SEO 2.0 | Definitions

Definitions

What is SEO, Web 2.0, SEO 2.0

Findability, New and Better SEO? Experts Disagree; 12+ Findability Resources

14 Comments Filed Under: Definitions, Search, Reputation Building, Design, CSS, Usability, SEO 2.0, SEO

Findability is a seemingly new term that has become a buzzword recently due to a book called Building Findable Websites by Aarron Walter (not to mix up with Aaron Wall, author of SEO Book). Now as a true SEO 2.0 I’m always on the lookout for new concepts and innovation. So I took a little time to find out more about findability, it’s meaning, roots, who coined the term and when.

The first thing I found out was that neither Aaron Walter nor renown usability expert Jakob Nielsen used the term findability first. It appears that the term findability and most notably ambient findability was coined in 2002 by Peter Morville who even published a book of the same title. First things first though, so let me explain what findability is about.

Website findability is the new and better SEO so to say or, on-site SEO without the bad rep of the SEO industry if you adopt the definition from Building Findable Websites.

Basically Aarron Walter says that building websites for findability encompasses not only SEO but a holistic approach with usability and web standards etc. in mind, a position I can fully support. One thing that Mr. Walter attempts to tell us though is:

SEO is bad, findability is good.

This is a good move from a marketing perspective as nobody likes SEO of course, the term is a stain in itself or at least is perceived by the majority as such.

When we go back to what Peter Morville wrote in 2002 we discover that findability and SEO are not contradictory but basically twin brothers. He acknowledges how

SEO contributes to a websites findability along with usability and other important aspects of information architecture.

Now that might be the problem of it not generating enough hype so that Aarron Walter took a more aggressive approach.

Also Walter reduced findability to websites build with web standards while Morville’s definition extends to the real world. Morville uses examples like looking for long term parking or restrooms on an airport which strike home very convincingly. Jakob Nielsen used the term in 2006 for the first time as far as I can see. Nielsen also limited it to website findability without denouncing SEO though.

Now am I angry at Aarron Walter for being explicit about SEO? No, I’m glad, glad someone makes a strong point on renaming the “whole problem”. In this sense I took the wrong approach with attempting to redefine SEO and having to deal with it’s reputation problem. Using another, better term is the by far more effective way of redefining something. Sadly it’s mostly used by political think tanks to manipulate the public usually. In this case the outcome of the manipulation is a positive one. People will acknowledge best practices and put them in use.

I don’t care how do you call it, SEO, findability or like myself probably SEO 2.0 as long as we have the same goals. Our goals match while the methods do just partly as findability refers in web development only to the on-site or on-page factors of SEO which is not enough to be found, especially in the Web 2.0 environment, but they match.

The single most positive aspect of website findability the teaching aspect:

Findability teaches designers, web developers and information architects what they condescendingly ignored for years, making websites findable.

Now as I am the garbage man of all these lazy designers, web developers and information architects and had to fix crap websites for years, I’m sick and tired of it. I want to do the real thing, the content, the SEO 2.0 the fun stuff.

So clean up your websites yourself guys and don’t rely on the poor Mexican migrant worker wit a sombrero to do it.

That said, I still prefer the approach of Peter Norville. So do not only read Aaron Walter book but also, or at first Norvilles “Ambient Findability”.

Btw.: Building Findable Websites only covers the on-site SEO basics, adding some microfomats and the likes, if you really want to do web design for findability you need to read the Web Design for ROI, a book that will change your professional life forever.

Findablity resources:

From now on please refer to me as findability expert, maybe this way I can outsmart the SEO haters

Twitter Dilemma: To Tweet or Not to Tweet? Pros, Cons, 50+ Links & Tools

30 Comments Filed Under: Sphinn, Mixx, StumbleUpon, Social Media, Definitions

The birds by rickydavid.

In recent weeks I faced a huge onslaught of posts about Twitter from at least 5 sources per day I read. Many people will probably assume I’m an early adopter, but I was not on Twitter, well, until now. So follow me or I will never again stumble, sphinn, mixx or link you! Now said that, I’m not sure yet if I will use it for more than testing as with the hundreds of Web services I try. Indeed I’m only an early adopter where it does make sense from the start. Now Twitter was useless as is but with growing community and market share it seems the point where it matters has arrived.

