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So my buddy Joost who puts out some kick ass wordpress plugin’s has started a wordpress SEO Newsletter. If you’re a fan of wordpress, you should subscribe because there are some good tips and plugins discussed, and I’m a wordpress mac daddy, so that means something.

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Hey Yahoo Shortcuts Wordpress Plugin People, here’s a suggestion for improving your plugin, give me a checkbox to let me toggle the “Creative Commons” AND “OK to use commercially” settings.

For example if I was writing about my upcoming trip to say Hawaii and wanted to drop an affiliate link or two, while being perfectly legal, I might want to include a picture. Currently your plugin would give me these 1.5 million pictures (link). But if I wanted to be legit I could really only use these 39,000 pictures (link). Sure your plugin shows me the little $ with a line through it that’s it’s not ok for commercial use, but sorting through 1.5 million pictures can take a while, giving me checkbox to narrow my searches makes me a happy blogger more efficient blogger.

While we’re at it where’s my Free T-Shirt you promised, it’s been 4+ weeks since I submitted my application …

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I’ve been looking for one of these myself for a while but have never found one. A plugin that lets me put in my amazon aff id and then appends it “automagically” to all previous and new amazon links that get created.

All of the amazon plugins I’ve seen work with a search mechanism requiring you to go through and do it yourself, I’m looking for something that runs in the background unattended.

Anybody know of one, anybody want to write one for some links …

This post in no way endorses the concept of paid links or the exchanging of links for goods, services, or barter for monetary value or anything that has a fudiciary value. Additionally this post is meant for entertainment purposes only, no wagering allowed. The names of the people involved in this post have been changed, and similarities between persons living, dead, or undead is purely coincidental. No animals were harmed in the production of this post.

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I was reading Matt’s post today about stats and it reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to write about. What are the goals you have for your blog, if it’s a commercial blog and not a personal one where is your ROI.

Is it making a sale (direct or affiliate)?
Is it clicking on ads?
Is it getting links?
Is it building your brand or growing your exposure?
Is it building a conversation with your audience through comments?
Is it building your subscribers?

Measuring sales, ad CTR and counting links is a pretty straight forward process, so no need to cover that. Building your brand and measuring exposure is a fuzzy non exact process, and not something I can speak to with any level authority. However the last two are more quantifiable.

It’s pretty easy with a CMS like wordpress to figure out which posts are getting the most comments, but what if you have a multi author blog, especially one with lots of posts, measurement gets much trickier. My buddy Joost de Valk has an excellent plugin that helps you measure blog metrics (screen shot below).

You still have to put the data in the right context, but it can help you understand what’s occurring. For more on blog metrics read Six Recommendations For Measuring Your Success by Avinash Kaushik.

Another metric that IMHO is not used to it’s full potential is blog subscribers. As long as the trend line is high and to the right, people assume things are good, but what if you want a better idea of which posts are generating the most subscribers. The logic being if more people subscribe when you write about apples instead of oranges, you should write more about apples. Here’s a post explaining how to use Google analytics to track clicks on your feed buttons (screen shot below).

Using this data I can see a direct correlation between posts where I am critical of Google and the number of comments and subscribers. At the end of the day being able to quantify what your customers want and giving it to them, goes a long way to making your project more successful.

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Sharing in Google reader is pretty interesting, right now only two people are sharing with me which is kinda sad. What’s cool is if you turn out to be an annoying “social tuesdays” only kind of friend I can turn you off and ignore you completely. You also get to see the lame drivel cool stuff I think is interesting. So if you want to share stuff it’s mgray [dot] atlasws [at] gmail [dot] com.

ps: oh and google don’t think I didn’t notice the google profile thing you snuck in there …

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Really wordpress when you decided to screw up the whole category system adding tags would it have been that hard to add a “nofollow” parameter flag to the_tags? I mean does anybody on the wordpress team get duplicate content as a concept?

You can get the Robots Meta plugin from Joost de Valk which makes the pages noindex,nofollow but it would be nice to fix things front end as well … sigh

wordpress you really need to get a competent SEO on the development team. Out of the box you suck as far as search engine friendliness goes, you have to jump through a lot of hoops to get things working.

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you get stuff like this

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Recently I was discussing how the disparity of numbers in analytics was causing me some aggravation. After digging a little deeper I think I found part of the source of my frustration, the Google Desktop Reader.

How Google Desktop Can Drive traffic to Your Website »

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Ok I’m not a programming expert, but I have been involved with computers and programming long enough to pick up a few things you shouldn’t do, like …

Don’t make massive changes to your database schemas that break existing functional programming. I worked for a retail company and had been using the same database schema for over 10 years and one of the top rules was don’t make a change that will break someone else’s fully functional program. I mean hello … do I have to explain the reasoning behind this … what kind of third rate one eyed single finger coders you have working there. Look at all the non functional plugins we’ve got to deal with now. I have one blog with at least 6 plugins … not worth the trouble right now updating across all the blogs I manage … sigh

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I’m looking for a plugin for wordpress plugin and haven’t been able to find one, so I’m hoping one of my readers might know of one. I’m looking for a plugin that adds the excerpt to the contents of a full feed that’s already being published.

