Apparently no one actually READS anything online, they scan it for content, and just read things that catch their eye. Except for my faithful Guerilleros, you guys read every word of these posts, right? Right?!

Since people are only reading what catches their eye, you need to make sure you draw attention to what you want people to be sure to read. How?

Write it in big letters!

You probably saw that before you even actually read that far. Now there are two ways to look at this. Either put what you want to make sure people read in the big letters, or, and this is a trick I use sparingly, make it kind of obscure.

What? Don’t make it clear? Well, here’s where a little knowledge of psychology is useful. People are curious. If they see big words, telling them something that seems a little random, they are more likely to read the surrounding info to see why you capitalized it. This gets them to read even more than just the words in big letters. But if you over do it, they will get frustrated, and not read any of what you wrote.

Another trick is to use bold letters. Again, the eye is naturally drawn to things that stick out. Bold letters certainly do. They also add emphasis to your writing, such as what I did in my last paragraph with the word “why”.  And again, the obscure trick works here too. People read more of the surrounding content to see why that one particular word or phrase is bold.

One more trick I’ll share is using bullets. Bullets have several uses.

• They also draw attention
• They present your info in a clear manner
• They allow you to make several points with out all the damn commas
• They make people think your presenting a lot of info
• They allow you to summarize all your important info so hopefully they’ll read it in the bulleted list

Again though, don’t over do it. Maybe one bulleted list for every 250 words or so.Also, don’t get crazy on the length of the list. Five bullets, maybe six. Otherwise people just start scanning the list.

Your bestbet is to combine all three, like I did in this post. You can even combine all three together for maximum eye draw. Here is an example”

Tips to get people to actually read what you wrote!

• Write in big letters!- People are drawn to them.
• Use the bold key!- Use it to draw the eye, or for emphasis.
• Bullets, bullets, bullets!- Present your info in a neat and orderly manner.
• I didn’t give a fourth tip!- Bulleted lists are kind of pointless if you only put three things on it.

See? Did you read this whole article or just the things I drew attention to?

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This tutorial will cover really basic aspects of writing a wordpress blog post.

It shows you how to log in, add text, images, and embed a video from youtube within the body of your post.

It also explains a little about the photo gallery feature and how to manage pictures once they’re loaded into the WP interface.

Hope this helps your guerilla a bit

See you soon!

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You’re probably familiar with the wordpress permalink structure showing some sort of date on the url, right? Something like this:

If you know a little bit about SEO, you know that the first place search engines look for keywords is in the domain url. As we see in the example above, 2009/07/10 is not a keyword anybody but a horoscope writer would target.

So, how can you change that silly date insertion to a more interesting, SEO-friendly url?

Changing your Permalink Structure

A permalink is the address given to a blog post, which is an abbreviation for “permanent link”. They are permanent because unlike your main domain url, which changes as you write new posts, the url on your permalinks remain the same. Therefore their importance for SEO.

To make changes to your blog’s permalink structure, follow these instructions:

1. Log into your admin area (blogdomain.con/wp-admin)
2. Scroll down to Settings >> Permalinks

At that point, you’ll see some WordPress suggestions like these:

You don’t want to use any of these. Instead, at the bottom, where you see “Custom Structure”, enter this code:

/%category%/%postname%/

Your configuration should look something like this:

What happens now?

WordPress will use the categories you determine for each post as part of the permalink url, which will include (hopefully) more relevant keywords to your url.

After you’ve finished, your permalink will look like this:

The Difficult Part?

So far, all you had to do was enter a half-a-line code to your wordpress admin area. That was ridicuosly easy.

The part that actually requires some thinking is determining which Categories suit your blog best.

For that, I highly recommend an extensive keyword research.

Make sure your categories:

• are relevant to your content,

• have decent traffic volume,

• are generic enough to hold more than one or two posts.

The key with categories is that they’re not TAGS, but more like umbrellas from where your tags will come out.

After a week of updating all of the permalinks, I experienced a better indexation for most of the keywords within my categories, and an overall blog traffic increase of 20-25%.

It’s definitely worth it.

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