SEO 2.0 » Wordpress

101 Ways to Make Your Blog More Popular and Successful

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 14:05:13 +0000

After 13 years of online publishing, 7 years of blogging for a plethora of blogs, being an SEO for six years and being paid for blogging for five years by now I finally am convinced that I know how it works.

What I learned about online publishing, blogging, SEO in more than 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: Twitter

1. Get social on Twitter, the people on Twitter will support your blog if you do it right

2. Follow some people on Twitter who share your interests but not too many

3. Reward people tweeting and retweeting you, or say “thanks” at least

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

5. Add a retweet button like the one above to your blog posts or web pages

6 – 10: Niche social news sites

6. Target niche social news sites like SERPd, Earners Club or BizSugar

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

8. Tweet good articles from the niche social news communities

9. Use a striking avatar like the sombrero guy image I use

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

11 – 20: Your blog

11. Add an unforgettable image or huge headline in your blog header

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

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

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

15. Reply to your genuine commenters who add value in the comments

16. Link to other bloggers, most notably your peers, not only the well known ones

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

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

19. Review and address 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 support 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 posts on other blogs

24. Notify other bloggers if they have “Page not found” errors 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. Meet other bloggers in real life and connect

28. Submit other’s blog posts to your favorite social media or vote there for them

29. Do not expect other bloggers to like you just because you’re there, actively befriend them

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

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 post headlines 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 or too long posts

35. Write timeless blog postings not just yesterday’s news

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

37. Be yourself, do not write like 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 clean, lean HTML and CSS for website speed

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 headlines (h1 is for the blog name)

45. Use 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 in your posts 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 rather than CSS 3 tricks only newer browsers support

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 .png screen shots 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 100 kb, 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

64. Write about 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 have 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 in Sweden

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

71 – 80: Blog SEO and promotion

71. Contribute to blog communities like the ones on LinkedIn or BlogCatalog

72. Tweet your blog posts

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

74. Use WordPress 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 when commenting unless it’s your blog’s name

77. Don’t overdo 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 to enhance your RSS feed

83. Let people subscribe by email via Aweber or Mailchimp

84. Offer a full feed not just excerpts

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

86 – 90: Branding

86. Create a personal brand. Don’t blog as “admin”

87. Get a unique and remarkable name for your blog

88. Get a short and easy to remember name for yourself, Tadeusz Szewczyk = Tad Chef

89. Use your blog URL and/or avatar throughout the Web

90. Trademark your blog name

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 know

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 for your topic, don’t try everything at the same time

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 have inspired me to write this post: Smashing Magazine, Vandelay Design, Skellie, Social Networking Articles and this SEO blogger.

Originally published October 29th, 2007. V2 republished August 14th, 2010. Last updated July 3rd, 2011.

* Image: Spreng Ben.

by Tadeusz Szewczyk
©2012 SEO 2.0. All Rights Reserved.Copyright SEO 2.0 at onreact.com

Hey Freelancer: Are You a Worker or an Entrepreneur?

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 11:49:39 +0000

Construction Worker by Saad Akhtar

Recently it dawned on me what the biggest roadblock to my financial success is. I started my freelance career as a worker and I’ve remained one ever since. I sensed it in the past as well but the realization came only recently when I was able to put it in words.

Roughly 10 years ago I got a great web agency job during the new economy boom. It was a well paid and it was easy. I got paid by the hour and after work I still had enough time for sports, partying or whatever. Then the tide changed and the new economy broke down within a few weeks. I kept my job for a while but soon enough someone who was cheaper has replaced myself. He was a nice guy and I even showed him everything before it became apparent that he’d replace me.

In a way I was lucky. The company went bankrupt a year later in spite of the lay offs. The management has been replaced as well but they were just cold blooded capitalists. They were all about cutting costs no matter what happened with the people. So soon enough nobody cared for the company anymore, the employees cared only for themselves and even fought each other not to get laid off first.

Long story short I was quite happy to leave early after I overcame the humiliation and feelings of failure. I was trying to find a new job for a while but wasn’t really serious about it. I didn’t want to live through all that again.

In a company where you’re just an employee it doesn’t matter who you are or what you like doing.

At the end of the day only the money you earn matters. So you have to do things you hate, sit all day in a crowded room (aka office) with people you often despise and your boss or employer decides about your fate. I’ve described this as wage slavery in the past and I haven’t changed my mind since. Wage slavery hasn’t been abolished along slavery although the Abolitionists meant to end both kinds of slavery.

