Overlook Park by dougtone.

There are so many WordPress SEO tutorials out there we don’t need another one. Some of them are very good, I don’t doubt that. They cover most of the blog & WordPress SEO basics like proper URLs e.g. We have also numerous best WordPress SEO plugins lists out there.

Blog SEO is mainly NOT about basics and plugins.

You may use one, two or three of these plugins but not more. The true SEO for blogs is more advanced. On the other hand you don’t need some advanced technical skill-set to master it.

Much of blog SEO is directly related to

• interlinking
• keyword choice
• content prioritization (siloing)
• community creation

You may cover the SEO basics or use the “best SEO plugins” but still write content nobody will ever find. So what’s the deal? How do you really take care of your blog & WordPress SEO? I’ve seen countless WordPress SEO tutorials but most don’t cover any of the following 30 points most bloggers overlook:

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Amazon River by lollyknit

One obvious Web trend in 2010 is what I’d like to call SEO mainstreaming. SEO goes prime time so to say.

A few people still try to “pull a Calacanis” and tell you that SEO is a dirty word while at the same time spamming Google with fake SEO articles. Nonetheless many other, more sane publishers outside the SEO industry acknowledge that SEO is an indispensable part of any and every Web endeavor.

Thus they publish their own resources and articles dealing with SEO and search marketing. Sadly they don’t get the attention they truly deserve while everybody notices those few who dismiss SEO. Continue Reading »

Wicked by xlorddashx.

Black hat SEO is both a myth and a reality we have to face sooner or later as SEO practicioners. While I abide by probably one of the strictest SEO codes of ethics around and SEOptimise is a clean white hat SEO company company itself we still can’t deny that there is black hat SEO.

The sheer existence of black hat SEO techniques must be acknowledged for several reasons.

As Rishi Lakhani noted on his new SEO blog: You need it at least to know what to avoid or to know how competitors who perform worse than you still manage to outrank your site.
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In today’s weekly Twitter Friday column I want to compare the 3 most common retweet buttons for WordPress blogs. A retweet button is a button that not only retweets the particular post it was clicked one but also displays how many people tweeted that link: On click these buttons also lead to a list of those who tweeted the link.

I have compared 5 categories:

1. data retention – how long does the service store the tweet/retweets so that you can access them
2. customization – in as far are you allowed t change the appearance of both button and the retweets
3. URL shortener/s – which URL shortening service/s are used or supported
4. issues – things that seemingly don’t work
5. extra features – features the others don’t have or you wouldn’t expect

Continue Reading »

Lately a discussion about the RSS format flared up. Without RSS blogs and the whole infrastructure of the current Web would not be possible.

Some commentators argue that RSS is already a format of the past. A few of them add that Twitter replaces RSS for end users.

Does it really? There is some truth to it. This is just a subjective impression though. Statistics indicated already a year ago that RSS is not really popular. Fred Wilson or rather a commenter on his blog summed it up pretty well. In my own words: RSS is alive but not (yet) kicking.

The focus of this blog post is not to discuss whether RSS is dead, dying or alive and whether Twitter really replaces it. Today I will attempt to assess the ramifications of the current move from RSS to Twitter or if you prefer it the addition of Twitter to many people’s daily reading habits.
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With Twitter the phase of “do we really need it?” is over. The “how do we use it?” phase is right now. There are numerous ways of using Twitter for everything from business to bull**** and even clients come up to me and ask me about Twitter after reading one of those Twitter articles in the main stream media.

So what are the Twitter tools that really make a difference for SEO and overall business users? Continue Reading »

WordPress is the most popular blog platform for a while now and thus the main target of hackers just due to this fact. Also vulnerabilities pop up so often that you just can’t keep up with the hackers. Recently one of the many WordPress Blogs I look after got hacked again by an “online pharmacy”. Of course I’m not the only one. It was the second hack with 3 months of this WordPress blog.

This time the hackers (or more aptly crackers) even blocked my access to the WordPress admin so that it took really hours of work to get it clean and running again. Ironically this blog was the one I kept up to date quite diligently, uploading a new WordPress version as often as I could. Sadly you have to do it almost weekly, yes there are plugins now to do that, but nonetheless you have to take a look what changed (sometimes a major overhaul of the admin interface) and whether your plugins still work etc.

In short: It’s work and it’s tedious and it’s annoying but most of all, it’s dangerous!

So I really can’t recommend WordPress blogs to clients anymore unless you know they’d be able to do all that upgrading and fixing.

In case you need a reliable, easy to look after and secure blog platform for corporate or business blogging and if you want to host it yourself (still the best option for SEO etc.) you need a WordPress alternative.

