All About Leatherman Tools

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One of the best ways to get your blog out there is to let people know about it. This can be done by a number of ways, this article is focusing on technorati.com. This website is defined by it’s owners as:

“Technorati is the recognized authority on what’s happening on the World Live Web, right now. The Live Web is the dynamic and always-updating portion of the Web. We search, surface, and organize blogs and the other forms of independent, user-generated content (photos, videos, voting, etc.) increasingly referred to as “citizen media.” “

So what does this actually mean? I don’t know the full extent of it yet, but I do know that you can set up a free account on their site and add your blog to their database of blogs. The objective of course is to ultimately be noticed by the blogging community on technorati.com and get lots of traffic. This is sort of like google.com, but for blogs.

I just finished registering this blog at technorati.com, wow, I’m only ranked 8,911,336, I wonder how long it takes to move up 100,000 (or rather down 100,000)…

Someone suggested that I also register the blog at blogskinny.com which I promptly did only to find out that in order to get verified, I need to put one of their image / track back code snippets which tie back to an affiliate program that pays them! Am I missing something? Is it worth it to register at blogskinny.com and give them free advertising to be included in their search engine?

Note to self: review and study blog search directories, the good, the bad, the ugly.

I don’t know how important tagging is, both in terms of search engine optimization as well as in terms of site usability. All I know is that tagging is another way to provide users with access to information in a classified manner. When writing an article for a blog we have the option of “tagging” the article. The problem is that unlike categories where WordPress gives you a list of categories to choose from, tagging is more of a free style process that gives you granular control of how an article is found on your blog.

This is great and simple enough to use, but if you write a lot of articles on the same topic, then tagging can be a chore. Luckily there’s a great plugin for WordPress that makes tagging less of a chore. You can find it here: Simple Tags. The developer’s website is here: Simple Tags Developer.

Simple Tags offers many options that add value to your articles, in particular, the following are worth mentioning:

1. You can select tags from previously written articles.  This creates a consistent tagging experience for both the writer and the reader.
2. Simple Tags will also suggest tags from Yahoo and the Internet, this is really cool.
3. Simple Tags integrates with the All in One SEO plugin in that certain features are disabled if the All in One SEO plugin is installed.
4. Embedded tagging allows you to write articles and embed tags in the articles, by using the “tagging” element identifiers which are customizable.  This is particularly useful if you’re submitting articles to your blog via e-mail.

There are many more features that we’ll discuss as we develop this blog.

A the end of the day, all of us bloggers are looking for ways to improve our Search Engine standings.  This blogger is no different.  Using the WordPress platform for blogging is teaching me a lot about page relevant page components and their importance in making sure that the search engines can find your site.

The plugins available for this platform, continue to amaze me in their simplicity, both in installation and usage as well as how much they bring to the table in terms of getting our blogs properly indexed out there.  The latest addition to my plugin arsental is the must have All in One SEO Pack.

I downloaded and installed this plugin tonigh and have already easily configured a variety of the options available through this plugin and the options are teriffic.  From home page title, to meta tag descriptions, it all counts in the quest for rankings.  Below is an image of the options page associated with this plugin:

I have to say that installing the sitemap plugin and actually generating a sitemap using the plugin was surprisingly simple.  This particluar plugin offers many options which should be explored individually to make sure that the site is as fine tuned as possible, for now, the sitemap has been created (you can see it here: http://www.skeletoolcx.com/sitemap.xml).

Now what? The next step is to let Google know about the existence of the sitemap and its location.  In the Google webmaster tool section (after you’vie activated the free Google webmaster tool suite for your site), you can let Google know about the site’s sitemap.  Click on the “Sitemaps” tab, enter the URL of the sitemap and submit, that’s it.  Google says it will take several hours for their system to recognize the sitemap that has been submitted, that’s ok, there’s more to be done.

Unfortunately not everything I’m doing is going to be in an orderly fashion.  Setting up a “sitemap” is a multi-step process that is done after the blog is set up.  I have yet to complete the “How to set up a blog” article set but since this is a living breathing diary about setting up a blog, I have to document every step of the way.

A “Sitemap” is defined as by sitemaps.org as:

Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL (when it was last updated, how often it usually changes, and how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site) so that search engines can more intelligently crawl the site.

Wow, this seems pretty important and since I’ve already submitted my site to Google and the “googlebot” is already visiting my site (crawling it) better get this set up ASAP. Luckily since this is a WordPress operation (grin), many plugins (application extensions) are available, including one that automates the “sitemap.xml” file creation process, all I have to do is install it and configure.

The sitemap extension that I have chosen for this site for generating the “sitemap.xml” file is (drum roll):

Google XML Sitemap Generator for Wordpress by arnebrachhold.de

Download the plugin, follow the instructions and it should work.  Probably the most complicated part is to change the permissions per the instructions to allow the plugin to “create / write” the .xml sitemap files.  These are the specific instructions to install and configure this plugin:

1. Upload the full directory into your wp-content/plugins directory
2. Use your favourite FTP program to create two files named sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz and make them writable via CHMOD 666. More information about CHMOD and how to make files writable is available at the [WordPress Codex](http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_File_Permissions) and on [stadtaus.com](http://www.stadtaus.com/en/tutorials/chmod-ftp-file-permissions.php). Making your whole blog directory writable is NOT recommended due to security reasons.
4. Activate the plugin at the plugin administration page
5. Open the plugin configuration page, which is located under Options -> XML-Sitemap and build the sitemap the first time. If you get a permission error, check the file permissions of the newly created files.
6. The plugin will automatically update your sitemap of you publish a post, so theres nothing more to do :)blockquote>