On your Business Page, under the logo, click Edit page.  On the left of the screen, select Applications.  You will now see the Static FBML application listed.  Click “Go to Application”.  This will take you to a simple page that has a Box Title and FBML box.

The Box Title is the name of the tab (“Welcome, Menu, Shop” or whatever you want).  In the FBML box you can use HTML or FBML.  For the work I’ve done with this application, I just used HTML. When you are done, click Save Changes and your tab should now be on your Business Page.

Note: You must be an Administrator of your Business Page to use this feature.
You can only use this application once for each Business Page.

Here is a helpful link: Click Here

Plug-ins are what I call enhancements to WordPress. They are like extra tools to make your site better, custom and SEO friendly.  Only two plugins come with a standard installation and even these plugins can be removed if you don’t want or need them.  Plugins are completely up to you. In this blog entry I’m going to discuss the four “must have” plugins.

The first plugin I recommend is Askimet. This plugin comes standard with every WordPress installation. Askimet works to block spam comments on your blog. Activating this tool is pretty straight forward. In the plugins section, click Activate under Askimet. Then go HERE for your key (this does require you to signup).  Keys for Personal Blogs are free and non-personal keys are between $5-$15 per year. After submitting basic information for your type of blog an email is sent to you with the key.  Back in WordPress there will be a red box at the top t of the page asking for the key. Enter the information and you’re done. Your blog is now protected from spam comments.

The rest of the plugins I’m going to refer to do not come pre-installed on WordPress. You must find them and install them manually. Don’t worry this process is easier than it sounds.  There are two options for installing plugins.

1.       In the WordPress plugin page, there is a search for additional plugins box. Type in the name of the plugin you want, click search and select install on the plugin you were looking for.

2.       Outside of the WordPress admin console, locate and download the plugin you want. Then FTP the unzipped files to yoursite.com/web/content/wp-theme/plugins. Login to the WordPress Admin Console, navigate to the Plugins page and there is your plugin.

The Social Networking plugin that I recommend installing is AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button. This plugin adds a button to your blog posts that allows readers to share the posts on multiple Social Networking sites (like, twitter, facebook, etc) It’s a great way to let users help you get your blog noticed.

There are two SEO plugins that I would suggest to every blog user; Meta SEO and Google Sitemap Generator. Meta SEO helps you manage and add meta tags to your blog posts. After activating this plugin you’ll notice a new category in the left navigation of the WordPress Admin Console “Meta SEO”. This is where you manage your tags. To add tags to posts, either add a new post or edit an existing post. Scroll down beneath the content area of the post and you’ll see new features called Meta Keywords, Meta Tags, and Meta Descriptions, which is where specific post SEO information goes.

The other plugin, Google Sitemap Generator, does just that; it appends new posts information to an existing sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.zip file. Before this plugin is activated, you need to create a blank sitemap.xml and a blank sitemap.xml.zip files to upload to your site. Place these files here: yoursite.com/web/content/. Activate the plugin and submit this xml file to Google Webmaster tools.

I have recommended four basic and very helpful plugins that every WordPress site should have; Askimet, AddToAny: Share/Bookmark/Email Button, Meta SEO, and Google Sitemap Generator. Although there are thousands of plugin out there, from my experience these four are the foundation to improving your blog.

Do you use any plugins similar to these? What are your core plugins?

Related posts: Search Engine Optimization Starter Tools, How to manage a blog – tutorial

Search Engine Optimization also known as SEO; sounds scary but there is nothing to be afraid of.  All SEO is a process of optimizing your content for search engines.  Keywords, organization, and linking all support the improvement of SEO. There are many ways to use SEO, but this topic requires its own blog post(s).

So, what does SEO have to do with writing a blog post?  Everything!  Every blog post requires a title but before you just type in a title, stop and think about it.  Having a blog title made up of common, everyday words will make the blog harder to find on search engines.  For example, if you’re looking for a blog about arranging wedding roses, you wouldn’t search for “arrange flowers”.  Instead you’d type in “Arrange wedding roses” which will produce more accurate results.  The second title specifies the type of flower and the type of arrangement. These are keywords.  Having keywords in the will help place the blog higher than blog posts without keywords in the title.

