WordPressing » WordPress

Give your Blog Posts the Perfect Finishing Touch

Martin Metzmacher — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 14:43:21 +0000

So you have written a post for your WordPress blog. Congratulations! Now all you need to do is have more viewers read your post. How do you do that? Well, this article is all about giving your WordPress blog posts the perfect finishing touches so that more viewers can read your posts. A lot of traffic will then go to your blog site, and you will become an authority of your niche in the online community.

Reduce the Title Length

After adding the new post, you need to put the title and the body of the article where they belong in the Edit Post page. Have a look at your title. Is it too long? Well, you need to trim it down to seven words or less. There are several reasons why this is important, but one of them is that you don’t want your blog post URL to be too long. Once you’ve done that, check the Permalink under the title box where you inserted your title. Click on edit, and then copy paste your title to the link, and WordPress will automatically supply the dashes. Furthermore, if your title contains words such as ‘and’ or ‘or’, words that Google doesn’t look for because they are too common, you don’t have to include them in the Permalink to make the link even shorter, provided that the title still makes sense by dong so.

More Tag

Now take a look at the body of your article. Remember that in the home page of your blog, your post title is listed along with a few parts of the body. You can define which part of the body is shown in the home page before another link prompts visitors to Read More. You can do this by putting a More tag by clicking on the more tag button at the Edit Post page, in line with other features such as bold and italic. The following is a picture of the more tag button:

Figure 1. The more tag button.

In connection with the more tag button. You can also edit the Read More text which reads “read more” by default. You can customize this to say, “Continue reading article so and so,” for example. You can do this by at the “Read More” Text feature under SEO Details and Additional Style.

Add Tags

Adding Tags to your blog post is very important because it contributes largely to describing your post and allowing it to be found through searching or browsing. You can add tags at the Post Tags section at the Edit Post page. There is a blank space where you can type in specific words, usually subject words, that define the content of your article. For a start, you can use the Suggested tags located at the bottom of the Post tags section. You can click Suggested tags by Yahoo and WordPress will automatically show you Yahoo’s suggestions on what tags you should label your article with. You can then choose some or all of these suggestions by clicking on them and then clicking add in the Post Tags section.

Of course, you can then proceed to typing what you think are the words that best define the content of your article. You can start looking at the title, and see if it contains words or groups of words which you want to add as tags. Then, scan the whole document from top to bottom and look for key words or phrases which you can add as tags. Not only that, you can also use words that are not found in the article. For example, if you are doing a review about a PDF research article online, you can add the words PDF and research as tags, even if these words aren’t found in your article. In addition, it is also a good strategy to add names as tags because people like to search for names. Following our previous example, you can tag the name of the author of the PDF research article you made a review about.

Add Category

Under the Post Tags section in the Edit Post page, you have the Categories section, which contains all the categories that you made for your blog posts. It is very important that you choose the right category for your blog post so that it will not appear lost or out of place in a certain category. Apparently, you should figure out what the main thought of your article is, and this is especially important if your blog is composed of several categories which are sub-niches to the general niche of your blog. For example, if your blog is all about behavioral targeting, you can have categories like behavioral marketing, behavioral advertising, and behavioral targeting. You need to know which category to put your article, but if you’re really not sure, it may be wise to just label it under the category which is the overall niche of your blog.

Add Post Image and Thumbnail Image

A blog post looks so much better if it has a high quality picture in it. Thus, it is very important to have a thumbnail image and a post image for your article. When a visitor views your blog home page, he will be more enticed to read the rest of the article if it is accompanied by a thumbnail image, and reading the article, he will find it more visually interesting at least if it is accompanied by a post image.

