Just when I think I got all my embedding issues figured out with Viper, I find out it doesn’t work with basic Flash files (swf). So I was one again on the plugin hunt.

In no time at all I ended up at Kimili’s site and found the Kimili Flash Embed for Wordpress plugin. Upload one file, activate it and then use special code to embed a Flash file into a Wordpress blog post. It’s that simple. Still, I’ll never remember the special code, but that’s easy enough to find again as it’s listed on the Plugins page.

There is also a Textpattern version for those of you running that software.

[tags]Flash,Textpattern[/tags]

I’ve been searching and searching for a good way to get videos embedded into a Wordpress blog post and the best was was to turn off the WYSIWYG editor. Well not any more. Viper’s Video Quicktags could be the best plugin around.

What’s so great about Viper’s Video Quicktags? For starters it works with YouTube, Google Video, WMF, Quicktime and FLV files. But the kicker is it adds buttons to your WYSIWYG toolbar.

This is a big feature as I may know how other plugins work, but remembering, or telling someone else, is a bit harder. With Viper there is just an icon to click on and it tells you want kind of ID it needs. Simple and effective. Plus it’s a snap to install.

We are currently testing the Viper’s Video Quicktags plugin on a few blogs and so far it seems to meet the need.

How do you get your Flash files into a Wordpress blog post?

[tags]flash,quicktime,google,google-video,youtube[/tags]

I just got done posting a comment on David Naylor’s blog and I’d like to stay involved with the conversation, however there is no ability to say connected via email or feed. This then disconnects the commenter’s from the discussion unless they remember to come back.

A quick fix would be to enable comment notifications. Wordpress has a great plugin called Subscribe to Comments which will allow all readers to subscribe to any post. If you subscribe to a post’s comments, you’ll get notified via email when a new response has been added. This is great if you asked a question or made a comment that someone else responds to. It also brings the visitor back to your blog to where they might participate in more discussions.

Lets not forget that post comments can help a posts rankings/visibility. All comment text is indexable and will work for the post. A good comment discussion can possibly help increase the rankings and visibility.

Did you also know that in Wordpress, each post has it’s own feed for comments? Bringing this out into the open gives users the ability to subscribe in their favorite feed reader and not their email box. Simply add /feed/ after most Wordpress URLs and you should end up with the posts comment feed. This is how I’m staying connected to the post on David’s site.

In great news, Google, Yahoo and MSN have agreed upon a XML sitemap standard.

What’s this mean to you? Well, you just need to create one XML sitemap and you can submit it to all three engines. I’ve been doing that for a while and didn’t seem to have any problem but now it’s official.

Why should you create an XML sitemap? An XML sitemap outlines all the URLs on a site so that search engines can find them all easily. Much like a normal sitemap, it just lists all the pages however, an XML sitemap is optimized for search engines, not for people. By giving search engines a list of URLs on your site, you are increasing the number of pages they know about and can refer traffic to.

If you posted once a day for a year, you’d have 365 post pages. That doesn’t include categories, archives and any other blog related pages. Since the numbers add up so quickly, it’s hard for a search engine to keep up and even harder for a user to keep them organized so that an engine can find them all easily. An XML sitemap gives engines one file full of all the URLs on your site, optimized just for them.

One of the things that bugs me about Wordpress is this WYSIWYG editor. It’s nice, but it has a tendency to eat your code. However, I found out a few cool features.

Did you know that you can put in basic HTML code into the WYSIWYG editor and it’ll render out as HTML when you hit save or publish? You can put in bold, italic, span, link and image HTML tags all in the WYSIWYG editor. Have an image on Flickr you want to post? Put the entire raw code that Flickr gives you into the editor, and it’ll be converted into a pretty image when you post it. That’s quite handy when you don’t feel like toggling back and forth between the HTML window.

This does not work as nice though with services like YouTube that offer Flash elements. Embedding Flash is a bit more tricky. I’ve found it best to use Safari or a browser that doesn’t do the whole WYSIWYG thing. Then putting in the YouTube code works fine.

