Like many, I assign categories to all my posts but I lag a little when it comes to tagging because, well, it’s boring and I hate doing it. But tags are important to help you organize your posts and help readers find archived posts when the categories simply don’ t give enough information. Tags are also part of a good SEO system (search engine optimization - getting higher on search results); even though some bots and crawlers don’t rely too heavily on tags since they have been abused in the past, they are still indexed and do help drive traffic to your site.

Post Tags

Many people ask what the difference between categories and tags and it can be a bit fuzzy. A category is the topic of your post, a high level summary. The tags are a list of anything that is mentioned in the post and anything people might search Google for, such as specific people, websites, plug-ins, products, locations or events.

I had no intention of trolling through 800+ posts to tag the ones I have already written. WP Calais Archive Tagger is a Wordpress Plug-in that will search the content of your previous posts and add relevant tags to each one. It is fun to watch it generate the tags for each post and made me look back to figure out what I wrote on the post that it tagged “Tia, Toronto, conductive paint, in-the-car panic attacks, Christmas and electrophoresis.”

Going forward I plan on using the Tagaroo Tag plug-in, also from the Calais community, that will suggest tags for the new post as I write and even allow me to look up relevant Flickr images right on the write-post page.

Meta Tags and Meta Descriptions

Meta tags are the invisible tags viewable only by bots and crawlers indexing your site and help determine the categories and search results your site should be included in and the relative position on the search results page. To manually add Meta tags in Wordpress:

1. On your Wordpress admin, click the design tab, and the theme editor sub-tab.
2. Select the Header Template
3. In the header you will see the following:

<title><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?><?php wp_title(); ?></title>

Adam is drinking from a glass that is bigger than his head.

Here are a few handy online tools to help you spring clean (fall clean?) your blog and make sure it is optimized, tagged and correct. I am a notorious bad speller so I need to use a lot of these to find spelling errors, mis-linked hyperlinks and weirdly-spelled meta tags.

I do not own any of these sites and have tried most, but not all. Always use discretion when giving your email address, but the sites I have been to all had online reputations and recommendations and clearly stated privacy policies, so I felt safe with them.

Spell Checking:

http://www.netmechanic.com/cobrands/FutureQuest/spell_check.htm

http://www.texttrust.com/

http://orangoo.com/spell/

Finding Broken Links:

www.linktiger.com/

http://www.creatingonline.com/site_promotion/broken_link_checker.htm

http://validator.w3.org/checklink

http://www.netmechanic.com/cobrands/FutureQuest/link_check.htm

Browser Compatibility Checking: (How does my blog look in other internet browsers?)

http://www.netmechanic.com/cobrands/FutureQuest/compat_check.htm

http://browsershots.org/

I didn’t mention any HTML validation in this article – that is a little more behind-the-scenes and a topic for a more in-depth article about website maintenance, but I will be writing about validators and other web developer tools in the future.

(My Project Wonderful Ad)

Yes, “Project Wonderful” sounds like the spawn of a Disney mascot and the Make-A-Wish-Foundation, but it is in actuality a two-way ad network where you can either post or host ads on blogs all over the blogosphere. Yeah, I just used that word. Blogosphere. Whatcha gonna do about it?

Signing up to host an ad box means submitting your site and then populating your ad box with ads you approve, so you can pick only other artists if you want, or designers, or Etsy stores, for example. To avoid the embarrasing “YOUR AD HERE” that proclaims to the world that no one thinks you important enough to advertise on yet, you can start the bidding at $0.00, which should fit in anyone’s budget (if it doesn’t you’re doing the budget wrong) and fill up the spots until someone starts to bid for the spots in higher increments. And you can either withdraw the money you generate, or use the profits to bid on ad spots for you on sites in turn.

I just started my ad boxes, so they are still going for anywhere from $0.01 to $0.50 per day an ad. That’s not bad at all - 1 cent a day means 30 cents for a whole month of advertising. If you want to get in on the action before the bidding gets high (because, let’s face it, it will because I am awesome) then click on the link below either of the two 5×1 ad boxes in the sidebar and check out Project Wonderful for yourself.

I want an iPhone. I want it bad. I can’t have one until December 28th ( …don’t get me started on why Rogers wont let me have one until then) but until then I will have to settle for stealing Adam’s every second he forgets to hide it.

My lovely web-designing, iPhone toting husband has attempted to placate my pining by helping me iPhone-ize sixthandelm.com. This involved creating a custom webclip icon for this site and informing me of a really handy Wordpress plug-in to make your blog iPhone-format friendly.

