![\"JetPack](\"https:\/\/ingmarverheij.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/WordPress-stats1.png\" "\\"WordPress")
how optimizing my site. I focused on the following topics:<\/p>\nI\u2019ve been writing articles on weblogs since 5 years and figured it would be time to investigate some time in how optimizing my site. I focused on the following topics:<\/p>\n
After a weekend of reading articles, installing and configuring plugins and some tweaking the weekly visitors increased by 30% <\/strong> <\/p>\n The goes without saying, content <\/strong>is key<\/strong>. Writing a good and interesting article is the most important part in getting people to visit your site and read your articles. <\/p>\n I always use the following rule<\/strong> of thumb<\/strong> when I write an article:<\/p>\n With the last rule in mind I would like to inform you that your visitors<\/strong> are lazy <\/strong>and unfaithful<\/strong>. Big chance they found your article via a search engine or forum, visitors are information hungry. If your visitor think <\/strong>they can\u2019t find the information they\u2019re looking for within four seconds<\/strong>, they will leave<\/strong>. Visitors don\u2019t care you are a respected author who invested days work in an article.<\/p>\n Therefore you should make sure the article is easy to read and has clear outlines, some tips:<\/p>\n After reading your article you can keep your visitor on your site by offering links to related articles which the visitor might find interesting. I\u2019m using the Contextual Related Posts<\/a> plugin to show related posts as a widget<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Let\u2019s start with the first topic, optimizing your site for search engines like Google or Bing. This is called search engine optimization or SEO, it is a study on its own. I\u2019m not a subject expert, Joost de Valk<\/a> is. He has written numerous articles about SEO, I recommend reading the The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For WordPress Sites<\/a>.<\/p>\n Joost de Valk is also known as Yoast, he is the author of the WordPress plugin WordPress SEO by Yoast<\/a>. If you\u2019re interested in optimizing your WordPress site, I highly recommend his plugin.<\/p>\n A summary of the recommendations I implemented:<\/p>\n I\u2019ve replaced the built-in search tool by Google Custom Search<\/a> for two reasons 1) content on your site is indexed faster 2) it reduces the resource usage on your site, resources of Google are used. I\u2019m using this WordPress plugin<\/a> on my site.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n If you\u2019re writing articles you probably want acknowledgement for the work you\u2019ve done. The reader of the article you be able to know who the article wrote and (possibly) how they can contact you. <\/p>\n If you blog using WordPress the author is mentioned by default in one of the first lines of the article, but it doesn\u2019t tell the reader anything about who the author is or what he does. You can create an \u201cabout the author<\/a>" page and link to that page from the menu, but most readers won\u2019t click that link (they\u2019re lazy and unfaithful, right?). For sites with multiple authors probably won\u2019t work out either. <\/p>\n Information about the author can be included in each article (at the bottom or on left\/right side with a widget) by filling in \u201cAbout Yourself\u201d in the user profile in WordPress (Dashboard > Users > Your Profile). I\u2019ve used the WP About Author<\/a> plugin from Jon Bishop<\/a> to show a nice fancy box with information about me. <\/p>\n The nice thing about this plugin is that is uses the information from the WordPress User Profile for links to the \u201cFollow Me\u201d buttons like Twitter<\/a>, LinkedIn<\/a>, Google+<\/a> and more. This way readers can get more easily in contact with the author.<\/p>\n The image shown in the \u201cAbout the author\u201d box is retrieved from Gravatar<\/a> based on the E-Mail that is linked to the WordPress User Profile.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So how do you make sure that not only the reader of your article know the author, but also ensure it is acknowledged by everyone else? Google has recognized this problem and introduced Google Authorship<\/a>. With Google Authorship you need to create a circuit of verified trust linking your articles with your digital identity on Google+<\/a>. If done correctly your articles show in the search results including a link to your Google+<\/a> profile.<\/p>\n Rick DeJarnette<\/a> wrote an extensive article about setting Google Authorship: The Definitive Guide To Google Authorship Markup<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Copying other peoples content is a big no-no <\/em>unless you give credit to the original author. A rule of thumb is that you only cite a few lines where your refer to and include a link to the author and the original article. For more details read \u201cHow to formally cite a blog post<\/a>\u201d by Martin Fenner<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Informing your readers you\u2019ve published new content is important for two reasons: 1) you like to inform people about your content 2) search engines indexes you faster (and higher) to more people link to your articles.