Today you can abolish wage slavery yourself. The most common and often easiest way to do so is to try to freelance. Of course freelancing is not easy but once you’re established it’s OK. There is one problem though with freelancing. Freelancing, at least done the way I did it, is not really the end of wage slavery. It’s just a different, more subtle way of wage slavery as long as you remain a wage slave in your head. To simplify the matters and to make this article less provocative I’d like to call the wage slave “worker” as everybody else does.

Even as a freelancer you remain a worker. You become “your own boss” as the saying goes. This is “truer” than you think. As your own boss you are the person who has to exploit you.

You have to force yourself to wake up early, to work hard and to work long hours, after all you get paid by the hour, just like a worker. You have only a finite number of hours to sell so you can make your clients pay more but “the invisible hand” of the market will slap you once you become too expensive.

The problem is your mindset. It’s the mindset of the worker from the nineteenth century. Someone who toils al day and is still dirty and hungry. Think about it: We’re in 2010, automation is not just about the manufacturing process. With computers and the Internet you can automate almost everything. At least you have tools to make everything easier.

As a worker you are serving the tools not the other way around. You have to keep them running like the assembly line in the factory.

It’s not the tools that assist you, you assist the tools. For web designers Photoshop is the assembly line. For bloggers WordPress is the assembly line. For SEO people Google Analytics is the assembly line.

Now let’s compare it to the entrepreneur. I don’t mean the already rich lazy capitalist living off the fortune made in the distant past. Imagine an entrepreneur like yourself. Somebody who has no money yet to multiply by itself. S/he has a different mindset.

An entrepreneur has an idea. S/he then invests time to put in practice. S/he may borrow money but let’s assume s/he does not for the sake of simplicity of understanding. This person won’t get paid from the start in many cases. So an entrepreneur has to invest time and work without being paid at first or not much. Then later the entrepreneur expects that the investment will pay off. The investment pays off once the product the entrepreneur has developed get sold.

The product can’t be time of the entrepreneur. Remember, a worker would sell time but not the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur strives to sell something, be it a product or service that is scalable and can be automated. Today we can automate production with ease.

Any digital product can be reproduced endlessly without a major effort.

Even services can be automated to some extent as repetitive tasks do not have to be performed over and over, think of templates etc.

To become an entrepreneur you have to to think like one. Your mindset is more important than having capital. A worker would spend the money after a while and stay a worker. An entrepreneur would invest it. You don’t have to read Marx (I never had) to know that today we, the workers, own the means of production. The desk, the computer, even pencil and paper are all means of production. In the West everybody can afford a desk, a computer or pencil and paper.

Most of us stay workers, even as freelancers. We keep our assembly lines going and we tend our tools, we care for our Photoshop, our WordPress, our Google. We buy new versions of Photoshop, we keep on updating and securing our WordPress, we hug our search engine the cute Google monster.

It’s the entrepreneurs behind Photoshop, WordPress and Google who make the money off your work.

They don’t force anybody like the capitalists of the nineteenth century. We’re just too dumb to earn money like they do. They automate, they scale, they sell self replicating products and services but not time. You can’t fight them like the workers did hundred years ago. You have to join them and I don’t mean working for them as your employers.

Change your mind. Become an entrepreneur like them. You don’t need capital, you don’t even need workers. You mainly need a different mindset. The means of production are already yours. So I ask you again, like I asked myself these days: Hey Freelancer, are you a worker or an entrepreneur?

by Tadeusz Szewczyk
©2012 SEO 2.0. All Rights Reserved.Copyright SEO 2.0 at onreact.com

Attention! SEO 2.0 Was Spreading Malware Yesterday

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 10:34:30 +0000

Hello Dear SEO 2.0 Readers!

Unfortunately the SEO 2.0 blog has been compromised yesterday along with other sites on my server. The purpose of the attack was to spread malware.

In case you have visited the SEO 2.0 blog or onreact.com in the morning or during daytime of April 6 your computer might have been infected with a trojan.

Have you seen the following error on SEO 2.0?

“Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ‘<’ in /kunden/onreact.com/webseiten/seo2.0/wp-includes/default-widgets.php on line 1034″

Then your system might have been compromised as well. As onreact.com itself was infiltrated as well but showed no error message not seeing the message does not mean your system is clean.