Now I’m still undecided and was was analysing pros, cons among all things twitter like tools for a while now to assess if and how I will use it if I will. As I’m a social media monster when I enter a new service to really contribute I either take it by storm or I won’t at all. This way I conquered the above mentioned social media StumbleUpon, Sphinn and Mixx.

Indeed Twitter is a lot like Mixx although it’s a different concept. Both sites do not result in significant direct traffic or other benefits you can measure easily. I wanted to share my thoughts on Twitter and help you decide whether it makes sense or not so I collected 50+ Twitter related links to answer the question: To tweet or not to tweet? Also once you decided you want to use it, you will find plenty of ideas how to use it below:

Pretty bird by Picture Taker 2.

Balanced Twitter pros and cons articles

Polka - the humming bird by Cris Pierry

Reasons to use Twitter

I look up to the little bird by monkeyc.net

Reasons not to use Twitter

Red wing black bird 3723 by Casch52

Twitter tools
clients

scanners (Twitter search etc.)

Bejia flor / Humming bird by Marcio Cabral de Moura

Twitter marketing how tos, tutorials and resources

Now of course the main reason why I’ll be using Twitter is to inform you of my eating habits! No, probably to indoctrinate you with my SEO 2.0 propaganda. It does only make sense when I have enough people to preach to. So follow me now if you are really serious about the SEO 2.0 cult!

On a side note: I have been on Pownce for a while, but like with Digg, SEO hater Kevin Rose has failed to create a real community here. Basically most people who are my friends on Twitter either never show up at all or just reuse their Twitter stream there like Dosh Dosh for instance. I already was angry at him for not replying when I noticed this…

How do you use Twitter?
Do you use a client?
If yes, which one?
What are you using Twitter for?
What do you tweet about actually?
What are you doing?
What is your user name?

If it makes sense I’ll follow, stumble, sphinn, mixx and link you! Did I miss some valuable links? Add them in the comments, this list will be continually updated.

Semantic SEO: Your Website is a Goldmine with On-Site SEO 2.0

13 Comments Filed Under: Definitions, SEO 2.0, Usability, Web 2.0, SEO

This post has been sponsored by Nstein*

[Update May 15th, 2008: New image added]

Image by Kevin Rosseel

You think on-page SEO is dead? It hasn’t even begun! To be clear, your website is a goldmine and you haven’t even started to dig for the gold.

In my SEO 2.0 blog I have covered blogging, social media and the likes to the point of excess. At the same time I have dismissed most of on-page SEO as obsolete or as built in basics of even the simplest CMS software.

Do you think on-page SEO is just about h1 tags, meta descriptions or enhancing website copy with keywords? Now think again.

Consider using the term on-site SEO referring to the whole site not just each page for itself. Now add the adjective “semantic“.

The semantic web (often called Web 3.0) and its search are about meaning.

Google matches phrases without knowing what they mean. Semantic search is based on understanding what the search query is about. What if you could use software to determine the meaning of your own content and categorize it in topical clusters?

You could:

Make users stick with your website as a reader would always find related articles to the current one he just read
Serve contextual advertising like Google does
Automatically improve indexation with “internal links” cross-linking related content

Doesn’t sound revolutionary? Well, what does it mean then? Nowadays you will typically structure news by location and topics. For instance Europe or business are used as categories. So a story about fuel shortage in Great Britain could be found in Europe and business categories. Now what about other relations? What if the story is related to another one from outside Europe or one that is not about business directly? A reader keen on reading the latest energy and fuel news would not find anything of interest anymore amidst bizarre stories from Europe about a father hiding his daughter in a cellar for over 20 years or singer Amy Whinehouse and her legal problems.
Yes, these stories have been been put together in Europe on CNN (April 28th, 2008). The reader will leave.

With semantic SEO implemented on your website you can make the reader find several stories related to this one, automatically.

Using this example: There are a few related stories out there right now: In Brazil president Lula speaks out about bio fuel , in Singapore the oil price reaches a new height, Venezuela and Iran plan to work more closely together (thus limiting western access to oil). Also there is another story about pirates freeing hostages near Somalia. Now the first three are obvious. The fourth one is related too but how? Pirates and other militants are also increasingly a problem in Nigeria where they attack oil tankers.

How did I find out? I used a news aggregator that uses semantic web and search methodology to determine which articles and news are related.

So instead of reading just one article or page I read 5 increasing page views per visit or stickiness
The website could show contextual ads about alternative energy or energy saving
Older news about the same topic could have been directly linked to the latest news automatically. Google could spider them and rank them up as relevant again.

