If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Matt praises WP 2.3 ; does a much better job of putting posts in one location even though can be seen in, for instance, home page and category archive. This is very important in not triggering Google’s duplicate content filters.
Matt stressed offering useful service like a demo or other training rather than just brochure-ware to score higher in index.
If you have a brick and morter location submit to Google Local business center. Free and will bring up map to your business.
Use a site map to help Google and other search engines spider you site.
Have navigation in HTML not Flash or JavaScript. Make it easy for search bots.
Luckily my clients are not members of this union so I expect them all to post more actively to take up the slack caused by these slacker bloggers. We must keep the blogosphere growing. Long live the blogosphere.
I have been using a plugin called All In One SEO Pack for several months now. It is great for optimizing your titles for search engines and letting you tweak them further, generating META tags automatically and letting you define them. Best of all it helps to avoiding indexing of duplicate content.[a no, no for Google bot]
Here is a video tutorial that explains its use in better detail than I can write. Seeing it done makes learning easy. The Tubetorial series on Word Press tips is excellent. Note especially the section on per post customization; here you can make the title seen by the search engines more keyword focused than the one you might want for the title that humans read.
Check out this video of a session at WordCamp 2007 in San Fransico, July 21. [unconference like blog philly sponsored by WordPress]
Jeremy Wright of blog network B5 did a great job moderating a panel on blog monitization. Its 50 minutes long so I will tell you some of the highlites for me.
A list blogger Darren Rouse made $150K in 2006 from his blog. In 2007 it is now possible for mere mortals to make a living from blogging. Still hard work but now doable.
One reason why is that advertisers are moving money into blogs in a big way. Proctor and Gamble will be spending $50 Million(yes with a M) on a social media ad campaign.
He cautioned though that the average blog with less than 30,000 page views/month will not earn a full time income from advertising. Most blogs still are best monitized as a promotional vehicle to get consulting projects, a job offer or speaking gigs.
Be careful with paid links, Google doesn’t like them. Be sure to use no follow setting so links thru works but page rank will not since Google might interpret that as bogus.
Every week make one part of your blog 1% better. Try something different even when you don’t know if it works. In fact blog about your experiments.
Be part of a community; get to know your fellow bloggers especially in your own area.
Don’t be isolated.
And lastly, never lose the passion. Write about what really interests you.
Abhijit Nadgouda wrote a great post on the benefits of Word Press as a content management system:
Pages and Posts
WordPress supports two basic types of content - Pages
and posts. Pages are used to hold information that is valid for a bigger span of time. For such content, a change overwrites the earlier content. Posts are used for content which is more dynamic, like news and updates. In stead overwriting with changes, such content builds an archive.
Now, any web site that represents an entity - company, product, educational institution or an individual, at least in today’s age, has both such types of content. Providing news and updates helps keep the readers and customers uptodate through subscriptions.
The recent versions of WordPress also lets you set one of the pages as the homepage.
You can do away with the blog and archives look and create a corporate user interface. In a blog the posts take over the entire web site, whereas in a non-blog web site the pages get more dominant.
Categories
Sometimes you might have more than one content types for which posts
are suitable, like news and articles. In such a case you can use the categories to differentiate between the two. The categories can be hierarchical and there is no limit on the number of categories you have. This is one of the best tools to use for content classification.
Feeds
Feed
is one of the most used techniques by readers to keep themselves updated. WordPress generates feeds for both pages and posts and various other queries,
which you can offer to your reader and customers. It is also quite popular that these feeds can be easily converted to emails using various services. What this means is that you can reach out to the web, feedreader and email users by just publishing the content once.