To put an image to your post, I suggest that you look for pictures at Flickr. However, be sure to use those pictures under the Creative Commons license. According to creativecommons.org, “Creative Commons is a non-profit that offers an alternative to full copyright.” Indeed it is the surest way of using a picture online without having to worry about copyright issues. To do this, you need to search for pictures in this link: http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/. Once you find the picture that you are looking for, clicking on it will lead you directly to its own page. In this page, there is an ALL SIZES on top of the picture which will take you to the page containing links to all sizes of the picture, from thumbnail to original. For the thumbnail image, click on the thumbnail size button. This will show you the thumbnail version of the picture. Right click on that picture and choose Copy Image URL. Then paste this URL to the Thumbnail Image blank on the Post Image and Thumbnail section of the WordPress Edit Page. Then, type a thumbnail image text at the bottom. This text is usually the title of your blog post, so just copy that. Do the same for the post image, but this time, click on the Small size button in the Flickr page.

Meta Description

Meta Description is very important for your blog post as well. This is usually composed of a phrase or sentence, or two, which summarizes the entire content of your article. This is actually the first couple of lines which appear with your link and blog post title at a Google Search listing. You can write the meta description at the Meta Description box under the SEO Details and Additional Style section.

When writing the meta description, it is very important to include the title of your blog post and some of the tags you chose for the article. This makes your article a lot more relevant to visitors who may have used your tags in Google search to come across a listing which contains your blog post. Furthermore, the meta description should be the short summary of your entire article. This is important because when people read it in the Google listing, they will learn right away what the post is about and will really benefit from the information they get from just a few lines. Then they will think to themselves, “Oh I learned about this from your blog post without even opening it yet.”

Published on date

Finally, you can also edit the date when you want your blog post to appear on your blog. When you have edited several blog posts and are ready to publish them all, you don’t have to publish them all on the same date or immediately. You can choose to Publish some of them a week after and the others the following week, or even publish one article per week at a time, depending on your preferences. You can do this by looking at the upper right portion of the Edit Post page, in the Publish section. Click on Edit, then select a date when you want the post published.

The good thing about this is that your blog will seem to be very busy when it appears to be posting blogs every now and then. Another good thing is that after setting a date, if you check the home page of your blog, you will see on the upper right portion, a very cool feature which lists Next Week’s Topics, which are the titles of the posts which you set to be published next week. This gives you the upper hand on the Google listing for when these future posts will finally appear next week, because some of the tags for those articles already appear in your page at present.

These are the finishing touches you can do for your blog posts in WordPress. Do all of these before hitting the Publish button, and see amazing results! Enjoy!

Translation & Multilanguage WordPress Plugins

Martin Metzmacher — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 16:40:21 +0000

Through the Internet the physical barriers of sharing information have fallen. You can now send an e-mail with one click and in the next second it arrives on the other side of the world. However if the recipient of the e-mail on the other side of the world happens to speak a language that you do not speak, all the speed gained was in vain. Thus it seems that the next battle for free information will not be a political or a technical struggle but will present itself as a sociocultural problem.

It is an economical advantage if information only exists in one language, because then the members who speak the language can get into action faster. If we really want to do more democratic information sharing, we have to address the problem of representing multilanguage version of website in the Internet. The tools listed here will help you accomplish the task.

The 9 Best Translation And Multi-language Plugins

xLanguage

Eager to present your blog in different languages? Just download this plugin and see its magic. The plugin also allows the visitors to choose their preferred language easily and that’s what makes it popular with a wider range of audience!

The plugin does not interfere with the WordPress database. It provides you with the freedom to customize the options and even hide the posts that are written in foreign languages. The amazing plugin provides different themes for different languages and enables crawling of text from all languages under a single URL.

A full featured plugin to totally customize your WordPress blog for global needs.

Download xLanguage WordPress Plugin

ZdMultiLang

The plugin that is a favorite amongst all, allows you to blog in loads of languages, so forget about the language barrier, once and for all. It translates categories, posts, pages and tags and at the same time switches blog languages with its intelligent features.

One of the most know plugins for more than one language translation.

Download ZdMultiLang WordPress Plugin

Global Translator

No language barricades!

Had problems in translating your blogs in the past? Forget about this exasperation now. Global Translator allows you to translate your bog into 41 different languages! How about that? But it solely depends on your search engine as to how many translation languages it allows you to choose. But still, it is quiet embraced and popular these days.