Now this means

an increase of 500% in page views per visit for this example
serving highly relevant ads with most probably high click-thrus
new crawling and better ranking for several articles resulting in more targeted search traffic

All this just with semantic SEO implemented on-site. Nowadays most of your content gets wasted. You can let machines dig for the hidden gold in your archives instead. So how do I do that or rather which solution can do it for me?

I do not know myself yet. I was aproached by Nstein, a company that is “powering online publishing” for large publishers across the globe to help them spread the word about their latest webinar. This free webinar is about “Semantic Tagging & Automated Discovery Strategies: For SEO, Editorial, Contextual Advertising and more“.

Now as even I needed some explanation what this really means I decided to write a sponsored post* for them. It does not make sense to advertise for something that nobody understands.

I was approached by potential advertisers in the past but never conceded to run the ads due to the lack of credibility of their products or companies as well as lack of focus at my audience or value for my readers.

Now the Nstein representative could convince me on the phone that this latest webinar can really be of use for my readers. Especially he cited the above mentioned news aggregator as one example where Nstein has already successfully implemented semantic methods for on-site SEO I just call semantic SEO.

Anyways, you can be sure that any method that looks like SEO 2.0 to me and that allows to potentially double, triple or even increase the number of page views by 500% in my case will make me want to cover it.

Now as I feel a little uneasy about this first sponsored post* and wonder if it’s too sneaky to write for an advertiser about something I want some feedback from you if this post was useful or not and if it’s acceptable to write posts I was asked for on my own blog and getting paid for them. Until now I only got paid for guest blogging on other blogs.

*This is a sponsored post. It’s not an ad. Also it’s not a sponsored review. It just introdocuces a topic I was asked to write about by the sponsor. The text is written by myself and only reflects my opinion so it’s not even an advertorial. It’s not automatically an endorsement of the above mentioned offer.

How to Blog: 7 Writing for Blogs Guidelines that Define Blogging

6 Comments Filed Under: Blogging, Fun, Definitions

Many people just don’t get the differences between websites and blogs or more specifically between news and blogs.

You can have a Wordpress based site posting daily the latest news and still won’t be a blog.

How to blog then to really make your blog a blog? That’s easy once you acknowledge and put into practice the 7 writing for blogs guidelines that define blogging:

Character:
What character does the SEO 2.0 blog have? It’s daring, humorous, interdisciplinary, visionary, radical. I’m not sure whether everybody does feel the same about the it but at least these were the first 5 things that came to my mind. Do you have some adjectives to describe your blog? If you don’t or they sound more like “average, just another WordPress blog, bleak” you should change something. A blog needs a distinctive character. It’s not necessarily the character of the blogger. SEO 2.0 is just part of me.

Subjectivity:
The writer of a blog should always write what s/he thinks. Not what a company thinks (it does not in the first place) but what you, the blogger, like or dislike. Only God is objective. So embrace your subjectivity and write from your own point of view.

Imperfection:
A blogger is a human being, thus imperfect and that’s fine. You blog quickly and thus you often make mistakes. That’s fine too as long as you react to people who point out issues and you correct the mistakes you made. If your blog sounds as if a whole PR department has worked a night to devise a posting you should rather write press releases. So a blog thrives with imperfection.

Sponsored Message
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Non-commercial:
While blogs, especially corporate and business blogs often are dealing with business and there is nothing wrong with “making money blogging” the nature of the blog or there the blog posts is non-commercial. So the blog post itself can’t be a sales pitch. If you want to sell something, even in a blog post, the article must contain something useful for the reader.

Personal voice:
People read most blogs because they like the person behind them or the team if it’s a group blog. There are plenty of “blogs” where a bunch of no-name badly underpaid editors fill WordPress sites with content. This is not blogging. If you can’t recognize or imagine a person behind a blog it’s not a blog it’s a news source at best. A blog needs a personal voice.

Critical approach:
If you applaud just about everything nobody will trust you. This applies also if you will leave out everything that’s negative. So even self improvement blogs will deal with negative aspects of life. You do not have to negative yourself but yo can’t sweep everything under the rug. You need a critical approach to things. Tell people when something’s wrong.

