Hi, guys, and welcome to BuildMySiteForFree.com. Today, I’m going to be walking you through the writing settings section of WordPress. So to get to your writing settings, you want to come down to the navigation menu where it says “Settings.” And you’re going to open up your submenu and scroll down to where it says, “Writing.”

And this is going to bring us to your Writing Settings page. This is the page where you set your basic options for when and how you write all of your posts. So the first section is where you choose pretty much the size and formatting of your posts. So first, you choose the size that you want your post textbox to be. And by default, it’s 10 lines, but I chose 20. So the bigger the number, the taller the box will be on the writing posts page.

The next section is the formatting section, and here, you can either check the first box to convert emoticons to graphics. So if you’re typing any smiley face from your keyboard, WordPress, by clicking this box, will automatically change that into a graphic on display. And then if you click the second box, this will allow WordPress to correct invalidly nested HTML codes automatically.

And then your next three options is your default options. So first, if you forget to post certain items into a category and you want them to always be posted to a specific category, especially when you forget, you choose this item right here. And every single post that you create will automatically go into this category. And by default, it’s always under “Uncategorized.”

And then next, you choose your default post formatting option. So you can choose it to be standard, a side, or a gallery. And then last, you have your default link category. So any time that you forget to categorize a link, by default, they will go under the category you select right here.

Then your next option is the Press This option, and Press This is an application that lets you grab bits of the Web, so you can click text and videos and images from any webpage. And then you can edit it and even save or publish it in your posts from your site. And what you could do is either click it and drag and bring it to your bookmarks bar, or you can actually just right-click it , and it will open up this box where you can actually save it to your favorites, edit it from here, and then save it or publish it.

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Our next option here on the Writing Settings page is our Post via e-mail. Now if you’re not around your computer a lot and you want to constantly publish posts from your email, you can do that by setting up these options right here. So you would enter your server information, your login name, your password. You even have the option to select a default mail category as well, and this is where you would set this up so that you can – at any time – from your email publish posts to your blog.

And the next section is the Remote Publishing section. And here, by clicking either of these boxes, it enables Atom Publishing Protocol and other publishing protocols to allow you to post on your blog from a remote website or a desktop publishing application. So by default, these are both disabled. But if you check the first one, it will add on publishing protocol. And if you click the second box, it will enable different publishing protocols, such as WordPress, Moveable Type, MetaWeblog, et cetera.

And then our very last section here on the Writings page is your Update Services. And here, you can select which ping service you want to notify when you’ve made new posts or updates to your blogs. So by default, it has pingomatic.com, but you can choose any website you want and enter it into this text box here. You can also, for more information, click this Update Services link, which will bring you to the WordPress codex page to give you more information on the Update Services section of the Writing Settings page.

And then, of course, once you’re done, you want to save these changes. And this is how you set your Writing Settings portion of WordPress. Thank you for watching.

Hi. Welcome to BuildMySiteForFree.com. Today’s tutorial is about trackbacks. Now trackbacks are comments left on your blog by other blogs, not by actual viewers. Now when you write posts, what happens is in that post, you can give a link to a post made by another blog, which of course, would be a different blog than yours.

What then happens is you publish that post. And once you have done this, your blog sends a message to that blog that you have made a link to them. This is called a ping or a network ping. Then that blog can post a receipt that they’ve gotten your message, and the whole point of this is to acknowledge other blogs. Especially if you like something that that blogger has written, you’ll use a trackback, and it’s to pretty much compliment that blogger and to show them that you like what they’ve written.

So to go about actually adding a trackback, you do need a specific version of WordPress. So where it would appear is if you’re on your Add New Post or Edit Post page, you would scroll down to the bottom of the textbox right here, and it would be underneath here.

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Usually, you’ll have an option to add an excerpt for that specific post to put on your Blogroll, or you’ll actually have a textbox here where you would insert the URL of that blog, which would be how you would go about adding that trackback. However, the version I’m using does not have this option, but what I’m going to show you is how to actually manage this trackback option and to set it.

