In this post I’m going to show you some really basic steps that I use on my sites, and can help you improve a lot the search engine optimization for your WordPress website. As for that, you will set up two sitemaps: One for robots and one for visitors… both for indexation but in different ways. You may be wondering, “But why two sitemaps”? Well… One is a XML sitemap, for automatic indexation by search engine robots and the other one is a WordPress page, so that visitors can get to know and check the various parts of your site, and it also allows to improve the inner links on your site. This doesn’t hurt your indexation at all, as it only refers to organized pages, without duplicating your content.

Setting up the XML Sitemap:

For this purpose, I use the XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress plugin. This plugin generates a XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog, and allows automatic notification to Ask.com, Google, YAHOO and MSN Search, upon content modification. It is translated in many languages, has a configurations page where you check whether of not you want some of its automated features to work, customize parameters and features and in case you are not used to work with the webmaster resources supplied by the search engines, it also has some help files and links to allow you to become familiar to Google Webmaster tools, Yahoo Site Explorer and the most recent Bing Webmaster Tools. I really recommend this plugin as it does what it’s supposed to do, and does it very well. You just need to download it, unpack it, upload the folder to your wp-content/plugins/ folder, and activate it in the plugins tab, upon the WordPress Admin Panel. After that, you can access the configurations page on the Settings tab. Further instructions can be obtained with the plugin itself.

Setting up the WordPress Page Sitemap:

For this one, I use Dagon Design Sitemap Generator plugin. This plugin allows some customization from its options page, on the admin panel, and has some features like support for multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, multiple-page generation with navigation, permalink support, choose what to display, what order to list items in, show comment counts and/or post dates, and much more. To take advantage of this plugin, download it, unpack it, upload the folder to your wp-content/plugins/ folder, and activate it in the plugins tab, upon the WordPress Admin Panel. Then, go to the Settings tab, and configure the plugin to your taste. Almost in the end of the options page, you get to fill  the path to the XML Sitemap that you configured in the last plug-in, making the XML file accessible to real people, as well as crawlable trough your site and not only by submitting it directly to the webmaster tools given by the major search engines.

Making the good even better (optimization!):

As a final touch, I recommend you to have a few things in mind. The Dagon Design Sitemap Generator plugin needs to be inserted in a page for it to work. Personally, I do not see any advantage to have a Sitemap page in your main menu! It’s ok to have it in a visible and accessible place of your website, but not in the main menu. So, you can make a small text link on the footer or header, and to remove the page from the navigation I use Simon Wheatley’s Exclude Pages Plugin. It is a plugin that adds a checkbox to every page of your site. If you uncheck it, the page will be excluded from any listing of pages, which is usually limited to your page navigation menus. Simple as that.

I hope this helps you to get your WordPress site a little bit more Search Engine Friendly and Optimized, and it just simplifies your life. Also, don’t hesitate to support the people behind this brilliant plugins!

Design your way:

The Blog of Web Designer Bogdan Sandu, from Bucharest, Romania. A great source of information, freebies, tutorials, inspiration and showcases. It’s really worth the visit, so check out Design your way, or visit the feature page. Also, his Twitter is a nice source of information…

The Design Gene:

The Design Gene is a showcase of Flash, CSS and Blog websites, run by Jessica Miller, founder and lead designer at Corvus Design Studio, which shows a good example of a showcase website done with WordPress. Nice and clean, updated frequently and a nice example of good taste. Jessica also mentioned TwistedStudio as a “great website that utilizes Slab Serif fonts for accent or logo” in her blog. Once again, thank you Jessica!

E-CREATIVE.NET:

E-CREATIVE is a nice source of inspiration, where websites are categorized in titles such as fashion, automobile, entertainment and sports, and are classified according to design and colors, as well. You can also access a Forum, a Job Board, freelancer listing, recent news, etc. Visit E-CREATIVE or the feature page as “Site of the Day”.

Design Awards Gallery:

Design Awards Gallery describes itself as ” A CSS Websites Catalog aimed to provide you with the stunning collection of the most creative and inspiring CSS web designs from all around the world”. Well, there sure are some stunning websites showcased there, and their own design is really nice. Visit Design Awards Gallery or the feature page. By the way, the categories, tags and keywords were not chosen by me…

My Design Award:

My Design Award, as the name says, it’s an award giving website. Besides the award giving stuff, they review professional portfolios, publish artworks as wallpapers and logos, some free templates and even integrate a mini-social community, in a PHPBB based forum. Visit My Design Award or the feature page.

