He’re’s a little secret, I’ve slowly and steadily been unsubscribing from SEO blogs for the past few months, and last week the total number of  marketing blogs I read dropped below 10, and I think the time has come for an intervention. For a lot of you the time has come to ask yourselves does your blog suck … and what are you doing to change it?

What are your metrics for success? Is it traffic, page views, user engagement, links, comments, rss subscribers? It’s ok if one or two of them flatlines or drops, but if most of them have turned south, you have a problem.

What are you writing about? Are you writing about topics that are of interest to your community and staying on topic?

Are you engaging the community? Are you interacting with other people in comments? Are you engaging people on twitter, not just looking for retweets?

Are you being helpful? Are you writing tutorials teaching people how to do something? Are you taking questions from your community and paying it forward?

Are you publishing regularly? You don’t have to publish daily but you do have to publish often enough that people don’t forget you exist. Are you publishing at the right time of day when most of your community is in front of their computers to read it, or are you publishing today’s news at 9PM Pacific Standard time, when most of your community is long gone. That’s not news that’s ancient history.

Are you stepping outside of your comfort zone? Are you challenging the authorities in your space who are you think are wrong? Are you willing to take responsibility for those actions, realizing not everyone will agree with you?

Are you visually interesting? Are you using pictures? Not just for the sake of meeting a visual quota but good images that make a post better.

Are you Innovating? Are you evolving and improving how you do business, and are you trying new methods and techniques?

To put a fine point on it what are you doing to be interesting and worth reading?

If you don’t fix what’s broken now, don’t despair I’ve published a how to guide on how to shut down your blog

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Does your Blog Suck … Here’s How to Fix It

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When you’re running a blog with affiliate links, one of the key factors that can increase your conversions, help you make more sales, and ultimately put more money in your pocket, is to have ads that are targeted to match the content. In this tutorial I’ll be showing you some tactics on how you can improve this targeting using tags.

In a previous post I spoke about integrating advertising into your blog, if you haven’t read that post it might be worth going back and checking it out as we’re going to be building on that post. The instructions here show you how to get things done in the Thesis framework. Of course you can adapt it to any blog, it’s just easier with thesis!

In a post earlier this year Patrick Gavin, spoke about how blog advertising was broken and gave some ideas on how to fix it. One of the concepts he mentioned was placing the same ad in the masthead, sidebar and at the end of the post, it’s that concept we’re going to be putting into place. The first step is cleaning up your tags, and standardizing them a bit. You don’t need to do all of your posts off the bat, but your should start with your most important and post that get the most traffic. Try to reduce the tags down to a handful of manageable concepts per post. For this tutorial I’m going to using travel as an example. For posts about locations or cities (ie Top Ten Nightclubs in Las Vegas) I’m suggest using the city name as a tag. For events such as spa visits or golf trips I’m suggesting using tags such as “day spa” or “golf”.

I like to use the Adrotate plugin for wordpress to handle my advertising, it’s pretty flexible and powerful, allows you to rotate multiple ads per group, and pass links thru a redirection script so you can track CTR and be in compliance with with any google paid linking suggestions.

First step, you are going to need to create an ad group for the masthead, sidebar, and afterpost area, in the example shown below you can see I’ve done that, in this case it’s for the Excalibur Hotel in Las Vegas.

If you are going to have a lot of ad groups it’s important to come up with a naming schema that’s easy to work with and use it consistently.

Next you’re going to need to put banners in each of those ad groups, in the example below I’ve put two banners in each of the ad groups (sorry impressions and CTR numbers sanitized) click to enlarge

Now that you have some tags in place and ads set up for those tags, it’s time to pull everything together.  Open up your custom_functions.php file and let’s create a function to display a masthead banner with this code:

function add_header_image () {
if (has_tag(array('excalibur','Excalibur'))) {
echo adrotate_banner(37,0,1);
}
}

Ok so what does that all mean … the function add_header_image () creates a function to display a banner, we have to call the function for it to work, but we’ll get to that in a second. The if (has_tag(array('excalibur','Excalibur'))) says if the post has the tag “excalibur” or “Excalibur” to do what’s in the next set of brackets. I’ve found that sometimes WP isn’t case insensitive, so I put both in to be sure. The echo adrotate_banner(37,0,1); says go to ad group 37 and randomly display one of the banners from that group. As you can see from the screen shot above we have two banners in that group so we’ll display one of them. You can learn more about how to call ads from the plugin page. Ok one last step add this code into your thesis custom_functions.php file:

add_action('thesis_hook_after_title', 'add_header_image');

That uses a thesis hook to call the function add_header_image () from above right after the title. Now if you’ve got a page that has that tag, go view it and the ad should appear in the masthead. The functionality is exactly the same for the sidebar and after post, you just need to create separate functions for them calling the appropriate ad group.

