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Do you want to make your WordPress Blog easier to navigate for your readers and subscribers, and make search engines rank your site higher?

Well, there are a few very simple free tasks you can do in the WordPress’s Administrative dashboard like improving the link name of a post, using categories,  tags, and pages to better organize your posts, and making custom menus for your sidebar. These tasks require no plug-in installation special software, website account registration, or much technical skills to do.

All these tasks I mention on this article should be safe to do in WordPress without risking messing up your blog. If you don’t like the results of the tasks I talk about when you do it, you can very easily switch back to the previous state since you won’t be installing a new plug-in, accessing your database or FTP server, install theme or editing WordPress HTML and php code which can break your blog if you are not careful.

I’ll mostly talk about making simple changes to link names, and how to better organize your post for improve results for reader satisfaction and search engine optimization.

Click Here to learn how to change the settings of WordPress to make it more reader or search engine friendly!

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XML sitemap

A XML sitemap is a sitemap you make for your website or blog makes it easier for Search Engine crawler bots like Googlebot to crawl your website links.

A Sitemap also tells search engine when a page was updated, does the page’s content change much, and how important a page is compared to the rest of the pages on a website or blog.

Link info for XML Sitemap

A sitemap is basicly a page which list all the links to pages and posts on a website or blog.

A websites XML Sitemap is used by  Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Ask, and possibly other search engines to help crawl your site faster for new content by providing tips to web crawlers to crawl your site better.

I have been using WordPress XML Sitemap Generator Plug-in to help me automatically build and update this blog’s sitemap when I make a new post. It is very easy to use and install. All I have to do is install the plug-in and enable it, and it works automatically. You can fine tune the settings for your needs, but the normal settings should be good enough for mosts bloggers needs.

The XML sitemap for your blog can technically be used by humans to browse your website if they visit your example.com/sitemap.xml page, but it lacks navigation and formating, so navigating it can be hard, time consuming, and frustrating if the link names are not descriptive or using the default permalink settings in wordpress like “wordpress/?p=123” instead of the permalink types which list your title like “wordpress/2010/09/14/sample-post/”.

XML Sitemap Generator also notifies/ping Google, Bing, and Ask by default everytime your sitemap is generated because you have updated your blog with new content. However with Yahoo, you need a Yahoo App ID to tell Yahoo your site have been generated.

WordPress XML Sitemap Plugin can help you get more blog traffic from search results pages  by making it easier for Search Engine Crawlers to crawl your website’s pages, so it increases the chance of getting your pages and posts indexed faster.

Click Here to learn more about WordPress Sitemap Generator and how it can improve your blogs post being indexed by search engines

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Broken links Plug-in

Nobody likes clicking on a link in a blog post which leads to a “Page not found error” Page in their web browser, but it is very easy to make a broken link in WordPress. For example, you might of forgotten to type the “http://” protocol and just typed the domain name like example.com in the link text box, or a more common problem is you made a typo and redirected a user to a website which does not exists.

Broken links make your blog looks unprofessional, and can’t get index by search engines since there is nothing to index. Plus, fewer people want to link to your page if it has lots of broken links on a lot of pages and posts, so having broken links can decrease your back links which is not good for Search Engine Optimization.

Clicking every link in your blog can be very time consuming for finding broken links.

However, There is a broken Link checker plug-in to find broken links in WordPress. It is called “Broken Link Checker” it monitors your blog for broken links. When it finds a broken link, and image links it notifies you in the WordPress Dashboard or can notify you by e-mail for newer links.

You can also change the broken links in the broken links checker to the right address, or tell Broken link checker to exclude the link which is temporary down because of web hosting problems on a commenters or external links hosts.

Also, website domains expire sometimes, and links will become broken. It is best not to link to expired domains which became expired since they can be registered by virus, spyware, and malware companies in the future. Linking to known dangerous sites can put your visitors’ computer in danger, and make your blog untrustworthy even if you are unaware that you are linking to websites with viruses, spyware, and malware on it. Using Broken Link Checker can minimize the chances of you linking to broken links from trustworthy sites which expired, and a cyber criminal re-registered the domain name for spreading viruses and scams.

I have been using Broken Link Checker for about a year, and it works great. I never had any major problems with it since it is so easy to use.

Click Here to Learn more about Broken Link Checker Plug-in for WordPress, and see screen shots of it.

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