SEO 2.0

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:

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. Commenters linking to specific subpages like domain.com/my-new-product because I’m not your catalogue.

6. People adding a signature in their comment because you already got a link, you don’t need a signature, that’s greedy.

7. 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.

1. 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.
2. 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 …”
3. 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.
4. 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
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.

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:

1. domain.com/?p=123
2. domain.com/category-name/seo-2-0-basics-wordpress-url-design/
3. 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

Yes, your blog! I am talking to you. At least if you found me via Technorati or other vanity search methods. This blog post here explains one way how you can find out whether your blog has been compromised and advertises Viagra, Phentermine and online casinos. I checked mine and then I checked others.

I found out that for instance these blogs have been hacked by spammers:

• Hey, Hot Shot!
• scale nine : skins and themes for flex and adobe air
• Elatable | Bradley Horowitz
• The Macalope
• conduit labs blog
• Crazy Apple Rumors Site
• AvantLink’s Affiliate Marketing Blog

Are you one of them? Check your source code. Some blogs aren’t hacked on the front page but certain posts are.

When I tried to contact one of those bloggers, I noticed that he makes it very difficult to contact him. No email address to be found neither on LinkedIn nor on his site. I surely will not pay to upgrade my LinkedIn account just to tell you that you’re hacked.

Do you know other methods to test whether your blog has been hacked by spammers? Add them in the comments.

Btw.: If you are one of those Internet newbies who mistake SEOs for spammers: I did not hack you, so before you sue me:

I am the guy who told you that you’re blog has been hacked!

After 10 years of online publishing, 4 years of blogging for a plethora of blogs, being a SEO for three years and being paid for blogging several times by now I finally am convinced that I know how it works.

What I learned about online publishing, blogging, SEO in 10 years you can now read in 10 minutes.

This is my list of 101 ways to make your blog more popular and successful. Most of it I tried myself, other measures have been taken by numerous other bloggers with success so I have to catch up on them myself.

1 - 5: StumbleUpon

1. Get social on StumbleUpon, it brings huge targeted traffic if you do it right

2. Add some friends at SU but not too many

3. Reward people stumbling you, or say “thanks” at least

4. Stumble only good stuff, so people get interested in you and visit your blog

5. Link your blog on your StumbleUpon home page

6 - 10: Niche social news sites

6. Target niche social news sites like DZone, Sphinn or Hugg

7. Become a power user at the one that fits you most

8. Stumble good articles from the niche social news communities

9. Use a striking avatar

10. Socialize with other (power) users and add them as friends at Facebook or Pownce

11 - 20: Your blog

11. Add an unforgettable image in your blog header

12. Use WordPress, as it’s the most widely used blogging platform and makes socializing with Trackbacks easier

13. Use a great design or customize a great WordPress theme

14. Allow trackbacks and real links in comments (dofollow)

15. Reply to your comments

16. Link to other bloggers, not only the well known ones

17. Create pillar or mile stone content like huge lists, thorough tutorials, breaking or unique news

18. Be the first to say something: uncover scams, debunk myths

19. Review other bloggers

20. Create a blogroll of blogs that are similar to yours and/or a good supplement

21 - 30: Other blogs:

21. Accept and revere authorities in your field

22. Make a list of the top 10 blogs in your field and try being like them and better

23. Contribute guest post on other blogs

24. Email other bloggers if they have “Page not found” or their design is broken is some browser

25. Get inspired by other bloggers

26. Comment on other blogs, out of interest, not only for marketing purposes

27. Go to unconferences and bar camps to meet other bloggers

28. Submit others blog posts to your favorite social media or vote there for them

29. Do not expect other bloggers to like just because your there

30. Do not annoy other bloggers with IM, email or other means, only contact them if it really makes sense

31 - 40: Copy writing

31. Write about popular topics but not those everybody else already covered

32. Find a new angle to a story instead of mere repeating or linking

33. Use striking, funny, easy to remember titles like “The Day I was reborn, twice”, “I ate my iPod“, “10 Ways to become a Millionaire in 5 Weeks”

