Well, maybe not Alexa rank, but they do make a rank t-shirt and z***** is pretty innovative…

(Update: oh well, they disabled the hotlink. It was a picture of a custom t-short showing rank, but I guess they prefer no publicity over a hotlinked image. So much for assuming they were an innovative company…)

By describing the strategic use of Wordpress blogs for search marketing for a customer, I defined a process I am calling SEO-Aware Wordpress Publishing.

You start with Wordpress, configured according to SEO best practices, and then … you don’t start publishing, but rather you get a little SEO training. Training in SEO copywriting, yes, but also beyond just SEO copywriting. I could have called it SEO copywriting on Wordpress, because we make strategic use of page slugs/permalinks, H tags, outlinks, and excerpts, and the various SEO plugins for Wordpress as they support our publishing mission (where at least one outcome metric is search marketing).

Since I know that YOU know what I am talking about, I am inviting you to continue this conversation on your own SEO blog. Below I will present three SEO tips for Wordpress Publishing that I would include in that initial SEO training session for an in-house copywriter/author responsible for publishing on the platform. The goal is to help them become SEO Aware, to reduce the amount of SEO involvement needed on the blog. If you have other tips you would recommend, why not publish them on your blog as a follow on? If I see the potential, I’ll collate the best tips into a larger article with credit given back, of course.

When publishing with the SEO’d Wordpress blog, consider these tips for SEO-aware blogging:

• write the excerpt first, from a perspective of “here I am telling the desk editor what this blog post is about and why it is important from her desk’s perspective“. You can always go back and edit it again later, but writing it first makes sure it gets something in it. Drafting the excerpt will also probably help you forumulate your post (especially the attitude of your post, and the closure it needs).

• The post slug or permalink defaults to the standard “null permalink” provided. This ensures your drafts are saved in a safe location until they are ready for publication. But since we craft permalinks like we craft headlines and titles (after the post is written), consider making the first line of your post “Permalink: ” so it remains painfully obvious that we need to create a permalink before approving the post for publication.

• Consider hiding buried treasure messages in the “title” field of embedded links. When your reader hovers over the anchor text, they will appreciate the way the hover tip gives them additional, off line communication about the link. The message can also can help them to store a concept in short-term memory, giving them confidence to not click away just yet, but rather stay and finish reading your prose. For example, Michael Gray made a video about SEO for Wordpress

• If you didn’t just hover of that link to Michael’s blog and see the buried treasure message, do it now.

Good job! I hope you SEO consultants recognize the potential value in continuing this conversation with 3 of your own tips published on your own SEO blog.
Topical Tags:SEO

From SEOHumor.com, translation courtesy of Google:

Yesterday in Pervoprestolnoy on art. Domodedovskaya metro after drinking for a couple of FlyAway juice, the body clearly alluded to the need to go in the toilet. Upon noticing the corresponding index on the wall in the form of tablets, brain machine has issued the full phrase is “a direct reference to the text toilet.” Then, laughing long, discussing with Andre, looked like in the real world redirecting similar link.

Another great domain name idea that didn’t turn out quite as splendid as imagined?

It’s still a “Google Dance” if you watch the datacenters, and confirm the update process with additional evidence such as new sites not getting included for a few to several days prior, despite indexing, as if the queue was backing up so the update could propagate. Also watch the international traffic referrals. They provide early clues.

After all these years it seems Matt has accomplished his coup d’état of the update naming process. This one’s Dewey, whether Matt intended to name it or not. It’s still underway… and might be the result of infrastructure changes or software changes, but things they are a shiftin’.

If you’re waiting on a new site to appear and rank, or have been enjoying the spoils of a questionably-deserved #1 ranking for a long time, best of luck to you.

Addendum: I’ve seen some reference to the Dewey / Truman race in the webmaster forums. Please, if you’re going to read into Matt’s choice of name for this “Google Wierdness”, remember Matt studied Library Science. John Dewey comes to mind… Dewey Decimal system, Instrumentalism, etc.

Updated: Message came in from the conference organizers:

I received quite a few emails and calls this morning from people forgetting to reserve their hotel room at the discounted rate that ended yesterday. DON’T PANIC !!! The hotel has agreed to extend our rate until April 7. Our rate of $239 is only for the days of the conference with an April 18 check-in and April 21 check-out. Any additional dates around this will be charged current hotel rate pricing. To take advantage of our rate though, you must book with our Domain Roundtable code. Go to the venue section of the website or you can call the hotel, (415) 512-1111, and tell them you are a Domain Roundtable attendee.

Today is the last day to book the Domain Roundtable conference hotel at the discount rate, so if you haven’t yet take a look. It’s the Palace Hotel, dead-center in San Francisco. I often stay at other-than-the-official-conference-hotel when I travel, because I’m different that way, but in this case the Palace is the “other” hotel I would have chosen.