The plug makes use of permalinks and is arrayed with smart caching system. That not only boosts the traffic for your blog but also gives you the independence to choose between different layouts without even facing the problem of their database being altered. So users can ensure 100% satisfaction level. The plugin is assembled with four different translation engines: Babel Fish, Google Translation Engine, Promt, FreeTranslations.

If you don’t have Global Translator, you are missing out on valuable traffic.

Download Global Translator WordPress Plugin

Codestyling Localization

The plugin (for blogs and websites) allows the users to manage and edit ‘gettext’ translation files directly out of their WordPress Admin Center. The USP of this plugin is its automatic detection of gettext ready components for its users.

Managing language file is a kid’s play with this plugin.

Download Codestyling WordPress Plugin

Kish Translate

This prominent plugin is a perfect translation plugin that is quiet popular with its users. It not only translates your blog post to 20 International languages but also takes care of the links, images and other entities in the most apt manner. At the same time, the plugin gives you the freedom to adjust the height, color, etc of the widget in your own way. One can easily set the life of a page, after which it will automatically get refreshed.

The most wanted plugin opening the doors for a fast language translation process.

Download Kish Translate WordPress Plugin

ICanLocalize Translator

It is a multi-lingual plugin that allows running multi-lingual WordPress websites and at the same time gives its users the independence to keep a fine check on the contents of different languages. That is the sole reason for its popularity level.

The plugin is dressed with some of the blazing features like automatic translations and updates. It also makes use of different domains or directories within the same domain. The best thing with this plugin is that the ‘updates in translations’ automatically follows after an ‘update in the content’ structure. So it is a complete solution altogether!

The flexibility to check the contents of different languages anytime is what gives it a rank in the most wanted list.

Download ICanLocalize Translator WordPress Plugin

Google Translator

This ablaze plugin is added in the sidebar and allows the readers to change the existing language into the language of their choice. The USP of this plugin is that it supports base language as well as multi language with brilliance. It is due to all these reasons that the plugin is quiet celebrated and accepted in the WordPress community.

Especially convenient for translating long i18n.property files for different languages.

Download Google Translator WordPress Plugin

Indoeuropean Translator Widget

This multi-purpose plugin offers a widget that further provides various translation links in your sidebars.

It makes use of the native language name and also offers apt XML lang definitions. The plugin saves a lot of time as you can easily customize it according to your preference level. With this plugin around, users don’t need to worry about losing their page rank as it also offers apt XML lang definitions. Last, but definitely not the least, it displays valid XHTML code.

Celebrated and popular as well.

Download Indoeuropean Translator Widget WordPress Plugin

ICanLocalize Comment Translator

This plugin, along with its partner plugin ICanLocalize Translator Plugin, acts as a perfect combination for your blog. Both make quiet a popular pair. It not only stores the contents in the translated language blog but also converts the received comments into desired language. The duo of these two plugins works brilliantly for websites. Readers, sometimes tend to leave comments in their own language, but with this plugin, you can easily translate them in your language. And when you will reply back in your language, the readers will be able to understand your comments into their own language. You need to install “ICanLocalize Comment Translator” in the translated-language blog, and ICanLocalize Translator in the original language blog. Then the duo will work together in a distinguished manner.

The fully automated translation mechanism is the key feature of the plugin.

Download ICanLocalize Comment Translator WordPress Plugin

I love WordPress!

Martin Metzmacher — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 14:51:57 +0000

I love WordPress because it is so simple and can power a lot of different sites: normal websites, blogs, social sites and even web shops. It started out as a blogging system, but has developed into a more comprehensive system that can handle a lot of different sites. If you are not overly concerned about user rights management and you like and fast and easy workflow, you will soon become a fan of WordPress. I surely am! On this page I show that it is very easy to create a professional website using WordPress CMS. I will offer advice on installation, themes and plugins. Actually this blog is created out of an egocentric movement: often times I find myself doing the same things again and again, whereas it would have been easier just to write a list the first-time. This is why you will see many (10) lists. On top of this I hope that this will be an educational resource for the people that I work with. Using these easy principles and step by step instructions you will get your content management handled very efficiently.