I watch the blogosphere since 2001 and contribute since 2003 so I’ve seen plenty of blog platforms. There are at least 7 great self hosted blog platforms that are good WordPress alternatives: All of them offer clean URLs, semantic markup (h1, h2 etc.) and similar SEO basics.

1. MovableType: One of the most popular blog platforms. It has been bigger than WordPress a few years ago but it wasn’t Open Source and you had to pay for it so it lost market share. Now MT has open sourced and it is marketed aggressively as the secure alternative to WordPress. It certainly is more secure and has less upgrades to be performed. MovableType had some major spam problems traditionally, this might be a drawback though. Akismet on WordPress manages spam almost perfectly by now.
2. Serendipity/S9Y: S9Y was the upstarter when it comes to blog platforms. It’s relatively new as it hasn’t been around in the early day of blogging but has a growing community. Some people in the SEO industry use Serendipity so I’d be glad to hear their opinion.
3. Drupal: Drupal is more than a blog platform but you can set a blog with it comfortably. Also it has been hailed as SEO friendly for ages. Some pretty large sites that are not blogs use Drupal too and to be honest I’ve hear of any problems with Drupal.
4. B2Evolution: This blog platform has been around for ages but never got really popular. It may be name or the lack of character, B2Evolution even attempts to mimic WordPress looks by using the Kubrick theme, but this might be as well an advantage. anyways, just the fact that it’s around as well as “alive and kicking” for a such long time makes it a viable alternative.
5. Textpattern: Back when I started blogging it was an easy decision, WordPress o Textpattern. It was a choice like PC vs Mac, the more design oriented bloggers have chosen Textpattern. The community seems a little dormant by now but Textpattern is still a good choice it seems to me. Also there seem to be quite a lot of plugins for SEO.
6. Mephisto: This is a comparably unknown blog platform but if you look at the code, screenshots and and WordPress-like URLs it looks very promising. Sadly due to lack of funding and only two developers working on it Mephisto is stuck at Version 0.8
7. Typo: In version 5.1 Typo introduced many of the features we’re accustomed to from WordPress or MovableType. Now it seems to be a really good alternative. Like Mephisto the URL structure follows WordPress defaults and the markup looks great.

In case you want to build a blog on a more stable and less insecure and hackable platform than WordPress try one of the alternatives above. Of course I haven’t tried all of them so I’d like to hear some feedback from you:

• What are the drawbacks and advantages of your blog platform?
• Why is is good for SEO or why not?
• What do you miss or why did you dump WordPress or another blog CMS in favor of it?

Business blogging is not always easy.

A business blog is subjective but unlike a private blog you still are writing for people interested in your trade, products and services and not necessarily you as a person watching movies and eating out.

You can’t annoy people too much, you can’t be too

• personal
• funny
• outspoken

So you need ideas that are creative while not being too creative as to scare away your business audience.

To assist you I collected a list of 50 blog post ideas for business blogging for any industry. You can apply it in most niches I think. Some of these ideas are the bomb and will bring you publicity and popularity while others focus on highlighting your expertise or are part of a social networking strategy. Some of the post ideas are all of these at once.

1. Envision the future of your industry by extrapolating the current developments
2. Explain why everybody should care for your trade and not only specialists
3. Make a list of famous people who deal or dealt with issues related to your business
4. List 30 or more online resources for business people in your industry
5. Review a publication dealing with your industry
6. Make a list of the top myths in your industry and debunk them
7. Disagree with a high level personality in your business, prove her or him wrong
8. Make a list of the top 10 blogs in your niche
9. Report from a trade fair
10. Compare the your national market to markets abroad
11. Collect the best blog postings in your niche and compile a best of-list
12. Expand your focus to a similar area of expertise by comparing
13. Write down a code of ethics for your blog and your business as a whole
14. Explore and depict a niche social media platform for your trade, if there is none use a forum to do that
15. Add a forum to your blog or site if your site has a big enough community to sustain it
16. Break the rules of your trade by remodeling them and adapting to current situation, write about it
17. Go off topic and link a topic from everyday life back to your business “10 Ways SEO is like Base-Jumping”
18. Make a list of WordPress plugins that are most useful for your industry “The 10 Best WordPress plugins for Graphic Designers”
19. Reach out to your clients and fans: “What would you like to change in [insert your product or service here]?”
20. Display attractive images of your products, several of them, in the best case your own products
21. Analyze the current climate in your industry and explain the ramifications
22. Identify leaders in your area and ask them to guest post on your blog or write for their blog instead
23. Show what went wrong in your company, why and how you dealt with it, learning from mistakes is very helpful for others
24. Compare the new vs the old ways of doing your buisness
25. Highlight top female bloggers or experts in your trade
26. Create fictional and visionary product description
27. Satirize a very well known personality, be it of your trade or outside of it
28. Write an allegory about your idol doing your business like “The Bruce Lee Method of Business Blogging”
29. Thank your 10 favorite readers and/or commenters
30. Expose a scam in your industry (make sure to consult a lawyer in advance)
31. Take a big brand (or several) and use it as an example for best practices vs mistakes
32. Use humor to lighten up a boring topic “I Can Haz Pay Per Cat? The Lolcats Way of PPC”
33. Explain the local advantages of your company, do not hide behind modesty: “Oxford: SEO since 1542″
34. Review a book dealing with your topic that really displays thinking outside the box
35. Combine your topic with another one, usually but wrongfully not combined with yours, like SEO and graphic design
36. Express your own personal view an a highly debatable issue and do not just repeat common ground opinions
37. Make a short movie to show on your blog, this can be something funny or just simply you speaking
38. Create a list of indispensable software or web tools for your job
39. Take a common issue many people care about and explain how it relates to your business
40. Introduce a new business model in your trade or better, several of them
41. Be the first to break news, for instance reveal your new product via the blog
42. Check your search engine referers and write postings for those queries that had no matches until now
43. Check in your stats which post is the most popular one and write a follow up
44. Join a trade organization and explain why you did it
45. Make a donation to a good cause and blog about it
46. Introduce the 10 most promising bloggers in your industry
47. Check Digg, StumbleUpon or Technorati to find out what’s most popular right now and find a new angle to it
48. Engage in a discussion on a forum and reprint on your blog
49. Ask people on Twitter a question and blog the best replies
50. Make a list of blogging ideas specifically for your industry

