SEOptimise » wordpress

Top 20 WordPress Plugins – 2011 Edition

Kevin Gibbons — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 23:02:28 +0000

Tonight I was delighted to be invited to speak at the London Blog Club and presented about the WordPress plugins which I find most useful.

Here are the slides from my talk:

20 Top WordPress Plugins – 2011 Edition – Kevin Gibbons, London Blog Club

If you have any questions on this please let me know in the comments or on the meetup.com page.

30 Very Useful Twitter Tools You Must Be Aware Of

Tad Chef — Wed, 04 May 2011 13:46:42 +0000

There are numerous ways of using Twitter for everything from business to fun. The key to using Twitter effectively is the use of tools. Without tools, Twitter can be overwhelming and difficult to fathom. There are numerous tools that allow you to sift through this massive resource of latest news, links and gossip.

So what are the Twitter tools that really make a difference for advanced Twitter users?

I selected just the best of them: 30+ Twitter tools that are most useful right now. Most of these tools have been around for years so they have a sound business model. They simplify manifold tasks but have one thing in common: you must be aware of these tools if you’re serious about Twitter participation.

Standalone and Web-Based Twitter Clients

CoTweet
CoTweet is a solid and free web-based Twitter client with some useful CRM features aimed at business users. I use it quite often.

TweetDeck
Sleek Adobe Air desktop client for Twitter offering a good overview with several panes.

Seesmic
Seesmic is like both CoTweet and Tweetdeck; they have a web-based client and an Adobe Air based app with similar features. They even support Facebook and other services as well.

twhirl
One of the more popular Twitter clients from the early days of Twitter. I can still recommend it.

Spaz
Cross platform open source Twitter client for Mac, Windows and Linux.

Hahlo
Web-based iPhone (and iPod Touch) optimised Twitter app that works inside modern browsers as well.

Misc. Twitter Tools
ManageFlitter
An advanced Twitter contact management tool I can highly recommend.

Twellow
Twellow is the “Yellow Pages” of Twitter.

iTweet
This is an alternative web-based interface for Twitter, and indeed it’s a little more usable than the default one on Twitter.com.

TwitterCounter
This is a Twitter followers counter similar to the Feedburner count for blog subscribers.

Paper.li
Ever wanted to publish a newspaper? Paper.li does it on your behalf. Just pick the sources, be it people or hashtags.

Magpie
Magpie is an ad-network for Twitter. It boasts that users can make something like $50-200 a month just by tweeting.

Twitter WordPress Plugins

Twitter Tools by Alex King
I use this set of tools over on my own SEO blog and it works fine, you can even tweet from the WordPress backend and your blog address will be used as the client (software) link.

WP to Twitter
Twitter updater plugin using the SEO friendly Cli.gs short URL service for tweeting your posts.

Reliable Twitter
This WordPress plugin uses the Google Ajax API to get a reliable stream of tweets to your blog sidebar.

Firefox Extensions for Twitter

Echofon
Simple but effective and popular Twitter Firefox add-on. I have used Echofox as my main Twitter client for several years now.

TwitBin
Even simpler Twitter add on for Firefox.

HootBar
Lets you post to Twitter right from the address bar of your browser.

Twitter Social News

Topsy
Search the most popular current stories shared on Twitter. Also available this week, month or all time search.

Trunk.ly
This is a Delicious-like social bookmarking site for Twitter but it’s automated. It collects the links you share on Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and everywhere, saving them as bookmarks with tags. You can share them with others as well.

TweetMeme
Find out the most popular stories as shared via the Tweetmeme button.

Twitturly
Social news-like interface for the current hot tweets.

MicroBlogBuzz
Shows you what’s most popular today, this week etc. on Twitter and across the other common microblogging platforms.

Twitturls
Shows the latest and most popular links on Twitter.

Twitter Analytics

Klout
Klout is probably the most widely used tool to determine a person’s (or account’s) authority on Twitter. The sheer number of followers is a worthless metric.

bit.ly
Use bit.ly as URL shortener and you can look up how many people clicked the actual links along with some other stats. For shortening links you can also use j.mp – it’s even shorter and does not have a domain from Libya (.ly).

TweetReach
Tweetreach is an analytics tool that estimates the number of impressions you have received, even listing the users who provided them. It’s quite biased though, as impressions by large numbers of bot followers do not mean much. So make sure you weed out the automated accounts when considering the numbers.

TweetStats
This statistic tool measures everything from when you tweet (weekdays, time of day) to who your real friends are by counting how often you address people.

Twist
Twist allows you to quickly view and compare popularity trends on Twitter. It’s similar to Google Trends.

FriendOrFollow.com
This tool compares your list of friends with your followers and shows you who does not follow you back.

These 30+ Twitter tools will allow you a seamless integration of Twitter in your daily routine, but make sure you know what you’re doing on Twitter and have some business objectives.

This post was originally published on November 14th, 2008. It was last updated: May 3rd, 2011. Numerous links have been removed and added. Many descriptions have been altered.

* Image by Noël Zia Lee

What Checking Broken Links Can Teach You About the Web & Linking Out

Tad Chef — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 14:25:10 +0000

Probably you haven’t noticed yet as I haven’t told you yet: starting from 2011 I’m stepping up my efforts on SEOptimise. I write more regularly for the blog and I’ll help the SEOptimise team with their blog SEO among others. So I start with the basics: broken links.

