SMarT Marketing

As a long-time internet user, I have seen breadcrumbs really take off around the internet and recently with many of the major Wordpress websites using them. You may be asking, “Why should I use them on my blog?” Well, breadcrumbs are excellent for improving user navigation and helping the search engines establish your website’s structure, otherwise known as SEO purposes. Unfortunately, Wordpress hasn’t inherited the use of breadcrumbs, which is a grave disappointment in my opinion. However, there is hope. Wordpress plugin developers have created various breadcrumb plugins that enable us to enhance the functionality and SEO of our blog. The plugin that I use is a favorite of mine and gets the job done. I use yoast.

How do I install it?

1. You need to download yoast. You can download it here.
2. After you download the plugin, you must unzip the package and upload the file to your Wordpress installation’s plugins folder.
3. Go to your plugins menu and activate the plugin.
4. You can adjust the settings under Settings > Breadcrumbs.
5. After all the settings are correct, you just add the following code where you want your breadcrumbs to be displayed:


<?php if ( function_exists(’yoast_breadcrumb’) ) {
yoast_breadcrumb(’<p id=”breadcrumbs”>’,'</p>’);
} ?>

Now, that you have your breadcrumbs installed and working correctly, you have officially added another important asset to optimizing your blog for search engines.

Wordpress has become the best blogging software and will continue to reign as the best. With the popularity of Wordpress, I am surprised to find the unpopularity of certain plugins being used. If you manage a Wordpress blog, I would strongly consider my list of the top five plugins to use:

Wordpress Database Backup - An excellent automated or manual backup solution for your Wordpress database. A classic.

Akismet - Can someone say SPAM? Yes, we all hate it and Akismet is the best Spam protection you can get for handling comments on your blog. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they are spam or not, also checks the trackbacks for spam.

All in One SEO Pack - If want exposure and traffic to your blog, you might as well optimize it for the search engines. This automatic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugin works right out of the box for your Wordpress blog.

Google XML Sitemaps - It is a simple, but very effective tool for auto generating sitemaps every time you make an update to your site. This plugin is the best tool to tell Google how it should crawl your blog and where to find everything you want found.

WP Super Cache - Speed and responsive all wrapped up into one little plugin. This plugin must efficiently caches your system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching Worpress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests.

National SEO Day is approaching! Approximately 28 more days until the first annual National Search Engine Optimizer’s Day! It all came about on June 26, 2008 through Dana Larson’s Twitter page and through word of mouth and intense viral marketing techniques this annual celebration might be a start of something big! The National SEO Day website does a very good job at keeping tabs on the event and actually nominated me to wear the first National SEO Day Badge. Thank you National SEO Day, I know the family will be proud. Join us in counting down the days and spreading the word!

National Search Engine Optimizers Day is coming so mark your calenders! I first came across it on Dana Larson’s Twitter page. All I know thus far is it will be acknowledged on August 8, 2008 and will be the first of hopefully many of celebrations to come. Do search engine optimizers get the day off for this holiday? Probably not, but if it grows legs we can cross our fingers for a lunch to honor us.