Informal:
Humor, colloquial expressions or off-topic posting are part of blogging. Without them your blog becomes an official website. A blog must be informal to some point. Or it should be 10% informal so that it does not get too sloppy. Nonetheless blogs are informal and not 100% earnest.

Now said that I bet I forgot some other important factors but I prefer the number 7 to, 8, 9 or sometimes even 10 (less work so if you you think I forgot the most important blog writing guidelines prove me wrong in the comments.

10 Commandments of Business Blogging

21 Comments Filed Under: Reputation Building, Blogging, Social Media, Definitions, SEO 2.0

Whatever you do, you need passion, image by fatboyke

What exactly is business blogging? To me, at least in this post, it applies to any blogging attempt that is motivated by the advance of any business or marketing endeavour. It may even apply to blogging for a cause what many green bloggers do.

Business blogging does not have to be blogging about business as some people apparently assume. This is not my understanding of the term.

Business blogging might be done by an individual who is a freelancer like I am a freelance SEO consultant in Germany but to me it sounds more like the blogger is part of a larger business or a company. Also you have to differentiate: Business blogging is not necessarily corporate or problogging but might be one of the two or both.

In the search industry bloggers Matt Cutts and Rand Fishkin are probably the best examples of business blogging I refer to. While Matt Cutts’ blog makes me stay away from it for several reasons it is along with SEOmoz nonetheless a good example for blogging semi-privately for a business, thus for business blogging that is neither really private nor really corporate as there are many “real” Google corporate blogs.

So while business blogging is used very successfully not only in the search industry there seems to persist a large amount of uncertainty about the nature of it to the point of some spectacular failures of business blogs.

So to establish a few guidelines for proper business blog behavior there arises a need for a set of “social values” especially in connection and to deal with social media. These are indeed fairly simple and self-evident once written down. I just did it: So take a look at the 10 commandments of business blogging and also make sure to read my introduction called the 10 simplest ways to boost your social media credibility right from the start:

1. Use your real name
If you want anybody to take you seriously you have to use your real name for your blog.

2. Disclose what company you are working for and what exactly you do there
Do not blog under false pretenses, disclose from the start who you are, whom you work for or who pays you, why you blog, what your exact position is, it’s a big difference whether you’re from the PR department or you’re the CEO.

3. Blog yourself
Do not use ghostwriting under your name. If you have not enough time do not blog. Blog for yourself in your own name not for your company, people will cite you and not the company. Above all be yourself, not solely a CEO, entrepreneur, engineer or consultant. Make people feel that you’re there as a person. Shoot pictures of your cat or dog. Do not cover your family though, that might be even dangerous.

4. Do not sell, inform
Do not attempt to sell your products via your blog posts. Inform people. Make your readers aware of them but mainly inform your audience on the issues of your trade or industry, not solely your own business.

5. Do not “blog” press releases, tell stories
Well, this is kind of evident although many people will do it anyways. Press releases are for the press, blogs are your interface to social media. You might even employ social media press releases but keep your blog clean.

6. Engage your audience
Blogs are defined by the conversations of real people. It’s about dialogue. Again, if you do not have the time to reply to comments, do not blog. If you start a monologue your business blog will fail.

7. Use casual language not corporate newspeak
Everybody hates corporate newspeak. Also many people do not even understand the meaning of it. Use normal casual language, but do not swear or ridicule yourself too much. Wearing oversize sombreros is OK though.

8. Do not demean others, especially competitors, but deal with criticism and other issues of your company
Positivity and honesty is key for a successful blog, even more for a business blog as people are wary of being lied to by corporate or business entities. So do not tell people how bad your competitors are or the rest of the world. Also deal honestly with issues, especially criticism regarding your work and company. Do not feed the troll though. React if it’s not slander. For the latter call your lawyers, but do not call your lawyers in cases of decent criticism!

9. Do not make your employees vote you up
Well, ever wondered why Apple stories are daily on the Digg frontpage? Well, voting up your company’s blog is vote fraud on social media. If you have more than 5 - 10 employees you should forbid it altogether.

10. Do not hide facts when you describe something
Telling only half the truth is like lying on blgs and social media. People will tell you anyways. So try to anticipate what others think and take a proactive stance. Show them your unique selling proposition like saying “we’re the first to introduce these features”.

Now will following these 10 commandments make you a great business blogger? No, they most probably won’t on their own, but without them your business blog will fail. To stretch my commandment metaphor: It’s not enough to play by the rules, you need faith. With blogging it’s more about the enthusiasm or the passion.