<\/p>\n You can inform your readers and peers using the following methods:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Writing the same article on multiple websites is called \u2018cross posting\u2019. Cross posted articles are indexed only once by search providers, meaning the other sites with the same article would receive hardly any hits.<\/p>\n Usually the site with the strongest present \/ highest ranking wins the battle, increasing the strength of the site. Fortunately you can direct search engines to a preferred website by giving a \u2018hint\u2019, it is honored 99% of the time. With the canonical URL tag<\/a> you can not only merge the search results of pages with similar content on the same site, but also cross domains<\/a> The canonical tag is set on each article and needs to point to an article with the (exact)<\/em> same content, otherwise the search provider won\u2019t honor the request. I\u2019m using the WordPress SEO by Yoast<\/a> plugin which has this feature implemented.<\/p>\n As an example I\u2019ve kindly asked the search provides (using a canonical URL tag) to index my article The Citrix XML server explained and demystified<\/a> on ingmarverheij.com<\/a> instead of peppercrew.nl<\/a>. After a few days waiting Google honored my request:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Do you have any tips or remarks? Let me know in the comments!<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ve been writing articles on weblogs since 5 years and figured it would be time to investigate some time in how optimizing my site. I focused on the following topics: Content Visibility on search providers (SEO) Author visibility Informing your readers Cross posting After a weekend of reading articles, installing and configuring plugins and some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-container-style":"default","site-container-layout":"default","site-sidebar-layout":"default","disable-article-header":"default","disable-site-header":"default","disable-site-footer":"default","disable-content-area-spacing":"default","footnotes":""},"categories":[496,288],"tags":[549,547,551,550,548,546],"class_list":["post-4753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion-article","category-other","tag-author","tag-blogger","tag-canonical","tag-cross-posting","tag-seo","tag-wordpress"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ingmarverheij.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ingmarverheij.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ingmarverheij.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ingmarverheij.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ingmarverheij.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4753"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/ingmarverheij.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4753\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4796,"href":"https:\/\/ingmarverheij.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4753\/revisions\/4796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ingmarverheij.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ingmarverheij.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ingmarverheij.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Glimlach\"](\"https:\/\/ingmarverheij.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/wlEmoticon-smile.png\")
<\/p>\nContent<\/h1>\n
\n
\n
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)<\/h1>\n
\n
The Author<\/h1>\n
![\"Ingmar](\"https:\/\/ingmarverheij.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/About-the-Author_thumb1.png\" "\\"About")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"WP](\"https:\/\/ingmarverheij.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/WP-About-Author_thumb.png\" "\\"WP")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Appearance](\"https:\/\/ingmarverheij.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/Appearance-Edit-CSS_thumb.png\" "\\"Appearance")
<\/a>Note: <\/strong>WordPress adds a default Author box when a description is added. This box is hidden via CSS, the easiest way is to use the custom CSS (Appearance > Edit CSS). You need to add the following lines:<\/p>\n.author-box {\n\tdisplay: none;\n}<\/pre>\n![\"About](\"https:\/\/ingmarverheij.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/Google-search-result_thumb.png\" "\\"Author")
<\/a><\/p>\nInforming your readers<\/h1>\n
\n
Cross posting<\/h1>\n
. This means that if you cross post your articles you can \u2018direct\u2019 traffic to your preferred site, ignoring the strength or rank of the other sites you post. <\/p>\n![\"Canonical](\"https:\/\/ingmarverheij.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/Canonical-URL_thumb.png\" "\\"Canonical")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/ingmarverheij.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/Google-Search-citrix-xml-server-before_thumb.png\" "\\"Before")
<\/a>![\"\"](\"https:\/\/ingmarverheij.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/Google-Search-citrix-xml-server-after_thumb.png\" "\\"After")
<\/a><\/p>\n