I almost forgot and that isn’t good.

Permalinks in wordpress are how the links look for the pages in your blog.  I have it set so that a link looks like

http://www.pcscribbles.com/2008/05/oops-important-wordpress-plugin-all-in-one-seo-pack/

rather than

http://www.pcscribbles.com/?p=10

So, more keywords on the page for the search engines to crawl and, generally, looks better (I think).

The permalinks (found in settings) need to be set once and then left – changing it in the future can cause there to be copies of your pages giving you duplicate content problems – you don’t want that!  I put a dot in the “Month and Name” option – but you can be fancier if you like.

Martin

Technorati Tags: permalinks, wordpress

What is duplicate content?

Well, let me tell you.  It’s pages / parts of pages on the internet that are the same / extremely similar.  From the view of the search engines, why would they want two or more copies of the same page in their index?  Their customers i.e. the surfers only want one copy so any other copies just get dumped and never see the light of day in the search engines results.

In a WordPress blog, if you write a post you can get a copy on the front page, a copy in all the categories that the post is in, a copy in the tag pages, a copy in the archives and probably other pages.  What the SEO Pack does is to make it so that all copies except one aren’t indexed by the search engines.  It also helps with sorting out titles, descriptions and keywords for your pages and that helps with the search engines to a small extent.

Installation is easy, just upload the plugin and activate it – I have left the default settings and it seems to do the trick but I’ll be doing some tweaking at some point.

Martin

Technorati Tags: all in one seo, duplicate content, wordpress

One thing I’ve thought in the past was strange is that WordPress doesn’t have a “contact us” page – this is just a simple form that allows surfers to contact me rather than having a link that opens up outlook express.  The form automatically gets converted to an email which gets mailed to you.  Not a hard job and they’ve been around for years / decades.  I can only assume that it’s due to security – years ago there was a perl script called “mailform” which had a flaw that allowed 3rd parties to send spam out using your server.  It wasn’t long before the loophole was closed but I’d imagine there’s still servers online with the dodgy version of the script sending out thousands of emails 24 hours a day without the owner knowing.

Anyway, the plugin I chose is called Contact Form 7 and it has some nice features.  The main one is that it requires a captcha which is an image with some numbers on it.  To successfully send the message, the user needs to enter the numbers – it stops automated messages being sent from your server (in theory!)  There are some programs that can read the images and fill in the numbers so you need to keep an eye out for excessive bounced back messages which could indicate spams being sent.

Anyway, installation wasn’t too bad.  The usual – upload the plugin to the wp-content/plugins folder on the server.  Make sure that the captcha/tmp folder is write enabled otherwise the captcha won’t display (caught me out…).

Enable the plugin and go to settings / Contact Form 7 and there’s a default form there for you which works but didn’t have the captcha code in it.  Below is my version of the code…you need to click on default form in the Contact 7 settings and paste the code in the top box (removing the old code, of course). 

Your Name (required)
[text* your-name]
Your Email (required)
[email* your-email]
Subject
[text your-subject]
Your Message
[textarea your-message]
[captchac captcha-76 size:m]
Enter the code above: [captchar captcha-76]
[submit "Send"]

You will have to change the captcha-76 number to the code of your captcha.  To find it out there’s a button called Generate Tag.  Click on that, find where it says Captcha and a box will appear and it’ll have a name – in my case it’s captcha-76

Lastly, you need to create your contact us page which is really easy.  Go to manage, choose page and I called it Contact Us.  Swap to HTML view (if you use Visual Wordpress changes the code…not good) and copy in the following…

<edit>I tried to post the code needed here but it brought up the form…so you need to go to the Contact 7 settings, choose your form and at the top there’s some code saying “Copy and paste this code into your post content.”  Take the code below that and post away…simple!  Remember to post it via HTML view…</edit>

Remember to change the name if necessary (the code above was for the default form that came with the script).  Save the page and that’s it.  Check the page on your wordpress form, send yourself a mail and hopefully the contact us page is there for you – congrats!

Any problems…post in the comments…don’t send me an email via contact us

Martin

Technorati Tags: wordpress, contact us plugin