I will try to explain the attack and how you can clean your computer and protect yourself. I am not a computer security expert to trace the attack completely and explain it very accurately but I’m Web savvy enough to deal with the attack.

It seems the attack was not possible due to a WordPress security leak.

It seems an ages old version of an FCKeditor on my server was the exploit the attackers used to insert the malware code.

The malware code was a JavaScript inserted into all files containing “index” in their names and all files with .js ending.
The JavaScript code inserted a hidden iframe into my websites.
The hidden iframe executed a script that attacked your browser (here Firefox) via outdated Adobe Reader or Adobe Flash plugins.
It then loaded a trojan on your computer using those plugins.
The purpose of the trojan was most probably to or to load other malware onto your system.
The trojan might have been also able steal your passwords, especially FTP passwords to infect your server as well.

What can you do now if you think you might have been a victim of this attack?

Download Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware and run a scan on your computer. In case it is infected remove the trojan.
Uninstall your Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash plugins. Install the latest versions after the next startup of your browser.
Check your websites for suspiciously looking cryptic JavaScript code. Especially the index and .js files.
Check your files on the FTP for latest timestamp and try to remember whether you actually have updated on that date.
Change your FTP password to make sure nobody can use it without your permission.
Delete or update all of your outdated software on your server. Old CMS versions, counters and other scripts.

For additional info and a deeper understanding of the issue plus an additional server removal tool read the following resources:

by Tadeusz Szewczyk
©2012 SEO 2.0. All Rights Reserved.Copyright SEO 2.0 at onreact.com

10 Blogging Mistakes Most Bloggers Make

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:20:11 +0000

Executed by mistake is a Creative Commons image by the moog.

Sometimes it takes years of blogging to notice your most obvious mistakes. I’ve been blogging for several years privately, then a few professionally and still do on several business blogs. By now I have made most mistakes you can make as a blogger I guess. I’m not the only one though.

Most bloggers make the same mistakes either by neglect or due to the limitations of the medium and software itself.

In many cases you have to make the decision to change your ways to stop making the most common mistakes. Here are 10 blogging mistakes most bloggers make and you probably do as well.

Embedding videos from YouTube etc.
Most bloggers embed YouTube videos on their blogs. Vimeo is also popular. There are plenty of other services as well. Some even embed Hulu videos. YouTube videos often get removed aka deleted or censored. Even a teenager managed once to take down several videos on fake copyright charges. Vimeo is less restrictive but people also remove videos on their own sometimes. Hulu videos can’t be watched outside of the US. So for all of these reasons you have an empty screen on your blog. Many posts don’t contain anything beside a video so such a post is dead, even more dead than a dead link. I know because I learned the hard way.

Tweeting instead of blogging
Some people obsess about Twitter. In a way I do as well and sometimes I tweet away my ideas or the sheer time I’d spend on blogging otherwise. Consider each idea you have for blogging before you tweet it. Everything tweeted is lost after a few minutes. Whatever you blog is yours and lives on for ages unless you use a third party service like Blogger or WordPress.com perhaps.

Submitting your own blog post on social media other than Twitter
Many bloggers still tend to submit their own postings to social sites like Digg, Reddit or StumbleUpon. It doesn’t work that way. Most of these sites either limit that or downright ban self submission in many cases, especially for business blogs. Don’t do that. Make other people discover your content. Socialize on social media but don’t self promote to get some traffic.

Using 125*125 display ads
Banner ads are dead but everybody uses them on blogs these days. Some WordPress themes even come with predefined banner ads areas. They look ugly, nobody clicks them and your bog appears spammy when it’s plastered with blinking ads. Use text ads instead (I’d recommend Yahoo) and affiliate ads but only very good ones matching your content.

Blogging too often or not often enough
In recent months SEO 2.0 has turned too silent for a good blog. Over the years I’ve noticed that 3 to 5 posts per week are best for a blog. 2 weekly posts are the minimum and more than 5 in a week lead to overload. Many blogs these days blog less often and look more like static websites this way. You lose attention, people start to forget about you when you blog rarely. Several posts a day in contrast lead to an information overload nobody can digest. This way you get more and more casual traffic from search and social media but you overburden your loyal readers. Your loyal readers are the backbone of your blog though. Don’t annoy them.