Colour Crash:

Colour-Crash is a blog in German, with Design related information. Their main articles feature free wallpapers and photoshop tutorials, but they have content like funny pictures, photos, video tutorials, news, etc. I was featured in the “Design of the week” category, among other nicely done websites.

QNT – Quandtnet:

QNT (quandtnet) is a portal site with a selection of digital art magazines and a web design gallery with inspirational sites. As it says in the about section QNT “showcases websites with outstanding appearance, new ideas and a successful perfection”. You can find sites from private and commercial sites, to experimental Homepages, all sorted by categories. Visit QNT or the feature page.

GOUW.NU – Graphic Orgasm Ultimate Portal:

GOUW, which means Graphic Orgasm Ultimate Portal is one of the oldest site submission galleries on the web. They always choose a trendy design, as they change it from time to time. The site is divided in “Cool Sites”, “Previews” and “Daily News” links, which are feed by users, and approved by their staff. As GOUW doesn’t have a page for the sites it features, but only an archive, I leave you with their redirection link to my page, which just opens TwistedStudio’s homepage.

A few days ago, I read an article in Darren Rowse’s Problogger about “Seven Essential Applications for Bloggers Using Windows“, written by guest author Shankar Ganesh. I enjoyed the article and in fact, I already use some of the applications, such as FileZilla, FeedDemon and TweetDeck, but I though that first, It didn’t covered all the aspects of a full blogging experience and second, I didn’t got the reason to use paid software versions when today we can rely on free and open source applications, which sometimes offer even more complete and solid solutions than some of the paid solutions. So, I decided to get you to know my point of view. I’m not planning to make statements about specific applications for a specific purpose, but rather to give you some good examples of tools that can help you to take care of several issues that we have to deal with, such as browsing, composing, etc.

Web Browser:

I think it’s obvious that the most important tool for a blogger, a blog reader or a normal web surfer, is of course, the browser. Since the subject is about Windows Bloggers, the question remains “what about the browser?!” should you stick to Internet Explorer? I would certainly not recommend you to. First of all, I’m not an Internet explorer fan since the times of the first browser wars, as I began to use Mosaic and then became stuck with Netscape Navigator for quite a few years, and since then, I’ve been trying to change my mind, but I’m not able to. I’m known between my friends to open a LOT of windows (tabs since its introduction, and I love them!) and every time I get to check a new version of Internet Explorer, I tend to get the same-as-always results… A few errors, a crash and a final punch to the desk. Why would someone put himself to sacrifice with such a painful browsing experience, when there are other good and much more complete free solutions? In my case, I use Flock for surfing and Mozilla Firefox for working. Flock (which is based on Firefox) has a very strong social integration, with automatic interaction with sites such as Facebook, Digg, Pownce and lots more, but it has also a bunch of already installed plug-ins to ease your job, such as a photo uploader, media bar, feed highlighter, web clipboard and a blog editor with automatic spelling checker. On the other hand, Firefox has an huge library of addons to customize the browser as you like, and there are some pretty cool extensions for almost anything you could imagine. Flock has integration with social bookmarks like delicious already installed, but you can install that on Firefox too. This allows me to have two different favorite toolbars, to have an easy and quicker access to the sites or tools that I use the most, depending of what I’m doing, but, at the same time, to keep my bookmarks synchronized. In case this isn’t enough for you, there are always more choices, like Apple’s Safari, the fast and safe Opera, and the most recent Google Chrome.

Content Building and Management:

