Natural Search Blog


BlogMaps – Geographic Pinpoint Maps for Blogs

A few days ago, I noticed a BlogMap in the righthand column of Robert Scoble’s blog – I don’t see it there now, so perhaps he was just experimenting with it. But, the Blogmap immediately appealed to me as a cool mashup concept, and a nice enhancement for locally-oriented blogs.

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.

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Blog Tag – You’re It!

Okay, so, I’m late to the Blogtag game, but better late than never, right?  I’m not sure who came up with this, but the idea behind the game is that you have to tell 5 things about yourself that most of your readers might not know, and then “tag” five other bloggers by linking to them. Stephan tagged me back around Christmas timeframe, and I was so busy vacationing, and then getting back into work-groove that I neglected to play out my piece in this cool little SEO meme. So, here goes.

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!Voynich Manuscript, Cosmology Page 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.)

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Getting 404 errors with Ultimate Tag Warrior?

If you’re running WordPress and you care about SEO, then you’re probably running the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin too. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then read my blog SEO tip on tagging.

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!
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New WordPress Plugin for tracking offline impact of SEO

We just released a new WordPress plugin, Replace by Referrer, which allows you to track the effectiveness of SEO and other online marketing activities by replacing text on your landing page based on the referrer (i.e. which search engine or site referred the visitor). So, for example, you might want to offer a different toll-free phone number depending on the search engine used by the visitor. That would give you the ability to track the number of phone inquiries delivered by each search engine. Pretty cool, eh!

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

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Tagging WordPress Pages with Ultimate Tag Warrior

I’ve blogged before about the SEO benefits of tagging blog posts. For those bloggers using WordPress, I recommend the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin to accomplish this.

But what if you have a WordPress-powered site and you want to tag static Pages, not just Posts? Well I have some good news! Even though Ultimate Tag Warrior doesn’t currently support tagging of Pages, I managed to figure out a workaround. The hack (to version 3.14159 of the plugin) involves the addition of a mere two lines of code…

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Optimizing through Image Sharing Sites – SES Presentation

Here is the full Comparison Chart of Image Sharing Sites which I mentioned in my presentation on Optimizing through Image Sharing Sites at the SES Chicago ’06 Conference. Also, here is my PowerPoint presentation on Optimizing Through Image Sharing Sites.

There are quite a lot of Image Sharing Sites out there currently, but only a few of them stand out as best-in-class for potential SEO benefit purposes. Read on for a few more notes about this.

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Attending SES Chicago 06

I’ll be attending the Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2006 conference next week, and I’ll be speaking on the panel on Images & Search Engines, for anyone interested.

My part of the presentation will be on “Optimizing Through Image Sharing Sites”. I’ve written here previously about optimizing images for both image search and web search, but some of the material in next week’s presentation will be completely new, and hopefully worthwhile for anyone looking for new organic traffic opportunities to exploit. I’ve been sweating to complete some of the research for this for the past few weeks, and I think the resultant info will be pretty cool!

I’m planning to drop a handful of my bizcards off at the Superpages.com booth in the exhibit hall, for anyone interested in contacting me while at the conference. I understand that our booth will also be sharing space with our compatriots from Inceptor (a company we acquired earlier this year). I’ll be interested in seeing how this hybridized booth thing works out, along with any new Idearc branding that might start showing up on it.

Mike Sack from Inceptor will also be speaking later the same day as myself, on the panel for Converting Visitors Into Buyers.

Finally, I should also mention that Stephan Spencer, who graciously invited me to guest blog on here many months ago, will also be speaking that same day on the panel for Blog & Feed Search SEO. I’ve heard Stephan speak on this subject previously, along with Rick Klau from FeedBurner, and I found it very interesting/worthwhile.

Want to optimize? Don’t use Trackback Submitter

For a number of weeks now, we’ve seen a real spike in comment spam submitted to NaturalSearchBlog. We have a nice, heuristic-based module that keeps this out, and we moderate comments. I normally review the filtered comments, and they’re usually just tons of crappy spamlinks for sex, drugs, and gambling. Today I found a number of bona-fide comments that got aggressively filtered out with the deluge of spam, so I resurrected those and approved them. If you’ve commented here recently, we apologize for the delay in approving the comments — but they just got sucked in with the bulk of crap.

One of the 5,000-plus spam comments was from a vile company called “Trackback Submitter”. I knew what this was, of course, but I went to their site anyway in order to see what they say about themselves, and found unsurprisingly that they LIE, LIE, and LIE! If you’re a webmaster wanting to build traffic, avoid this software or you could damage yourself. Read on and I’ll explain…

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Attending the 2006 Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose?

I’ll be attending the Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose next week. Drop me a line if you’d like to meet me during the conference!

There are a handful of sessions I’m interested in sitting in on, and I’m looking forward to having dinner one night with some of my old friends from college who work in Silicon Valley.

Some of you may be interested to know that Stephan Spencer is scheduled to appear on a panel on Blog & Feed Search SEO, though I’m thinking I’ll have to miss that in order to attend the simultaneous session on Duplicate Content and Multiple Site Issue. Sorry, Stephan! 😉

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