Automating content creation
Many services offer ways of syndicating content. You can post content to your blog automatically this way you posted on Twitter, Delicious or elsewhere. This scares away your loyal readers as well. I did just recently when testing the Twitter tools integration on SEO 2.0 I disabled now the weekly twitter digest as it’s low quality cross posting. You can add Twitter or Delicious in the sidebar instead so that it doesn’t pollute your RSS feed.

Creating “blog spam” postings
The “blog spam” kind of blog post seemingly will never die. They contain only a link to the source and short description of it . Basically it’s just wasted time. Your blog turns to an obstacle between the reader and the real source. If you don’t have any value to add don’t blog it at all. at least add your opinion beyond “this is great” or collect a few links.

Not socializing enough
Blogs aren’t islands. They only strive as part of the blogosphere. Bloggers who don’t socialize enough with other bloggers and social media users can’t get popular in the first place or they turn to one way communication in case they already are well known. In both cases the overall quality of the blog deteriorates. Never forget your blogging and social media peers. Link out, vote and contact them on a regular basis.

Not updating old content
Most blogs have a huge archive of blog posts which get plenty of visitors from search who bounce after noticing that the post is outdated and the links broken. Make sure to revisit your old postings, update and fix them. You may even republish them once the update is substantial enough. Also write for longevity in the first place. Nobody cares for yesterdays news tomorrow.

Not focusing on best postings
Usability expert Jakob Nielsen has written about it years ago. One of the most common issues with blogs is that they don’t show the most popular postings on top. Plus like mentioned above many popular postings are outdated. I’ve been testing many “popular posts” plugins for WordPress. I haven’t found the perfect one yet. I’ll tell you once I do. Some people recommend the Socialrank widget, formerly known as AideRSS. I might add it in future.

Do you make these blogging mistakes as well? Do you miss some common mistakes by bloggers in this list? Tell me about it. I made all those mistakes above myself and noticed afterwards so it’s easy to recognize them on other blogs.

by Tadeusz Szewczyk
©2012 SEO 2.0. All Rights Reserved.Copyright SEO 2.0 at onreact.com

Think Relationships not Technology

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 12:40:51 +0000

Links is a Creative Commons image by Ravages.

After Matt Cutts’ disclosure that PageRank sculpting support has been discontinued many SEO practitioners struggle with the issue of links in comments or from User Generated Content (UGC) in general draining their PageRank again.

Matt Cutts says that good (non-spammy) outgoing links are a positive ranking factor but few people notice or care.

SEOs are still stuck in the past.

Moreover they focus on technology not conversation. It should be the other way around:

To succeed in a post Web 2.0 environment, where the social web is all-encompassing, self-evident and taken for granted you need to focus on the human factor of SEO.

Some people already argue that the E in SEO stands for experience not engine anymore. Face the facts:

SEO is about humans not robots.
SEO is about humans not tools.
SEO is about users not Google.

SEO is about conversation not technology. It’s even more than that, it’s about relationships. Soon this blog will be two years old. The people I “met” online back then when I started are mostly still around and I’m part of their virtual sphere. I can be silent for a while or they might have stopped blogging in the meantime but all the time the number of my friends online is growing. Having a link means having a relationship with another human being who edits a website.

Web 2.0 allows everybody to link in a plethora of ways. You can bookmark, vote, tweet whatever, you spread the news and good resources via a myriad of channels. The channels change, it’s Friendster one day MySpace the next and Facebook a day later. The relationships stay and the links to other people stay as well. Unless you think robots, tools and Google. They can dump or ban you anytime. People can as well, but they usually don’t out of the blue. Even if they do on the Web you won’t lose 2/3 of your revenue over night.

So make sure you listen to the right people in the conversation. Then make sure to connect with them, forge a relationship, create a link.

The HTML link that shows up on your website is just a manifestation of the real link between two individuals, the person who links and the person who is linked to.

What does this mean for blog comments? I don’t care if you just link your microsite which is unrelated to my blog as long as the link between us is a real and valuable one. It will pay off for both of us, sooner or later, no matter what the robots, tools or Google have to “say”.

The only thing you must care about now more than ever considering blog comments and likewise UGC elsewhere is the quality of links. With WordPress blogs it’s easy:

Moderate comments with links
Moderate all comments on posts older than a week
Do not allow links to empty pages, deep links (unless they’re relevant) and gambling/NSFW pages

Most of these things are common sense and have been practiced by most bloggers already. Also make sure to use one of the many dofollow plugins until WordPress removes the obsolete “nofollow atribute” from the default WordPress package. Using nofollow you hurt both your site and your commenters sites.