Now let’s extend the programming, let’s say in addition to the Excalibur Hotel I’m going to write about the Luxor hotel too. I don’t want an ad for Excalibur on the Luxor page, what I really want is an ad for the Luxor Hotel. Here’s how you do it:


function add_header_image () {
if (has_tag(array('excalibur','Excalibur'))) {
echo adrotate_banner(37,0,1);
}elseif (has_tag(array('luxor','Luxor'))) {
echo adrotate_banner(40,0,1);
}
}

What that code does is say does the post has the tag “Excalibur” if so display the Excalibur ad, if it doesn’t see if it has the “Luxor” tag, if it does display the Luxor ad. Again you want to repeat this for the sidebar and afterpost slots.

The next problem is what if we have a post that doesn’t match either of the tags, right now we’re going to have no ads displaying. To rectify that situation you’ll need to create a default ad group with some generic industry banners. Once you do then change your code to this:


function add_header_image () {
if (has_tag(array('excalibur','Excalibur'))) {
echo adrotate_banner(37,0,1);
}elseif (has_tag(array('luxor','Luxor'))) {
echo adrotate_banner(40,0,1);
}else{
echo adrotate_banner(44,0,1);
}

If you notice the last part is an else not an elseif. Without bogging you down with programming minutia you want the else to be last this is what it does when none of the other “if” or in programming language elseif is tests are true.

The last thing we need to think about is the order of the elseif in the code. The way this programming works is the first condition it meets will be the banner it displays. So let’s assume we have code that looks like this:


function add_header_image () {
if (has_tag(array('las vegas','Las Vegas'))) {
echo adrotate_banner(36,0,1);
}elseif (has_tag(array('luxor','Luxor'))) {
echo adrotate_banner(40,0,1);
}else{
echo adrotate_banner(44,0,1);
}

Let’s also assume we have a post about the Luxor hotel it has the “Luxor” tag AND it also has the “Las Vegas” tag. As the programming is currently set up it will display the Las Vegas ad group, and not display the Luxor ad group. Generally speaking as the specific, in this case Luxor ad will probably be better targeted it will have a better conversion rate, so you’ll want that ad to display. So you should change the order of the “if” statement to something like this:


function add_header_image () {
if (has_tag(array('luxor','Luxor'))) {
echo adrotate_banner(40,0,1);
} elseif (has_tag(array('las vegas','Las Vegas'))) {
echo adrotate_banner(36,0,1);
}else{
echo adrotate_banner(44,0,1);
}

There might be other reasons you’ll want to change the order of the “if” statements, for example one may have a significantly higher commission, so you would want that to appear first. However don’t obsess over getting the order perfect, if the programming works for most posts, but not all of them, just omit the tag that is triggering the ad you don’t want on an individual post by post basis.

One of the great things about the adrotate plugin is it has impressions and CTR built in, so  you can see if you advertising is working. If you do a really good job matching your tags to your ads you can get soem really decent CTR rates as shown below:

Where the more generic default ads will have a lower CTR

If you enjoyed this post you might want to check out some other thesis tutorials. If you’re still fighting with your blog theme and not on thesis what are you waiting for, thesis allows me to be much more productive and profitable with all my blogs.

photo credit: etohaholic

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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There’s been a bit of speculation as to why I turned off comments here, and the occasional are comments coming back or is this just a temporary thing. My apologies for not addressing this sooner, but I’ll give you the real reason and address some of the speculation as well.

Broken Window Theory: There’s a police theory that was popular in the 80’s and 90’s here in NY that was known as the broken window theory. Basically it said if a neighborhood had broken windows nobody ever repaired, some sectors of the population would take this as signal no one cared, and the area would slowly decline into a lawless ghetto. I’m of the opinion that the same thing is true of blogs and blog comments. Lot’s of people would make comments here and would use keyword driven names or link to questionable websites. Others would make questionable nonsense comments. I would have to decide where these real people or bots and how bad was it. The more “borderline” comments you let through the more you would get the following months, and your moderating workload would just increase.

