WordPress Search Engine Optimization Server Side

WordPress is ready and willing to be your partner in search engine optimization. This new series will focus on the best ways to optimize your WordPress installations. It is going to be broken down into 2 parts:

1. Server Side WordPress Search Engine Optimization – these articles will deal with the backend, management dashboard, plugins and themes. We will be exploring the proper use of the robots.txt file with WordPress as well as other server-side technology to best optimize your blog and feeds. We will also look at the installation of analytics tracking, setting up specific blog oriented goals and getting your blog ready for submissions and planting.
2. Front End WordPress Search Engine Optimization – these articles will deal with how to optimize your content, obtain trackbacks, submit your blog, submit your feed and plant your articles. We will also be looking at the front end of Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Center, Yahoo Site Explorer, FeedBurner and powerful services such as Technorati, Del.iso.us and mag.nol.ia.

I know that there are more blogging platforms than WordPress, and that the backend articles are not going to help people running TypePad, but the front end posts will help anybody with a blog. I use WordPress and am an expert at customizing and marketing that platform. As every professional blogger will tell you: “write about what you know”!

Getting Started With WordPress and SEO

We are going to assume you have hosting that either offers WordPress with their packages, or that you have control over your servers and can install whatever you want. I host with Rackspace Managed Hosting and have 4 servers, 3 of which are Linux. If you are ready to get a blog going and either have hosting that doesn’t offer WordPress or want to upgrade, call me at 727-856-4695 and I can hook you up with all kinds of different hosting. My Social Network Marketing packages all include hosting if you don’t have a blog and want one.

Once you have installed WordPress and chosen your theme, the fun stuff begins! It helps for you to have a theme that is optimized. A search for WordPress SEO themes will show you a ton of excellent themes that are ready for SEO. While it is true that you have hundreds of choices, you want to keep it simple. Themes that are 100% CSS driven are hard to modify if you aren’t a serious coder. I normally don’t promote any one website over another, but there is a very solid themes system from Easy Web Tutorials that is among the best and easiest to customize.

The theme is extremely important since it dictates how your blog is presented to the search engines. Things like meta descriptions and post headers are extremely important, and are usually within the index.php, single.php and page.php. The page is extremely critical if you use them as well as posts. Standard page code has the title of the blog appear as the primary meta title, I usually remove that line of code so that only the actual title that you input into the visual editor is the title of the page, not the complete title of the blog THEN the page title. Most search engines don’t read meta titles past 85 characters.

If you are unsure of anything I said in the last paragraph, please leave a comment with your question and I will answer it.

Once your blog is installed and you have chosen and installed a theme, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done. For search engine optimized WordPress installs you will need several plugins to help the search engines help you. My next post in this series will list all of the plugins I use, where to download them and how to configure them.

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Search Engine Optimisation Down Under: First Rate

I would like to tell you about some friends of ours First Rate which is a Search Engine Optimisation Agency in Australia, and New Zealand. Founded in 2001, First Rate are active members of the Australian Direct Marketing Association (ADMA), the Australian Interactive Media Industry Association (AIMIA) and The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO).

First Rate Search Engine Optimisation Services

First Rate are involved with every aspect of Search Engine Marketing, Website Strategy, Email Advertising & Marketing, E-commerce Functionality and Measurement Tracking. They were New Zealand’s first company to solely focus on search engine technologies. In 2007 they will be opening a full service office in Melbourne.

Search Engine Optimisation

First Rate works hard to bring their clients the best in Search Engine Optimisation. First Rate started as an SEO specialist provider and is now one of the most experienced SEO specialist provider in Australia and New Zealand. The founder of First Rate is a frequent speaker at industry events and conferences in Australia and New Zealand including Search Engine Room and Search Engine Bootcamp, last year he also presented at Ad Tech Sydney & Ad Tech New York.

Search Engine Marketing

The basis of Search Engine Marketing is in pay per click advertising. Basically, website owners bid to keep their websites at the top of the paid search results. The trick is to spend the least amount for your traffic, and optimise landing pages to best obtain Return On Investment. First Rate has 15 Qualified Google Adwords experts on its staff. First Rate manages over 1,000,000 paid clicks per month for its clients.

First Rate’s experience marketing hundreds of Australasia’s most successful websites, they have created a unique marketing system along with supporting software that allows them to create highly successful internet marketing campaigns.