Now that we have keywords in the blog title, let’s cover the use of categories.  Blog categories were once explained to me as drawers in a file cabinet.  Each blog needs to be filed away and there are only so many drawers, so each drawer needs to cover a general topic.  The above simile uses the drawers as categories and the file cabinet is a website.  The main points to take away from the example is each blog needs to be assigned to a general category, there should be a limited number of categories, and categories help organize your posts.  So if you have a category labeled “Fitness” and I find one blog in this category I can easily navigate to the Fitness category to view the rest of the Fitness blogs.

Tags are a place to enter keywords that deal with the topic of the blog.  We can think of Tags as the folders in the file cabinet drawers.  These would be keywords that are (or wouldn’t fit) in the title.  Back to my Fitness Category; if I wanted to see more specifically blogs about Running, a tag would take me to that “file” with all Fitness blogs that deal with Running. When thinking of tags, it’s suggested to have a handful (or two) and reuse as the tags over and over again.  Having too many tags can overwhelm end users. How do you enter a tag? Most blogging sites follow this format: health,medical center,technology.  Where a comma separates the words and spaces are only allowed between phrases, like “medical center”.

Now that we’ve gone over how to organize your blogs, the next step forward is end-user interaction.  This section will cover comments, trackbacks, social networking, and RSS feeds.

Each blogger has their own opinion about enabling comments on blogs.  The purpose of comments is to allow readers to share knowledge, ask questions, and give their “two-cents” on the topic.  You might even get comments from readers requesting more blogs about the topic at hand. Without comments, it’s just your opinion/view out there.  No discussion, no feedback. Not having reader’s comments makes for a pretty lonely blog out there on the web.   Now, I do want to mention briefly that having comments enabled on your blog not only leaves the door open for readers to interact with the blog, it also can lead to some spam.  There are tools available to help alleviate spam and some bloggers just turn off comments on old blog posts.

Every now and again, you may write an excellent blog that completely inspires someone.  This end-user would like to write more than a comment; that’s where trackbacks come into use.  Trackbacks are a way of telling another blogger that you have found their post useful, and have made a post of your own which continues the discussion. This feature must be enabled on your blog site and enabled on the other person’s blog site to work.  When a reader uses a trackback that was set on your site, you will receive notification.  Now you can see what they wrote and post your comments.  You can look at trackbacks as a way to “link” common blog posts together and generate more conversation.

With the explosion of Social Networking websites, it is an excellent SEO strategy to use plugins on your blog site that enable readers to easily place a link to your blog on their social networking site (facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc.)  This is the electronic “word of mouth” advertising that every successful blog uses.  Using this feature as a plugin, takes little time to setup and can be one of the best features on your blog.

Living in the hustle and bustle of everyday life, Many people don’t always have time to sit down to go through all the of the blog sites they want to.  This is where RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds come to the rescue.

Every blog should have an RSS feed URL.  This allows potential subscribers to use an RSS Reader, which requires this URL.  A RSS reader aggregates all of the end user’s favorite blogs and RSS feeds into one central location; allowing the user to simply check the RSS reader to view the latest updates from their selected blogs and RSS feeds.  A RSS reader can be a stand-alone desktop application like NewsGator or many homepages like Google allow you to add widgets that will serve as an RSS reader.

*** Suggested Tip: Use Google’s Feedbuner to publicize your RSS feed.  The advantage of Feedburner is it allows you to change where your blog is hosted without changing the RSS feed URL that viewers have subscribed to. Subscribers that are linked to RSS feed’s that are run through Feedburner won’t even notice that your blog location has changed which prevents loosing subscribers.  If you move your blog without Feedburner, then users will have to re-subscribe to your RSS feed which can lead to loosing subscribers.  For more information on what feedburner can do check out their help section.

In conclusion, successful blogs harness Search Engine Optimization which leads to more readers.  Keeping your blog organized and encouraging viewers to interact with your blog are the fundamental steps to building something great. There have been many steps covered here and I hope every topic gives you a better understanding on how each part builds to the next part.

Do you have any experience with blogging? If you have, what has helped you? If you haven’t, did this article help get you started?