For people who want to switch off comments altogether: Why are you on the Web? The Web is about sharing or at least offering information. Consider this: Everything you publish and share might empower others and hurt you so either you risk that and reap the benefits or you go offline, no need for a website then.

Think relationships not technology and no single tweak, small or big, from Google or any other site can hurt you. Stay connected to your peers throughout the many platforms and using all the upcoming tools and never forget what really counts.

All you need is link love!

Link is a Creative Commons image by fotorita.

by Tadeusz Szewczyk
©2012 SEO 2.0. All Rights Reserved.Copyright SEO 2.0 at onreact.com

7 Stealth Publish for WordPress Uses to Consider

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 10:30:39 +0000

CC: Stealth by Johnson Camerface.

A WordPress plugin that removes posts from the RSS feed is what I’ve been searching for for a while now. I thought it would be an advanced RSS manipulation feature but it’s far simpler than that. I’ve found Stealth Publish.

Some of you already noticed as I used it without reading the manual first and the post appeared in the feed anyways. The solution Stealth Publish offers is simply adding a custom field in WordPress (you can do it below each post in your new post dialog).

OK, I wouldn’t write as much about Stealth if not for the countless possibilities it offers in spite or even due to its simplicity. So what are the possible uses? Let me propose 7 of them. So check out the 7 Stealth Publish for WordPress Uses to consider.

Stealth publish excludes a post from the RSS feed and also the home page of your blog. This allows you to easily add

A non-blog section to your blog. This might be anything that is neither blog nor static WordPress “page”. It might be a directory, glossary, FAQ etc.
A section in a different language. This is very important for multi-lingual bloggers like myself
A “mullet” kind of link bait article only designed to attract social media users, for instance the horny and ignorant Digg mob
A post geared towards Google users but annoying or redundant for your regular readers and subscribers
A post that is simply not good enough for the frontpage or the feed following an editorial decision, newspapers never feature everything on the fp
A content theft test to find out whether your pages get copied via RSS or via scraper bots
An affiliate post, content exchange or advertising page you don’t want your true fans to bother with unless they really want it

Of course the Stealth Publish is still limited, the “stealth” posts seem to appear in comments and recent posts so they are not hidden completely. Take this into account when you post the Britney Spears naked stuff. I might look into the code to add some more options. My time is very limited though. Still there are other ways of making posts appear only partly in the WordPress system.

With this code you can solely remove posts from the frontpage.

Also there are ways of RSS manipulation to exclude whole categories from the RSS feed. So it’s just a little help to think out of the WordPres box. You can do more with WordPres without much hassle than you imagined.

Of course I wouldn’t write as much about plugin testing if it wasn’t for a purpose. I’ve been planning to add a SEO directory to SEO 2.0 and now I’m on the way. It will be basically a very high quality “part of the blog without directory plugins” kind of directory. Now you will probably think:

Aren’t directories SEO 1.0, dead and spammy?

Well, not mine. You know me. That’s another post though. Stay tuned.

by Tadeusz Szewczyk
©2012 SEO 2.0. All Rights Reserved.Copyright SEO 2.0 at onreact.com

The Only 7 WordPress Plugins Business Bloggers Need

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 15:37:01 +0000

CC: Only only by Thomas Hawk.

Serious, professional and business bloggers listen up:

Forget all those top 100 WordPress Plugins lists, those top 10 SEO Plugins for WordPress compilations.

I blog for 4 blogs now, at 3 of them I’m am the main or only person to do so and I don’t need more than 7 plugins for WordPress. Even these only 7 WordPress plugins business bloggers need are too many in some cases.

With WordPress plugins less is more, for security, clutter and upward compatibility reasons.

While setting up a new business blog I rechecked the plugins I use on my SEO 2.0 blog and elsewhere. You will notice a big surprise. Scroll to the bottom if you can’t await it.

1. Akismet
the one and only anti-comment spam solution. Use Akismet and spam becomes a rarity.

2. WordPress Database Backup
Backs up manually or automatically. After last time my databae got hacked I was really glad to have that. A true must have.

3. DoFollow
To make links in comments and pinkbacks count in search engines. There are plenty more sophistacaed plugins to disable the default “nofollow” attribute on those links but simple is beautiful, they just add more clutter. Why give your readers real links? Why give your guest a cup of tea?