34. Do not write too short posts

35. Do not write too long posts

36. Know your audience and offer it what it wants, not only what you think is appropriate

37. Be yourself, do not write you you would write for an employer, write as if you write a letter to a friend

38. Offend offenders

39. Do not offend people weaker than you

40. Ask questions and incite discussions

41 - 50: X/HTML and CSS

41. Use X/HTML and CSS (Flash blogs exist!)

42. Use headings, lists, bold, italic and other means of making a text readable

43. Use large headlines

44. Use the h2 tag for post titles

45. Use Flash image replacement to make your headlines look better

46. Do not use fonts for headlines which are not meant for them and look ugly (Verdana)

47. Make your font size readable for your post but not too big, your readers are not half blind

48. Use colors that contrast but not too much and not too many of them, black on white is still king

49. Be original but let people recognize that your blog is a blog, by using some well known elements

50. Use compatible CSS, no CSS 3 tricks

51 - 60: Images

51. Use images in posts

52. Use striking images in your posts, like collages, bright colors, images that metaphorically illustrate your point

53. Be original, do not just display the Google logo when you write about Google

54. Do not steal images without proper attribution

55. Use a list of images to attract large audiences, but don’t forget #54

56. Use screenshots or parts of them as images for your blog posts

57. Use pictures of beautiful women

58. Do not use pictures as the only content of a post if it’s not a list

59. Do not use images that are bigger than 50 Kb or 500*500 pixels, not everybody in the world has a fast connection

60. Use thumbnails for bigger images

61 - 70: Topics

61. Cover the most important things in life: Love, peace, happiness, community, freedom

62. Do not write about SEO (it’s too late for me)

63. If you write about SEO call it blogging tips or make money online

64. Write how you feel

65. Interview interesting and well known people

66. Write about stars, people love stars: Angelina Jolie I love you!

67. Write about what you know first hand, what you experienced

68. Concentrate on positive topics, do not just write how bad everything is

69. Do not write about your wife, kids, where you live, how much you earn or what you bought unless you’re properly armed or live Sweden

70. Write you earned thousands of dollars by blogging to get known

71 - 80: Blog SEO and promotion

71. Use blog communities like MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog

72. Use CLIQ to be displayed on similar blogs you like

73. Ping Technorati and Google Blog Search (default in English WordPress)

74. Use WordPress 2.3+ as it’s already SEOed to the max out of the box

75. Link out to others to get linked, do not engage in link exchange, link buying or selling or any automated link schemes

76. Do not use keywords like “california real estate” as your name in comment fields unless it’s your blogs name

77. Don’t do conventional SEO on your blog, it’s in most cases counter productive

78. Do not write content - write articles, reviews, interviews

79. SEO is not Spam, Blog SEO is not trackback spam

80. Do not automate your blogging efforts

81 - 85: Getting Subscribers

81. Display a (big) orange feed icon where everybody can see it

82. Use Feedburner

83. Let people subscribe by email

84. Offer a full feed

85. Explain what RSS is for people new to the concept and offer a choice of the best RSS readers

86 - 90: Branding

86. Get a decent logo

87. Get a unique and remarkable name for your blog

88. Get a short and concise name for yourself, Tadeusz Szewczyk = Tad Chef

89. Use your logo and/or avatar throughout the Net

90. Trademark your blog name and logo

91 - 101: Miscellaneous

91. Do not offend people for being different than you

92. Be open minded, let anything and everything inspire you

93. treat your readers and other bloggers like real people, with respect and compassion

94. Explain stuff that you know, there are always some people who don’t

95. Be different but stay true to yourself, do not pose as somebody else

96. Do not overload your blog with ads

97. Do not use Google Adsense or Text Link ads unless you have to or depend on it

98. Become an expert in your trade, be a specialist in your topic

99. Do not try to do everything or be everywhere, concentrate on the stuff you like, prefer and are good at

100. Cooperate with others, altruism is the best egoism

101. In short: Practice SEO 2.0

I want to thank five bloggers who inspired me to write this post: Smashing Magazine, Vandelay Design, Skellie, Social Networking Articles and this SEO blogger.

Women are like websites. Getting links is like having sex. You can pay for sex or you get it for free. If you are very attractive you have no problems. If you are ugly, boring and shallow you have to pay. Still there are lots of guys that are quite intelligent, interesting but kind of introverted. I know, I was one myself. The same applies to websites.

There are very useful websites out there that still won’t get many links for many reasons I do not want to recount here. Their webmasters have the money to purchase links, but they don’t want to to pay prostitutes especially as Google scares people with penalties who enter bad neighbourhoods.

So what can you do if you want to stay ethical and can’t think of any linkbaits or other methods to get links? What to do if you could pay a link but you do not want to annoy big Google?

Well, consider one of my 20 methods of getting legit paid links without getting banned. Many of those methods are even cheaper. Moreover nobody can harm you, they are perfectly clean.

Skip text link ads, paid reviews and other controversial link building tactics.

No bribery or dirty tricks involved. Starting with easy already well known and often practiced ones. The farther you get, the deeper you enter terra nova of SEO 2.0!

Indeed as altruism is the best egoism, the most successful of the methods help you by helping others.