Search Engine Optimization And Social Network Marketing

Search engine optimization used to be the only other option for Internet Marketing outside of Pay Per Click or other paid search advertising. There are two other ways to build solid traffic and help out your SEO efforts:

1. Social Network Marketing – Web 2.0 and everything that comes with it. The most powerful marketing tool in existence that is pretty much free to exploit, social network marketing and particularly RSS is a new and improved Internet.
2. Affiliate Marketing – this is only useful for e-commerce and product oriented sites. I mention it here only because it cannot be ignored in any online marketing strategy. I will be writing a whole series of e-commerce related posts in the next month and will be going into detail about how to set up and run affiliate marketing campaigns.

So we have established that traditional SEO now has a very powerful companion in organic or non-paid marketing campaigns. The question is, how do you use it?

SEO and Web 2.0 Optimized Social Network Marketing

Search engine optimization is a big topic. There are many techniques that are involve traditional search engine optimization. They revolve around common sense tactics and link gathering. If you follow the SEO newsletters you have been reading about link popularity and how many experts believe that high inbound link counts no longer have the same positive effects that they once did.

This is something I have been saying for quite a while. I have proof that inbound links, particularly reciprocal links have no where as much weight as they once did. So what is a webmaster to do? Get on the Web 2.0 bandwagon and invest all your organic strategies into blog, feed and article planting.

Most online businesses use blogging as their means of social network marketing. If you are in the process of getting into Web 2.0 for your website, I have some quick guidelines that you should follow:

• Place The Blog In Your Site’s Relative Path – don’t use any type of outside blogging system for a company blog. Blogger for example will do NOTHING to help your website in the SERPs. You will only truly benefit by installing a blog system as part of your domain. For example:
  www.domain.com/blog. This can be difficult if your web server is on a Windows platform. Ideally you are using Linux hosting. If that is the case then WordPress is by far the best solution for a blogging platform. Make sure that you install the blog in a sub-directory of your websites root folder. I use a keyword for the blog folder. Here it is:
  www.getfoundnow.com/internetmarketing/ I installed WordPress into the internetmarketing folder.
• Use An Optimized Theme – WordPress comes out of the box pretty much optimized for search engines, but there are definitely themes that are more optimized than others. The issue is in how it displays the meta tags, particularly the meta description. With a fancy looking theme, you can install special plugins for the meta tags. I use Tag Warrior, meta head description and a few others that I created myself.
• Utilize XML-RPC – a very powerful updating system called pingomatic is default installed within WordPress. If you go to manage>writing, at the bottom is a list of directory services. I used Robin Good’s top 55 as a starting place of RSS directories to ping. This basically notifies RSS directories and blog directories when your site has been updated. I put a list at the bottom of this post of the pinging services I use.
• Utilize XML Sitemap Plugin – I use a cool plugin that not only creates xml sitemaps, but notifies Google, Yahoo and Ask when your site has been updated, in fact it is a dynamic plugin that will re-build your sitemap every time a comment is added, a post is written, etc. I have a link to the plugin page on my RSS Syndication Services post.
• Optimize Your Posts – utilize traditional SEO tactics within your articles. Since most meta descriptions are pulled from the first 100 to 200 characters of your article, make the first couple of sentences a description of the story. You obviously want to use keywords and tags that you are promoting within the article in the fist paragraph as well. After the first paragraph use an <h2> tag to wrap a heading. If you are promoting multiple keywords use 2 or 3 <h2> tags, but always have content after the tags. If your topic has multiple sub categories, use <h3> tags. Again always have at least a paragraph before and after and <h> tags. Since your story’s title is default formatted as an <h1>, don’t use another <h1> tag in the story. Any instances of your keywords or tags, should be bolded, then italicized. If you have multiple instances of the same keyword or phrase, rotate the tags. If you are on Blogger, go into the code and use <strong> and <em> tags. It is important to follow normal search engine optimization practices within your posts. Lists are always a good tactic. Either numbered or bulleted lists give the content within the lists more authority. As you can see by this list I bold the initial statement, another common SEO practice.
• Use Minimal Intra-site Linking – If you are promoting a static page on your main site or trying to build placement for a keyword on your home page, then you want to optimize your content with bold and italics like I just laid out, but don’t link until the last instance of the keyword. Lets say your are promoting a keyword phrase, and it appears in your post 5 times, link the last phrase. This will build authority for that keyword on the page you are promoting.
• Nofollow Outbound Links – if you have to link to an outside site as a reference utilize the:
  rel=”nofollow” attribute within the link. You will also want to have the link open in a new window. I always put the nofollow attribute first, before the target=”blank” that will open the link in a new window. If you are referring to a source for statements within your post like Wikipedia, a regular outbound link won’t hurt. In fact I have evidence that an article that has a reference to a site with a lot of authority can help the authority of the post itself. Be careful not to have too many outbound links and that the page or site you are linking to has at least a page rank of 8.
• Use Deep Link Navigation – if you are writing about a topic that refers to another post on your blog, link to it. This counts as a comment within WordPress or a trackback depending on how you set your blog up. Default settings for internal linking on WordPress is to make the link a comment which is good for the original post.

