Spark plugs and WordPress SEO

Both the Subaru and this blog need a bit of attention this week. One of them is drinking a little more than usual and throwing random lights at me, the other isn’t as search engine optimised as I thought it was
Luckily I won’t get half as filthy fixing the WordPress SEO side of things as I will getting deep into a boxer engine..

A supreme lack of spark

Firstly the Subaru (aka the Slowbaru from now on given it’s non turbo) has been playing a game of ‘flash up the check engine light but make it go away as soon as you look at it.’ And this obviously means that it’s embarrassed by something going on in the engine bay, but not in a major way to have that light permanently on.
Given I’ve noticed that a full tank of petrol hasn’t gotten me nearly my usual mileage over the last couple of weeks (by a good couple of hundred kilometres) and knowing I’ve never changed them since I got this thing last year, I’m going to say it’s the spark plugs (or possibly it’s eaten another knock sensor but I’m leaning to the plugs side).
Interestingly while working out which ones would go in without too much trouble, I’ve run into the issue of conflicting information – Supercheap Auto’s website gives me a spark plug model that’ll do the trick easily enough…only for Repco’s website to tell me ‘No, no that one doesn’t fit, try this one.’ Nothing like trying to guess who might be right there.

One site suggests yes, the other not so much

You’d think there was some kind of universal parts database they’d all agree to use here but anyway..
The best solution for this issue is to pop one of the plugs out and see what we’re working with her (and if it’s not available, find the best alternative.)
Edit: Saving myself a lot of searching, I got stuck in during a free afternoon and pulled out one of my original spark plugs to see what I was working with. It’s a NGK BKR6E-11 and if you need a quick and easy guide on how to get the old ones out and the new ones in, all you need is right here on my car blog, Drive Another Day.

Luckily fixing the WordPress SEO is a far easier process which I knocked over with 20 minutes at work, takeaway coffee by my side.

‘Google likes squares’

Secondly like car maintenance, sometimes a page/blog/whatever needs a little fine tuning. And while I’d like to tell you I made all the recent improvements (including the ones you can’t see behind the scenes) that would be a big fat lie, strong enough to make me a candidate on this show.

No the fine tuning WordPress SEO idea came from an email courtesy of RankMath, which is a WordPress-SEO Plugin that I use here at One Man Many Plans. Now normally I gloss over any email that any plugin creator ever sends me (there’s so many to read and most if not all completely ungrip me when I do, so..) but this time it was a very helpful ‘50 step WordPress SEO checklist.’

Which ultimately turned out to be very helpful WordPress seo tips email because it seems I missed a few things along the way when getting this page up and running (kind of like installing an engine into something and realising a couple of months down the track that it’s not sounding right and also there’s still parts on your workbench that should have gone into it on install day…)

Wordpress SEO
I will figure you out, one day!

While the things I missed were not earth shattering game changing things, there were a few wordpress for seo tips in there that I was completely unaware of:

-I thought I’d already submitted a sitemap_xml to Google and I hadn’t. So now it’s got one and anytime soon floods of hungry blog readers are going to swarm in and consume all my content in a flash (here’s hoping).

-It wasn’t submitted anywhere else like Bing and Yandex (even though I’m not sure what that last one is about)

-‘Google likes squares’ when it comes to icon previews. My current icon is a random section of my former banner and couldn’t even pretend to be a nice looking square if it’s life depended on it, so that needs some attention.

-The former banner wasn’t mobile friendly which didn’t help (new banner time?)

-Adding the page XML to bing led me to add the Index now plugin which will instantly index anything I write from now on (like this post) as soon as it happens. Lovely.

-And just a few housekeeping/tidying up things to make the whole ship more ship shape and cough up a far lot less check engine lights. Wait, I’m confusing the car and the blog again aren’t I? Anyway I highly recommend having a look yourself – Rank Maths 50 Step WordPress SEO checklist is definitely worth a look over. No I haven’t been paid to promote this guys, I just found their email to be incredibly helpful and figured it’d be good to share (and sent them a thank you email about it too)

Now that I fixed that part, it’s back to the car. Anyone know what works well in a Subaru Impreza spark plug hole? Let me know below!

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