WordPress Archive Lists
January 24th, 2006 by Sarah KingOne thing I haven’t become involved with is writing plugins for WordPress but I have been looking at ways to make my blog more efficient.
I tried out a tag system back in October but found that it generated too many tags and often irrelevant tags so finally scrapped it in favour of the plugins from Ultimate Tag Warrior produced by fellow kiwi Christine Davis (who I don’t actually know 
). Her system allowed me to produce a “Tag Cloud” which is pretty cool.
I haven’t totally got my head around the custom tags page with url rewriting but for now I’m happy with urls like /index.php?tag=kiwi and I’ve learnt a little about templates.
So when I posted some info about the UTW plugin at DigitalPoint one of the members asked about Category Archives and gave a new plugin to use. I took a look and couldn’t quite work out how to use it, so took the lessons from UTW and applied them! Read the rest of this entry »
SEO contests are so “Middle Class”
January 17th, 2006 by Sarah KingA new SEO contest started yesterday, day before, all depends on your time zone. I created a v7ndotcom elursrebmem page out of idle curiosity and a v7ndotcom elursrebmem contestants directory for people to get extra, themed, links to their sites.
There’s been stacks of activity with domains being bought and onsold, ebay auctions, charity contestants (go Alek) and, of course, spam.
I just checked my Google Analytics page for the directory just to see who the competitors are. Now it is an international affair, but look at the countries. Pretty much only western, first world countries.
So, is SEO and the little games associated with it, just for the bored middle classes?
Google Sitemaps and Verification
January 16th, 2006 by Sarah KingIt’s been a while since I checked back at the sitemaps pages to see how my sites were doing, they’d all been pinging happily and Google had been checking frequently so I’d been happy to leave them be.
I visited today and found that Google have added a verification process whereby you upload an empty html document onto your site, Google find it, accept that you are authorised to have access to the site and then feed you extra info from their databanks.
I can get this overview of whether Google has problems with the pages and how they are ranked – proving that Google still buy that PR matters.
Another page shows the queries where my site has been returned as an option (top 10?) and where my site has been selected by the user. This gives me good clues about optimisation and page building – and about the topics that people actually want to read about!
Top 100 vBulletin Forums
January 9th, 2006 by Sarah KingOn a whim I decided to purchase the domain Top 100 vBulletin and put a wsnlinks directory on the site to rank vBulletin forums.
The only requirement is that External Data is turned on giving me access to external.php.
I’m then ranking the forums based on
- Number of threads
- Ratings by visitors to the directory
- Google’s PR