4. Feedburner
I had to give up. FeedBurner is th best RSS feed enhancement out there, it’s by now alömost standard. You have to use it.

5. Sociable
There are plenty of social media buttons plugins but most of them add clutter and look bad or redirect you to their sites. Sociable, currently maintained by renowned SEO Blogger Yoast is the best.

6. WP Super Cache
In case you want to get featured on Yahoo, CNN or Slashdot use this. Also it’s perfect to block DDoS attacks by the infamous crap site Digg.

7. A “Related Posts” Plugin
There are dozens of “related posts” plugins and I still haven’t found one suiting my requirements. Any suggestions? You really need one to retain your readers. I promise to install one in 2009!

Surprise, surprise: I don’t use a single SEO plugin!

Yes, one of the most popular SEO blogs out there does not use SEO plugins for WordPress.

It’s partly my SEO 2.0 business blogging philosophy partly due to the fact that I haven’t found a SEO 2.0 WordPress plugin that makes sense to me.

OK, OK, in case you’re into SEO 1.0 and love

meta tags
fighting duplicate content
PageRank sculpting

and the likes I recommend Platinum SEO Pack. I’ve installed it but later deacticivated it as I wanted to keep my non-SEOed WordPress to prove the point that SEO 2.0, that is SEO without conventional SEO, works.

Business bloggers do not need to care too much about many plugins sometimes interfering with each other. Reduce clutter and keep it simple below the hood too.

by Tadeusz Szewczyk
©2012 SEO 2.0. All Rights Reserved.Copyright SEO 2.0 at onreact.com

Blog Suicide: Top 7 Title & Meta Tag Mistakes that Kill Your Blog

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:40:18 +0000

Suicide by frozi.

I’m shocked! Not only do bloggers waste time with meta tags although most of them are worthless for Google, bloggers hurt themselves using meta tags. It does not get better it seems it gets worse. Lately more and more people commit Google suicide by adding “privacy” to their blogs. I’m all for privacy but if you blog you blog for people to read your blog so in most cases you do not want to bar them from arriving there. Other people commit blog suicide by telling hackers to hack them.

Also the title element, which resides in the page head of the HTML document as well still gets abused and wrecked all over the place like it’s 1999. Blog suicide by title-tag is an awful, slow death but many people choose it anyways. A messed up title tag will make Google de-index you partly, devalue the content in the search results and finally scare away the remaining users that might have found their way to your blog in spite of all that.

These are the top 7 title & meta tag mistakes that kill your blog, blogging is beautiful, do not commit blog suicide!

meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow”
This is basically a “no trespass” sign for Google or in other words Google suicide. You will still get indexed with a URL but you won’t get visitors from Google. Spam bots will still crawl you though. Not only newbie bloggers commit suicide like that, some “of UK’s most influential online journalism bloggers” (problem still pertaining despite me pointing it out 2 weeks ago) green activist blogs (meta name=”suicide” removed by now after my intervention) or even SEO bloggers!

meta name=”description” content=”SEO, seo, Seo, SEO blog, seo blog, blog seo”
This is telling Google users “this is spam” and “get off”. Either you do not use this tag at all, then Google displays text from your page or you enter a short and encouraging sentence here, something like “This SEO blog will kick your ass SEO 2.0 style!” ;-)

meta name=”keywords” content=”SEO, seo, Seo, SEO blog, seo blog, blog seo”
This is telling Google “look out, potentially spam”. Meta keywords do not count for Google ranking but many believe believe that Google checks whether the keywords contaianed in the meta tag are also in the page copy. If not you get downranked.

meta name=“generator” content=“WordPress 2.x.x”
This is basically telling hackers “come in”, as WordPress vulnerabilities abound and WordPress itself always advises you to upgrade to the latest version at least once a week it seems. Also Technorati will de-index you if you use an older WordPress version. Delete it!

more meta tags = better
Back in the days I assumed that the more I tell the search engines in my meta tags, the better. The contrary is the case. Google and most others do not care. They just notice that your page heading is full of useless crap and the real page content is far down so you get downranked for a lower code to text-ratio than average.

Search Engine Optimization And Marketing Blog Offering Tips, Tricks And Links To Make Money Online
Nobody will read that, people will bounce and you won’t rank in Google for any of these keywords besides some bizarre long tail combinations. Keep it short.