1.      Robots.txt is a simple text file that helps manage search engine crawlers indexing your site and what to crawl or not to crawl.  Search engine spiders are programmed to look for this file.  The suggested location for the robots.txt in the same directory as your index file; generally the root directory.

Having your entire site crawled is not always necessary.  Keeping crawlers away from unfinished pages benefits the site by preventing unfinished work displaying in search engines.  Other areas of a site that isn’t necessary to index would be the following: directories with thank you or error pages, files that contain sensitive data (but not sensitive enough to password protect), and doorway pages.  Setting up a robots.txt is a convenient and easy way to improve your website ranking and protect your site from being labeled as a “spam” site.

How to write robots.txt: http://www.outfront.net/tutorials_02/adv_tech/robots.htm

2.      Sitemap.xml is a file that allows crawlers to index your site on a more advanced level.  This XML file “draws a map” of your site enabling search engine spiders to help accurately rank sites and perform more accurate searches.  Creating a sitemap.xml file can be done multiple ways.  There are free sitemap.xml generators for smaller sites and Google Webmaster Tools can generate maps for larger sites.  Once the file is created it is recommended to make an entry in the robots.txt file that informs spiders where the sitemap.xml file is located.

Robots.txt file:
Sitemap: http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

Free Sitemap.xml generator: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

3.      Google Analytics is a free tool that has multiple uses.  One feature is seeing which keywords are actually creating user traffic. This will allow you (or your marketing team) to improve keyword optimization.  The better keywords you have the more web traffic you’ll have, which in the retail world can lead to more sales.  Another feature is viewing which pages are getting the most traffic, which pages are creating high revenue, and which pages have a high bounce rate.  Knowing page traffic will tell you where you should place important information and which pages need to be reworked.  The last feature I’ll be talking about is who are your website visitors?  Google Analytics will track new and returning visitors, geography location and referral sources.  Understanding the geography of your visitors allows you to make smarter web decisions.  For example, you wouldn’t sell snowmobile parts if your biggest audience is located in the Southern United States.

Google Analytics Tools: http://ezinearticles.com/?5-Benefits-Of-Google-Analytics-In-A-Search-Engine-Optimization-Campaign&id=925838

4.      Google Webmaster Tools is a free tool that ties all the previous information together.  From submitting your sitemap.xml, analyzing the robot.txt file, and improving your Inbound Linking Quality Score; why wouldn’t you want this tool in your toolbox of tricks?  Instead of waiting for a Google to find your site, you can submit information to Google.  Submitting information also gives you feed back of any errors and status updates with sitemap.xml and robots.txt files.

Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools can be integrated.  When you setup Google Analytics you can submit this information to Google Webmaster Tools, putting more information in one spot.

Google’s ranking algorithm uses Inbound Linking Quality Score, which can be improved with relevant keywords in anchor texts.  Google Webmaster Tools gives you the ability to see your Quality Score and analysis needed to improve this score.  The benefits and features of Google Webmaster Tools are endless.  So why wouldn’t you use this free and easy to setup tool?

Google Webmaster Tools: http://ask.enquiro.com/2008/why-you-should-use-google-webmaster-tools/

So there you have it.  Four easy and free tools to help you get started with your SEO adventure.  There are many SEO options, some are free some are not.  Finding what works best for you depends on your goal, target audience and resources that you’re willing to use.

Problem for SEO is it really scews up the formatting and positioning of the tags.

First get the data there.

If you’re not overly concerned about formatting of the title tag, in the content page:

What is happening is the meta tags are being added to the first line in the head tag (below the title tag). Think of it like a stack, that is why it is being done in reverse order in which you would think.

If you want to do a little more work to remove the spacing and line breaks from the title tag you need to take this approach.

In the Master page remove the runat=”server” from the head tag. Now you can create literal tags for each desired tag in the <head> tag.

Now in your content page you can access these literal controls by:

The first approach is quicker to do and still allows you to put a default title in it. You may not want to set the title and meta tags for each page.

The second approach requires that you set the title and meta tags on every page if you want them. I suppose you could use a contentplaceholder for many of the pages which is quicker than doing it in the code-behind for pages that you don’t need the tags to be dynamic.

My SEO guy is finally happy that I came up with a solution for this.  I hope this helps you get an SEO guy off your back.