1. A webclip is similar to a favicon, for an iPhone. When your site is bookmarked as a menu item by anyone on an iPhone the webclip will automatically display instead of a standard safari bookmark icon. Below are the webclips Adam created for my site, his photoblog and the website for Wonderday.ca, a group started and run by Adam and some friends. He even listed a tutorial for creating your own and loading the file on your website so it is automatically recognized and displayed by iPhones.

2. WPTouch is the nicest mobile webpage formatter I have seen. It takes your site and makes it mobile friendly, easy to read on an iPhone. It acts as a Wordpress theme, with customizable colours and icons, but in actuality it is a Wordpress plug-in and set up and customized like any other plug-in on Wordpress. The extras are stripped and it presents a really clean list of your latest posts with a dropdown menu to view other pages on your site. It does not affect your blog appearance on regular computers, only the iPhone.

With the explosion of the mobile web, it is really important to have an easily navigable version of your site for people on the go. So now my site is iPhone-optimized and all I need is the damn phone.

A bonus tip from Adam on how he created the above screenshots of his phone for me:

A tip to get a screen grab of your iPhone (like shown above) simply hold down the home button and then click the lock button on the top of your phone once, and it will flash white and send the image to your camera roll in your phone.. where you can sync it up with your computer or simply email the pic to yourself.

Guess what? Another cool thing offered by PayPal, only available to Americans. Being a Canadian Etsy seller can be really frustrating sometimes when it takes so long for new PayPal features to get to us, despite that fact that we are SO CLOSE to the states that we practically are one.

You’d think paying your bill by PayPal this would already be an option to us since Etsy and PayPal are such “BFF,” but there are a lot of things that you would think Etsy would have by now (like an RSS feed with images, a Public API, a mobile site, seller shop stats…) but since they are growing so fast, I think a lot of this stuff is getting pushed aside while they deal with keeping the site from exploding on a regular basis.

Well, rant over, here’s how to pay your Etsy invoice via your PayPal account using the The PayPal Plug-In, but it’ll only work for those of you reading this in the US. This plug-in allows you to use PayPal to pay for purchases on ANY site, regardless of whether or not they take PayPal. Go to the PayPal site and log in, go to the Products and services tab and scroll down to “more products and services.” The PayPal plug in is listed there. Download and install. It sits at the top of your browser and automatically asks of you would like to pay by PayPal when it detects you checking out from an online store that does not accept PayPal normally. To use it on your Etsy bill:

1. Go to “My Etsy”
2. Go to your Etsy Bill.
3. Select “change payment information”
4. Wait for the plug in to slide down and fill in your info. Make sure you tell it you will paying here again so it keeps your info. The plug in generates a “fake” MasterCard number that debits right from PayPal, no actual MasterCard needed.
5. Each month you can use the same fake MasterCard number generated by PayPal to pay from your account. Easy! And not available in Canada. Sigh.

With Christmas closer than any of us are willing to admit, it’s time to start finding that perfect gift. If you’re dedicated to buying handmade this season, this means you’ll be spending lots of time on Etsy. To save you time, grab the Etsy Search Plug-In for firefox or IE7 (You’ll get a dead link in safari or IE6) and you can search Etsy listings right from your toolbar. This saves you going to the homepage for your searches, jumping right to your results from whatever page you were on before.

This tool is provided by Etsy, so you can trust that it is safe to download and install.

Sorry.

Yesterday I threatened to throw a snowball at someone in an Etsy forum thread and someone else commented that I could since I live in Canada and I replied that I was in Toronto and yeah, it gets cold enough for snowballs here, but in January, not october and then ten minutes later it started to snow. In October.  In Toronto.

Last night the blog hit 10,000 visitors and I ran a little contest in honour of that milestone. About 20 visits before the big mark I announced that the 10,000th visitor would get a $50 gift certificate to Sixth & Elm’s Etsy Shop if they caught a screen grab of the ticker reading “10000” and sent it to me.

Didn’t know about the contest? It was an exclusive for followers of Sixth & Elm on Twitter, so add us on if you haven’t yet. We will be playing more games like this, each with a gift certificate for the shop ranging from $25 to $250, so stay tuned to the Blog, Twitter and the Facebook Blog Network for your chance to win. (Hint: the Facebook Blog Network application is new with not that many followers yet, so you have a better chance to win if I do a Facebook-exclusive contest. Just join the network and I will post on the wall or send a message for the next contest).

By some weird internet magic, we actually got TWO confirmed winners for this contest. Both DigitalMayhem and 3zArt will be enjoying their $50 discount – in fact, DigitalMayhem has already spent hers!

Currently the blog is displaying a little funny in ie and safari but okay in firefox. I will be working out the formatting kinks tonight and hopefully it will all be lined up right for tomorrow…