Donate money	Support webmasters or programmers and many will link to you to show their appreciation	Just one link, often with a high PageRank, but sometimes spammy if people donate only for SEO reasons (you can tell when you read German anchor texts)
Sponsor a Wordpress Theme	Better pay a designer to make a Wordpress theme for you and then give it away on your site, people will naturally link it	At least the designer will link to you, potentially hundreds or even thousands of links if the theme really rocks.
Pay a developer to code a Wordpress or Firefox Plugin	You can’t do everything yourself, pay someone to create a useful Wordpress or Firefox plugin .	Brings potentially hundreds of links, Aaron Wall does it for instance.
Stage a contest	Give away penalty of small prizes unlike those who offer a “free iPod” for thousands of contestants.	Depending on how stingy you are you get some, many or no links. Contests are common, so be creative.
Offer free web hosting for artists or activists	Artists and activists will love it and you can ask them to link to you, but they most often will even without being asked	Everybody loves art and many people support activism, so those sites get strong so you get a good link for each site you support.
Help charities	There are many ways to support charities but giving them money is the most direct one. There are thousands of them, so you surely will find dozens of causes you would like to support.	The charity will probably link to you and if you do a little more, announce it big time, people will love you for it and link to you
Create a charity	Internet Marketers for Single Mothers? Why not?	Why just donating money to someone who probably has not the marketing skills to get real support and outreach? Will get you lots of links.
Offer discounts for students	Students have less money now, but will have more in future. Already they are important influencers online. Offer discounts for them.	Students have homepages, indeed I had one my first three years of my Internet endeavour in college. If you offer something useful to students many will link to you. Ever heard somebody talking about .edu links?
Use a product or service of a company that will show you in their portfolio	Many companies will proudly show off their clients in their portfolio, sometimes even write a success story. Why buy a product of a company that does not bother? Choose the one that does.	One link, often high PageRank. If you let a well known designer redesign your site you may even get dozens of backlinks through CSS galleries.
Send bloggers presents (your product)	There are millions of bloggers. Most of them below the radar of the Technorati Top 100 although they are experts in their trade. Sent them a present, your product for instance. They will be delighted and blog about it.	If it’s a nice present even other bloggers may link to you. I you send presents to a bunch of bloggers, you will get a bunch of links…
Mirror a heavy traffic site	Support your favorite open source software, videographer or netaudio artist with a mirror.	Potentially dozens or hundreds of links.
Pay a designer to create free icons	Every webmaster needs icons, but who wants to pay for them? Or who can afford it?	Many links, depending of the quality of the icons.
Buy an established blog or website	Many bloggers blog for some months and then stop and sell their blogs. Often with high PageRanks.	Keep the blog going and get many links to that blog.
Pay a programmer to create a useful tool	A SEO tool or CSS generator of some kind will always get some attention.	Depending on how useful the tool is, you get plenty or at least some links.
Pay a copywriter to write guest articles at established weblogs	I write myself and the links are often the best ones. At least before I started SEO 2.0	At least one link per article, but authority links.
Pay a translator to translate your articles and give ‘em away	Your article republished all over the world for free? It’s possible. SEO 2.0 posts have been translated in at least a dozen languages.	Dozens, even hundreds of links possible
Offend an evil corporation and pay a lawyer to defend you	What about a lawsuit against Yahoo for handing over Chinese dissidents to the police? Invest in freedom.	Basically if you can convincingly fight against anti-democratic corporations people will love you. No wonder.
Pay a cracker to deface your site	Well, you get linked for being defaced. Especially by your readers. This is a win to win situation if there is no real destruction done. The cracker can brag about that and you get linked.	Many links if the defacement is spectacular enough and people care for your site.
Pay a star to make a guest appearance on your site	Musicians and writers in most cases lack money, even the famous ones! It can be just a visit with some pictures.	Lots of links, especially if you target the MySpace generation. They’ll love it.
Pay an artist to offer a mp3 download for free on your site	Why not paying the artist to offer his new song as a download on your site? Make sure that the people link the page/site not the mp3 directly though.	People love free mp3 downloads, especially by well known rock stars. The more known or the rarer the more links. Many in any case.

Now don’t get me wrong. Not one of this methods is about “manipulation” or something. They’re not even really paid links. They are completely legit and you won’t get penalized for them whatsoever. Otherwise Google has to penalize the Web as a whole!

On a side note: I do not use the methods myself as I can garner enough links without paying anything, I’m just sooo cool ! I used some of the methods without payment, such as guest blogging.

The best things in life are free. The same on the web. So treat those ways of getting paid links as a first step to organic link heaven.

