I wrote earlier about a search engine optimisation (SEO) service I had started using (and which I am still using) called Scribe.  Well the people behind Scribe have now produced >> a rather good report on SEO which you can get here.

The report, as you would expect from the bloke who set up the Copyblogger site, is very well and clearly written.  It explains how SEO works, what the search engines are looking for, and why it is important.

The last part discusses (of course) the SEO optimisation software Scribe.  The software has moved on since I bought it when it was first launched.  They are now re-launching it and there is a new special offer.  You can read about it in the report, and it is worth thinking about if you write a lot on blogs and web-sites.  I use Scribe all the time now, and have found that my visitor numbers have risen as a result.

However it is entirely up to you.  But do read the report as it is free and you will find it very helpful.  You can >> get it by clicking here (affiliate links).

Wordpress navigation

I like to be able to move around my blog easily.  And for a long time I have been really annoyed by the fact that there were no ‘next post’ or ‘previous post’ links at the bottom of my blog posts.

This is present on many sites automatically, but not on mine.  I use the Headway theme, which in many respects very good.  However, when I asked a question about this on their forum, I did not get much help (their forum help is not all it is cracked up to be).  So it was left to me to go rummaging around to see what I could find.

Searches in the plugin’s directory brought forth a few which looked promising, but none of them did what I wanted.  I liked the WP-PageNavi plugin though, so decided to keep that one (and added it to my other blogs). But how to get the previous/next post links? Time to visit the Word Press Codex.

The WP Codex is a great site which has lots and lots of technical information about using, hacking, repairing, doing anything really with a wordpress site. I am slightly hampered of course by not being a developer and not having had any training in php. However I managed to find a page (which you will find here) which gave me some code to make the links.

But where do you put them? On the files. Happily, if you need to do this yourself,  you do not have to download and upload files via ftp or (in my case) cpanel, as you can get at them via your WP administration area. In the appearance section there is a link to a page called Editor. There you will find pages with all that puzzling code. Take a look at the index on the right. The one you want is called Single Post (single.php).

Get the page up and put this code in a suitable place (you may need to mess around a bit):

<?php previous_post('&laquo; &laquo; %', '', 'yes'); ?>
| <?php next_post('% &raquo; &raquo; ', '', 'yes'); ?>

Yes I know it looks peculiar, but you don’t have to understand it, just copy and paste it.  Then go to your page and refresh.  Voila!  You can see it right at the bottom of this page (assuming you are looking at the post page).

“But”  hear you say “there is only one link”.  Thats because you are looking at the most recent post.  There is only one link – your last post.  Go back a few posts and you will see them both.  But yes, that worried me too for a while.

Needless to say I then went off to put in the links on all my other blogs.  I had a bit of a problem however with my Lodger Landlord blog, as that uses the most recent version of Headway.  The one with the visual editor.

The Headway visual editor, I have found, is brilliant, until it suddenly stops working, and you can’t get it going again (and the Headway forum are no help).  Not only, I have found, can you no longer edit much of the appearance of your blog, you also can’t edit single.php.  Because it ain’t there.

So the Lodger Landlord does not have the previous post/next post links.  But all the others do, and I am dead chuffed that I have managed to do a bit of coding all on my own (with a bit of help from the Codex of course).  But even so, I don’t think I’ll give up the day job yet …

Have you had a go at anything like this?  How did you get on?

If a picture paints a thousand words, you will want to keep them in your excerpts!

An excerpt, in case you did not know, is a reduced version of a post which goes below the initial post on the home page. So you get one post in full and then a lot of excepts. Shortened versions with a link to take you to the posts own ‘page’.

Excepts are good for several reasons:

• They help your SEO. Apparently Google does not like repeated content, so if your posts are in full both on the home page and on their own page, you will be penalised
• It makes it easier for people to scroll down and find what they are looking for.  This is particuarly useful if you tend to write long posts
• It encourages people to visit the post ‘page’.  As this is where the comments box is they are then more likley to post a comment

Headway, the theme I use, creates excerpts automatically, which is nice.  If you don’t use a theme such as Headway though, you may need to find a plugin which will make the excerpts for you.  I had this problem with my Green Blogging blog, and I found and now use Excerpt Editor there.

By defualt, WordPress strips out all the code in excerpts and just presents the text.  However, this is a bit boring, and also annoying if you have gone to some trouble to find the right pictures.

Excerpt Editor kept my images in my Green Blogging blog, but the Headway service did not.  I was particularly keen to keep the pictures in my Lodger Landlord blog.  The pictures in many cases define the post, and would be useful for people scanning the list of excerpts looking for a particular post.  But how to do it?  Time to look for another plugin.

I found one eventually.  There are several that I suspect would do the job, but the one I used (and am using here at the time of writing) is Thumbnail for Excerpts.  I chose this one as I liked the fact that it said it would make my life easier!

