Tag Archives: WordPress

How To, Uncategorized

How to Add a Sidebar to Your WordPress Site

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WordPress is a great tool to create a unique website or blog. It offers some great plugins for the most basic of site needs all the way up to addons and upgrades you may never need. One way to make for a great site for your visitors and those in your network is to make your site easy to navigate. This can be done with clearly labeled links and calls to action without a ton of clutter and confusing layouts. An easy way to accomplish this with WordPress is to add a simple sidebar. As you can see from the image below, this blog uses a sidebar to help our visitors navigate that page and though past posts. Read on for our step by step guide to adding a side bar.

  1. Log in to your WordPress account using the same log in and password as your GDI member account. Once logged in you will be in the Dashboard area, from here, navigate to the Appearance link on the left hand side and click on “widgets” beneath appearance.
  2. Once you are in your widgets area you will see options to your right depending on what kind of theme you are using, but you should have at least one “Side Bar” area shown. These areas are drag and drop, meaning you simply need to chose the options from the bays of widgets in the center of the page and drag them to the sidebar area.
  3. Now it’s time to decide what you would like in your sidebar area. Some good widgets to use in a side bar are categories, recent posts, and archives sorted by months, like the GDI blog has. Add anything you would like to the side bar, but don’t add too much, as cluttering this area would defeat the purpose.
  4. After dragging each widget to the side bar area, you may need to format the widget by adding a title or adjusting some options. Take the time to reload your blog after each change to see how the widgets show, be sure to test all links and widgets to ensure they’re working.
  5. You’re done! Test your sidebar widgets often to ensure they are still working as desired.

Advice, How To

SEO Tips for Your GDI Sites

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S-E-O are three letters we hear all the time when talking about websites, but what do they mean? How do I do it for my site? First off, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization basically means increasing the chances of your site coming up in search engines with the help of best practices. Read on for some of these best practices for your GDI Sites. These tips can apply specifically to WordPress sites or be tweaked for your site created using whichever platform you like.

Permalinks

When adding your first post to a WordPress site and after you have added text to the title box, you will see an option below it with your posts permalink. This is a link that will always take you directly to this post. There is a button to the permalink that labeled “change permalinks.” Click it. When you click this button it gives you the option to choose how your permalinks are displayed. For search engine optimization (SEO) reasons, you do not want your post permalink to be www.blog.yoursite.ws/123. This will hinder search engines from finding the post. You should select any option you like where your title will show in the permalink such as www.blog.yoursite.ws/make-money-with-gdi. You can also access the permalinks options in Settings>Permalinks.

SEO Plugins

We went over the benefits of plugins in this post, and shared that there are plugins for nearly everything you need. Well, SEO is no exception. You can search in the plugin database for SEO tools or Google “Popular WordPress SEO tools” to see some great options with user reviews. Plugins like the All in One SEO Pack have a ton of customizable options for someone who wants to take the time to optimize each post in every way. For more hands off approach, try something like SEO Smart Links that will automatically link posts with in your blog when relevant keywords are used. The more links you have to your site and within your site, the better your SEO.

Tags for SEO, Categories for Navigation

You will notice that each blog post allows you to add tags and categories. Tags are great for SEO. You want your tags to be keywords that are used often though out the post and that are great for SEO and keyword searches. Rank possible keywords against each other with the help of Google’s Keyword tool to ensure your chosen tags is popular search term. You want your keywords to be words and phrases that are searched often.

Categories are helpful for when you do get visitors from search engines. Categories should be basic descriptors for posts that can be used over and over. A category like “advice” will help someone navigate your page and keep all posts that fall into that category in one easy to navigate page.

Social Bookmarking Sites

Social Bookmarking sites are used to manage, favorite and share sites and content. These sites are also used to be directed to content you may like, based on the categories you select when signing up. As such, these sites are great to share your own content, in the hopes that someone else might see it when browsing their suggested sites and links. Sites like Digg, Delicious and even Pinterest allow you to share content and allow other users to find it based on topics they have an interest in. People can come across you blog post as they browse category content and when they click for the full post they will be brought to your site. Social Bookmarking can both drive traffic to your site, and increase your SEO with inbound links.

This is hardly a full list of SEO tips, so stay posted to the blog for more. Share some of your tips in the comments!