An easy way to improve your site’s search engine ranking is to use “pretty permalinks.” Permalinks are the direct and, well, permanent links to your blog entries. It’s what other websites will use to link to your content. “Pretty permalinks” is the term WordPress.org uses to mean “making your links look better and be more user friendly.” They could just as easily have called them “User-Friendly Links”.

WordPress creates ugly permalinks by default. They have question marks and lots of numbers and are completely meaningless. They look like this:

http://www.mysite.com/?p=206

That garbled mess doesn’t mean anything to anybody, including search engines. They still work—they get people where they need to go. But they’re not very useful. A simple way to make your permalinks user friendly is to use the “pretty permalinks” concept. Pretty permalinks look like this:

http://www.mysite.com/title-of-your-post

That makes your links a lot more useful. And useful is pretty. It’s not only good for humans looking at links, but it can also help your search engine ranking. Having real words in the url, especially keywords for your content, is a good search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.

How to Make User-Friendly Permalinks
You can change how WordPress creates permalinks in your WordPress dashboard under Settings >  Permalinks. You can choose one of several options for permalinks.

The “Post name” setting will give you a simple url like this:

http://www.mysite.com/title-of-your-post

The post name is a simplified (and search engine friendly) version of your post title, which you can edit for any post beneath the title.

“Day and name” and “Month and name” will add dates to the url along with the post name so you can not only tell what the post is about but when it was posted. You can also get fancy with a custom structure and add all kinds of goodies to the url, like the category, author and more. WordPress offers the detailed code, but in general, simpler is better. And pretty, too.

Old Site Without Pretty Permalinks?
If your site is already live and you didn’t use pretty permalinks, you can’t just change the settings. That will make all your current links break (that’s bad). Permanlinks are supposed to be permanent (duh), so you’re not supposed to change them. But it’s not too late to go pretty. There’s a handy plugin that can help you change your permalinks while redirecting the old ones so you don’t lose people in a cloud of broken links.

The web may be worldwide, but sometimes local is what matters. Many businesses aren’t interested in worldwide hits, they want a purely local audience. For these businesses improving local search can be a jackpot. And in many cases it’s easier than you think.

Search Engine Optimization
The first step for local optimization is to tackle your standard search engine optimization (SEO), but from a local perspective. This means using local keywords to bring in local customers. Use the names for your city, county, state, surrounding area and any nicknames (Twin Cities, Fox River Valley, tri-county area, etc.) as keywords. Make sure those terms are prominent on your site, both in the text and in the page titles. Your goal is to be the top result when people search for “Grand Rapids barber” or “Tulsa church” or “San Antonio lawn service.”

Local Listing
Another approach that can help is listing your site locally. You can check various local listings like Google Maps, Yelp, online yellow pages and others to make sure you’re listed—and most importantly—that your information is accurate. Many of these sites will automatically import lists of businesses but not have current info like your website. Most of these sites should also be free.

Cover the Basics
If you cover the basics it’s usually easier than you think to be highly ranked for local search. Using these tips and the basics such as WordPress and well-designed themes will get the job done. The competition is often minimal because you’re not competing worldwide, but just in your area. That kind of local attention can be a serious advantage.

Helpful Tip: Use the All in One SEO Pack to help with global search engine optimization settings, as well as customized settings for individual posts and pages.

Sometimes WordPress gets pigeon-holed as a blog platform – and, of course, it’s an awesome blog platform. But, as you know, it’s also a full-blown content management system. As such it’s ideal to handle all kinds of sites, including magazine style sites.

How you create a magazine style site is up to you. You could pick up a theme specifically designed for that style, whether it’s free or premium. iThemes offers the bSocial theme that offers a slick, social-focused look for a magazine style site.

Another option would be to build your own custom magazine theme. Using iThemes Builder you could set up a magazine site with little to no coding needed, or use an existing child theme, like Scooter, Covert, Covell, Adept, etc. to build your magazine site. And, of course, you can use the magazine extension with any of the Builder child themes.

However you do it, the idea is to change the typical homepage for a WordPress site. On a typical blog, the homepage is simply a running list of the latest posts. Some sites utilize ‘read more’ links to send readers deeper into the site for longer posts, but in general the homepage is just a long, scrolling list of posts.