Blogs amass a record number of broken links over the years as they often deal with short-lived developments or news.

The Web deteriorates fast and with it your site quality when you link out. In my last post I argued that linking out is important for SEO. That’s true but you have to keep in mind who you link out to. Seeing hundreds of websites either disappear or move without proper redirects can teach you a lot about the Web and links. What did I learn?

Google, Microsoft and Yahoo don’t care for broken links

You might assume that companies owning search engines themselves would get the issue of broken links on their own sites. They don’t. There are plenty links to fix here. Google is really awful, many URLs do neither return a 404 nor a 301 to the new version. Yahoo and Microsoft sites like MSN tend to offer proper 404 pages bu does not bother to redirect to newer URLs. So in case you care about longevity you better just link to the blog posts that announce a new service by Google as these tend to stay online longer.

Startups tend to disappear after a year or two

In my highly popular tools list which I compiled over the years but even with a list covering web analytics I saw a considerable number of dead links. I’ve seen that before on my own blog over at SEO 2.0 – tools disappear fast, especially tools based on third party services liketter. Almost all of the first generation Twitter tools from around 2008 had disappeared by the time I update it in late 2010. At the same time most of the blog links were still working. Even those that get acuired are often gone, either by getting swallowed completely by the company that bought them or by sheer neglect.

Sites by people who comment for SEO vanish fast

When installing Broken Link Checker for WordPress and letting it run for a while on a blog that has been online for a few years you might experience a shock: hundreds of links are broken! Soon you’ll discover though that most broken links stem from blog comments. Most of these are not your regular commneters but those who offer less value and comment mostly for SEO purposes. It’s amazing how many comments, track and pingbacks lead to nowhere after a while. It’s often generic sites the likes of expert-internet-marketing-services.biz that vanish the fastest.

Some well known SEO publications do not redirect all posts to new URLs

Pronetadvertising.com was one of my favorite sites over the years. Also Kevin has linked their posts as far back as 2007. They are still around but some seemingly still valid posts have changed URLs or disappeared completely. I could restore some of those links manually both on SEOptimise and on SEO 2.0 I was surprised though to see SEO experts forget this. There are many reasons for such issues, sometimes the blog gets rid of old outdated posts. In other cases the company restructures or the blog gets underfunded in the long run so that obvious tasks like redirecting to new URLs get forgotten.

Even flagship blogs sometimes go offline after a few years

This is probably the saddest part of checking broken links: witnessing the demise of your idols’ blogs. Well known and respected industry blogs doshdosh.com and tropicalseo.com are just two sad examples of blogs from acknowledged experts that are no more. So long out is always a bit of a hazard n the long run. Even the best of us can fail to keep up their blogs after a few years.

Black hat SEOs hijack your legitimate links

Linking out to bad neighborhoods is even worse than linking to broken pages as your site is not just full of holes due to broken links but also may inadvertently become part of spammy link network. Thus you have to check redirects as well not just 404s. Often links get redirected to

How can you check your blog/site for broken links?

You can use lots of free or affordable tools.

How to link out for longevity?

Link out to news sources from stable websites or blogs not the actual tools you describe. The tool might be long gone while the article will be there for years. So you better link to an NYT article about a new feature by Google than the Google feature itself which might disappear altogether in a year. Remember Google Wave and Google SearchWiki. There were gone within a year.

How to fix outgoing links without breaking your posts?

Link out to archive.org for important sites. When doshdosh.com went down I linked to the archived versions of Maki’s articles.
Use a site:brokenlinkurl.com “headline of linked post” to find it elsewhere on the site.
Unlink the the link altogether when it doesn’t hurt the value of the post
Delete the whole post whenever a post only consists of the link or is built around on it. Many early posts on SEOptimise were tumblogging short notes consisting mainly of a link.
Make a screen shot and link to it for pages where you expect a quick change (like AFP stories on Google News or Wikipedia that might get deleted soon)
Save a local copy and set up a mirror once the original disappears you can use the Firefox extension ScrapBook o save web pages with ease

Why check and fix broken links at all?

The SEOptimise blog exists since 2006, yes it’s already five years old so it’s only logical that many links are not valid anymore. Google seems to assume that older blogs have lots of broken links as I couldn’t see much of an positive impact in search results after fixing of hundreds broken links on my own blog over at SEO 2.0.

At the same time I’ve seen static pages jump back to top results after an update with the obligatory link check. It may depend on the level of change or on the fact of adding a new date.

Still I highly recommend fixing your old postings as it directly harms the user experience and ultimately your reputation when visitors end up on outdated content full of broken or misleading outgoing links. Sometimes even internal links break. As search engines often show older content people will end up on your outdated pages as well.

So at the end of the day it doesn’t matter whether Google really takes broken links into account as a direct ranking factor.

You have to fix links anyways to stay a credible source over the years. It’s also not just about the broken links. Years old advice or suggestions are often not true anymore or there are better solutions by now. Thus I sometimes replace old links with new ones to a completely different resource.