If you register you can get $100 off by first joining DomainTools.com as a Gold member (it’s a month-to-month thing.. no contract term). A cheap ‘n easy way to cut $100 bucks off the reg fee. I think the discount is tiered… so if you are a Silver or Elite member, the discount might be different. Just log in to your account and the discount code appears in the announcement right in front of you.

Last year’s Domain Roundtable in Seattle was an eye-opener for me as an SEO. It was the first “domainer conference” I attended, and the combination of SEO and domaining was such a natural I think many of us on both sides of the aisle were dumbfounded that the two groups hadn’t been mingling more closely all along.

When you look at how SEO, what I call “competitive webmastering“, and the business of domaining have aligned themselves with each other over the past 2 years, attending this one is a no-brainer for me. Whether you call it “domain development” or “internet publishing” doesn’t really matter… the entrepreneurs are all interested in monetization and asset development. Many of the brightest people I have met in the industry were at Domain Roundtable last year.

I’m fortunate to be able to attend the whole show this time so if you’re in San Francisco or will also be visiting to attend Domain Roundtable and want to get together, drop me a line. I hope to invade Natasha’s favorite dive bar at some point, which has this Yelp review:

What prevents me from giving this place 5 stars are the patrons of this bar. The people here are like graduated hipsters who now work cool 9-5 jobs and drink wine on a regular basis. Pretentious comes to mind. You can be classy and sophisticated without being rude. Nothing against the bar, but the patrons who go into it spoil my fun time.

How could i visit San Francisco and not experience that for myself?

Check out the Domain Roundtable conference and the Agenda, including the SEO Panel.

Usually it is best to wait a few weeks after a major software upgrade, to enjoy relative stability while your friends on the bleeding edge tear their hair out over bugs and gitches. Wordpress 2.5 is no exception. After a couple trials, I can say:

• Post Slugs Are Gone. (Note: this has been updated after Claudius posted a great comment, below). Those wonderful SEO assisters have been mangled renamed in 2.5. They are still there, but hidden… until after you title a post, and move on to another field, when they slowly reappear (ajax fade in) as a small-print permalink between the title field and the content box. Not obvious, and it doesn’t appear unless you have already conifigured WordPress to use a custom permalink structure. This will take a little getting used to, but at least the editable permalink idea is strengthened.

• AJAXy Enough to Make You Cry: Can you say heavy? Can you say toad-slow interface? Okay so I still like Firefox 1.5, but seriously, is it necessary to have so much javascipt on every page load? I love the way they say the new editor won’t mess up your code… and it does. So I truned it off.. like always. But now I am having trouble tolerating the little hesitations that happen CONSTANTLY now as AJAX phones home. WP used to slow down when I clicked… now it slows down as I type. Yuck.

• Editors Get All The Credit? Edit a post some author wrote and viola.. you are now the author! Sweet!

• Prepare to Scroll Like You’ve Never Scrolled Before: It’s is definietly more work to use Wordpress 2.5. More clicks, more scrolling, more moing the mouse around the screen. Not sure why. I think it’s got something to do with getting better, but I’m not sure I understand that part yet.

• Start Building Those Backlinks All Over Again: (Updated: Since the editable permalinks are there this is no longer the problem that is appeared to be, as long as you have customized your permalink settings and you pay attention to the small print beneath the title edit box). If you think that first comment about post slugs was subtle, think about what it will mean to migrate a blog to this new version and not be in control of the URLs. You will go insane trying to align your existing inlinks with the new URLs. Don’t even look for dupes.. you won’t find peace there, either. But thats ok, you can simply choose to WAIT and not migrate the old blog, until WP 2.5 is fixed, right? Well, some people who didn’t use page slugs upgraded, and guess what? If you had used at least one known permalink structure, you’re hosed. Those page URLs are gone… and according to a poster on the WP forum, you’ll simply have to choose a new permalink structure (and throw away your existing backlinks)..mmmmkay?

Oh, one more thing. Wait. The only big disaster I can see possibly coming is if the Wordpress exploit going around only gets fixed in 2.5, forcing everyone to upgrade to 2.5 or remain vulnerable. Please, please, please don’t let that happen.

As I wait for yet another install of Magento to delete itself, so I can install it yet again, I am reminded of my tech support days. Then, as now, this Open Source stuff is all about “been there, done that“. The more times you’ve done it before, the better you are at doing it. No matter what level of conceptual understanding you have, you still have to have “done it” in order to be able to “do it” again.