So what you would want to do is come over to your “Settings” link. Open it up, and you scroll down to where it says “Discussion,” right where my cursor is. This will bring you to your Discussion Settings page. And the only box you need to check off for this is right here, this second one, I’m going to constantly check it so you can see what I’m doing. By checking this, you are allowing these trackbacks to occur. So you’re allowing these link notifications to get to your blog and to be given to that blog.

If you do not want trackbacks, all you’ve got to do is uncheck this box and then, of course, scroll down and you want to save your changes. However, trackbacks are a good thing, so for most people and most bloggers, you’re going to want to keep this feature by checking that box.

Now the last thing I do want to mention is that your blog must report trackback protocol for this to work. And this has been a video about trackbacks. Please stay tuned for more videos. Thank you.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to BuildMySiteForFree.com. Today’s tutorial is about how you find your category ID number. Now each category has a unique ID number, and there are several things you may need it for on WordPress. A few examples may be when you need to add certain tags, like the query posts tag, you need your category ID number. You also may want your category pages to look different from one another, so you also need your category ID number for that.

And there are several other reasons as well. And now to go about finding your category ID number is very straightforward and very, very simple. All you want to do is when you’re on your Dashboard, come over to the navigation menu and open up your Posts submenu. Here, you’re going to scroll down to where it says “Categories.” And once you clicked that link, it will bring you to the Categories page.

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And you can see here, on the right side, is a list of all the categories I currently have. Now in order to find this category ID number, all you have to do is hover your mouse over the specific category. And down at the end of the window browser in the status section, you will see, at the end of the URL link, the category ID number.

So for this one, you’ll see it says “ID equals 18.” This one, the ID number is 7. For this one, 1. And for this one, it is 6. And that is all you have to do in order to find your category ID number.

Thank you for watching.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to BuildMySiteForFree.com. Today’s tutorial is about how you find your category ID number. Now each category has a unique ID number, and there are several things you may need it for on WordPress. A few examples may be when you need to add certain tags, like the query posts tag, you need your category ID number. You also may want your category pages to look different from one another, so you also need your category ID number for that.

And there are several other reasons as well. And now to go about finding your category ID number is very straightforward and very, very simple. All you want to do is when you’re on your Dashboard, come over to the navigation menu and open up your Posts submenu. Here, you’re going to scroll down to where it says “Categories.” And once you clicked that link, it will bring you to the Categories page.

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And you can see here, on the right side, is a list of all the categories I currently have. Now in order to find this category ID number, all you have to do is hover your mouse over the specific category. And down at the end of the window browser in the status section, you will see, at the end of the URL link, the category ID number.

So for this one, you’ll see it says “ID equals 18.” This one, the ID number is 7. For this one, 1. And for this one, it is 6. And that is all you have to do in order to find your category ID number.

Thank you for watching.

Hi, everyone. Welcome to BuildMySiteForFree.com. Today, I’m going to be explaining to you how to manage your authors and users on your blog. So I’m going to show you what the page looks like and explain to you the different options you have. And I’m also going to talk a little bit about the rules that users can have on your blog. So it gives you a little bit more of a knowledge if you are going to start a blog with multiple users.

Now by doing this, first, you want to go to “Users” on your navigation menu. When you open it up, you’re going to want to click the very first link that’s titled “Users.” This will, of course, bring you to the Users page. Here is a list of all the users you have currently on your blog. So if you are the only user, you’re going to be the administrator, and you will be the only name in this list.

But if you decide that you want to add multiple authors to your blog, this is where the next part comes in. So first, I will show you that you have the option to delete users at any time, which means they will no longer have access to your blog and be able to write posts or manage posts on your blog either. And by doing this, you would just click the name of the user you would want to delete. You would come to the dropdown menu where Bulk Actions are and you press delete and then hit Apply. And this will delete the User from your blog.

