Even More Ways to Improve Your Blog

Customize Your Twitter Design

http://twitter.com/twitter/status/248036110771564544

I love the new feature Twitter has rolled out, headers. You can see mine here: @onestarrynight

The dimensions are 1200×600 and once you upload the image, it will give you a screen where you can “crop” the image”. It will then place your bio area over this image so keep that in mind when designing your Twitter header. You can change the design of your Twitter profile by going to https://twitter.com/settings/design.

I also recommend a background image, something that tiles well is best.

Search Engine Optimization

I can’t express enough my love for the WordPress SEO plugin.

WordPress SEO lets you set titles and meta descriptions either through it’s main settings page or on a per page/post basis. Built in XML sitemaps, RSS footer, Twitter cards, and so much more. I literally install this plugin on every single WordPress install I do.

In general though, you’ll want to have a strong title and to use that title again, somewhere in the post. For example this post is titled, Even More Ways to Improve Your Blog. The title is clear, you know what to expect AND by including it again in the post itself, it means a search engine will rank this post higher in its search results.

Add Your Social Media Profiles

I do this in four places. Header, sidebar, footer, and on the comments page.

<a href="http://YOURDOMAIN.com/feed"><img src="/pathto/rss.png" alt="rss feed" /></a>

<a href="http://twitter.com/USERNAME"><img src="/pathto/twitter.png" alt="twitter" /></a>

<a href="http://facebook.com/USERNAME"><img src="/pathto/facebook.png" alt="twitter" /></a>

<a href="http://pinterest.com/USERNAME"><img src="/pathto/pinterest.png" alt="twitter" /></a>

I made a few Autumn themed icons for you to use, these are fairly large so you can scale them down to whatever size you need. Credit, as always, would be appreciated if you choose to use these. Just click the image to download the .zip file!

Footer Content

I think everyone should have some sort of content in their footer aside from the copyright information. I sometimes do a full-fledged three column footer, other times I just have large social media icons. Some ideas for footer content would be:

• Facebook like box
• latest tweets
• social media icons
• sponsors / ads
• search bar
• popular posts
• email subscribe area

Fix Your Social Media Sharing Plugin

For those of you that use a social media sharing plugin for your posts, you want it to show your twitter username, for example, via @onestarrynight.com rather than via AddThis or via ShareThis:

To change it in AddThis, in your WordPress dashboard:

Settings – AddThis – Advanced Tab

Enter your Twitter username in the Twitter via: field.

To change it in ShareThis, in your WordPress dashboard:

Settings – ShareThis- Click to add extra Twitter options

To change it in AddToAny, in your WordPress dashboard:

Settings – AddToAny – Additional Options box

var a2a_config = a2a_config || {};
a2a_config.templates = {
    twitter: "${title} ${link} by @YOURTWITTERID"
};

Feature Your Categories

Here’s pretty way of displaying your main categories with images!

In WordPress when you create a category you generally create a “slug” or short name for the category, like so:

Keep that slug name handy!

You’ll want to create some images using your preferred graphics program, I’m using Photoshop, and yes again Autumny themed. I’m doing mine using the dimensions of 250×100.

And now to link it all up!

<a href="http://YOURDOMAINURL.com/category/CATEGORYSLUG"><img src="/urlpathto/image.jpg" alt="featured category" /></a>

Let’s say you want to be a bit more fancy, you want people to subscribe via RSS to an individual category, well that’s easy enough!

<a href="http://YOURDOMAINURL.com/category/CATEGORYSLUG/feed"><img src="/urlpathto/image.jpg" alt="featured category" /></a>