, link exchanges, partnerships, Who knows.

Now, you can have your say in the comments. Have you tried something like this ? Or have you began to follow any blog because the blog owner used to add interaction to your blog ?