And it works.  As you can see.  Bingo!  The only problem that if you do not have an image on the post, it show a rather ugly holding white image.  This is not a problem with the Lodger Landlord site where I have always had one image per post, but it means I cannot use it on my Landlord Law Blog.  This was set up about 4 years ago and for at least a year and a half at the start there are no images at all.  But that is not a problem really as I have a lot of other images scattered around to make the site look nice.

I have had to put in quite a few images on this blog though.

What do you think?  Do you use excepts on your blog? Do you think keeping the pictures is a good idea?  What plugins do you use?

Update: during this past week (October 2010) I have upgraded this blog to Headway version 166.  For some reason that I don’t understand the Thumbnail for Excerpts plugin stopped working.  The Headway forum told me that thumbnails are now part of WP version 3, and indeed a closer look at the edit post page found a thumbnails section at the bottom right.

This works differently from the plugin and I have to allocate a picture to each post to be its thumbnail.  After which I have to delete the picture from the post text box or it appears twice.  So I am currently going back through the blog allocating a thumbnail for each post.  Its a bit time consuming but its nice to see some of the old posts again.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation (in case you didn’t know).  Bloggers, as well as having to write readable copy, are also supposed to optimise it for the search engines.  Personally I have never really bothered that much with SEO, trying instead to write interesting articles of the sort which hopefully the search engines would want to promote.  But  not any more!

One of the advantages of following various ‘big bloggers’ (see my post here) is that you get information about new services that are being launched.  Recently I received an email telling me about a new service from copyblogger Brian Clarke.  Its called Scribe.

Scribe is a wordpress plugin (affiliate link), which analyses your blog post, via a content optimization service which you are able to access via an ‘API key’ you get when you sign up. As a user it is like magic.

You type your post.  Then you fill in the SEO information boxes you have at the bottom of your post if you are using the Thesis or Headway themes, or if you have the free All in One SEO plugin (you have to have one of these or you can’t use Scribe). Then you click the analyse button, which appears in the Scribe box at the top right of your screen once you have done this.

The Scribe system then digests your content, and thinks about it (presumably connecting with the Scribe service) while a little spinning circle spins. Then up pops a box telling you what percentage SEO success you will have and what you need to do to improve it.

As you will realise from this post, I have invested in Scribe. I have a number of blogs, and as my business depends to a large degree on the internet, it is important that I am visible. Also, there is an ‘early bird’ offer from Scribe if you sign up before 19 February.

Hopefully my posts will now become a lot more visible on the internet. We shall see.

Note – I have just analysed this post and it has scored 99%!

To get exposure for your blog, it is really important nowadays to promote it via social media.  One of the best ways of doing this is to get other people to promote it for you!  You do this by giving them handy little buttons and links.  My theme, the Headway theme provides social media buttons to go in the sidebar, but it is also nice to have some links for people to click when they finish reading your post.

When my web designer did my Landlord Law Blog for me, she sourced the add to any button which has links to practically every social media site you could possibly think of.  However after a while I started to get annoyed at the way it kept popping up and getting in my way when I was using the site.  Then I read about Nicholas Cardot’s plugin – Nicholas writes a very good blog called Site Sketch 101 and you can read about his plugin here.

I did try his plugin for a while, but it did not suit the style of my sites, so I decided to go looking for a few more.  One recommended by a Site Sketch 101 reader was the sexybookmarks plugin, and I am using this (at the time of writing) for my Landlord Law Blog.

However there are others.  One that I quite like is I love social bookmarking, and this is the one I am using here  (at the time of writing this – I may change it later).  The social media buttons appear if you hover hour mouse over the text at the end of the post.  You can customise how they appear and the buttons that show.

So far as twitter is concerned (very important for promoting blog posts), many sites have the little green tweetmeme buttons at the top of their posts.  I had this too for a while.  However after reading the Site Sketch  15 best wordpress plugins post I decided to start using backtype tweetcount.  This has two advantages (1) readers do not have to authorise the program to access their twitter account and (2) you can change the colour of the box to match your site style.  I have made it orange on the Landlord Law blog and the ‘house blue’ colour here.

Have you used any of these?  Which do you prefer?  Can you click one of them please before you go on your way!!

I love favicons.  They are those tiny little icons that sit in the address bar next to the website url/web address.  I think they look really cool, and differentiate (for me) sites where attention is paid to detail from all the others.

Apart from  aesthetic values, I think it is very important to have a good favicon.  Why?  Because it helps develop your brand:

• With many browsers (such as Internet Explorer and Firefox) the favicons appear in the tabs, so you can more easily locate sites with recognisable favicons
• They also appear next to the links on booksmarks (including online books marks)
• Apparently links with recognisable favicons get clicked more often

Creating a favicon

A favicon is 16 pixels wide so its design has to be simple to stand out.  Complex logos don’t work.  There are sites where you can upload an image (such as your regular logo) and it will turn it into a favicon for you.  However these  often turn out blurry.  I think the best favicon creation sites are those which allow you to adapt the image, or to create one from scratch.