Flagrant Spammers: Sorry Akismet but you’ve been owned, the spammers can walk all over you. While only abut 10% got through if there where thousands, that still meant you had to spend time moderating them out. Additionally there where always people getting flagged as spam, who at least in this instance, weren’t.

Haterz: I make more controversial posts than most people, so it stands to reason I’m going to have a higher than normal percentage of haterz. The more haterz I get, the more time I have to spend moderating comments.

To put it in a neat little package, the amount of time I was spending moderating the haterz, spam, false spam, and spamoflage, had gotten to be too much. It was either post less or remove the time I waste on moderation. Removing comments has nothing to do with limiting pagerank “evaporation” or limiting link flow, link consolidation or any other hare brianed scheme’s floating about now, it has to do with spending my time wisely and profitably.

That’s not to say I don’t think comments are valueable, it’s just in most situations especially in this space, the value can be really hard to justify. Are comments off forever … well forever is long time … however I can say I’m extremely happy with the amount of extra time I picked up and don’t anticipate turning them back on the short term future.
photo credit: Samjhana Moon

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Why I Turned Off Blog Comments

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Anytime a social media consultant starts talking to prospective clients and they bring up blogging, they talk about how RSS can be used to help them directly connect with their customers … the truth is in most cases it’s a BIG FAT LIE!

First off persoanlly I’m a big fan of RSS, I use it daily to help me efficiently process  a large amounts of information, the problem is I’m a techno-weenie-geek, and not “regular people”, and therein lies the problem.

In the past two to three years I’ve probaly looked at the backend and RSS subscribers of several hundred blogs. Across those hundreds of blogs once you step out of the techno-weenie circle, RSS adoption drops off the cliff. Let me give you an example, according to Google Reader TechCrunch has ~347,000 subscribers

Also according to Google reader techcrunch has more people reading it than read the politics section of MSNBC or the Washington post

If you seriously believe that techcrunch has as much reach as the Washington Post just turn off the computer and step away from the desk, because your reality is severely distorted and you need some quality AFK time. What these numbers really show is that RSS has a higher adoption rate within certain spheres of influence.

According to Feedburner I have ~10K subscribers

According to Google reader that’s almost 2,000 more people than subscribe to the New York Times travel section

Do I really have more reach than the travel section of the New York Times … hardly. While Google has tried to make RSS adoption higher with the google desktop, and Microsoft has tried with windows vista desktop gadget, most people simply don’t get or use RSS in a meaningful or significant way.

So does this mean RSS is a failure and you should give up blogging … no, but it does mean you need to have realistic goals. If your subject matter doesn’t heavily intersect or overlap with things techno-weenie’s are interested in, your RSS subscribers will be low. However you can use your blog like an email newsletter and send people updates to their inbox, something most people do understand. If you use google feedburner the service is available for free and pretty much manages itself (unless you get the occasional kook who can’t figure out how to unsubscribe himself and you have to do it manually). Your blog can still be used for viral content, linkbuilding, and ranking in the SERP’s you just won’t have that direct pipeline into people’s attention stream that you do for those who suffer bordline infomania
photo credit: kennymatic

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

The Big Fat RSS Lie

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In old days newspapers and magazine figured out there where optimal times for publishing certain types of stories, example Tuesday was traditionally “Science Times Tuesday”. As old world publishers transitioned to online publishers those rules probably don’t apply anymore and just might be working against them.
In the interest of disclosure I feel it’s important to say I have had travel clients in the past in still do some work in the travel sector today. That’s one of the reasons I have a scan feed folder set up for travel news, which is what led to this post. As long as I can remember one of the key features of the New York Times was the Friday “weekender” and “travel” sections, which where packed with things to do and places to go. Some newspapers operated slightly differently having the travel section on Sunday, but the prevailing logic was travel was part of the “weekend” section in newspaper world. This mentality continues to this day, as you can see in the graphs below which show publishing volume via RSS for the New York Times travel section:

The vast majority of the stories published under this feed are published on Saturday. I’d estimate about 75%-80%, and I wonder if they aren’t doing themselves a disservice sticking to this antiquated rule of Weekend = Travel. I’ve seen thousands of analytics profiles over the years, and I can only recall a handfull who as a rule had higher than average traffic on the weekend as a typical behavior. Most sites are busy during the week (and working hours) and have traffic patterns that look similar to the one shown below.