Disclaimer: While I’m a Christian myself I do not want to hurt anyone’s religious feelings. The metaphor of the commandments is not meant to disrespect the real ten commandments, in contrast, it’s to highlight the need for ethics in every discipline even such a worldly one like blogging for business purposes. To my Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, agnostic and other readers: This is also not a way to disrespect any other religion as inferior. It’s just a way of explaining things.

7 Misguiding Terms You Should Abandon

15 Comments Filed Under: Self Empowerment, Blogging, Definitions, SEO 2.0, SEO

Nowadays we use terms and expressions daily which not only bury the real meaning of the phenomenon they try to describe, they also misguide yourself and others.

Some words simply change your intentions to the negative by adding the wrong meaning or meaninglessness to some things.

I used most of them myself mistakenly without really thinking about the ramifications. These terms infuse hidden negativity into your approach. You have to purge them to change your mindset.

Check out these 7 examples of words or expressions that you should abandon:

Traffic: I wrote a whole article about that. In German you never say “traffic” you always say visitors. Your visitors are not cars or numbers. If you view them like an amorph mass you will never meet their expectations. Treat your visitors like guests. Offer them some tea and crackers. Also traffic reminds me of drug trafficking and such.
Link bait, Internet users are not fish and link baiting sounds like tricking people to swallow the bait. Why not speak about link incentives? I have come up with 3 different terms naming all aspects of what you call link baiting nowadays
Web 2.0 SEO: What could this be? SEO for AJAX apps? Social Media Optimization? It’s confusing. Use SEO 2.0 instead: Here it’s clear that this means a new phase of SEO and web 2.0 is implicit in it.
Blog monetization: To be honest, this sounds like “sell out”. It reminds me of going to the flea market or pawn shop. Why not “earn a living blogging” instead which sounds 10 times as decent? Or just blog advertising?
Make money online, yeah, make money online or blogging is the new “get rich quick”. It sounds like make money talking or sleeping. It’s one of the reasons people hate this. It’s bling, bling all over. Again “earn a living blogging” or “earn an income online” sounds 100 times more decent.
Black hat SEO - Let’s face it, what is black hat SEO? It’s search engine spam also called spamdexing. SEO stands for optimization, you do not optimize, you fool search engines, circumvent filters, you find loop holes in “black hat SEO”. It’s in no way an “optimum” afterwards, only for your pocket probably. Get real.
White hat SEO - By using this term, you acknowledge that all other SEO is not white hat, as well as acknowledging black hat SEO. It’s like saying there is good optimization (to make sth. better) and bad optimization (to make sth. worse), if it’s bad it’s not optimization at all, that’s an oxymoron. It’s either fixing or breaking things. SEO is fixing, spam breaking things.

Did I already tell you that I was a poet and linguist once? Language transforms reality. Master the language, do not use words that skew reality in the wrong direction and misrepresent things.

I think there are more terms like these that misguide you and others daily. Do you know some? Add them in the comments.

The Most Important Difference Between Websites and Blogs

14 Comments Filed Under: Blogging, Definitions, Usability

Website vs Blog: What’s the difference?

What is the single most important difference between “conventional” or “static” websites and blogs? Many people will probably reply

Blogs are dynamic, websites are not
Blogs encourage conversation, websites do not
Blogs offer RSS, websites do not
Blogs publish current news, websites do not
Blogs create the blogosphere while websites are in a way standalone islands

Now you already might suspect where I’m at: All of the differences, with the exception of #5 maybe are not true (anymore)!

You have all kinds of websites which are enhanced in a way that they are not static but dynamic in their nature and I do not speak about static HTML vs PHP
Also you do not need a blog to lead a conversation. Asides from forums, wikis and all kinds of Web 2.0 sites any site can add a comment form or a connection to a forum which will enable users to engage in a conversation and also engage you, the publisher, in one.
There also plenty of services which will create an RSS feed for any website etc. based sites.

News sites like CNN or BBC are of course not blogs but they publish news and naturally the two are not the only ones. Everybody can create a non-blog website that deals with the latest news, buzz or products.

While there is no extra sphere for websites, the so called blogosphere is not as tangible either I would argue. Nonetheless this is indeed a difference somehow. Is this the most important difference? No, it isn’t.