40 Social Media Tools & WordPress Plugins – a4uexpo Presentation

Kevin Gibbons — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 12:53:26 +0000

Today I presented at a4uexpo London on 40 Social Media Tools and WordPress Plugins. This was split equally between the two sections and I’ve shared the slides and individual links, plus provided a very quick summary for each below.

a4uexpo – 40 Social Media Tools & WordPress Plugins

Top 20 Social Media Tools

Hootsuite – manage your social media accounts online and link up with your traffic stats in Google Analytics.
Untweeps – tidy-up your Twitter account by finding the accounts you’re following which have gone stale.
Klout – find influencers based upon Klout score and find ways to improve the influence of your own account.
Topsy – find the top influencers to connect with and help retweet your messages, based on a keyword query.
Wikipedia Traffic Statistics – view how much traffic an individual Wikipedia webpage has generated.
Flowtown – customer insight tool to find which social media sites your customers and contacts are using.
Social Mention – online reputation management tool to show brand mentions and overview of topics.
Scout Labs – view recent stats on brand mentions, plus all information from blogs, news, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter.
KnowEm – protect your brand by claiming the social media profile handles to stop other people from registering them.
Pitchengine – promote your press releases to social media channels.
Journalisted – find top UK journalists based on a search query – recommend searching for industry name.
SWix – comprensive tracking and reporting to pull together a range of social media profile stats into a single dashboard.
Domain Superstar – find new domain name opportunties based on a keyword query.
StumbleUpon advertising – give social media campaigns a boost with some extra paid visits.
Skimlinks – quickly and easily convert external links to affiliate links, when there is a merchant available.
ad.ly – advertise via Twitter and MySpace to promote your content by paying per tweet/message.
oDesk – find freelancers online to hire for a wide-range of web-based tasks.
Fiverr – build Facebook fan pages and Twitter followings, amongst many other small tasks.
Omgili – search just for forums and find new discussions based on a keyword query.
TubeMogul – distribute your videos to all of the top video sharing websites via a single upload.

Top 20 WordPress Plugins

Sharebar – useful WordPress plugin to display all popular social media bookmarking buttons alongside blog posts.
Blackbird Pie – easily share your favourite tweets by embedding them directly into blogs posts.
su.pr – encourage StumbleUpon votes when using URL shorteners to send links out on Twitter.
Backtype – pull together the latest discussion around a blog post from social media websites.
Subscribe to comments – encourage the continuation of blog discussions, with email alert messages to commenters.
All in One SEO – automatically optimise title tags, description and noindex/follow meta tags.
Yet Another Related Posts – automatically build internal links to related content from each blog post.
Google XML Sitemaps Generator – great way of automatically generating an XML sitemap to keep your blog up-to-date.
Redirection – easily manage the redirection of a blog from one URL to a new version.
SEO Smart Links – automatically create internal/external links when keywords are mentioned within content.
Feedburner FeedSmith – automatically forwards any RSS URL’s to use a single Feedburner version.
RSS Footer – add copyright, external links and promotions for subscribers and scraper sites using RSS feeds.
WordPress Database Backup – make sure you have a backup of your site incase the worst happens.
WP Super Cache – make sure your blog is running as quickly as possible, looking to keep users and search engines happy!
A/B Theme Testing Plugin - split test two different WordPress designs or layouts alongside each other simultaneously.
Zemanta – get inspiration to brighten up posts, with images and external links recommended to bloggers.
WP Robot – automated plugin for important Amazon and eBay products into a blog automatically. Be careful with this one!
WP125 – ad management tool to rotate ads and manage the expiry date for direct advertisers.
Geolocation targeting – try targeting your ads specifically for your most popular audience locations.
WP-e-commerce – convert your WordPress site into an e-commerce store so that you manage the buying process.

Also if you have any questions from the session, please ask – happy to answer either in the comments or via Twitter.

Advanced Blog & WordPress SEO: 30 Points Most Bloggers Overlook

Tad Chef — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 07:57:48 +0000

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:

Strategic Ranking

Google loves blogs and fresh content. Blogs offer everything Google needs so it rewards blogs and publishing new posts frequently. On the other hand you will notice that your blog ranks often in random ways unless you decide what blog posts and what keywords and phrases you want to rank for. With the several blogs I write for I often notice this kind of behavior. You have to prioritize and decide yourself which posts you wan to rank. In SEO it’s often referred to as siloing.

Outdated posts may rank forever.
So you have to return to those posts and update them for better SEO results. You may also redirect your old posts to new URLs but I prefer the update.

New posts often rank far worse than old posts.
Thus you have to update the old posts sometimes instead of writing new ones on the same topic.

More keyword posts don’t automatically mean better rankings for those keywords.
Adding “UK SEO” to each an every post doesn’t mean you will rank better for UK SEO. Rather focus on the best performing post about UK SEO on your blog.

Tag pages might outrank your posts.
Adding a tag cloud to your blog is good for usability and still common. Your tag or category pages might outrank your posts though as they are always linked on homepage. Tag pages make people bounce though. So don’t link your tags and categories everywhere.

Nobody finds your best posts unless you mark them as “best”.
Usability guru Jakob Nielsen has written about it years ago. You have to add a best posts, featured posts and/or most popular posts list to your blog. We use Postrank for that purpose.