The same or almost the same title tag on several or all pages
Consider a post title like this: “New SEO tool”. And then add your blog title like “Search Engine Optimization And Marketing Blog” or longer. More than a half of the title is the same now so Google will treat the page as very similar to other pages. You might even end up categorized as duplicate content. This results in one page of the two not to show up in search results. Also you won’t rank for SEO tool if more than 50% of the title is stuffed with other keywords.

This is really very basic stuff you need to address. You might be a wonderful blogger but if you fail here it won’t be any good. So please do me and yourself a favor and do not commit blog suicide do not make one of these 7 title & meta tag mistakes that kill your blog.

by Tadeusz Szewczyk
©2012 SEO 2.0. All Rights Reserved.Copyright SEO 2.0 at onreact.com

Top 10 URL Design Failures of Famous Websites

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:05:06 +0000

Famous painting, image by caribb, but no clue in the URL: http://flickr.com/photos/caribb/2355878576/

Do you know what the New York Times, the World Bank, WordPress.com, PHP.net and others have in common? Their URLs suck!

A few days ago my list of the top 10 fatal URL design mistakes has been hugely popular:

To prove how messed up URLs, these most important guiding units on the Internet, still are, I made a list of renown sites using completely inappropriate Internet addresses, directory and other URL structures.

You’ll be surprised to recognize some of the top 10 url design failures out there. I listed the examples accordingly to my original URL design mistakes list:

1. Bloomberg.com, renown news outlet: Session Ids (+ multiple random URLs for each page #5). Example: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aH5xJRoWZFOU&refer=home
Also try
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aH5xJRoWZFOU&refer=spam
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aHhgZh8jHAs02
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087

2. Inhabitat.com, Technorati Top 100 blog: Mangled apostrophes in URL (+ date based URLs for timeless information #9): http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/07/02/philippe-starck%E2%80%99s-designer-windmill-for-all/

3. Fox News, infamous war propaganda machine: Numbers instead of speaking URLs
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,308077,00.html
What’s wrong here? Consider the headline: “Pop Tarts: Angelina Freaks Out Seeing Herself Naked in ‘Beowulf,’ Calls Home to Explain”

4. PHP.net, homepage of the world’s most popular server side script language: Multiple canonical URLs
http://php.net/
http://www.php.net/
http://www.php.net/index.php
etc.

5. New York Times, most renown US newspaper: Too many parameters which also change randomly, this example is so horrible it mus be repeated.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/technology/27google.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=business&adxnnlx=1214553738-5Jvl01JfMCKLx5duMGRv9g&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Also try:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/technology/27google.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&new-york-times-urls-suck
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/technology/27google.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/technology/27google.html

6. New York Times and multiple bloggers: Only one very broad and boring keyword in URL:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/technology/27google.html
If you’re eager to know what Google did on this date check out also this blog:
http://julielemonde.com/2008/06/27/google/
In fact you can find such intriguing URLs for almost any date.

7. World Health Organization (WHO): Too many useless subdirectories
http://www.who.int/csr/don/archive/country/arg/en/
Also make sure to check out the “killer” content of this page!

8. Universities: UUCP, Berkeley, UCN and the World Bank, the world’s most hated bank: Check out these Joomla! crap URLs, don’t they have some smart computer science students to fix that?
http://www.uccp.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=29
http://iurd.berkeley.edu/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=173&Itemid=164
http://global.unc.edu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=75&Itemid=81

Remember those black clad anarchist in Seattle 1999? Yes, one of them apparently infiltrated the World Bank’s computer department to sabotage their URLs, this is one of the worst examples of URL crap:
http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/NEWS/0,,contentMDK:21828803~pagePK:34370~piPK:34424~theSitePK:4607,00.html

9. WordPress.com: Blog service and Smashing Magazine, Technorati top 10 blog:
Now tell me, is the date the most important and first to be seen info for this post here?
http://princessofsomething.wordpress.com/2008/07/06/where-the-heart-is/
Is this resource’s most important factor the the date when it was published, like it’s a 4th of July celebration or something?
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/07/04/web-form-design-patterns-sign-up-forms/
Also consider this article, would you still read it after seeing the date?
http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/2005/06/27/google-video-to-launch-video-playback-service

10. SEO 2.0, blog dominating the global SEO 2.0 market: Yes, I failed here recently when I renamed my categories
http://seo2.0.onreact.com/category/reputation-building/
This will result in an error. I could have used this WordPress SEO plugin instead to prevent this error.