For a magazine style site you need to redesign that basic approach. You want to highlight several posts more intensely, maybe with an image or a small bit of teaser text. And you don’t want those features to go away as new content is added. Using the Featured Post plugin in DisplayBuddy makes it easy to create an appealing magazine site.

A pre-designed theme will do it for you, while creating one using Builder will give you the flexibility to come up with the exact layout you want.

Two premium training courses from WebDesign.com will walk you through this process:

• Building a Magazine Theme with Builder
• BluePrint Basics: Magazine Theme for Builder

To view the webinar videos, log in to your WebDesign.com account.

Not a member yet? Check out your options.
(To access video replays you’ll need a premium annual membership.)

When you build your own website there’s a point at which you need to upload files to your server. No matter how easy web creation tools seem to get, this one act of moving files from your computer to your web space fills people with dread. Maybe it’s the nebulous concept of moving files to cyberspace or maybe it’s that techie acronym FTP that brings on the confusion.

Whatever it is, telling people to upload their files to a server causes confusion. Well, no more. We’re going to demystify the uploading process and lose the anxiety over FTP.

Glossary
First, let’s define a few terms.

FTP – This scary acronym stands for File Transfer Protocol. That’s a geeky way of saying how you move files from one place to another. It’s how you move your website files like HTML pages, images and PDFs from your computer to your website.

Host and Server – For us non-techies these terms are basically interchangeable and refer to the place where your website resides. You move your files from your computer to a server, and now they can be dished up on the Internet.

That’s it. See, not too overwhelming.

FTP Tools
In order to move your files from your computer to your server, you need an FTP program. A great one for beginners is the free FileZilla. You can download the appropriate version for your computer here.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed FileZilla, you’re ready to start uploading files.

Using FileZilla
First things first, you’ll need to connect to your server. You’ll need to enter some information from your host so FileZilla knows where to go—kind of like giving it an address. This is standard information you should be able to get from your host. You need the host (also called the server, usually your url), your username and password. Enter these across the top (usually you can leave “port” blank) and hit “Quickconnect.”

If your settings are correct, it will connect you to your server (if you have trouble, contact your host to make sure you have all the correct info).

Once you’re connected it’s fairly straight forward. On the left (under “Local site”) is your computer’s hard drive. Double click on folders to navigate around and find your website’s files on your computer. On the right (under “Remote site”) is your website. Simply drag files from the left side to the right (from your hard drive to the server) and—poof—they’ll be available on the Internet. It’s that easy.

That’s it. Now you can upload your own files. Believe it or not, you’re an FTP pro.

Creating a portfolio and showing off your work can be a challenge. It’s takes time to do and that’s time you’re not creating more work. But it’s also important to keep bringing in more work, so you need to find time to create and maintain your portfolio.

WordPress can make it easy. More than just a blog platform, WordPress is a content platform. Using a simple content management system is a smart way to speed up the process of creating and maintaining your portfolio. You can do it all yourself and you don’t need to bring in someone else. It also doesn’t have to be super time consuming.

While WordPress is capable of hosting a portfolio, it is designed as a blogging platform, which means that most themes are fairly text heavy. But there are a number of themes out there specifically designed for portfolios. They make it simple and easy to show off your work. All you need to do is upload images and write descriptions of your work. Easy.

Kepler, Kepler Light, Covell and Covert are a few themes from iThemes that work with the Builder platform. This makes it easy to build out extra functionality or build your portfolio in a preexisting WordPress site but with a different look and feel.

There’s also the Digital Gallery theme from iThemes, a standalone theme that will also make a portfolio quick and easy. And of course there are loads of other free and premium portfolio themes out there.

A Few Tips for Creating an Online Portfolio:

• Less is more. Put your best work forward and show a potential employer a few quick samples of your best work. Don’t flood your portfolio with everything you’ve ever created.
• Get to the point. Text explaining each project and your role in it is helpful, but keep it simple. Don’t go on and on. Potential employers need to quickly understand what’s your handiwork and what’s not.
• Keep it simple and organized. The goal is to have potential employers quickly review your material and hire you. The best way to encourage that is to keep your navigation simple and keep everything well organized. Don’t make it so complex that people get lost or use a navigation so unique no one can figure out how it works.
• Maintainability is key. You want a portfolio that you can easily add to over time. That means it has to be quick and easy to add new projects. Using WordPress will make that easy, but even still, don’t make the process of adding a new project overly complicated.