Thanks to John Chow, who pointed me to the All In One SEO Pack. This Wordpress plugin lets you control the title, description and keywords META tags for every post, as well as separate META tags for your blog homepage. The Wordpress defaults aren’t the best for Search Engine Optimization, so this plugin helps Google understand your blog pages better. If you don’t know what META tags are, you can learn about them in this book. That’s where I learned the basics. My plugin is installed and running.

 I also changed my URLs so that they’re more easy to read. Before I had:

http://www.artifexus.net/?p=9, which humans don’t understand and doesn’t help Google, either. Now, I have:

http://artifexus.net/world-domination-just-pennies-at-a-time-9.htm, which helps us people AND the Google bots.

Emily tells us how to fix it (you should do it before you launch your blog). Go to Options and then Permalinks in your admin panel. You should see the default option selected. You want to select ‘Custom’ and insert the following:

/%postname%-%post_id%.htm

That tells Wordpress to use the name of the post instead of the id number. The id number is tacked on at the end to help wordpress navigate quicker to the page. Once you do that, hit Update Permalink Structure, and you’re good to go. There’s other options, like category/postname, and other steps you need to do to make it work, so make sure you check out the instructions on emily’s post. Thanks, Emily!