The series will be separated into days, starting with day two… ok lets get started.

Day 2 : WordPress Admin panel.

Introduction

In our video here we quickly reviewed all the necessaries that we would be using in order to use and edit our new WordPress install. He quickly went over the WordPress file structure. The necessary changes that needed to be made to the wp-config.php file when we upload, and the location of our all important theme files.

www.example.com/wp-content/themes/theme1

Body

Moving on through the video the main bulk of this video was getting the understanding of the different template files in your wordpress theme, what they do and how they work, so lets move through a few of them.

As described in our video if we go to APPEARANCE | EDITOR we will be able to see all the template files included in the wordpress theme currently activated.

If we start by importance usualy index.php would come to mind in a wordpress site. We can see there’s no doctypes or much html data in our file at all, but rather many simple php requests to header and footer and sidebar etc.. These are essentially statements that calls in those files from you directory. So header.

In our header.php we find our doctypes and titles tags and start of our html elements. This is loaded at the top of every page or post that calls get_header(). Pretty easy to understand.

Similarly our files typically end with out get_footer() call and our footer.php contains all the closing tags for information contained within our document.

Single.php – used for individual post pages.

404.php – used when a page within your wordpress blog cannot be found.

Sidebar -  calls widgets and other custom information into the 1 or more sidebars in your wordpress theme.

Conclusion

After looking through and familiarizing yourself with the themes directory withing your wordpress install you should be able to identify the different files and what they more or less accomplish. With this basic knowledge we will be able to simply identify where and what files we need to be editing in the future while we move on to developing our own theme, in the new few videos.

If you’re having problems understand the videos or information please comment and we will see if we can help you out.

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Before

Completely unsure about how good bots scan and index files and sites, myself and other bloggers alike had come up with a million different ways to present their own robots.txt file, and a million more ways to do theirs if they where using a wordpress site.

they ranged from

User-agent:  *
Disallow: /
Disallow: *

to something similar to this.

User-agent:  *
Disallow: /wp*

After

Some of what we have in our typical robots.txt is indeed valid, but bear with me for a second as i explain what i did to come up with some new results.

to gather statistics on what was being indexed I cross referenced the results from some analytic tools that I had available.

1. Google analytics (google search stats)
   
2. Stat press (wordpress stats)
   
3. awstats (server side built in stats)
4. Web mastering tools (By Google)
   

From the data I was able to pull from these resources I specifically looked for what was being hit. Because of the special way that wordpress loads, and imports I could see that /index.php was being indexed as a file, but most other FILES on the site where not indexed. All other PAGES or what would be considered a page by a typical computer user where not indexed as an actual FILE but rather indexed by its permalink location.

hmm … interesting Google bot indexes files and paths. Interesting  but not unexpected.

By now most of us know this, you set up a permalink structure in your website and it dynamically changes the links throughout your site to reflect the change. This is great for dynamically driven websites looking for a cleaner path or some SEO optimization.

The Google bot can in most cases follow an average custom permalink structure, I will note that the more difficult the permalink structures are ether crawled slower if crawled at all. I would shy away from lots of string names within your structure =?etc …

Back to robots…

So how does all this effect your robots.txt structure you ask? Well if you have gotten yourself a good permalink structure and you can then you can essentially set up your robots to block everything but the categories, pages, or posts you want it to crawl, and is perfect for helping eliminate duplicated content.

Here’s an example.

My own robots.txt file

User-agent:  *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /category/archive/
Disallow: /feed/

I have disallowed my wp-admin directory, and a category in my wordpress permalink structure /category/archive, and finally disallowed my rss feeds, accessed through http://www.cssorigins.com/feed if my site was indexed properly by Google then all the content that would be in the feeds would already been indexed and thus the feeds would be duplicated content. The same goes for the archive category, since I post all my posts into that category as well as their individual categories.

But remember that the bots index files as well, so it would be a bad idea to do something similar to this.

Disallow: /*.php

as your index file now would not be indexed, along with the rest of your website. =(

Don’t understand? Think there’s a better way? Please comment and help us build a better understanding of how the web works.

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if you currently are a webmaster of a domain go ahead and log into the webmastering tools section below

www.google.com/webmasters/tools

Once logged in the first thing it’s going to present you with is the option to verify your site and then submit a sitemap. Both of these steps are VITAL in the use of the webmaster tools and for the collection of accurate statistical information by Google.

Once the required fields have been filled out we unfortunately have to wait. Hopefully within the next 24 hours your site will be indexed in its entirety by Google and the data will be logged into your tools section.

Google tools keeps and displays information on …

• Crawl Errors
• Meta and Description Issues and Errors
• Top Search Queries
• External Links
• Internal Links
• Subscriber Statistics
• Sitelinks
• What Googlebot Sees

As for my advice, I would check back on your Google tools every few weeks if you’re doing constant updates to your website, just to make sure there’s no trouble on the indexing side of your website. A clean and healthy site index and no indexing errors throughout your site will help Google and other search engines to stay up to date faster and keep your website from losing natural listings due to errors.

As mentioned in a previous article if you are attempting to increase traffic to your site or are interesting in SEO (search engine optimization) going through this process is a must.

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