Whenever you want to change their role, you would come to this section after you have clicked the box next to their name, and you can change their role by choosing any of these that I’m scrolling over. And when you’re done with this, you of course, want to hit change and that will change their role.

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Next, I’m going to explain you a little bit of the roles’ definitions. So I’m going to open up this box again, and I’m going to start off at the bottom with subscriber. Subscriber only has access to manage their profile. Contributor has the option to write, edit, and manage posts, as well as upload files. However, a contributor, once they have written a post, need to save it as a draft because they need to get approval from the administrator before it is actually published. An author has all of the access that a contributor has. They can edit, write, and manage posts. They can upload files, but they can actually publish their posts to the blog without having to await for administration approval.

Next, we have editor. An editor can do both what an author and a contributor does, so they can, once again, edit, write, manage posts. Publish those posts and upload files. But an editor can also moderate comments. They can manage links and categories. They can edit pages. They can read and edit private posts, and they can also edit other authors’ posts. So you have a lot of roles here, if you’re an editor.

Then last, you have your administrator. An administrator is the site owner, so you can do anything, all of the above, with your blog. And like I said, if you ever want to change the role of someone so that they only have certain access to certain areas of your blog, this is where you would come. You would click one of the options and then, of course, hit change.

And then lastly, if you have a large amount of users on your blog, you can always come to this text box up here and search users. You can also see the amount of posts that each user has right here all the way on the right side. You will see their role here, their email here, and then if you choose to have a name next to them, that will be here.

And any time you want to edit any information for a user, you would simply scroll over their name. And where you see edit, you’ll go ahead and click that, and it will allow you to edit all of the user’s information.

And this video has been brought to you to teach you all about managing authors and users. Thank you for watching, and please stay tuned to more videos.

Hi, and welcome to BuildMySiteForFree.com. In this tutorial, I’m going to be showing you how to edit a category. Now you may have briefly seen this in our adding a category video, but I’m going to touch on it a little bit more now. And what you want to do first is go to the Categories option on your posts submenu, and it’ll bring you, of course, to the Categories page.

Now instead of going to this section where you would add a new category, you want to come right here to the list of categories you have already created. And if you notice, as I go over each one, you will see three words popped up: Edit, Quick Edit, and Delete. So obviously here is where you can edit and delete them. So one option you can have is you can click Quick Edit where two boxes will open where right from here, you can change the name and the slug and update it.

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Or you can click Edit, which will bring you to the Edit Category page for that particular category. So here, what I’m going to do is just change the name of the category and add a description. So what I would do is I would backspace whatever I already have and I want to add a different name and just make it All DIY – All Do-It-Yourself.

And I’ll keep it none because I want it to be a main category, and in the description, I will just copy and paste something I wrote. In this category, you can find great ideas for do-it-yourself activities around the house and garden. So here, I have my description, and I changed my name. And then once I’m done, I’m going to click “Update,” which will save the changes I’ve just made. And now if you come back to the Categories page, you will notice that the category’s been changed. It says “All DIY,” and it also has a description next to it now. And anytime you want to go back and change any information for any category, this is how you would do so.

Thank you for watching.

Googlebot has a specific user agent, I think it is Googlebot mobile, for mobile search. So if you see Googlebot mobile, then serve up your mobile site. If you see just regular Googlebot I would serve up just your regular site. It can be nice to have the content on a separate URL, so maybe use m.whateveryoursiteis.com; that can be a very good best practice.

The other thing that some people seem to worry about is they say, “Well aren’t I cloaking? Is this going to cause some sort of cloaking issue? Will I get into a penalty from that perspective?” The answer is no for the following reason; cloaking looks at the difference between what is returned to the main Googlebot, that is our Googlebot WebCrawler, versus to the user.