Truth be told exceptional content will make it’s way to the top even if it’s published on a holiday weekend on a saturday night at 2 AM, but let’s be honest even the best of writers can turn out mostly good, some excellent, and a few exceptional posts per month, and fighting with the calender and your readers habits isn’t helping you, so when you publish that post is important. Here are my tips for making the calendar work for you and not against you:

• Develop an editorial calendar – it makes sure you don’t miss things and minimizes the day to day pressure of “I have to blog today and have nothing to write about” .
• Avoid conflicting with conferences and big news stories – Unless you are writing about the conference or news event, don’t compete with it for attention, wait for it to be over, and don’t let people steal your thunder.
• Don’t publish when no one is reading – unless you are trying to fly under the radar and avoid detection, publish when people are more likely to read not when they aren’t.
• It’s a Global Web not a Local One – Where are the majority of your followers based, schedule your publishing times to accommodate the majority of them, but don’t neglect the others.

photo credit: ptL2007

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Does Your Publishing Schedule Match Your Readers Habits

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The following is a tutorial on how to add a dynamic content slider to your Thesis wordpress theme. It’s easily adapted to work with any wordpress blog, but like everything it’s just easier with Thesis
We’re going to be using a plugin to acomplish this and as a result this does bring up some icky programming issues. The plugin we’re using uses the mootools javascript framework, so if you have any plugins that uses this there is the potential for conflict. Secondly if you use any plugins that use JQuery  this will cause a conflict as well. One of the common plugins a lot of people are using which will cause a conflict is lightbox 2. If you are using Lightbox 2 uninstall it and switch to Shadowbox JS, you are sacrificing a few features, but it’s very similar functionality and it plays nicely with the slider, where Lightbox 2 causes conflicts. Next make sure you have the Dynamic Content Gallery plugin, it’s going to do the work for us.

First you’ve got to decide what posts you want to feature. The easiest way is just to set up a featured content category and put all the posts you want to be included in it. However you could tell it to use more than one category. The screen shot below is from the dynamic content setting page  I told it use the featured category (category ID 88) and the last 5 posts (post select 1 – 5)

Next you’ve got to decide on a uniform picture size for the slider to use, I’m using 600 x 300 since that’s the size I use for each post, I’m also going to re-use the pictures from each post, however if you wanted to use different sized images or just different images it’s not a problem, as long as you use a consistent size. Again on the dynamic content settings plugin page put in the size you chose.

Out of the box the plugin is configured to put the images in isolated subfolders “/wp-content/uploads/custom/” and “/wp-content/uploads/dfcgimages/“. Since I’m re-using the post images I changed mine to use my default image location

Another option you may have to adjust is the slider height, this is the height of the text box that shows with each image. You have to play with it a little to get the right height for you

If you haven’t already resized and cropped your images now would be the time to do that. If you don’t have an editor like photoshop or simply prefer to use web-based tools I highly recommend Picnik.com, it’s an excellent easy to use image editor. For each post that you want to appear in the slider you need to do a few things first put it in the what ever category you specified in above (in my case the “featured” category.

Next you’ll need to enter two custom fields for each post dfcg-image and dfcg-desc, the first is used for the image, the second is used fro the text in the slider.  You add them by clicking “add custom field” and selecting them from the drop down. Since this is probably your first time you’ll have to type them in, but after that they’ll be there. The dfcg-desc is the text that will appear in the slider again it takes a little experimentation to get the right length/size. Be careful to only put the file name in the directory not the full image URL.

Make sure you go through and add images and slider text for the initial 5 posts you’ll be using, you don’t need 5 to start but you should have at least 2 so you can make sure everything is working.

I am using the “features and teasers” setting on thesis, but I think the slider and 2 “features” posts underneath it would be too visually overpowering, so I’m going to use just the slider with the teasers underneath. This is where the beauty and simplicity of thesis comes into play without mucking with the HTML files I drop the number of teasers from two down to zero.

Next we’ve got to open up the Thesis custom functions file and add a few lines of code. I only want my slider to appear on the home page not every page so I’ve used the is_home() if/then statement you could easily omit it or change it. Here’s the code:


//featured content
function featcc() {
if (is_home()){
global $post; include (ABSPATH . '/wp-content/plugins/dynamic-content-gallery-plugin/dynamic-gallery.php');
}
}


Ok at this point I should point something out, the plugin programmer recommends this method to put the slider in


include (ABSPATH . ‘/wp-content/plugins/dynamic-content-gallery-plugin/dynamic-gallery.php’);


However that won’t work with thesis, you need to put in a modified version that looks like this:


global $post; include (ABSPATH . '/wp-content/plugins/dynamic-content-gallery-plugin/dynamic-gallery.php');


I’m not going to bog you down with the details that have to do with the hows/whys of the wordpress loop, but if you want to know you can read about it yourself.

