One of my goals for this year is to improve my blog-in terms of hits and subscribers and such and, to that end, I asked the proprietress of a blog I quite enjoy, Upon a Midnight Dreary , Dahlia Jane, for advice. She asked what I knew about SEOs.

My response: I know what it stands for.

So I looked into plugins and came across WordPress SEO by Yoast, which, aside from having a staggering number of options to tweak to your geeky heart’s desire, comes with an extremely useful guide . The guide can be used by anyone wishing to improve their site or learn about SEOs, but it would work best with the plugin.

In the process of optimising TAitA, I’ve been learning about such exciting things as link rot and breadcrumbs . [‘Link rot’ sounds like a euphemism for problems with your willy, which makes me laugh. But I digress.]

The first thing I’ve done is acquired the domain for theautodidactintheattic.com, rather than including my personal domain in the address. Hopefully, this won’t mess up too very much, as WordPress are supposed to be good about re-routing and that sort of thing. If you have problems with the site, please contact me through the contact form at the top of the left sidebar or comment on the offending post or page.

RSS subscribers prior to last Friday will need to resubscribe. I’ve put the RSS link at the top of the right sidebar. However, if you’re using bloody Chrome and click on that link, you get the XML file rather than the option to subscribe through various services the way you do with Firefox and (probably) IE. This is a rather WTF since Google (the entity that owns Chrome) has an RSS reader. [ This Chrome extension allows one-click subscribing to RSS feeds.]

From Ugly Hill by Paul Southworth

I’m learning a lot, and also having loads of, ‘What does that mean…why is it important’ moments. Discovering that there are loads of hidden rules of the Internet reminds me of this bit from Black Books:

Start at 7.00

‘The Internet is a game. It has rules. And you need to learn those rules because it’s not a game.’

If you have a WordPress blog and use plugins, please leave a recommendation in the comments. Or if you have any recommendations to improving hit-count and subscribers, your comments would also be appreciated.