You won’t rank for “x blog” unless you have “x blog” in your HTML title.
Google is still too stupid to recognize a blog by it’s set up or structure. Using WordPress doesn’t mean you will rank for your term + blog. Just search for design blog. You have to call yourself blog in the HTML title tag an dthe h1 headline. Doesn’t seem “advanced”? It took a me more than a year to finally prove that.

Strategic Linking

Link building in advanced SEO is not only about getting links. It’s also about how each link is part of your overall SEO strategy. Do you aim to rank for your main keyphrase or two? Or do you seek to become a great resource first and make each post rank as high as possible to harness the long tail? This decision determines how you will link out, link your internal posts and interlink them in future.

People click the first link in lists.
It doesn’t matter how you structure your list, whether it starts with “a” or the best list item. People tend to click the items on top. Consider this when compiling link lists.

Only first anchor text counts.
This might seem counterintuitive but Google apparently only counts your first anchor text in a page when you link the same page twice. So

Repetitive linking with the same anchor text is spammy.
While many SEO plugins automatically link a given page or post on your WordPress blog with a predefines keyword this is spammy. Google discounts unnatural accumulations of anchor texts like it discounts keyword stuffing elsewhere. It’s not 2005 anymore.

Broken links break your SEO and make less trustworthy.
Both users and search engines rely on trust factors like you not linking to bad neighbourhoods. Often old blog posts link to sites that do not exist anymore or worse have been overtaken by someone else and are more or less of low quality

You get no links without trust.
When it comes to business blogging most blogs won’t get authority links unless they become trusted resources. There are a few desperate people out there like Jason Calacanis who will attack a whole industry to get links but that doesn’t work for you. You are not a celebrity. Only people who trust you link to you.

You get incoming links by linking out (I don’t mean trackbacks).
Many people new to blog SEO assume that they have to hoard PageRank like they do on their static sites but only blogs that link out succeed in the long run. You get links mostly from other bloggers. How do they notice you? When you actually link out to them. Getting links with trackbacking everybody via automated plugins is spam.

Nofollow hampers your internal links (pings) as well.
WordPress still uses by default the so called nofollow attribute for blog comments. It was introduced to combat spam but it never did. The widely used Akismet plugin is for spam. WordPress also adds your nofollow internal links (pings) and thus hurts your site. Otherwise you can just ping your older posts by linking them in your newer post and both of them get a ranking boost.

Content Strategy

Content creation is not just about producing as many blog posts as possible and blog SEO is not about making these posts as keyword rich as possible. You need a content strategy and goals you want to reach. Also who re the people you want to reach with your blog posts? Think about that before you start blogging. Do you blog for branding, SEO or do you seek feedback from your readers?

Normal people or websites rarely link out to blogs, others bloggers do.
So you have to write for a relatively small audience of other bloggers to get links. Make sure to address other bloggers in your posts at least from time to time. Write for people, I mean people you know by name to achieve this.

Images rank far easier than postings.
SEO is still a niche topic. As SEO blogs are fairly well optimized also the images in them rank well. You may end up with more visitors from image search than from regular results. This works great for other more image oriented blogs as well. Descriptive image names and captions are key here. angelina-jolie-naked.jpg with “Angelina Jolie naked” as a caption will outrank 123.jpg with “look at her” as caption. Read about advanced image SEO in this presentation [PDF].

Listicles bring traffic but in depth posts like Seth Godin’s bring reputation (and traffic).
As an SEOptimise reader you know we produce quite a few lists. These lists are very popular. To get a reputation and trust you need to cover topics in depth though. Some lists manage both, like I hope this one does but random shallow collections of items aka listicles don’t. Take a look at Seth Godin’s blog. He manages to do both.

Embedding videos from YouTube or elsewhere is a recipe for disaster
Many US bloggers forget that the world is bigger than the USA. They will embed videos hosted on video sites to their blog posts. Sometimes the video is the only content in a post like that. Many videos can’t be displayed outside the US, even the most popular ones. Some sites like Hulu are US only. Some videos get removed for copyright reasons, other for personal reasons. So you end up with an empty player in your blog post. Use open source video players for your professional blogs.

Comments and Community

Your goal with a blog is also to create a community of supporters for your blog, site as a whle and brand. Blogs and comments are the most straightforward way to do so. Comments are very tricky though. There are many pitfalls to overcome, especially when it comes to blog comments and SEO. Disabling comments is no solution though for flagship business blogs.

Unmoderated comments may hurt your site’s authority.
You have to moderate comments very closely. That is: Check the name of the commenter, is it just keywords. Read the comment, check whether it’s original (or just a bit that copies the same comment from elsewhere or even from your blog comments above), click the link the commenter added. In case everything is OK then the comment should be approved. Otherwise it might make you look bad for both users and search engines.

Comments make your posts rank better, not only for long tail phrases.
Stale blog posts may outrank you but also may dissappear altogether. When people still add comments to old blog posts Google obviously assumes that they are still of relecvance. Also people add more contant via comments and thus you can rank for long tail phrases and often even quite popular keyphrases just becaus of the comments.

Switched off comments make your blog a one way street.
Many bloggers consider switching off comments altogether to get rid of spam, low quality comments and to have more time for writing. While the advantages of this approach might be obvious the drawbacks are a bit more long term and fuzzy but they are there. The conversation takes place somewhere else. You lose a community or the community you once had.