These guidelines cover how to take traditional SEO and apply optimization to Web 2.0 applications like blogs. The next article in this series will look at how Social Network Marketing can positively effect your search engine placement.

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XML-RPC Directories

Below is the list of xml-rpc reporting services I use to notify directories about changes to my blog:

1470.net/api/ping
blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
bulkfeeds.net/rpc
coreblog.org/ping/
http://1470.net/api/ping
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.fakapster.com/rpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
ping.amagle.com/
ping.bitacoras.com
ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
ping.myblog.jp
ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
rpc.pingomatic.com/
trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
www.blogoon.net/ping/
www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
xping.pubsub.com/ping/

Syndication Through Email: Using FeedBlitz RSS to E-Mail Services

RSS Syndication services that allow users to receive email updates of your feed are a powerful means to communicate with your readers. There are quite a few RSS to email services out there, and most have a free service level. The question is which one to use, and why? Well, I am here to tell you! I have tried most of the major players in RSS to Email and have chosen FeedBlitz as my personal favorite.

Why To Use RSS Email Services To Promote Your Feed

Before I get into the nitty gritty of why I chose FeedBlitz over the other email syndication services, lets take a moment to talk about why you would want to have your RSS feed emailed at all. First of all not everyone has embraced RSS, there are still quite a few people who don’t know what it is, let alone how to use it. By having an easy to understand message on your blog that promotes your feed as well as offers subscription through email, you can capture that audience unsure of how to use the RSS chicklets and other RSS identifiers.

Since I use WordPress and to a certain extent, Blogger for my personal, business and clients blogs, I will go into detail about the plugins that exist for WordPress. I don’t recommend Blogger for a serious blog, I only use it when a client doesn’t have control over their server. I also still have 2 blogs over there that can’t be moved since Blogger will only transfer to a domain, not a sub folder of a domain.

Okay for WordPress the tool to use is the plugin What Would Seth Godin Do by Richard Miller. THis puts a nice little box either at the top or bottom of every post that prompts users to subscribe to the feed. It is easily modified to incorporate the FeedBlitz info into it. Below is the code used to show both my FeedBurner feed and the FeedBlitz signup page:

<p style=’border:thin dotted black; padding:3mm;’>If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my <a href=’http://feeds.feedburner.com/GetFoundNowInternetMarketing’>RSS feed</a>. Thanks for visiting!<br><br>If you would prefer to receive updates of this blog through your email, <a href=”http://www.feedblitz.com/f/?Sub=181069″>click here to subscribe to email updates.</a></p>

The result is a cool box at the bottom of my posts. You can opt to have it at the top, as well as use cookies to only show the box for the first 3 times someone visits your site. This is done by cookies, but I chose to have it show all the time at the bottom of the post since so many of us block cookies, and I really don’t think it is obtrusive. Here is a screen shot:

Since I have installed this plugin on my sites and all of my clients sites, our subscription rates have tripled!

FeedBlitz has multiple ways to insert their code into any type of system that you might use. They also have a sign up form that you can install right on your site. When a user hits the submit button they are sent to the FeedBlitz page that finalizes the sign up procedure. They will receive an email confirmation and that is it! The service is 100% free and will email your latest posts every night.

FeedBlitz also has premium services. For a few dollars a month you can upgrade to a Turbo edition that allows you to email our your posts on demand. They also have a pro version for $10.00 a month that allows you to customize the email your subscribers get with your logo, as well as customizing the sign up page.

Finally FeedBlitz just started a newsletter service. For a small fee you can turn your email RSS feed into a customizable newsletter. This is extremely useful for blogs that are part of a static site. You can promote your blog feed on every page of your main site. No matter which service you choose, the free or paid versions are a very powerful way to reach your subscribers.

 

Web 2.0 News Podcast June 30 2007

Welcome to Get Found Now’s first weekly Web 2.0 news podcast. Every week I am going to review the hottest news and emerging trends in social network marketing. Each article will have an accompanying podcast for those of us who prefer to listen then read. Today’s podcast is going to go over all the latest news for the month of June.

Social Network Marketing News Podcast 1

What’s New In Web 2.0

Even thought to most it’s old news, Google’s acquisition of FeedBurner is my top story of the month. The other day I wrote the first in a multi-part series on RSS Syndication Services You should be Using: FeedBurner which goes into detail about what FeedBurner is and why it is so powerful.