It has been a long time…

What is the most important difference between websites and blogs? It’s about being up to date or timeless. Or it’s about being still valid. The info at a blog is expected to be valid at a certain point in time while the content on a website is expected to be timeless.

Of course there are plenty of exceptions to this but generally you assume that a website you end up on which is not a blog and which has no date marking when it was published contains still valid information. In contrast you will often not even read a blog entry after noticing that it was published two years or sometimes even 2 months ago.

When I started my SEO 2.0 blog I was surprised that my theme, DM Bloodless, has the date removed from the posts. After realizing it I thought about it and decided to let the date to be hidden.

Why?

I wanted my blog to both a timeless website and an up to date blog.

A few weeks later I published a post called 5 Dirty Blogging Tricks which covered this decision in a short sentence.

Blogsites combine the best of two worlds.

After almost 9 months of blogging at SEO 2.0 I am convinced that it was the right decision. Combining the advantages of websites and blogs is not as easy as I imagines though.

What to do?

You have either to refrain from publishing news or you have to find a way to deal with the fact that they are not timeless. You can:

Add a date in the content of the post: “As October 2007 it has…”
Add updates to a post “Update 11. December, 2007: The service has been discontinued by now”
Delete old posts or rewrite them.

Who wants to update old posts which are rarely visited if it all? Well, I don’t in most cases. You can change the date though and republish them on top though. This way you save some time by not posting a completely new posting while also offering new insights, perspective or another update.

Which one of the two do you prefer?

Think about it and please add your opinion:

What dis/advantages do you think this combination of blogsites does have?
How else can you combine the advantages of both without doubling the workload?
Do you update or delete your old postings?
Am I right at all? What is the most striking difference between blogs and websites in your opinion?
Who will become the next president of the United States of America?

Thus I won’t tell you that WordPress 2.5 has just been released this weekend!

Dofollow Blog Commenting Netiquette vs a Barbecue Party

22 Comments Filed Under: Blogging, Reputation Building, Definitions, SEO 2.0, Wordpress, Usability, SEO

First off: The introduction of real links in comments via the dofollow plugin has been a huge success, especially as I am ranking high for both “dofollow” and “dofollow plugin” in Google by now because my article about the end of conventional SEO was so popular and has been reprinted or translated numerous times including my “dofollow” link.

Dofollow encouraged participation substantially, moreover what most people do not mention in this context: It made this blog a really friendly place.

Commenters who also want a link rarely will offend you. So by far most coments are friendly, helpful and adding some new perspective, update or information. In short: People commenting on SEO 2.0 are truly contributing. In many cases I even rank for long tail queries that are found only in my comments.

Blogging is like inviting people to your barbecue party: They get invited and receive free food while you enjoy a nice get together.

I use Akismet for spam protection and thus have rarely problems with real spammers who let robots comment automatically on thousands of blogs. There are sometimes problems with false positives in case of people Akismet markes accidentally as spam. Aaron Wall of SEO book was flagged as spam by Akismet and one of my eager contributors david deangelo has been filtered time and again even after I made him a “member” of this blog. This is a bug that sucks but I will de-spam your comments if you contact me by email, my adress is onreact at onreact.com

Many people complain about so called “manual spam” which is an oxymoron in a way. Spam is an unsolicited message and if you allow comments (by people) you can’t call it spam in this case. Thus comments made by humans not robots are not spam in 99% of cases. Nonetheless some things annoy me too:

People commenting with a name like “SEO Company” or “Real Estate California” because I want people to comment not companies or services, especially if the keywords have nothing to do with SEO or other topics of this blog.
One liners saying something like “thanks, great article” because I don’t know if they are made by robots or not if they do not refer to the post.
People who do not read the article but comment based on the title and it’s keywords because it’s just ridiculous to state “I also like three-way links” if I just wrote that I hate them.
People using German or other non-English keywords as their “name” because it is impolite to exclude the majority of my readers who do not understand.
Commenters linking to specific subpages like domain.com/my-new-product because I’m not your catalogue.
People adding a signature in their comment because you already got a link, you don’t need a signature, that’s greedy.
Commenters who disagree with me, because I never err you damn naysayers!

On good days I will just approve your comments, on normal days I will change your “name” to something which sounds actually like a name or remove your URL but on bad days I will spam your comment or delete it.

Spamming your comment means that you get flagged on other Wordpress blogs too so you probably do not want to risk that.

