It takes a little bit more finesse to search engine optimize (SEO) your WordPress blog compared to a regular website. But fortunately, the web being a particularly wonderful place, there are answers out there to make it a less painful and inexpensive experience.

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So, let’s say you have a website and a blog. You want to advertise your blog on your website. It’s easy enough to add a link to your blog on your website, but that’s amateur stuff. You can do better. Why not add your RSS feed for your blog on your website so that a list of your current posts (and links to them) appear on your website’s sidebar (or elsewhere).

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I have a wonderful SEO person whose taught me and continues to teach me all sorts of wonderful things about search engine optimization for my blogs and me websites. Last week while we were discussing a client’s website redesign project (on which we’re collaborating), she told me about “The Way Back Machine“. Have you heard of this? Here’s a summary from the about page of Archive.org:

“The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that was founded to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format. Founded in 1996 and located in the Presidio of San Francisco, the Archive has been receiving data donations from Alexa Internet and others. In late 1999, the organization started to grow to include more well-rounded collections. Now the Internet Archive includes texts, audio, moving images, and software as well as archived web pages in our collections.”

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So, if you’re looking for yet another way to increase web traffic to your blog, try going through your personal My Yahoo! and personalized Google pages to get your blogs indexed better on both Yahoo and Google search engines. How? Well, add your blog’s RSS feed to your personalized Google page and your My Yahoo! page. Below are step by step instructions on how to use your personalized Google and My Yahoo pages to potentially bring more web traffic to your blogs in a very simple way.

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When I first began this blog, I suffered the same conundrum many beginning business bloggers suffered: How much is too much information? I didn’t want to give away so much info that the services my business offers can be of no use to them. It’s not as dire as giving away trade secrets, but blogging about WordPress design, content, tools, plugins, etc. sometimes means teaching readers how to, when to, and the where to of what I do, on some level. But, does it mean my readers can go out, install, develop, design, update, maintain, and fix bugs in their blogs after they read my posts? Not really. I don’t give away trade secrets, sure (not that much is “secret” in these days on the information superhighway). But, most importantly I’ve learned and I am still learning that what I know is one thing, what I and my business can do is another. Other business bloggers should know this too.
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So I was working on a client’s blog recently and was having the most frustrating time trying to embed video onto the site. I recall also having the same trouble on my Film Tops blog. I went to WordPress’s Plugins page and low and behold, I found a solution with a simple plugin.

EasyTube is a WordPress plugin that allows you to embed a YouTube or Google Video in your blog post without WordPress assigning p tags where they don’t belong making your published posts and those below them screwy looking. Anyway, the cool thing about EasyTube is that the code you have to put in your post is soooooo simple: or http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=:URL, that’s it! “URL” should be replaced with the actual URL where the YouTube or Google Video is found. You can also assign width and height: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=:URL Fabulous, ain’t it!

I decided to start a new post series called “Cool Tools for Your Blog”. Here’s the first out of many posts of cool tools for your blog:

Buttonmaker : With this buttonmaker, you can create your own antipixel buttons.

Local Biz Blogs : LocalBizBlogs is an easy way to connect with customers and build your business’s reputation on the web, even if you already have a website.

OneSite : OneSite is the leading provider of online community and social media solutions.

BlogHoster : BlogHoster is a PHP-based software product which allows you to provide a blog hosting service on your website. The blog hosting that you give your users with BlogHoster is comparable to popular third-party blog hosting services blogger and wordpress.com.

20 Analytics Tools For Blogs : A list of great analytics tools mostly blog specific.

Found this cool new WordPress plugin I think many bloggers may find useful especially for those who have blogs posts that have geographical significance. PostMapper.com hopes to be the biggest, baddest blog post mashup. PostMapper is a geographically orientated blog post directory. It’s part API, and part Mashup, and they even have a WordPress plugin that does all the work, save writing the post & entering an address. Allow bloggers to geocode their posts, and mash them up on a central post map. All travel blogs, photo blogs, and any blog with posts that concern locations can come together in one place. Check out the WordPress PostMapper plugin. If anyone uses this plugin, please let me know what you think.