Using third party tools like Disqus for comments makes them unmovable.
Many bloggers use third party comment management tools like Disqus make them stuck once you move your blog to another platform for instance. When the URLs change the comments can’t be ascribed correctly to their posts anymore.

Relying for Twitter for comments breaks them when Twitter is down.
Some bloggers do not use third party commenting tools but add Twitter authentication via OAuth. This is a good idea as long as Twitter is up. Just yesterday I couldn’t add a comment to a blog because Twitter was “over capacity”. Make sure Twitter is not the only way people can authenticate or allow comments by anonymous users as well. You can make those

Most people don’t comment.
99% of visitors do not comment on your blog. So pay special attention to those that do but don’t assume everybody else shares the same opinion. Also consider adding low threshold user participation to your blog. Something like adding stars for approval.

Most positive comments are spam these days.
“Thank you, great post!” This is not a comment. This is spam. Whenever I see a blog post full of such comments I know that the blogger in question doesn’t care about real comments so I don’t comment myself. I don’t want my comment to get buried below dozens of worthless bot like flattery. Also note that a comment providing no context and no relation to the actual post can be automated.

You have to reply to good commenters to keep your blog community alive.
While most comments are trash you have to try to keep the commenters who are really adding value by commenting on point. These people are your most ardent fans in many cases. They are your brand evangelists who will spread the message beyond your blog. Nurture them and your blog SEO will thrive.

Conversions and ROI

Blogs are not meant to convert visitors to clients. Also the ROI of blogging is fuzzy. You need to make a blog work for you and your business. Just adding a blog and assuming you get more conversions or a better ROI than before doesn’t work. So make sure to find out how your blog could earn money for you. Think about ways to convert your readers to subscribers, brand evangelists or even clients that are specific to your business. Each and every blog I write for has a different way of earning money.

The date makes people bounce.
Blogs, especially WordPress blogs still mimic diaries like back in 2001. So people will see the date of a post almost instantly in the URL or above the post itself. While hiding the date entirely is not a good idea showing it before the actual post as the most important information is a mistake. People will assume that your content is outdated when they see a date from a few months ago or last year. Business blogging is about value though, thus you won’t just blog time sensitive news. Display the date at the bottom of the post without highlighting it. Otherwise visitors just bounce.

Blogs do not convert unless you make them.
We know that there are basically three kinds of search queries. Navigational, informational and transactional ones. Blogs are geared towards serving the informational queries. People who get the information have no reason to stay on your blog and buy, subscribe etc. You have to blog for conversions to get them. This starts with choosing different keywords and placing a call to action at the bottom of your post.

Blogging doesn’t pay when it’s a shop window with no products.
The term business blogging suggests that blogging itself is the business. In most cases it is not. blogging only supports your real business. It’s like s shop window for showing off your expertise. In case there is nothing to buy though, no products you won’t sell anything.

You can perform A/B split tests with WordPress.
A/B split testing or multivariate testing is very en vogue these days even beyond the SEO industry. It is for good reason. You can optimize for the traffic you already have instead of trying to get even more of it. A/B split testing works in WordPress as well and can increase your conversion rates significantly.

You have to segment your blog traffic to achieve the best results.
When you study your analytics often enough you will notice that your visitors are often completely different. You have probably very determined search users, very casual social media users, and very devoted returning visitors if your blog works well. To achieve the best results and convert these visitors you have to segment them. It means you need to offer different things to different people. Example: Show targeted CPC ads to search visitors. Show CPM ads to social media visitors. Don’t show ads to regular visitors or special offers instead.

Advanced SEO?

Now you might argue that this or that this list isn’t about advanced SEO at all. You may be right. Most of these issues haven’t been covered in the quite common basic WordPress SEO tutorials though. So they are at least more advanced than the basics. Indeed that’s also my point:

These techniques described above are not advanced in the sense of difficult or complex.

Most of them are just less known. Also most also work on other blog systems as well or beyond blogs. This list is based on my experience with WordPress blogs though (I write for and optimize 4 of them regularly).

So don’t obsess about the WordPress SEO basics and plugins. Don’t overlook these 30 points like other bloggers do. You might outrank them by focusing on them.

10 Non-Industry SEO Resources and Articles – SEO Mainstreaming

Tad Chef — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 10:58:49 +0000

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.

technology
journalism
business
social media
web design

publications are among those who deal with SEO these days. Even Dilbert covers SEO! I’d like to feature 10 resources and articles from these non-industry resources this time.

The quality of the SEO advice and resources offered is quite high especially compared to the nonsense a few people spread to this day. I’m glad that SEO becomes mainstream. Finally common sense prevails over ill-fated boldness and provocation.

30 Black Hat SEO Techniques You Can Use Ethically

Tad Chef — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 16:33:03 +0000

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.

The good news is: Most black hat SEO techniques can be used in a clean, ethical white hat way as well.

They are like knives: You can slice bread with a knife but you can kill with it as well. It’s your decision how you use the knife. Also consider the problem with overall perception of the SEO industry. Your hat can be whiter than snow and still people will treat you as the guy with the virtual knife.

Personally I think black hat SEO is for the weak.