There are easy solutions or exceptions for most of these cases where both you and I can live with them or they even add some additional value. Tim Nash, a SEO consultant from the UK has a nice technical solution implemented: He added an extra text box for your favorite anchor text. This is really neat but I’m too lazy to hack my WordPress comment form and thus I prefer the easiest solution, introduced in part by my favorite blog consultant, Michael Martine. He just combines two things, his name and his job description.

So check out these simple rules of blog commenting netiquette, they might not apply everywhere but they will help you not be thrown out at SEO 2.0 and in other places probably too.

You can write: Michael Martine, Blog Consultant. You can also link to to an about page covering you. Also if you do not want to disclose your name or job position, you can even write something like Bob of Miller Real Estate or at least leave your initials to enable me to address you: AJ of Miller Real Estate but don’t write Miller Real Estate, AJ. Imagine being on a party again: You say your name first when you introduce yourself and then you tell people what you do for a living.
I appreciate people being thankful for a post but unless your refer to the specific post or I know your blog URL I have no way of determining whether you are a bot or not. So write something like “thank your for the post, it helped me with …”
If you want a piece of meat at a barbecue you don’t just drop in, take it and leave the party instantly. Stay for a minute to read the post, say “hi” and then leave.
Do you speak German addressing people on a party where nobody understands it? Try to translate at least. So do not write Web design Köln, but Mark of Dom Web Webdesign in Cologne
Imagine yourself on a party when asked about what you do for a living telling people, “Dirt Devil M110002!” So, as I said above, a page about you is OK, your homepage vacuumcleaners.com also but not a specific product page. Akismet will spam you in most cases you use subpages anyways.
A barbecue party is not a trade fair, you do not wear your name plate on your lapel. You just introduce yourself, that’s enough. So skip the additional signature.
Now imagine someone entering a barbecue party shouting: This place sucks, meat is murder, you dirty bastards stink! I guess such a person gets thrown out immediately. If you disagree, do it politely, with style after at least reading what this site is about. Of course I will delete trolls who offend me for all “SEOs being spammers“.

Did I forget something? Probably, feel free to add your take on the subject of blog commenting netiquette an barbecue parties in the comments below Introduce yourself and be nice to the other guest.

SEO 2.0 Basics: WordPress URL Design

5 Comments Filed Under: Definitions, Blogging, Design, SEO 2.0, Usability, Wordpress

WordPress is, you might already suspect it, the most popular blogging platform aka blog CMS out there. Thee are plenty of good reasons to use it although WordPress has some major drawbacks (it’s bloated, can be easily hacked, has a super-ugly admin interface etc). Nonetheless I use WordPress for more than one blog, indeed I use WordPress since 2003 for numerous projects.

WordPress lets you change your URL structure with ease. That’s nice but also there are some pitfalls.

Why should you rewrite your URLs in the first place?

to make them readable and self explanatory
to make them Google friendly
for better archiving

Now said that there is no one way to do that. There is no ideal URL structure for WordPress. It depends on what you need.

Just think about how you use your WordPress installation:

as a blog (most probably but not necessarily)
as a website
as a news source
a an archive or library for real or metaphorically speaking

Now there are several ways to “design”, as in so called URL design, your WordPress URLs. After years of practice my favorites are…

Stop, first I want to show you what the average WordPress URLs look like:

domain.com/?p=123
domain.com/category-name/seo-2-0-basics-wordpress-url-design/
domain.com/2008/03/15/seo-2-0-basics-wordpress-url-design

None of them are perfect, most of them have significant drawbacks.

#1 is short, no need for “tinyurl” services and it does not use any rewrite rules. I like that in some cases, for instance for blogs that have large numbers of short posts, then you can show off by having a four or five digit post number. It tells you nothing about the content though. Imagine this link in an email. Would you click it or rather a link like that: domain.com/britney-spears-naked

#2 lets you categorize your content but as WordPress categories do not work as desired, you can’t really choose which category is the most important one if you ascribe more than one and WP will almost randomly choose one, it’s worthless. Also, the “/” at the end mimics a directory which a post is not. Do you really want to trick your readers you dirty black hat SEO?

#3 is great for a historical view bu most blog readers expect current posts on a blog. Do you really think someone will click on a link like domain.com/2005/03/15/breaking-news ?