Also, you pay, but you give away for free, so you’re almost there, at completely organic link getting (not building, as then the links appear by themselves)!

Some of you might have noticed: SEO 2.0 has ads now. As I did not want to serve you spammy crap like Adsense or Text Link Ads I decided to advertise the Coudal way - only recommend resources or services that you use/d yourself. As my target audience at my SEO 2.0 blog is you, the web savvy webmaster, blogger and social media user I decided to place strictly SEO related ads that will enable any webmaster to do DIY SEO on hers or his own.

For DIY SEO you want to do several aspects of SEO yourself:

Keyword research, Optimize your website (on page SEO), link building, monitor search engine rankings, keep up with current news and developments. Did I forget something?

So I introduce to you the 5 most essential DIY SEO resources you need, please take note that those use affiliate links, so if you buy those products or services you actually support SEO 2.0!

1. The SEO Book by Aaron Wall: When I started doing SEO back in 2004 I did not know there was a SEO Book. When I finally found out, it was too late, I checked it and it is truly a must read for any beginner and intermediate user, but after being a pro for two years I could only admit, this guys knows what he does, as do I. It covers anything from keyword research, on page optimization, directory submission to spectacular link baiting.
2. Advanced SEO Tools by SoloSEO - The SoloSEO tools are a set of web based SEO tools that allow you to optimize and monitor a set of websites over longer time periods. It’s not just about checking PageRank or something. It’s basically a whole webware suite allowing you to check your rankings in the major serahc engines, link building tools such as link partner management and of course keyword research tools that spare you a lot of time and fuss.
3. Professional SEO Software Web CEO: What SoloSEO does as Webware, Web CEO does as Software. Web CEO is even more advanced. I used Web CEO for almost 2 years myself. You can download the free version which allows you to monitor a small number of eywords and offers you some fully functional other tools. Web CEO is, even in the free version, the best SEO software suite out there. I tested Web CEO as ranking checker here.
4. Search Marketing Standard, the only real SEO/SEM magazine out there. I subscribed to Search Marketing Standard even before the first issue was out. It was clear from day one, this magazine will become the global publication for the SEO/SEM industry. Now that I even contributed an article about German SEO to the magazine, I fully can recommend it for any webmaster trying to keep up with major paradigms shifts of search marketing. I read every issue almost completely.
5. Dreamhost green web hosting with preinstalled Wordpress: Dreamhost is not real SEO web hosting you might argue, true, it does not offer “several different Class C IP address” per account. What do you need those for in the first place? To mimic several different websites for Google = gray hat SEO. As I said, I write for the average webmaster or blogger wanting to score better on Google or having more traffic. To do this you need affordable hosting and if you blog, a preinstalled Wordpress. Dreamhost offers both and what’s most notable: It’s green! Dreamhost does not pollute mother earth with CO2. It uses clean energy unlike other hosts. I use Dreamhost for almost a year now for a Wordpress blog that had “too much traffic” prior to this. No problem here. Indeed a good friend of mine and a Wordpress guru offered it to me for free “because I have so much web space and bandwith I can’t use it myself whatsoever. The price 8$.

So all in all, these 5 products and services allow to engage in do-it-yourself SEO and to prosper with your website or blog. DIY SEO is not difficult if you now HTML basics, just try it. It’s what Aaron Wall of SEO Book says: You do not need a SEO consultant unless you are not web savvy at all or you work in a very competitive market. In 70% of the cases DIY SEO will be sufficient I guess.

I needed months and years to gather all that knowledge, you can in a very short time using these resources. I hope the ads are not too annoying or offensive. It took a day to position them in a useful uncluttered manner. That’s my goal: To create additional value for you by advertising those products and services that you might probably need and already look for in the quest for DIY SEO resources.

While adding a small del.icio.us widget in my footer I noticed that my theme, DM-Bloodless, which I consider the best black/white Wordpress theme of all times, has a minor flaw.

In Internet Explorer 6 there is a problem in displaying the sidebar/s if you use pictures in your posts. IE 6 will then remove the sidebar/s from the the right side and place one or both of them at the bottom below the rest of the content.

I checked some blogs that use DM-Bloodless and found out that it only happens to those that use inline pics in the content.

IE 6 is a browser many people still use although it’s kind of a time bomb that can explode anytime (thus called Exploder).

You just have to change one byte or character of code to fix this IE problem. Open your stylesheet in the “Theme Editor” you will find in the presentation tab of your Wordpress blog admin and reduce the sidebars margin from 15px to 10px in line 97.