The black hat logic goes: When you can’t win the game you have to cheat. It’s the same dilemma as in sports though: When everybody cheats how are you going to win? That’s why reputable and successful SEO experts don’t have to use it.

OK, long story short, here are the 30 black hat techniques you can use ethically as well. Take note how I am explaining only the positive way of using each technique. I do not advocate the use of it in it’s original black hat context. Use these knives as kitchen knives:

black hat by googlisti

Hidden text – Create modern CSS based websites with JQuery effects. They often hide large portions of text in layers to display them on click or mouse over for usability reasons. Example: CSS pagination.
IP delivery – Offer the proper localized content to those coming from a country specific IP address. Offer the user a choice though. Shopping.com does a great job here.
301 redirects – Redirect outdated pages to the newer versions or your homepage. When moving to a new domain use them of course as well.
Throw Away Domains – Create exact match micro sites for short term popular keywords and abandon them when the trend subsides. Something like tigerwoodssexrehab.com
Cloaking – Hide the heavy Flash animations from Google, show the text-only version optimized for accessibility and findability.
Paid links – Donate for charity, software developers etc. Many of them display links to those who donate.
Keyword stuffing – Tags and folksonomy. Keyword stuff but adding several tags or let your users do the dirty work via UGC tagging (folksonomy) every major social site does that.
Automatically generated keyword pages – Some shopping search engines create pages from each Google search query and assign the appropriate products to each query. You can do that as well if you have enough content.
Mispsellings – Define, correct the misspelled term and/or redirect to the correct version.
Scraping – Create mirrors for popular sites. Offer them to the respective webmasters. Most will be glad to pay less.
Ad only pages – Create all page ads (interstitials) and show them before users see content like many old media do.
Blog spam – Don’t spam yourself! Get spammed! Install a WordPress blog without Akismet spam protection. Then create a few posts about Mesothelioma for example, a very profitable keyword. Then let spammers comment spam it or even add posts (via TDO Mini Forms). Last but not least parse the comments for your keyword and outgoing links. If they contain the keyword publish them and remove the outgoing links of course. Bot user generated content so to say.
Duplicate content on multiple domains – Offer your content under a creative Commons License with attribution.
Domain grabbing – Buy old authority domains that failed and revive them instead of putting them on sale.
Fake news – Create real news on official looking sites for real events. You can even do it in print. Works great for all kinds of activism related topics.
Link farm – Create a legit blog network of flagship blogs. A full time pro blogger can manage 3 to 5 high quality blogs by her or himself.
New exploits – Find them and report them, blog about them. You break story and thus you get all the attention and links. Dave Naylor is excellent at it.
Brand jacking – Write a bad review for a brand that has disappointed you or destroys the planet or set up a brand x sucks page and let consumers voice their concerns.
Rogue bots – Spider websites and make their webmasters aware of broken links and other issues. Some people may be thankful enough to link to you.
Hidden affiliate links – In fact hiding affiliate links is good for usability and can be even more ethical than showing them. example.com/ref?id=87233683 is far worse than than just example.com. Also unsuspecting Web users will copy your ad to forums etc. which might break their TOS. The only thing you have to do is disclose the affiliate as such. I prefer to use [ad] (on Twitter for example) or [partner-link] elsewhere. This way you can strip the annoying “ref” ids and achieve full disclosure at the same time.
Doorway pages – Effectively doorway pages could also be called landing pages. The only difference is that doorway pages are worthless crap while landing pages are streamlined to suffice on their own. Common for both is that they are highly optimized for organic search traffic. So instead of making your doorway pages just a place to get skipped optimize them as landing pages and make the users convert right there.
Multiple subdomains – Multiple subdomains for one domain can serve an ethical purpose. Just think blogspot.co or wordpress.com – they create multiple subdomains by UGC. This way they can rank several times for a query. You can offer subdomains to your users as well.
Twitter automation – There is nothing wrong with Twitter automation as long as you don’t overdo it. Scheduling and repeating tweets, even automatically tweeting RSS feeds from your or other blogs is perfectly OK as long as the Twitter account has a real person attending it who tweets “manually” as well. Bot accounts can be ethical as well in case they are useful no only for yourself. A bot collecting news about Haiti in the aftermath of the earthquake would be perfectly legit if you ask me.
Deceptive headlines – Tabloids use them all the time, black hat SEO also do. There are ethical use cases for deceptive headlines though. Satire is one of course and humor simply as well. For instance I could end this list with 24 items and declare this post to a list of 30 items anyways. That would be a good laugh. I’ve done that in the past but in a more humorous post.
Google Bowling – The bad thing about Google bowling is that you hurt sites you don’t like. You could reverse that: Reverse Google bowling would mean that you push sites of competitors you like to make those you dislike disappear below. In a way we do that all the time linking out to the competition, the good guys of SEO who then outrank the ugly sites we like a lot less.
Invisible links – You’d never used invisible links on your sites did you? You liar! You have. Most free web counters and statistic tools use them. Statcounter is a good example. So when you embed them on your site you use invisible links.
Different content for search engines than users – Do you use WordPress? Then you have the nofollow attribute added to your comment links. this way the search engine gets different content than the user. He sees and clicks a link. A search bot sees a no trespass sign instead. In white hat SEO it’s often called PageRank sculpting. Most social media add ons do that by default.
Hacking sites – While crackers hack sites security experts warn site owners that they vulnerabilities. Both discover the same issues. Recently I got an email by someone who warned me to update my WordPress installation. That was a grand idea I thought.
Slander linkbait – Pulling a Calacanis like “SEO is bullshit” is quite common these days. Why don’t do it the other way around? The anti SEO thing doesn’t work that good anymore unless you are as famous as Robert Scoble. In contrast a post dealing with “100 Reasons to Love SEO Experts” might strike a chord by now.
Map spam – Instead of faking multiple addresses all over the place just to appear on Google Maps and Local why don’t you simply create an affiliate network of real life small business owners with shops and offices who, for a small amount of money, are your representatives there? All they need to do is to collect your mail from Google and potential clients.