To compose and to keep track of the content, my most important tools are also the most simple ones: my favorite pen, a cheap and good looking notebook, and a bunch of To-Do Sticky Notes. Why? Because I don’t always remember stuff or have brainstorms in front of my computer, but when I’m on the street, almost sleeping in my bed, or even in the bathroom! It’s also obvious that I don’t carry my pen and notebook to the bathroom, but as soon as I get out, I will write the ideas so I don’t forget them, instead of taking the chance of the computer being turned down, turn it up, think of something else and let the thoughts be lost in time. In this way, I can also take a lot of really quick notes and sketch some information for the content, some ideas for a post or even schedule some tasks to improve the blog engine. Besides the analogical tools as pen and paper, my most used application is windows notepad. Yes, it’s about the same, but in digital format. I make folders about different themes and take up some notes, or even start to write about a new piece of content. For further content development, I use either Microsoft Office or Open Office as my desktop productivity suites. However, I use more Google’s online applications like Google Docs and Google Calendar so I can keep on working everywhere in any computer. In Google Docs you can create and organize documents in different folders, edit them with headers included, check spelling and insert links. You can also work with spreadsheets, where you can organize information in tables, like stats, locations or even list some data. Just in case you are a very tidy up person, you can also check voo2doo, which is a kind of an online to-do list, where you can create tasks, organize them in projects, add some notes, assign deadlines to your tasks and manage all of that in a general dashboard. There’s also Blist, which is about the same, but everything organized on “Weblists” (Blists), where you can create lists or tables, with columns for specific types of data, like money, percent, flags, check boxes, Boolean (True or False) and more. It also lets you import/export data in CSV, e-mail the list, print it, or even publish it like a widget. If you use this wise, it can become a powerful tool to aid you in your blogging tasks.

File Transfer:

As for file transfer, if it’s in FTP, I’m a long time user of FileZilla. It’s powerful, quick, easy to use.. and free. I don’t need anything else for dealing with file uploading in File Transfer Protocol. In case you don’t want a stand alone application for FTP, you can always check Fire FTP, which is a good extension for Firefox, letting it work like a good FTP Client. Besides that, I find Flickr Uploadr (ha! another thing based on Firefox…) a very useful thing to use, because it automatically logs in to your Flickr account, you just drag the photos you want to upload, edit titles, descriptions and tags in a rush, create albums and push the upload button to let it do its job.

Image Manipulation:

When it comes to images, I think a Blogger has two main needs: Take some printscreens and edit pictures to insert in the blog post. To take printscreens, I use the awesome Jing which does much more than take printsceens. With Jing, you can capture a window, a pane or a region defined by yourself! This is an awesome timesaver. That capture can be saved as an image, uploaded directly to Flickr or to a defined FTP and after the upload it gives you the address to the image. Taking a picture is not enough? Don’t worry, Jing records video too, lets you narrate on the fly and saves the video in flash format. What else? It’s free! Now breathe, and lets get going. As for editing images to insert in the posts, you can either install software on your computer or you can use the online solutions that begin to appear in the web. I prefer to use installed versions that run on your computer, such as the multiplatform GIMP or the Windows Only Paint.NET, as they are more powerful, fast, and let you create a corporate image in a simpler way. But, imagine you are not in your computer, you have content to post and you are just missing the image part? Well, in that case, you could use some online image editors, such as the amazing Adobe Photoshop Express, the advanced FotoFlexer, the refreshing Picnik, or the fast and easy (yet, very complete) FlauntR.

Other Stuff:

I do use some other programs to do some arbitrary work. For example, I use FeedDemon to deal and organize my RSS subscriptions. It makes the job pretty simple, but it also has some powerful features like content filtering, offline reading and a “panic button” to mark as read items that you haven’t read in the past few days. You may be wandering: “Why don’t you use Google Reader?” Well… I prefer to use FeedDemon, as I find it faster to get my reading done, and I can also work cloud connected, because NewsGator Online syncs with your FeedDemon, as it uses the same account to keep tracks of your subscribed feeds, so that the syndication reading becomes optimized to the max, with the use of both. For my Twitter Updates, I use TweetDeck as my installed Twitter Client. TweetDeck lets you create groups of users, notifies of new updates, shortens URLs automatically, gives you a glimpse of what’s hot in Twittering, with a TwitterScoop Cloud, and shows much of the general twitter information like your friends updates, replies and direct messages all in one window. Last but not least, I use CutePDF Writer to convert documents into PDF’s.

Conclusion:

There are plenty of tools (most of them being free) that if are well used, can really help you optimize your Blogging experience, letting you work everywhere and in any computer. You can also check that you don’t need to be always online to blog, as the ideas come from your brain, and you just need a pen and paper so that you don’t forguet them. Get outside, talk to people and observe things… let the brainstorms begin! By the way, I will be releasing some complementary articles, from different points of view, to help people that want to VideoLog (Vlog) or PodCast, power up your twittering, WordPress optimization and some more. I hope you find this tips useful and… I wish you a good blogging!