The acquisition makes sense since I am sure that the selling of Adwords within the feeds should easily get Google their ROI. Since RSS is the backbone of social network marketing and Web 2.0, this purchase quantifies the potential of syndication as another means of using the Internet.

The month started out with the release of Andrew Keen’s “The Cult of the Amateur”. I first heard of the book on one of my favorite blogs Lessig.org. I went out an grabbed the book more out of curiosity then thinking it was going to give me any real information, or maybe inspiration for a post or two. Keen goes into excruciating rants about the amateur Internet, how wikipedia is as useless as your neighbor Bob’s blog, and how the web needs to be institutionalized.

I suppose my question is who is this guy, and what make him an expert? The fact is he failed in his attempt with audiocafe.com, it didn’t last 2 years. So who are the amateurs? He makes some good points about the inaccuracy of blogs and wikipedia, but if you’re like me you only use it as a starting point in research. Anyway I wasn’t impressed with Keen’s accuracy, and his opinions on digital sharing whether its music or video seemed over the top to me. I certainly don’t condone theft, especially of content, but there’s a big difference between making a valid point and ranting like Bill O’Reilly. I found his comparison of Google to a parasite amusing at best, dangerous at worst. I am sure he is bitter over the results of a Google search for his name. I really don’t recommend this book to anyone that is looking for positive answers to their Web 2.0 goals, in fact I don’t know who I would recommend this book to at all!

A positive Web 2.0 social network marketing story that came out this week is about U.S. Congressman George Miller (CA-7) who is one of the first politicians to embrace the power of social network marketing. Representative Miller is using Facebook to promote anti-war sentiments with his “ask george” campaign. He is asking visitors to use the tag “askgeorge” with their anti Iraq videos and messages so his staff can weed them out. As I was researching this story, I found it amusing how the non-techie political sites kept referring to Millers methods with the “so-called Web 2.0 sites”. What the hell does so-called mean? I am still amazed at how little people really don’t understand the legitimacy of Web 2.0. I know it is a term that is often misused or improperly categorized, but they had better realize that Web 2.0 is real, and it is here to stay.

What’s New In The Search Engine World

This next section will deal with what is new in the world of search engines. It will focus on the majors; Google, Yahoo and Live. If Ask or any other small engine has some important newsflash I will report them as needed.

Google News For June

June was a great month for Google. Their new SERPs called “Universal Search came out of beta. I know that Universal Search is ruffling a lot of feathers in the SEO world, but I like it. It certainly works for me as my strategies about news oriented marketing and dynamic content play out. I have been supportive of Google’s personal search amid criticism about privacy and Google’s data gathering policies. As a user and researcher both personal and universal search help me. I use iGoogle as my home page and follow all of my feeds as well as feeds of sites I am interested in. Using Google on Firefox with several plugins including the Google Toolbar has made searching much more effective for me.

Now changing to my SEO hat, I can see how these things can be worrisome to some webmasters. The fact is the SERPs are different, and moreover they are less predictable as users’ search history effects their results. As news, images and videos are thrown into the mix along with all the advertisements, organic listings are going to be tougher to maintain, especially above the fold.

Google also announced the creation of Google Gadgets. Developers can win a grant for as much as $100,00.00 for any successful gadget that can make iGoogle better. Developers will be able to set up their gadgets and the ones that get 250,000 page views will receive a $5,000.00 grant. If they can produce a plan to improve the utilization of their gadget, they can get a grant up to 100K. Things like this is what I love about Google and their attitude. They are definitely one of the biggest supporters of open source. By promoting creativity, and open source projects, Google is once again supporting that community.

Google also have released their Google desktop for Linux. While it isn’t as robust as Google Desktop for Windows, it is still a good sign. I am sure developers will be creating more desktop gadgets. All my primary computers in my office run Kubuntu, so I use Konquerer as my desktop search and am happy with that.

Yahoo and MSN or Windows Live Search Updates

Other than Yahoo adding more complexity to their horrific paid search interface called Panama, they have been pretty quiet outside of Yahoo adding Flickr streams to their image search. I will tell you that I am preparing a major series on Yahoo and how Inktomi has changed. I am sure many of you remember the good old days when Inktomi was as easy as pie to manipulate. Now Slurp is more advanced, but the foundation of their algorithm is still pretty easy to optimize for. If anyone has any specific questions they would like addressed leave a comment in this post.

That’s it for this week, I’ll be talking to you next Sunday about the exciting world of Web 2.0 and Social Network Marketing.