booze by tz1_1zt

Thanks to my Twitter followers @DerekEdmond, @seowolf and @DonnaFontenot for brain storming support on this list. The question I asked was:

What was the most evil black hat SEO technique your dirty, stinking competitors have worked with?

Why don’t you, the SEOptimise readers, answer this question as well? Otherwise just use these 30 black hat techniques ethically or try the many more white hat tactics first.

3 Retweet Buttons for WordPress Blog Posts Compared

Tad Chef — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 19:22:33 +0000

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:

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


	TweetMeme Retweet Button	BackType Tweetcount Widget	Topsy plugin for WordPress
Data retention	several months	a few weeks	unlimited (forever)
Customization	2 sizes, placement	2 sizes, placement, text, colors, custom CSS	2 sizes, placement, custom CSS
URL Shortener/r	bit.ly	bt.io, bit.ly, tinyurl etc. (you choose)	bit.ly
Issues	Does not support my blog address, doesn’t let you push the button twice	numbers sometimes seemingly random as tweets just stored a short time	Counts bt.io, su.pr etc. as extra URLs, thus inaccurate sometimes
Extra Features	Many platforms supported, comment tracking	comment tracking	Free statistics, retweets as trackbacks, groups influential users

There is one problem all the services face when they use bit.ly

Have you ever asked yourself what .ly stands for?

It’s Libya. Yes, that the dictatorship in North Africa. You trust dictatorships suing products Made in China as well? Well, think twice. The Lockerbie bombing has been committed by the Libyan secret service agent. So one day Libya might decide to block or reroute your URLs.

I’m not sure which one to choose myself yet. We use TweetMeme on SEOptimise and I test both BackTpe and Topsy on my SEO 2.0 blog currently. Thus I highlighted the most important pros IMHO.

There are several other less popular solutions. They offer less features but have other pros.

Twitter Friday: Is Twitter the New RSS?

Tad Chef — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 18:49:54 +0000

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.

At first I have to admit that I never got used to RSS. This is really a surprise to myself as well as I blog professionally for several publications. Also I have tested at least a dozen RSS readers and use 3 of them. Mostly I use RSS readers to test whether my RSS feeds actually work for others. Once or twice a week I will check my Netvibes subscriptions.

On the other hand I check my Twitter stream several times a day. Additionally I use several tools to determine who writes or tweets about me and about terms I care for. Last but not least I check several social news like Twitter aggregators to find out what’s hot and what not.

Nonetheless these tools are not enough to use Twitter in a RSS reader like manner. An advanced Twitter client like Tweetdeck allows you to subscribe to different keywords or users though. You could argue that this use case is really replacing RSS.

In a way not Twitter is a replacement of RSS but FriendFeed.

On Friendfeed you can not only subscribe to a blog but to everything an author publishes are at least wishes to share on FF. Thus Feedburner, the Google owned leading company offering RSS enhancement and management has recently added FriendFeed subscribers to the overall subscriber count of a blog. Many people, including me, disliked this measure.

From a marketing and SEO perspective RSS subscribers and Twitter followers (and FriendFeed subscribers as well) are quite a different pair of shoes. The main difference is:

You don’t own your tweets.

You just use a service that allows you to contact others. They might close it down any day, ban you or make you pay for it. A blog or any other publication that harbors content and offers an RSS subscription is online real estate. So from the publisher perspective an RSS feed is much more important than a Twitter stream.

Also you don’t offer a subscription to your blog via Twitter. Even in the case of publishing your new posts via Twitter it’s not really the same. Many people subscribe to your Twitter stream for other reasons than reading your blog. Thus the number of clicks to your blog posts will be most likely smaller than the number of people actually reading them via RSS.

So for web publishers, bloggers, SEOs alike RSS is the more important way of spreading your content. We can’t ignore the emergence of Twitter as a RSS like news reader. Many professional bloggers already automatically tweet whenever a new posting gets published. We at SEOptimise do that manually as well. This is somewhat obvious but primitive.

It’s as if we would offer TV programs on a radio, Twitter being the radio in this metaphor.

You can’t fully appreciate an RSS feed via Twitter. In the end it’s just a link you might overlook among the plethora of other updates.

Trying to gain and to retain your subscribers via RSS while at the same time getting more Twitter followers is the best way to go. You have to offer RSS enhancements to make people stick with RSS. For instance on my blog I offer Feedburner powered links to social sites which display the number of votes and the number of comments.