Magento on Dreamhost. Magento on 1and1. Magento on my dev server. Magento on my Redhat server. Magento on my local XAMPP installation. They are all slightly different, and now I know exactly why. But I still have to track down every instance of the use of HTTPS to enable use of a shared SSL cert (1and1), or manually configure the secure/non-secure basedir settings, and start with admin console unsecured, etc etc etc. Yes, I know it’s a great package. Yes, I understand why I have to manage these peculiarities, and I totally support the cross-platform approach that necessitates the compromises. But still, must I install it again?

The next time someone asks me “what do you mean by SEO for Magento. It’s already search engine optimized, because it runs on Zend Framework” I will likely switch from Pinot Noir back to Jameson. Yes frameworks are about best practice and flexibility. And SEO is about competitive webmastering. You use ZF as is, while your brother exploits the __call method to make sharper URLs, my cousin uses a Controller plugin to hack URLs before they get to the router, JoeSEO deploys good ole regex rules in Zend_Controller_Router_Route_Regex, and I struggle with enforcing strict URLs and a custom route class.

Question: Who will win in the SERPs?

Answer: The one who ties it all back to the shopping cart in a fashion most effectively tuned to the market, as defined by Google.

In a way that is portable, and flexible, and adjustable, of course. Sound familiar? Go figure.

Note: A few days ago, after proclaiming for many months that paid links are not allowed and arguing what does and does not constitute “payment” for links, Google has finally cleared up the confusion around the use of the nofollow attribute by publishing a living demonstration of the right way to barter direct back links. Using the very popular Google Webmaster blog as an example (which has a very high page rank), Google demonstrated the proper way to use direct backlinks, without nofollow, in reciprocity. Quid pro quo.. this for that… direct back links as a reward for participation.

And so, in the Spirit of Google’s example, keeping in line with the living example of correctness, I hereby thank my loyal Sphinners who pushed my post over 300 Sphinns at the search marketing community Sphinn.com:

Thank You (with links) Bionic Sphinners

Setting up and running a website is getting easier and easier, and it’s wonderful to see so many new webmasters sharing their voices with the world! For you as a webmaster it’s pretty easy going… until you run into an issue that you just can’t seem to solve on your own. Maybe some technical issues were flagged in your Webmaster Tools account; maybe you’re just trying to get your robots.txt to block a certain part of your site; or maybe someone reported that they got a virus while visiting your site (gasp!) maybe you want to get a ton of Sphinns on a post to make the Greatest Hits list. All of these issues can come up and sometimes it’s helpful to have a helping hand when diagnosing and solving it.

Our Google Webmaster Help Group Our Sphinn community is a great place to get help. There are many webmasters active in our group, friendly and ready to help others, often with first-hand experience. They can show you what might be wrong, show you how you can find answers in the future, and point you towards a solution that you’ll be able to use. They Sphinn your posts!

Just recently a webmaster came into the groups with a website that was having strange problems in need of more attention. Less than 20 minutes later, one of our dedicated members replied and pointed the webmaster to hidden content that was placed on their site by someone else Sphunn the post! Finding that Being ignored is bad enough; but not getting Sphunn finding it is even more frustrating.

While there are lots of helpful people in our groups, we have some that really stand out as being exceptionally active, helpful, competent and friendly. They volunteer time and energy to help build a great community and to help webmasters all around the world. In order to more publicly recognize their contributions, we’re calling them our Bionic Posters Sphinners. We want to highlight their outstanding efforts and thank them for the sound advice Sphinns they’ve offered to so many.

We wanted to take a minute and send a shout out to our Bionic PostersSphinners:

Thank you all for helping to make the Webmaster Help GroupJohnon.com post such a success!

Note: It will take some time to get everyone listed, so you can either be patient or post a comment with your details, matching your Sphinn credentials above.

Thanks Ken. That was hilarious.

Adobe has announced PhotoShop Express, a “free” online image finishing system that YOU can use to cleanup, sharpen, filter, remove red-eye, and do a host of other things to your photos, which you can also publish online, share, and embed. It’s all “free” as old-school Adobe defines “free” : no charge, free, gratis, wonderfully replete of expense…. as long as you hand over ALL of your equity in your intellectual property.

That’s right. All of your rights to your own images, as per this part of the terms:

Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.

Now if it isn’t bad enough, take a look at how they deliver that small print information. It’s not part of the Terms you see when you bother to click the (tiny) “terms” hyperlink on the sign up page. It’s actually in a separate “additional terms” document that is “incorporated by reference” in the original (lengthy) terms document. And this “additional terms” document is far more lengthy than the initial one… about 8 screens worth of scrolling legalise on my 1600×1200 display. Oh and there is yet another lengthy document “incorporated by reference” in this document, which I didn’t have the patience to read.

As Adobe seems to be saying via this release: “Adope. It’s all about US. Screw you.”