The site I used to create the S favicon for this site was www.favicon.cc.  This gives you a palette with the 16 x 16 canvas and a colour generator to paint with (see the picture above).

It took quite a bit of messing around to get the S favicon.  I initially made the whole square dark blue.  Colours have numbers when you are creating them on the web, and the number for the dark blue surround I use is #171D86.  White is #ffffff.  I then did quite a few different combinations of the letters SOLB or SOB or SB, none of which really  worked.  I finally put a white border just inside the square and put in the one S which looked much better.

I also created a suitcase favicon for my Lodger Landlord site – it is more of a gladstone bag look than the ‘proper’ case logo, but I think it looks quite nice.  It seems to stand out quite nicely too.

Putting them on your site

If you use the Headway theme, as I do, you can add it to the Headway Configuration page (load the favicon up to the media library and then use the link you will find there).  However I prefer the MaxBlogPress Favicon plugin.

Its a bit of a faff, as its not one you can upload from the wordpress plugins page. You have to download the file from the MaxBlogPress Favicon plugin page, and then upload the php file (no, I don’t really know what that means either) directly to the server. It goes in the wp-content/plugins folder. You can do this by fpt, or I use the file manager facility provided by my ISP Ecowebhosting.  Then, after you have activated it, you need to tell it where to find the favicon to display, in the special admin area. NB If you find it stops your site showing, go to the advanced options section and click the other radio button.

You have to register with MaxBlogPress which means you get put on the mailing list, but its worth it as it is a superior plugin. I like it because you get the icon on the bookmark for the admin area as well as for the site itself, which helps me (as I have quite a few blogs now, and I put them all in the same bookmarks section).

So there you are.  If you want to read more about favicons online, see the post on Blogussion here, and the links that they give.

What do you think about favicons? Have you ever noticed them? If you decide to add a favicon to your site as a result of this post, please let me know how you got on!

I’ve found another great plugin, although its got a bit of a silly name, and a soppy heart logo.  Its called ‘comment luv’ (I said it was silly), and what it does is give a link back to the most recent post on your blog commentators blogs.  I learned about it from the Blogussion site here.

“Why should I do that?”, Old School Lawyer might say. “If someone comes to my blog I want to keep them there, not send them off looking at someone else’s blog”

Well, there are a number of reasons:

• People are more likley to comment if they are going to get a plug for their own blog, and blogs with lots of comments are more interesting
• Its nice to find out a bit more about the people who are reading your blog
• If you use the comment luv plugin, you can register your blog on the comment luv web site, which may get you more visitors
• It is a nice ‘thank you’ thing to do
• He that giveth (so the social media theory goes) shall receiveth

Well thats the idea anyway.  But as someone who is interested in what other people are saying, I think its great to get a link back to their blog.

What do you think?

You can read more about the comment luv plugin here,  or if you have a WordPress blog, do a new plugin search on comment luv.

Did you know that there are plugins you can get for WordPress blogs so people can indicate that they ‘like’ your blog post?  Yes, as in the ‘like’ feature on facebook.

I started thinking yesterday that it would be a nice thing to do and went looking, and lo!  There they were!

I found three:

1. WP Likes by Aakash Bapna
2. I like this by “LeBen” Burgener (who seems to be French), and
3. Visitor like/dislike by Plugin Taylor

There were a few others that looked like possibles but they did not seem to work (or maybe it was me not doing it right).

I have installed all three (and then uninstalled two) and given them a go.  The WP likes is the most sophisticaed one, and this is the one I have used here and on my Landlord Law blog.  In its original state it is a bit big and black, but I ameliorated this by changing the colour to our standard blue and making it a bit shorter.  I think it looks pretty cool.  There is a rather neat little hand icon too.

The WP likes plugin would not work on my eco blog (www.greenblogging.co.uk) so I used the french one, which perhaps appropriately, has a little heart.  Its rather sweet but I would not want to use it for a legal blog.

The third one rather scarily allows people to say that they *don’t* like your blog as well as say that they do like it.  However it was not as attractive as the other two, so I decided to give it a miss (nothing to do with not wanting to know about people hating the blog of course…).

So there you are.  What do you think of them? Will you use them on your blog now? Do you like this post?  (If so please click below).

One of the fun things about using WordPress for your blog, is all the plugins that you can use.  I have just found and installed the cumulus tag plugin.

I first spotted this on Technolama (a legal technology blog) where I thought it looked pretty cool.  Having found it by chance this evening, flicking through the popular plugins list, I have installed it here, and given it the SOB site colours (I have them written down so I can cut and paste as necessary).

What do you think?  Does it make the site look more interesting? Or does it give you a headache!