Remember that business blogging is about value. That’s indeed the most crucial difference between private and business blogs. In private blogs people want to express themselves, business bloggers want to create value for others. So while writing a post for a business blog always consider this question: Of what use can this article be to potential clients, people in my industry and the general public?”

You may have noticed that we have moved the SEOptimise blog away from the subdomain blog.seoptimise.com and redirected this to www.seoptimise.com/blog.

The reason for this change is because inbound links to subdomains are treated differently to links which point to the main subdomain. Google generally has less trust in subdomains because it’s very easy for people to setup websites such as mysubdomain.blogspot.com. In this case rather than dominating the SERP’s because of blogspot.com’s overall link popularity, Google will value inbound links to this subdomain fully, but the weight of inbound links to the overall domain will have less influence towards rankings.

Keeping all content on the www version of the domain ensures that all inbound link juice is consolidated into a single subdomain, having a greater impact towards strengthening the overall domain. For example, external links to www.seoptimise.com/blog will help to lift rankings on www.seoptimise.com, whereas inbound links to blog.seoptimise.com will benefit the blog subdomain but have less impact to the overall rankings throughout the www version of the website.

There were some negative issues to consider, such as loss of Technorati rankings, change of URL’s for social media bookmarking and a temporary risk of losing rankings, but some reassuring advice from Jane Copland in SEOmoz’s Q&A (link only works for PRO content members) helped to show the decision to use a single www subdomain is clearly the best long-term strategy.

Below we have listed the steps we followed (and recommend) to migrate the WordPress blog to a new subfolder, whilst considering any SEO implications encountered during move:

1) Backup, Move & Restore
Follow these steps to backup the database, install WordPress in the new location and reset the WordPress URL’s to set this up in the new location. Also copy across any additional files such as plugins, themes, uploaded images and updated htaccess for the new permalink structure.

2) URL 301 Redirection
This is to ensure that no broken links or 404 errors are encountered during migration.

The following .htaccess code automatically 301 redirects all old previous subdomain URL’s to the new subfolder structure:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^blog.seoptimise\.com [nc]
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.seoptimise.com/blog/$1 [R=301,L]

3) Update FeedBurner RSS URL
Make sure your subscribers don’t miss out on your latest posts by reseting the original feed location in FeedBurner.

4) Help Google to quickly index URL changes
Updating your navigational links and XML sitemap should help to ensure Google indexes the new version of the blog as quickly as possible.

5) Remove duplicate content
Ensure that the old URL’s are removed from Google’s index to prevent any duplicate content issues. You can use Google Webmaster Central to remove URL’s but I would highly recommend waiting for the search engines to naturally crawl these pages instead, ensuring that any link juice and ranking history is maintained and redirected to the new version of the page. It may take a while for all of these pages to be removed from Google’s index, so to speed this up why not create a temporary sitemap so that they can follow all of the old indexed links and update it’s cache.

Using a 404 error page will also help you to quickly notice any problems in Google Webmaster Central’s web crawl errors and diagnostics during the migration. For any problems which occur you can setup individual 301 redirects from the broken URL’s to the most relevant webpage on the domain.

And it’s as easy as that!
Everything seems to have gone reasonably smoothly for us so far, hopefully I can report back in a few weeks to show how this has successfully improved our rankings! :D