Next we tell Thesis where to display the slider box in this case in the Feature box, by adding this line of code to the custom functions file:


add_action('thesis_hook_feature_box', 'featcc');


Lastly make sure you’ve got your feature box turned on on thesis:

Head on over to your homepage, and if you did everything mentioned above you should have a nice slider box.

Again you don’t need thesis to use this plugin or implement it on your blog but it is much easier if you do. If you’re ready to stop fighting with your code and wasting time, and ready to start getting things done, why not pick up your own copy of  Thesis?

photo credit: kreg.steppe

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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When I mention Thesis a lot of people don’t really get the value of it, to them Thesis is just a design. However they don’t understand Thesis and miss the real value of  Thesis as a framework.

First off we need to understand what a good HTML markup and framework can do. With a good framework like CSSZen Garden, you can achieve radically different layouts like this, this or this without changing the HTML. Really if your page is constructed properly you can achieve incredibly different looks, like those I just showed you, by only changing the CSS file. What does that mean to you as an SEO? One of the common fears a lot of people have is that when they change their page design it will negatively affect their rankings. If you use thesis you can change your design without changing your code, or having to worry about a ranking change as a result.

Ok I know you’re reading the words on the page and you can understand them but you still don’t believe me. Perhaps you’ve seen Matt’s Cutts blog which is now on Thesis, or Danny Sullivan’s or even Sugarrae’s and you are just like, MEH they all look kinda the same. To show you how can get thesis to NOT LOOK LIKE THESIS, I’m going to show you a blog I set up for client and how I matched it to their existing website design. Here’s the existing site (new window) and here’s the blog running thesis. Unlinked, things change, nuff said.

The two designs aren’t pixel perfect, but to anyone who is not a designer or doesn’t have extremely sensitive designer sensibilities, the two look damn close. How much was involved in making Thesis look like that, 4 image files which already existed, 1 flash file which already existed, 1 custom hook to put up the flash file header, 30 lines of CSS, and some changes to the thesis design option panel, that’s it.

As I said many times the benefit of using thesis is you don’t have to touch the HTML you can just work with the CSS file, which amounts to a huge amount of time and money saved on publishing projects. I understand a lot people can monkey with the HTML, but with thesis you  don’t have to anymore, it’s one less thing to worry about.

Stable code that doesn’t change everytime your design changes, means one less thing to worry about negatively affecting your rankings. If you’re ready come on over to Thesis …

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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I solved (at least partly) my problem maintaining rankings over time. Old pages that used to get traffic are once again seeing inbound search visits. I did it by tweaking my blog’s category pages, but I think the lessons are also helpful for ecommerce sites.

By default, Wordpress category pages show 10 posts. Similarly, most ecommerce category pages show 9 products per page (in a 3×3 grid).

This sucks for SEO, because your individual blog posts or category products get less and less internal linklove over time as they get pushed to the secondary category pages.

There are two types of secondary category pages – the extremely deep ones that no one will ever get to because it takes 10 “next page” clicks to get there. For this problem, Egghead created Wordpress pagination. Adding “1,” “2,” “3,” … links is just a partial solution, though. And as Rand highlights in this fantastic Whiteboard Friday (prompted by a question of mine, I believe ), pagination is still not great.

Search engines don’t have a particular reason to crawl deeper than the main category page, as a general rule.

This is more true for ecommerce sites where the products tend to resemble each other (e.g. diamond rings) and a deeper crawl is unlikely to make the results returned to searchers significantly better. Search engines also have that incentive in a Wordpress blog context since a percentage of the newer posts likely rehash older ones, though the rehash is less pronounced relative to ecommerce sites.

Further compounding the problem is the fact, as I just recently found out, that All In One SEO – probably the single most popular Wordpress SEO plugin around – adds a meta robots noindex tag to your category pages! (Or perhaps it writes to robots.txt; I didn’t pay exact attention but that’s a technical detail that is beside the point.) If I were a search engineer, I would treat links from noindexed pages as less valuable than those from pages meant to be in my index. No, I haven’t run this test scientifically – this part is just a hunch.