Also I use YARPP, a related posts plugin for WordPress blogs that also shows related postings on your RSS feed. Both enhancements create win to win situations for publishers and readers. On Twitter you should add value by not only publishing your RSS feed automatically. Twitter is for socializing and one to one communications as well. I even use it for crowdsourcing.

In future we’ll see more useful ways to use RSS and Twitter and combine them. TV has not replaced radio, cars haven’t replaced bikes and planes haven’t replaces ships. It’s the way you combine and use them.

Many thanks to my Twitter followers SEOHolicc and kieronhughes for providing the two sides of the same coin.

30 Very Useful Twitter Tools You Must Be Aware Of

Tad Chef — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:43:32 +0000

There are numerous ways of using Twitter for everything from business to fun. The key to using Twitter effectively is the use of tools. Without tools Twitter can be overwhelming and difficult to fathom. There are numerous tools though that allow you to sift through this massive resource of latest news, links and gossip.

So what are the Twitter tools that really make a difference for advanced Twitter users?

Standalone and Web Based Twitter Clients

CoTweet
CoTweet is a solid and free web based Twitter client with some useful CRM features aimed at business users. I use it quite often.

TweetDeck
Sleek Adobe Air desktop client for Twitter offering a good overview with several panes.

Seesmic
Seesmic is like both CoTweet and Tweetdeck, they have a web based client and and Adobe Air based app with similar features. They even support Facebook and other services as well.

twhirl
One of the more popular Twitter clients from the early days of Twitter. I can still recommend it.

Spaz
Cross platform open source Twitter client for Mac, Windows and Linux.

Hahlo
Web based iPhone (and iPod Touch) optimized Twitter app that works inside modern browsers as well.

Misc. Twitter Tools
ManageFlitter
An advanced twitter contact management tool I can highly recommend.

Twellow
Twellow is the “Yellow Pages” of Twitter.

iTweet
This is an alternative web based interface for Twitter and indeed it’s a little more usable than the default one on Twitter.com

TwitterCounter
This is a Twitter followers counter similar to the Feedburner count for blog subscribers.

Paper.li
Ever wanted to publish a newspaper? Paper.li does it on your behalf. Just pick the sources, be it people or hashtags.

Magpie
Magpie is an ad-network for Twitter. It boast that users can make something like 50 to 200$ a month just by tweeting.

Twitter WordPress Plugins

WP to Twitter
Twitter updater plugin using the SEO friendly Cli.gs short URL service for tweeting your posts.

Reliable Twitter
This WordPress plugin uses the Google Ajax API to get a reliable stream of tweets to your blog sidebar.

Firefox Extensions for Twitter

Echofon
Simple but effective and popular Twitter Firefox add on. I use Echofox as my main Twitter client for several years now.

TwitBin
Even simpler Twitter add on for Firefox.

HootBar
Let’s you post to Twitter right from the address bar of your browser.

Twitter Social News

Topsy
Search the most popular current stories shared on Twitter. Also available this week, month or all time search.

Trunk.ly
This is Delicious-like social bookmarking for Twitter but it’s automated. It collects the links you share on Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and everywhere, saves them as bookmarks with tags. You share them with others as well.

TweetMeme
Find out the most popular stories as as shared via the Tweetmeme button.

Twitturly
Social news like interface for the currently hot tweets.

MicroBlogBuzz
Shows you what’s most popular today, this week etc. on Twitter and across the other common microblogging platforms.

Twitturls
Shows the latest and most popular links on Twitter.

Twitter Analytics

Klout
Klout is probably the most widely used tool to determine a person’s (or account’s9 authority on Twitter. The sheer number of followers is a worthless metric.

bit.ly
Use bit.ly as URL shortener and you can loo up how many peopel cliecked the actual links along with some other stats. For shortening links you can also use j.mp – it’s even shorter and does not have a domain from Libya (.ly)

TweetReach
Tweetreach is an analytics tool that estimates the number of impressions you have received even listing the users who provided them. It’s quite biased though as impression by large numbers of bot followers do not mean much. So make sure to weed out the automated accounts when considering the numbers.

TweetStats
This statistic tool measures everything from when you tweet (weekdays, time of day) to who your real friends are by counting how often you address people.

Twist
Twist allows you to quickly view and compare popularity trends on Twitter. It’s similar to Google Trends.

FriendOrFollow.com
This tool compares your list of friends with your followers and shows you who does not follow you back.

These 30+ Twitter tools will allow you a seamless integration of Twitter in your daily routine but make sure you know what you doing on Twitter and have some business objectives.

This post has been originally published on November 14th, 2008. It was last updated: May 3rd, 2011. Numerous links have been removed and added. Many descriptions have been altered.

* Image by Noël Zia Lee

WordPress Hacked? 6 Great Self Hosted Blog Platforms as WordPress Alternatives for SEO & Business

Tad Chef — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 14:14:51 +0000

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.

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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?

© SEOptimise - Download our free business guide to blogging whitepaper and sign-up for the SEOptimise monthly newsletter. WordPress Hacked? 6 Great Self Hosted Blog Platforms as WordPress Alternatives for SEO & Business

50 Blog Post Ideas for Business Blogging

Tad Chef — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 10:49:52 +0000

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.

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

5 WordPress SEO Subdomain to Subfolder Migration Steps

Kevin Gibbons — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 22:01:26 +0000

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