Getting Wordpress setup properly for the bots to go through and rank your site is a very important item. In setting this site up, I had wanted to be able to use the sidebars for doing a number of things including having an Adsense area (would be nice to get some money back from the site.)

But in trying to use one of the themes from the free list of themes on the Wordpress site, I found that even though it said it supported sidebars, I couldn’t get any sidebar items to work. So I found that there is a theme from Semiologic that is free and is incredibly complete. The free version is limited on some of the features, but for most people it will work for getting started and then some. The Pro version has a number of extensions and I will probably upgrade to it at some point, but starting out with functional free is good.

The other item that is needed to use the sidebars with the Semiologic theme is a sidebar manager. There is a free plugin available for this, as the Semiologic theme did not install one as part of the free theme. I used the Sidebar Widgets plug-in from Automattic, inc. and as soon as the plug-in was activated, the sidebar widgets where available under the Presentation tab and I cold configure my sidebars.

If you know of some other great tips on configuring Wordpress for SEO ranking, please reply to the post so everyone gets the benefit of your research.

I had an interesting concept come to my attention yesterday.  It entailed using the Web 2.0 sites, like Digg, ClipMarks, Twitter, etc. and Stubmleupon to create a cross reference between your own website or blog and these other sites.

The way the concept worked was to create a reference on the main Web 2.0 site, like ClipMarks.com, and then use StumbleUpon to rate the ClipMarks site that references your site.  This makes it so there is a double off-site reference to your site without there being any direct link from the StumbleUpon, which should give a higher rating to the link on StumbleUpon.

If anyone else tries this, let me know how it works for you.

Till next time…..

Having been in the computer industry for many years and working with the web for almost 10 years, I figured it was time to really get into doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

So to help all the others out there that are in the same boat as I am, I decided to document the trials and tribulations of getting sites to actually be listed with search engines.

All the information that I have read gives lots of advice on what to do, how to do it, and why to do it. The problem is that they can’t seem to agree on what really works and how to systematically approach the issue of actually getting ranked. So in this blog I plan to tell other people of what I have tried, what it has accomplished and how it was done. Hopefully, others will also post what they have done and what the results were of those actions also.

So with that said, let the SEO games begin!!!