The Takeaway Tips on Optimizing Archival Material:

1) Go to Settings (aka Options in older versions of Wordpress) – All In One SEO – and remove the checkmark next to ‘noindex category pages’.

2) Go to Settings – Reading. Set “Blog pages show at most: ” to 100. Rand suggests (in that Whiteboard Friday) that this won’t solve all your problems, because it doesn’t scale. So here’s how to scale it…

3) Ironically, the answer is in another SEOmoz post. Consolidate the repetitive long tail post selection by moving all your content on a narrow subject to one particular post. This will reduce the number of posts (and hence the depth to which spiders need to crawl) as well as make for a single, more comprehensive post.

That makes it more linkable, incidentally. And it should help bring in more longtail traffic too, due to the mix of previously absent words with those already present! While we’re getting all Wikipedia style, why not throw in a table of contents for good measure, since your post is going to be getting longer?

4) Take Michael Gray’s tip on putting posts in just one category (see the vid below). This will enable you to maximize the value of each category page in getting posts indexed (or each subcategory’s power, as Rand cleverly advises in the Whiteboard Friday video).

For example, I recently wrote that my idea for measuring social media results could be coded using the Friendfeed API. Well, the Friendfeed API blurb is going to be integrated into the main post as soon as I find time. Similarly, a number of my link buying posts can be simplified and consolidated.

The Ideal Category Archive SEO Solution:

• Ajax – 100 posts can be intimidating, especially when that scroll button gets all tiny. Instead, why not have 100 posts loaded, but only 10 or 20 visible? To get to the others you click an AJAX link. Only when you get to say, the 100th or 200th post does a new page need to be loaded. This makes for decent usability while keeping things search engine friendly.
• Value-add tagging and sorting system – Essentially, you’d be able to tag something on the backend on a scale of 1-5 on how useful a post is. Alternatively, you could base this on user ratings of how good a post was, but this depends on having a large enough user base to sustain this.
  Then, users viewing your category archives could sort them by how valuable or popular an individual post is. This ’sort-by-importance’ view would be the default for search engines, ensuring your best content gets the most crawler attention.

What do you make of these ideas? Would you do any of this differently? Have additional tips on this? Why does All In One SEO noindex category pages by default, and likewise Joost’s robots plugin?

Gab Goldenberg writes on SEO at his SEO blog. Check out his services if you’re in the market for something professional.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Category SEO For Wordpress Blogs and Ecommerce

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As I cruise thru my SEO folder in my feedreader every day I’m filled with a sense of dismay and utter dissapointment with most of what I see. More often than not I see titles like:

How My Step Dad Taught Me The Ethics of Burnt Sienna Hat SEO

93 Ways Your Shopping Cart Software is Like Progresso Chunky Chicken Soup

How Personal Branding On Your Blog Is Like Paris Hilton’s Mink Coat

Ok so maybe I changed the titles a little to protect the uncreative, but I think you get my point. Using the same formulaic approach over and over, or doing the same thing everyone else is, is just like wearing the same underwear everyday, eventually you really start to stink.

Do you want to hang out with the guy who hasn’t changed his underwear in a week? Do you want to read the same kind of blog posts someone has been writting all week, all month or all year? Use anologies when they make sense, use them when they help you tell a story, use them when they help you make a point, but my god man for the love all all that is good an holy in the universe don’t use them everyday, it just makes you boring. Of course someone will chime in “I don’t blog for you I blog to show clients we understand the blogging medium” well good for you sparky I hope your clients don’t want more than one style of writing from you because if they do you’re in trouble.

Why is it important you get this? Because no matter what vertical you are in, blogging is a from of entertainment. Sure sometimes it’s also news and information but the more entertaining and interesting you make it the more people are going to want to read it. The more you differentiate yourself and make your posts filled with a uniqueness and style that only you can deliver the more people will subscribe and keep coming back.

So please change your underwear and stop with the analogies.

PS: yes this post title itself is an analogy, but in this case it’s really irony and satire cause that’s just how I roll…

Advertisement: Efficiently manage your SEO and Social Media campaigns with Raven’s powerful suite of Internet Marketing Tools

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Analogies in Blog Titles are Like Dirty Underwear

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There are lots of posts dedicated to showing you wordpress plugins that enhance your post functionality and add features but not many that focus on helping you clean and maintain a secure and orderly backend. I’ll include a few you may have seen before but also a few new ones to help keep things running smoothly.

