Wordpress is probably the best blogging platform around in terms of search engine optimization features, both built-in and available through plug-ins. Netconcepts sets up highly-optimized blogs for many of our clients and we even recommend setting up entire websites on Wordpress due to the ability to easily delegate editing functions among many employees as well as for the SEO potential. Our Netconcepts and GravityStream websites are both set up on Wordpress, for example.

One question someone asked during my session which I didn’t know the answer to was whether our SEO Title Tag Plug-in works on the new version of Wordpress (with built in wp tags) and the answer is yes - it has been updated to work with wp built in tags and tested on 2.3- not tested on 2.5 yet. (Thanks to Kerry Mann for helping me answer this one.)

Finally, here is a copy of the presentation I gave that a number of attendees have requested.

A media feeding frenzy is when a subject or thing that’s happened suddenly becomes a top headliner story for journalists. News organizations have a well-developed radar for which stories of the day are going to be the most interesting for their audience, and they avidly push to provide articles quickly to satisfy the public’s sudden thirst. As more journalists glom onto the subject, it suddenly seems that everyone is reporting on some variation of the same subject, and this is a media feeding frenzy.

Bloggers can hop onto these feeding frenzies, and ride the wave of traffic associated with them. (more…)

Many thanks to all of you who voted for it! (more…)

This might confuse search marketers about the value of providing RSS feeds on one’s site for the purposes of natural search marketing. Here at Netconcepts, we’ve recommended using RSS for retail sites and blogs for quite some time, and we continue to do so. Webmasters often take syndicated feeds in order to provide helpful content and utilities on their sites, and so providing feeds can help you to gain external links pointing back to your site when webmasters display your feed content on their pages.

Google has removed RSS feed content from their regular SERPs, but they haven’t necessarily reduced any of the benefit of the links produced when those feeds are adopted and displayed on other sites. When RSS and Atom feeds are used by developers, they pull in the feed content and then typically redisplay it on their site pages in regular HTML formatting. When those pages link back to you as many feed-displayed pages do, the links transfer PageRank back to the site originating the feeds, and this results in building up ranking values.

So, don’t stop using RSS or Atom feeds!

Over time, I’ve looked at a lot of small community guides, and many of the people who create them are masters of finding free widgets to provide functionality for things like weather forecasts, news headlines, and local events. But, many of these sites are missing even simple search functionality to help users find the local info on their site as well as elsewhere on the internet. (more…)

Technorati only counts the total number of blogs which link to another blog for the Authority number, not the total number of links - which is good, since various blog features like categorization pages, preview snippets, and other pagination and navigation schemes common to blogs can cause a link from a single posting to reappear multiple times from a blog’s site.

(more…)

If you operate a blog that’s about a specific geographic location, I think addition of a Blog Map to your layout could be a great feature. The BlogMap shows a small map image which has your blog pinpointed on it, and a link to all the other local blogs in your area.

If you use this, I suggest you be careful about using your home address for the map pinpoint, since this could introduce negative factors, personal security-wise. Instead, use a nearby address, or use your work address.

It took me about one minute to set up this BlogMap for Natural Search Blog:

If you operate a blog that is about your local area, I also suggest using the hCard Microformat in your site design in order to best optimize for local search engines, though blog search engines likely haven’t set up special algorithms for locality specification yet. I previously blogged about how to use microformats to optimize for local search.

Another option BlogMaps offers is to just display a button that displays the number of Bloggers nearby, hyperlinked to a list of them - something you could use if your were concerned about displaying your location. They also offer a button for “your local opml”.

The Blogmap interface is very elegantly done - simple, and easy-to-use. No surprise that this was developed by one of the primary Microsoft Virtual Earth developers, Chandu Thota. Chandu just recently left Microsoft, and I’d bet they’ll miss him.

One suggestion to Chandu: it’d be really cool if you offered the option for bloggers to display the larger map that pinpoints all the top bloggers in your mapped area. I know he may’ve avoided doing this because of the cost of the maps that would need to be delivered. The way around this might be to offer this add-on service for users who wish to pay a subscription fee.

Five Things You Didn’t Know About Me:

1. - I’m fascinated by the Voynich Manuscript. It’s compelling to me as an enduring mystery — likely one of the top seven mysteries in the modern world. Many cryptographers and linguists have attempted to decode it, and failed! If I thought it was more than an antique hoax, I’d be writing my own Perl scripts to try to break the code down. My first decoding book was written by Martin Gardner, and I used what I learned from it in third grade to break a coded message I found in my great-great-grandmother’s autograph book. I guess the takeaway is that I’m just damn compelled by puzzles. I used to compete with people in high school to see who was the fastest at solving mixed-up Rubik’s Cubes. I think my record was right around 42 seconds. (I’m not that fast anymore, but I’m obviously still a geek.)

(more…)

There’s been a long-standing bug in WordPress 2.X, ever since WordPress switched to internal rewrites instead of external ones within .htaccess. The bug is that UltimateTagWarrior displays 404 errors (File Not Found) on tag pages when you have rewriting of local tag URLs turned on (in Options > Tags in the WordPress admin). The bug usually only manifests itself when you are using custom permalinks (i.e. if you’ve selected “Custom” from the Permalink Options in the WordPress admin).

Well I’ve got good news! I’ve figured out the problem!
(more…)

It’s free and open source. Download it now for your WordPress blog or site. Enjoy!