Just remove the whole line

#sidebars { float: left; width: 385px; margin-left: 15px; font-size: 90%; }

and replace it with

#sidebars { float: left; width: 385px; margin-left: 10px; font-size: 90%; }

As I announced in my post called free website review I will review at least 5 websites from now on, but I guess more. #1 is Michael Martine and his Better Blogging weblog.

Michael Martine is a renown blogger and popular Wordpress template designer. Even Wordpress.com uses one of his designs. He wants to assist you with blogging and to make it “better”. What strikes me first is his huge popularity on Technorati, his unique custom Wordpress template with three columns and the fact that he does not rank in the Google.com search top 100 for blogging in spite of that.

Usability:

From the usability point of view Michael does many things right. Large headlines, readable font sizes on white background and not too many colors. The three columns divide the contents logically into posts, internal links and mostly external services. A good way to do that.

Nonetheless I get a little confused every time I look at the site. Why? It’s probably the usage of the colors and different font sizes but also the fonts themselves. The contrast of the colors is too piercing to focus your eyes. The different fonts, font sizes and variants force the reader to look very closely todistinguish them.

Design:

The design is unique although it uses a widely spread platform and it underscores the personality of the blogger showing his picture and his name as one of the main pillars of the website. The design is not strict enough though and lacks a central motive.

Visiting the site for the first time, the user does not know what part of the page to focus. He ends up looking at the photo which is all right but should not be the main focus. Maybe a logo or a header motive would alleviate this. The pictures in the content could use a frame of several pixels, simply a border in CSS. Nowthey can get confused for ads or part of the overall website design.

The search form in the upper right corner breaks the design pattern. The header should not be used to include part of the functionality. The form should be moved to the 3rd column.

SEO:

As Wordpress is SEO friendly anyways, the site is already prepared for Google. The above mentioned link popularity takes care of the rest. We have some duplicate content or supplemental results though. Some URLs end up there because they do not exist anymore, or have no real content like this one. Even some RSS feed pages end up in the index. Those should be made invisible to the Google bot in the robots.txt file.
The front page is cached with the date of today, that’s perfect and he’s got over 500 pages in the Google index that’s OK for a blog which is online for more than two years.
The blog does not target any main keywords it seems or it targets too competitive ones (blogging, free wordpress themes). So either it should target less difficult keywords or rather phrases like “professional blogging” and “simple wordpress themes” or it should use SEO 2.0 superpowers:

SEO 2.0:

To tackle the keyword problem Martine can build upon his best assets: High popularity of his Wordpress Themes and thus also the blog. He should release a made over theme he uses for his own blog and call it something that matters as a keyword like “better blogging theme” or “probloggers delight”.

After two weeks of blogging at SEO 2.0 I already found several like minded people with outstanding blogs I have never before heard of. Some of them are pretty new, others are just too good to become well known as not always the quality is the key to a break through.

Anyways I will present now the blogs that rock and will enter my roll:

• Internet Hunger by Tanner Christensen manages to surprise me both with the almost impossible ability to make a blog on Blogger.com look good and with an ever refreshing approach to blogging. The blog is very new but he already managed to interview Rand Fishkin.
• Skelliewag not only uses my favorite black/white Wordpress theme besides DM Bloodless and Cutline of course, Grid Focus, she also surpasses Copyblogger with her articles on, well, more than copy writing, rather content creation. She’s the one that makes me think that not necessarily the best blogs will prevail.
• Pingable is a very matter of fact, down to earth, facts before fiction blog that deals with SEO 2.0 as far as I’m concerned. If you are tired of my strange humor and bad English grammar, visit Pingable. It also uses an appealing black/white Wordpress theme called Silhouette.
• CSS Juice is an awesome new Smashing Magazine competitor. This blog has very well chosen collections of various CSS designs, techniques and tools almost daily. Everything you need to know how magnificent CSS works. His English is not perfect but who am I to say that?
• Sebastian’s Pamphlets is a heart wrenching blog by a highly skilled SEO specialist who both manages to gets your attention and deliver unique content you won’t find anywhere else. That’s why he will end up on myblogroll even with this ultra ugly Blogger theme.

Moreover I discovered some blogs in the last two weeks that are too far off topic to make it into my special interest blog roll. I’ll recommend them anyways in one of my next posts as probably for many people they will be useful for other purposes than SEO 2.0.

Welcome SEO Inside, the new international SEO blog of Gerald Steffens aka Minivip, one of Germany’s most reknown SEO bloggers, currently #1 in Google.de for SEO blog.

SEO Inside is based on Wordpress and looks good as it uses one of my favorite themes, Cutline. The first post is already really news, Google Trends has been updated and apparently testing a lower threshold for keywords to show up on Google Trends.