So there is no problem returning your main site to Googlebot and your main site to users using a regular web browser, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, anything like that. Now if you see a mobile user agent come in, something that you can tell from the user agent is an iPhone or an Android phone or something like that then it absolutely makes sense to return your mobile version of your site.

So in essence all we ask you to do to avoid any cloaking is if regular Googlebot comes, the WebCrawler, treat us just like a regular web user visiting with Internet Explorer or Firefox or Safari or Chrome. If a regular user comes in or if Googlebot comes in and it’s Googlebot mobile, then give it the mobile version of that site.

Other than that those are the main things to bear in mind. I think it is very handy to have a separate URL, like m. whatever the name of your site is, because then you can always do testing, you can make sure that things work. It might keep it a little bit more clear in people’s mind about what’s going on.

But if you do those you shouldn’t have any duplicate content issues. And if you do please stop by the forum linked to from Google.com/webmasters and let us know what sort of issues you see and then we’ll take that, see if we can debug it and make sure that it works better for everybody.

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Now if you are a mobile business, so for example maybe you’re a plumber and you get into your pickup truck and you drive around in a particular area then in Google Places you can specify a service area, which is roughly 50 miles around where you’re based. But that’s only if you actually have some base of operations there. You can’t be based in Topeka and claim that you have a service area of Wyoming if you have no physical presence there.

And I think that that’s a good idea. You do want to have local businesses show up and I know that the team has been really paying a lot of attention to trying to improve Maps quality, make it more robust, check on the authenticity of businesses, and that will only continue.

So if you’re an out of town company and you’re looking for a way to show up locally and you don’t really have any presence there, there’s not really a way to do that. But if you are a mobile business then you can use that 50 mile sort of service area around where you’re based within Google Places so that’s one option to know about.

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We’re both trying to figure out what users like and that’s the ideal sweet spot where we’re pursuing the exact same sort of things that you are trying to bake into your website. So, for example look at the things that people are complaining about. If people are complaining to Google that they don’t like content farms or article banks or whatever it is that they’re saying, “Oh Google I really don’t like this.”

We listen to that feedback as well and we try to figure out, ok if people really don’t like that how do we write an algorithm that’s going to return better content according to what our users are looking for? So we’re trying to suss out exactly what it is our users would like to have in the search results.

Maybe their complaining because one site is showing up to often in the top 10 and so they want more diversity, so we’ll write an algorithm to sort of say in our web search results, how do we encode more diversity?

So the thing to look for is try to get your finger on the pulse in terms of what users are unhappy about, what they want to see in Google, what they’re complaining about, because those are the exact same pieces of feedback that we’re listening to, even if we don’t talk about it outside of Google.

And so as a result if you’re able to assess, ok this is what Google is trying to change in order to be something that users like more, then you can provide those sorts of services or that functionality in your website. And that’s the sort of thing where now instead of chasing after the last algorithm and trying to respond to each individual update you’ll be sitting at the top of that mountain, hopefully whenever Googlebot crests, and we’ll find you right there.

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Matt Cutts: Great question. In general we don’t promise that site: queries will rank in the exact same order that other pages would rank in. So we do use a few different factors.

We do use some version, roughly, of PageRank but it’s not exactly in PageRank order. We also look a little bit at, for example, maybe how short the URL is and those tend to be URLs at the root page or one directory down. And those tend to be the pages that would attract the most links anyway.

So it’s kind of a combination to sort of try and surface the pages we think are useful either according to PageRank or interesting in terms of being relatively short. So it’s something that’s pretty important or pretty close to your root page.

But I wouldn’t necessarily say that, and it’s not the case, that it’s strictly in PageRank order or anything like that, at least the last time that I checked. So it’s a relatively good proxy of the pages that might be kind of interesting but I wouldn’t treat it as a perfect list.

You can always go through your server logs and figure out which pages are driving the most traffic and sometimes those are going to be deep URLs, for example that might get a very specific link or that rank for some other reason.

Hope that helps.

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