Welcome back to Our Love Affair with WordPress. In last month’s Episode 3, we customized the Harmony WordPress theme for a fictitious bra-fitting business. In this final Episode of Part 4, before we move on to Part 5 in the series, I’ll cover how you can add a little finesse, searchability and optimization to your weblog once you have the blog design, layout and basic elements down. The following are a few enhancements to your WordPress blog (or blog-powered website) that will make your blog more dynamic, optimized and user-friendly.

Usability, User-Friendliness: Keep your site visitors happy:

Feed Me: RSS Feed Subsription : : Strangely enough, I’ve seen some blogs that have no RSS feed links for their blog readers to subscribe to their blog feeds. That’s crazy! You should offer your site visitors a way to subscribe to your blog through RSS using their preferred feed reader (mine is Bloglines) and through email. The easiest and most popular way to set your blog subscription options up is to get a Feedburner.com account. If you notice on our sidebar and top navigation here at The WordPress PAD, if you hover over the RSS link you see that our rss feed url is http://feeds.feedburner.com/thewordpresspad. Doing this not only enables us to get the code to place a “subscribe by email” option in addition to the standard subsribe with RSS feed, among a lot of other cool services (like optimizing your RSS feed), you can track all your subscriptions through your Feedburner account. So, what are you waiting for, go get your Feedburner account now…if you haven’t already.

Tag, Your It: Tags, Tagging : : The newest version of WordPress 2.3 has a built in tagging system so that you can not only categorize your posts using standard categories but also index them using tags. For those new to blogging or new to blogging with WordPress, a tag is basically a linked keyword that you ad to each post so that when your post is published your readers can click on an interested keyword, let’s say “rss”, and all posts with that tag will come up. Usually these tags are important keywords that appear in your post that you think worthy of mentioning but are not necessary meant to be an entire category. I wouldn’t consider RSS a category but of course I will and have mentioned it many times on this blog that’s why I tag it. Anyway, make use of the new tagging system (taxonomy) by adding tags to your posts and perhaps adding a tag cloud on your sidebar of all the tags on your blog. With WordPress’s template tag “wp_tag_cloud” you can set parameters of your tag cloud so that you can exclude certain tags, display the more important ones with bigger fonts, limit the number of actual tags in the cloud, and more. Check out TVTops to see an example of a fabulous tag cloud.

Give Your Posts Some Air: Popular Posts and Related Posts : : Because a blog is ultimately an archive in one sense and a news center in another sense, old news (old posts) can be forgotten and unappreciated especially the good stuff. Give your best articles, your most popular ones some air with a Popular Posts plugin. In addition, give pasts posts in general some air with Related Posts plugins. Related Posts plugins create a list of posts (at the bottom of the current post or a sidebar as a widget, wherever) that have subjects related to the current posts. Usually these Related Posts plugins use your tags to decide what posts are common.

Socialize: Social Bookmarking : : Use something like Add This social bookmarklet that allows your blog readers to quickly bookmark and share your posts or your entire blog. Visit WordPress for more plugins.

Share and share alike: Email This and Print This: : I love these two plugins. Email this allows you to let your site readers email a post to themselves or others. Print This allows you to print a printer-friendly version of a post. It also writes out the URLs of the links on the post at the bottom in a tidy list. Fab!

BackUps, SEO and Sitemaps:

Back that thing up: WordPress Database Backups : : Like a regular website it’s a good thing to back up your files daily. Unlike a regular website, it’s not a good thing to loose your blog articles because of some annoying database, server or other unforeseen web error. It’s one thing to try and recreate a website’s layouts, reinstall software, and so forth. But, try rewriting all the posts you’ve ever written. Unless you’ve got photographic memory, you’re plum out of luck. I use the wp_db_backup plugin but there are other choices as well. You can also just backup your database through your phpMyAdmin on your web host account.

Pick me! Pick me! : Search Engine Optimization (SEO) : : There are many ways you can and should search engine optimize your blog. And there are many WordPress plugins that help you optimize your blog for search engines and your readers to find. But, I use two and would recommend them both. All-in-one SEO Pack and SEO WordPress. The All-In-One SEO pack enables you to search engine optimize every single post and page on your website with unique meta tags for your page titles, descriptions and keywords. The SEO WordPress plugin creates a robots.txt file to get rid of duplicate content (which search engines hate) and make your blog more spider friendly. This may sound like gibberish, but it isn’t. Basically, this plugin tells those little spider monkeys ( search engine robots or spiders) that crawl websites to index them where not to go and what not to do so the most important pages get indexed and the most important links are followed. Anyway, visit the SEO WordPress website for more details.

Mapping out: Google and other Sitemaps : : Adding a sitemap to your blog is helpful for two reasons, SEO and user friendliness. If your navigation system is simple and well designed and doesn’t block indexing anyway, it’s not really necessary, but it is helpful for search engines. But, if you have a more complicated site it’s very helpful for both search engines and your blog readers to find the content their looking for. Check out the WP plugin for generating a Google Sitemap or other WordPress plugins for creating a blog sitemap. I like Dagon Design’s WordPress site map generator plugin.

In general, what you want to do to enhance your blog readers blog reading experience is make it simple for them to find information. You also want to make it simple for search engines to find information too. But, never let SEO interfere with good blog content and good blog design.

See you next time on Our Love Affair With WordPress.