(cue dramatic voice over guy)
In a world where blogging has become mainstream now more than ever these are the two plugins you need … if you download only two plugins all year make sure it’s these two …

OK maybe that was a bit overly dramatic but really these two EVERYONE should be using:

Wordpress Automatic Upgrade – This one absolutely makes upgrading a breeze. I can’t tell you how many man hours this one has saved me.

Wordpress Database Backup – really nothing sucks more than losing a blog because of a catastrophe and this gives you the ability to send a daily backup to an offsite storage location via email (say something like a dedicated gmail account for instance)

Ok now onto the stuff you may not have seen already …

Broken Link Checker – link rot it happens, chances are if you link out a lot or have been blogging for more than a year your blog has some dead links. This plugin will run thru them all identify them and let you fix,update, delete, or unlink them … yea I know cool huh. Warning the first time this thing runs it’s pretty labor intensive, so choose a less busy time like a holiday weekend to first turn it on.

Cross Linker – So lets say you’ve written a great review post of that snazzy new Blackberry Curve you just bought. Your post is so great every time you write the words “blackberry curve” you want it to link to your review post, but you know … you’re lazy or forgetful. Cross linker will do the deed for you. it won’t overwrite where a link already exists, and you can also set it only link the first occurrence of the word so your posts don’t end up looking like intellitext on steroids or something.

Go Codes – Maybe your an affilaite and you’d like redirect all of your affiliate links through a script for tracking purposes or maintenance purposes. use GoCodes to set up a tinyurl like function on your blog so http://example.com/go/blackberry-curve/ sends people to your aff link. Want to change affilaites … easy peezy just update your go code instead of every link … neat huh. if you combine this with Cross linker above it becomes really powerful. You can set up cross linker to link to a gocode page … did we get a lightbulb moment …

Login Lockdown – Hacking wordpress is really becoming an issue lately, and anything you can do to slow people down is a good thing. login lockdown will block IP’s after a specified number of incorrect username/password combinations. You can configure some of the options, not perfect nor fool proof but it’s a start.

Audit Trail – Keep track of who did what and when they did it. Especially helpful when you have multiple admins, editors, or authors around.

Wp Security Scan – Sounds much more impressive than it actually is, but still it does some useful things and makes some good suggestions. Looks like the author also has some good ideas in the pipeline so it’s one to keep an eye on

Redirection – Have a few posts that have gone AWOL or people linking to stuff that doesn’t exist. This post tracks 404’s and lets you set up redirections really easily. Sure there are lots of ways to do this but this one quick easy and integrated into wordpress.

Simple Tags – So maybe you get a little sloppy and tag your posts in an inconsistent manner. You use things like “auto”, “autos”, and “Auto” and now it just looks silly. This plugin allows you to mass edit and neaten things up. It also suggests tags, but be careful if you have 1-2 crazy wild tagging authors it can get out of hand quickly.

Lighter Menus – So maybe you spend a lot of time in your admin panel and are annoyed it takes 2-3 clicks to get anywhere. This plugin shortens the path putting everything in some ajaxy style drop down menus … one click and away you go

WP PhpMyAdmin – maybe you’ve got some things you need to do in your database but don’t want to log in via your control panel. Now you can access your PhpMyAdmin right from wordpress. Use caution I’m sure this opens up some potential do to real harm if you aren’t careful.

WP Dashboard Editor – Annoyed by all the crap wordpress puts in the dashboard? Have a blog where the people logging in aren’t tech savvy and don’t need that info? This plugin lets you remove all that stuff and add your own messages … kewl …

Force User Registration Fields – Maybe you want to know who the people registering for blog are (or at least who they are pretending to be). This lets you decide what information people need to provide when they register for your blog.

New User Email Set Up – want more control over the sign up email new users get … this plugin lets you do it. Helpful if you are using password protected pages as a poor man’s intranet.

Lastly a little tip for you … if you are going to allow guest authors but don’t want them running renegade, and publishing without permission, set their user level to “contributor” not “author”. That way someone who has “editor” or “administrator” privileges has to approve and publish a post before it goes live.

And a hat tip cats who code and aaron wall for pointing out a few of these plugins.

Advertisement: Efficiently manage your SEO and Social Media campaigns with Raven’s powerful suite of Internet Marketing Tools

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

Wordpress – Clean Up Your Backend

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