I swear I am more and more impressed with WordPress the more I use it. I have been looking into some SEO type tweaks for my sites, nothing much new except for some tagging but I was forced to review what I had done so far which is:

1. Change post titles to something more friendly- Obviously Google and friends take the page title pretty seriously as we all know.
2. Change the permalink structure – This give a more readable URL and once again we know that the major search engines like to use the content of the URL as a big chunk of SERP weight.
3. Create a sitemap – this is probably the single most useful thing I have done for my WordPress pages, it is completely automated and gets pinged to Google every time I write or update a post.

Now, there is nothing very special with either of those three things I have done to improve my on the page SEO, where it gets really cool is in the fact this took me a total of around 30 minutes to do.

The only code change I had to make was to the header.php to change the way the page title is displayed at the top of the browser, this was a 2 minute fix really, nothing difficult at all.

When I run my pages through my SEO optimisation software now I get much better results, let’s hope the search engines feel the same way! I really should get around to sorting out the SEO for a couple more of my pages, the problem is finding the time to get it done.

I have taken on a couple of paid blogging jobs lately, this coupled with the need to update my own bogs fairly frequently has caused me something of a headache, I constantly needed to remember the URL and password of the various sites; this coupled with the fact my Internet connection here on the island is dead slow meaning it is painful to open graphic intensive sights was causing me problems.

The a friend turned me on to Windows Live Writer which is part of the Windows Live application suite released by Microsoft a while back. After installing it and patching it I can honestly say it’s made my life one hell of a lot easier. I can now post to any of the blogs I work on from a single application, furthermore I can prepare the posts offline and publish them when I have a decent connection.

Very cool stuff, thanks Microsoft, now and again you supply me with something really good.

Last year I spent a frustrating time getting the WPG2 plugin working for my other blog site, it was a total pain in the neck trying to get the themes to work properly.

Now I need to upgrade the wordpress install and I’m concerned that it will break the site beyond repair. Ok I can back it up before I try but it still means it’s going to be more work for me and I’m busy enough already.

I’m also considering removing the WPG2 plug in completely, this would mean re-writing a lot of the blog posts though as they directly embed WPG2 objects.

Oh well, we shall see, maybe I’ll just leave it running an older version of wordpress for the time being.