So you see the Web is full of broken URLs and there must be much work done before this mess is cleaned up. In 2008 we still face even huge sites which get the most fundamental findability and SEO basics wrong.

These top 10 URL failures prove that point. Contact their webmasters and make them aware of these issues. they can save thousands of dollars or even lives in the case of the WHO.

by Tadeusz Szewczyk
©2012 SEO 2.0. All Rights Reserved.Copyright SEO 2.0 at onreact.com

Top 10 Fatal URL Design Mistakes

Tadeusz Szewczyk — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 08:54:23 +0000

Address by sam.d

URL design? Is there any design involved at all in deciding how your Internet address and directory structure will look like? Yes, there is, or at least there should be! Nonetheless I see the same mistakes daily all over the place as if URLs wouldn’t matter at all.

A bad URL means your website or page won’t be found, clicked, visited and linked or submitted to social media. Without proper URLs most of your other great web design, usability and SEO measures get wasted.

Thus I decided to show the top 10 URL design mistakes which I encounter most frequently and which are in many cases fatal for your findability:

Session IDs: What’s that? Yeah, I ask you, what’s that: e967ef2d7f923aab20e10ddb4164a351 ? It’s a session ID. It’s different for every user so every user has a different address, it’s like inviting people to a party and giving them all a different address.
Apostrophes and other special characters: %e2%80%93 – This is an apostrophe in a URL. You can’t submit this to StumbleUpon. If you do you end up with a broken link at best.
Numbers instead of speaking URLs: Decide, 123 or angelina-jolie-naked, which URL speaks your language, which one you’ll rather click?
Multiple URLs for one page: www.example.com, example.com, example.com/, example.com/index.php, example.com/index.php? all leading to one homepage? No you have 6 homepages and counting! Use a canonical URLs script (WordPress 2.5 already does by default)
Too many parameters which also change randonmly. Ever tried to submit the New York Times to a social site? In many cases it’a a duplicate as http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/technology/27google.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=business&adxnnlx=1214553738-5Jvl01JfMCKLx5duMGRv9g&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/technology/27google.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/technology/27google.html

and dozens of other combinations are possible. This is even worse than #4
Only keywords in URL: Recently bloggers tend to shorten their URLs inasmuch as their posting become totally boring. I won’t click /2008/06/27/google if I see only the URLs (like, say, in an email) but I will click google-files-for-bankrupcy
Too many subdirectories or mimicked oney via URL rewrite: world/politics/asia/korea/local/ Huh? Do you know what I mean? If it’s that far down the hierarchy, why should I care at all? I want the frontpage news.
Simply PHP crap: Do you use Joomla or Mambo CMS? Their standard URLs suck big time: option=com_content&view=article&id=72&Itemid=37 They suck for both Google and StumbleUpon, the 2 most important traffic sources nowadays. As a user I don’t want to look at such crap either.
Finally date based URLs: 2008/06/27/ is fine but do you think I’ll click 2005/06/27/ ? No! I won’t. If you’re not into breaking news stop using the date as your most important first part of the URL.
Changing URLs after publication: If you use a WordPress URL like mine
http://seo2.0.onreact.com/how-to-spot-content-theft-on-social-media-and-elsewhere
and change it after publishing to say

http://seo2.0.onreact.com/10-ways-how-to-spot-content-theft-on-social-media-and-elsewhere

the users who’ll visit via Technorati, Google BlogSearch etc. will just encounter an error. You can prevent that by using post numbers and descriptive URLs in WordPress

My 10 URL design rules are quite simple:

Make the URLs clean
Make them simple
Make a URL human and machine readable
Use one URL per page
No special characters besides a minus/hyphen “-” ideally
Use slashes like real directories
Enhance URLs with numbers but don’t rely on them
Skip the date, it’s not the most important info
Do not ever change URLs once set
If you have to change URLs move them with a “301 permanently moved” redirect

So you see: Achieving findability by appropriate URL design is not rocket science, it’s more preventing stupid mistakes. For deciding which URL structure is best in WordPress (not mine!) check out his how-to article of mine: WordPress URL Design. Also make sure to follow these 10 Coding Guidelines for Perfect Findability and Web Standards.

Did I forget something? Tell me.

by Tadeusz Szewczyk
©2012 SEO 2.0. All Rights Reserved.Copyright SEO 2.0 at onreact.com