How do you backup a blog?

For Wordpress blogs, use the the WordPress Database Backup plugin. This plugin is included with all installs of Wordpress starting with version 2 I believe. Once enabled, you just go tot he backups section of the manage screen, make a few selections and it’ll backup your blog posts to your desktop or email. I wouldn’t suggest backing up to the server as that won’t do you any good if your web server goes down.

For Wordpress.com blogs, click on Manage and then Export.

With TypePad just got to the Import/Export area on the Manage tab of your admin area. Here you’ll be able to export all posts to your desktop. [backup support page]

Movable Type users can login to their admin area and click on Import/Export and then select Export.

Blogger doesn’t allow an export of all your posts like other services. However, you can edit your template with a bit of custom code to output all posts on one page, then save that page and revert back to your old template. Not the best solution but it should work. [Blogger How-To Page]

Many search engines have stated time and time again that they crawl pages they can get to easily. Basically, if it takes more than three steps to get to a page, it won’t get indexed as easily or or re-indexed as often. By adding related posts to your blog, you are now allowing a search engine spider to easily get older posts easily.

Related posts are just links to posts that were made in the past. Some may have been posted in the last week, others maybe last year. These posts have a much better change of getting updated in search engines then if they were buried in the archives.

Creating links to related posts can be done in a number of ways. One is just linking back to old posts within new posts as reference points. Another is taking the time to write out three our four related posts at the bottom of all new posts. This may be a bit more time consuming, however they will be most relevant.

It’s been said that meta keywords and description tags are dead. Where as I’d agree with the keywords tag, the descriptions tag I’m no longer convinced is dead. Actually, it’s quite important; especially for blogs.

If you use the site: command in Google, and look at Google’s descriptions (aka snippits) for a blog, you may notice some indexing issues. Usually one of two things happens. Either your blog description is generic and includes things like the date and categories, or your blog’s description is exactly the same. The second one will probably land a lot of your pages in the supplemental index.

If you check out Matt Cutt’s blog, you’ll notice that the descriptions start with the date followed by time, categories and then the first few words of his post.

Check out SEOMoz’s blog and you’ll see that most blog posts are showing up as supplementary results as all the descriptions are exactly the same “BLOG CATEGORIES. Advertising, Promotions & Public Relations Online · Analytics, Tracking & Measurement · Ask.com · Blogging & Social Tagging · Google …”

One things that blogs lack is an easy way to add an introduction paragraph to the beginning of the index page. However, there are may solutions, including Adhesive.

Adhesive allows the user to create a ’sticky’ post that will always show up as the first post on the homepage. This can then be used for an introduction/welcome paragraph that gives your visitors a bit of an explanation of what your blog is about.

This is especially useful for any blogs that function as a full fledged website. Giving the users a short explanation of what the site is about can be much more informative than just showing the last 10 posts.

If you have a bit of programming knowledge, a little PHP can help you discover and style the sticky post also. This will set it apart from the other posts so it feels like a separate entity and not just a blog post.

If you’ve used other Adhesive type plugins, please share your experiences.

I plan on installing Adhesive in the near future and you can see how it works. Until, then head over to the Adhesive site and check it out.

One of the downsides to a blog is the ability to easily assign meta keywords and descriptions to each blog post. I have done some research and found with a simple and fantastic plugin called HeadSpace 2.

HeadSpace 2 has two different ways of creating meta descriptions and keywords.

1) For those of us who feel we don’t have enough time, there is the automatic way. HeadSpace 2 can put an excerpt of your post in the description tag and the categories associated with the post in the keywords tag.

2) For those of us who need control, there is the manual way. Once installed each post now comes with a meta description and meta keyword box on the posting screen. Simply fill those two out and HeadSpace 2 will do the rest.

Either way is probably better than having none at all and much better than having the description or keyword tag the same on all pages.

Get HeadSpace 2

[tags]headspace, meta, description, keywords[/tags]