Why would I want that? If i put an image and short pargraph I can already get it to display on the page using the_excerpt_reloaded plugin. This give me control on the page to display adsense or any kind of advertising in the post exactly where I want, then follow it up with the rest of the post on the page. However the image or any text doesn’t make it to feed which is kind of a bummer. I could overcome this with some advertising plugin’s but they are flaky and I like to control the “inserted ads” via my own PHP based logic anyways. So anybody know of anything please drop something in the comments, TY.

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If you’re an SEO blogger and you publish a partial feed I’m putting you on notice, August 1st I’m dropping you from my RSS reader.

Putting Partial Feed SEO Bloggers on Notice »

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Yeah yeah I’m a day late and a dollar short but this is my blog and I can do things anyway I like so just deal or skip to next post if it bothers you.

SEO News Bloggers Introduce Yourself »

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Ok you can subscribe to posts via email if that’s your thing, the form is in the right hand sidebar. let me know if it doesn’t format properly, thanks.

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For those people who blog daily or semi daily is there an optimal post length that keeps people reading regularly without feeling overwhelmed?

Blogging in a Sound Bite World »

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So I’ve been catching up after working on client stuff for the past two days and think I may have my feeds set up incorrectly.

My Feeds - Do I Have it All Wrong? »

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When I speak with clients about blogging one of the key point I try to stress is that they should try and not only write about their niche, but try to take advantage of and tie into current events. The more widespread and front of mind the news or event is the better. To illustrate this point I’d like you to consider the Super Bowl which is coming up this Sunday.

Kevin Federline, the Super Bowl and Blogging »

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When Yahoo purchased MyBlogLog many wondered, was it a good deal, and why exactly was Yahoo paying so much. For those of you who’ve never bothered to check your stats or wondered what all the fuss is about I’d like to point out a few points.

Data Gathering from Blog Widgets »

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Today I was having a problem with my wordpress contact form being broken. When you would submit the form it wouldn’t process it would end up the exact place it started and the values would be lost. I searched on Google and didn’t find any answers so I had to tinker myself. Fortunately I found the solution was in some missing information in my htaccess file.

If you’re form won’t submit go into the Manage -> Files section on your main menu. Select the htaccess (rules for rewrite) on the lower right hand side. Make sure that you have the following lines somewhere in your code:

# These are the standard WordPress Rules
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

After that your form should start working again.

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I totally admit the publishing full feeds is probably a large contributor as to why I’m being scrapped to death. Thankfully I’m sitting on a fairly authoritative and trustworthy domain that helps Google decide I’m really the owner of the content. However if there’s anything we can learn from the MyBlogLog Purchase it’s that widgets are going to grow in importance in 2007

Google Widgets and Full RSS Feeds »

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Great just what they needed verification and validation that creating your own “blog storm” works. For more head on over to hitwise.

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Is it just me or has anyone else noticed more activity on the official google blogs in the past few days? Wonder if it’s a direct result of the Matt Cutts Blog Faster post or just a coincidence, of course I don’t believe in coincidences …

Official Google Blog: Kirkland calling Inside AdSense: Embed a photo gallery with Picasa Web Albums Google Analytics Blog: “Absolute Unique Visitors” versus “New and Returning”

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I met Chris at Pubcon in Vegas where he was live blogging some of sessions on his regular site 10e20.com. I also went out for drinks with him this past Monday night in the city (when people from NY say the city they mean Manhattan, any other use of the “the city” to describe a place other than Manhattan is just plain wrong). Today I see Arron announcing Chris Winfield is blogging on SEO Buzz Box .

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If there was ever any doubt that spam has invaded tagging and technorati it was disolved last night. I logged into technorati and this was the list of tags I was presented with:

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Every few days I go through my “junk suspects” email folder to see if anyone got flagged as “spam” that shouldn’t have. I noticed a large increase in spammers using political topics as subject lines things like :

“URGENT: Bush admits Al-Quada and Iran Link False”
“IMMEDIATE ATTENTION: New White House Plan Endangers All Americans”
“ACTION REQUIRED: Show Your Support for an America Against Terror” How to Win an Election With Keywords »

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Has P9 of Digg changed his mind and gone back to Digg? Is P9 Back at Digg »

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This weekend I was cruising through digg and came across an example of how you can completely “ruin the ride” by not giving me what you promised. Does Your Follow Through Suck »

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There aren’t many things as embarrassing as going to an uber-geeky mandatory pocket protector wearing web 2.0 conference and not being uber geeky enough. So in an effort to help Oilman get in touch with his inner geek and have some nerdy bragging rights he’s asking people to help him make the technorati top 100. So what do you have to do … go to this page and press the FAVORITE THIS BLOG BUTTON shown below …

Since there are about 1,000 of you reading this blog if you all do it he’ll be in like Flynn. What’s in it for you you say … we’ll you get that warm feeling inside knowing you’re part of community spamming action project. Still not enough for you … did I mention I’m holding this kitty hostage or that I’ll shoot the bunny if you don’t.

What still not enough for you, then listen to Rand’s reason’s where he doesn’t try to bamboozle you with silly pictures like I did, or promise you that he’ll show you some some hot women if you favorite this blog Like I did

Of course they were hot why else do you think they were all eating ice cream?

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One has to wonder do the folks at Microsoft actually read blogs? Judging by their most recent product release Max, I can only say the boys in Redmond are really disconnected from the way people do things. Microsoft Max Review »

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In the past few months I’ve gotten quite a few requests from people asking what plugins I use here and on other sites, and which ones I reccomend, so here’s my list with annotations.

SEO Plugins for Wordpress »

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