Now lets take a look at my own URL:
domain.com/seo-2-0-basics-wordpress-url-design

I love simplicity and I wanted my blog to appear to be a real website with real content not just ephemeral blog postings. It is not ideal for several reasons or rather purposes though.
Let’s say I make a list of 10 items and the add some more. I can’t change the URL though, as it would yield a 404 not found error n the old one.

Consider this URL again: domain.com/?p=123
Now changing the headline does not have any impact on it. Now wouldn’t it be great to combine these two? Yes, as I am a man of “as well” instead of “either or” you can and should.

The solution is fairly simple:
domain.com/123/seo-2-0-basics-wordpress-url-design

This URL has a major advantage:

Long URLs send via email often get cut at the end or otherwise destroyed in the process of sending.

It does not matter with this one.

domain.com/123/seo-2-0-basics-wordpress-url-design
domain.com/123/seo-2-0-basics-
domain.com/123/seo-2-0-basics-%FC%DF%F6%E4
domain.com/123/
domain.com/?p=123

will all successfully lead to the same post.

Unfortunately this is not enough in many cases. As Google is quite stupid and does not know you are a blog unless you call yourself a blog you might want to use

domain.com/blog/123/seo-2-0-basics-wordpress-url-design

or better, if you want to rank for the often searched for keyword+blog combination:

domain.com/seo-blog/123/seo-2-0-basics-wordpress-url-design

You can achieve this either by uploading your WordPress installation into the real “blog” or “seo blog” directory on you server via FTP or by rewriting again. WordPress lets you add a so called “category_base”.

Many people still want to use the date in their URLs as they write news blogs and for better archiving. You do not have to fake three directories with slashes (”/”) doing that.
When I want to retain the date I use either one of these two URL structures:

domain.com/20080315
or
domain.com/2008-03-15

Also

domain.com/2008.03.15
is possible.

WordPress will still allow you to access the years as in “domain.com/2008″, months or days.

Now you still have to decide which URL or Permalink design is the best for you.

The implementation of the desired URL structure is shown here at Wordpress.org or here with some screenshots.

There are also some dirty tricks as I like to call them

For instance you can any suffix after the URL. So instead of the good old “.html” or “.php” yo can add anything you want. In my case something like “.seo” would be perfect.
domain.com/seo-2-0-basics-wordpress-url-design.seo

The ROI of Blogging and Social Media

6 Comments Filed Under: Blogging, Social Media, Definitions

For years ROI or Return on Investment was a term used by business people in suits and marketers who worked for them. While search marketers often obsessed with rankings, traffic and conversions. Recently ROI is going mainstream as not only SEOs turn to ROI as the most important metric after rankings and traffic have become too unreliable to measure success the web. Most notably the book Web Design for ROI I already mentioned makes a huge leap in reversing the process of designing websites.

While a good looking homepage was key for many execs, now the check out forms or sign up pages are the most important parts of the website.

Now ROI turns into obsession though in the course of overt monetization of everything. Bloggers turn to measuring the ROI of blogs and social media as if ROI was a applicable to these media types.

To get the point across across quickly I ask you three questions:

Do you measure the ROI of meeting your friends?
Do you measure the ROI of reading books?
Do you measure the ROI of giving away presents?

Now you probably understand where I’m at. ROI is a monetary metric. I invest 100$ and get 200$ thus my ROI 200%. The same applies to time spent on work.

How in contrast do you want to measure time spent on things that are part work, part leisure?

In the current society the difference between both vanishes more and more each day. Especially the nature of the Web itself where you give away things for free and get others also for no cost changes our notions of work.

So do I work writing this blog? Well, not really, or partly, I am not earning money directly. Do I earn money because of the blog? I do. How do I know which money or how much of it ensued due to me writing the blog? I can’t. Often it is not measurable. Also you have to ask yourself whether it is desirable to measure it.

You do not want to measure the ROI of your relationships but you will have to admit that having a partner or children has a very positive impact on your life and thus your success at work.

Social media are virtual spaces where you do not meet real friends, you do not meet anybody in the sense of actually meeting them, but you contact people you would have otherwise never “met”. Can you measure the ROI of that, or do you really want to measure it all? This is also one of the most important differences between a social media campaign and a social media strategy. In a campaign you measure $ while devising a strategy you set other, more important goals that are not measurable by such simple metrics like ROI but may pay out in manifold ways.

If you still want to measure something for a private blog ROI can be the number of comments on your posts. 5 comments by 5 people mean 500% blogging ROI.