Whether or not you blog, today’s post about Wordpress Plugins will be a interesting read, especially if you have an online website and are perhaps questioning whether or not you in fact do need a blog. Over the past year many changes have happened, as lots of people with web-based businesses have turned to blogging as a way to help promote their online presence. In the online world, you have to be an authority in your niche or you simply won’t be able to compete with search engine results past page 2 or 3.

Are you asking yourself- ‘Do I need a blog?’

Well if you are trying to rank for terms so that your website comes up in search engines then the answer is

YES how can you afford NOT to have one?

Google recommends adding 1 page of content minimum per day. Daily blog posts can help you easily achieve this recommendation. The problem is usually in the quality and length of the posts. Professional competitive websites usually hire content writers who agree to post specific amounts of information on sites at certain times. With a high enough budget, a great site can have several updates (not much unlike a daily newspaper) each day, making its sections worthy of linking to and reading. Nothing beats daily fresh content, provided the topics are on par with the site’s niche and well written and informative.

Blog Software Questions

WordPress is free software that can either be hosted on a server or you can use their system to host your blog. For serious bloggers and professional business websites, my recommendation is to download and install WordPress on your own hosting server rather than use something online. Also having a great domain name for your blog can really help, or it can be in /blog from a main company site.

Why Choose WordPress?

My choice of blogging platform is currently WordPress. Why? Well, there are a lot of people out there who are constantly trying to improve it by writing WordPress Plugins that do the little things that you wish WordPress itself could do.

Often when a Plugin gets widely used, it becomes part of the next version of WordPress. Over the past year I’ve watched this software evolve quite a lot.

I remember just last fall not being able to do things in WordPress that I would complain about, which now are part of my daily blog routine.

Here are Some of the recent great WordPress plugins I’ve been using:

Smart Youtube

: - this Plugin lets you easily insert YouTube videos into posts by simply using a hyperlink formed like this:

httpv ://www.youtube.com/watch?v=somerandomstringfromyoutube

(^ NOTE the v in httpv  which is what makes this plugin work)

In the settings area of the Smarth Youtube plugin you can adjust default Video and Height in Normal Mode or in High Quality Mode. The defaults are 425x344 for normal mode and 480x360 for high quality mode.

Options:

• You can choose to include or not include related videos (Default is to Not include)
• Show Borders and alter the color
• Turn on or off AutoPlay (so the page plays the video automatically when someone arrives at the page without hitting play.

Aerosmith’s Love in an Elevator, demonstrating the use of the Smart Youtube Plugin.

SEO Title Tag Plugin

From Stephan Spencer’s Netconcepts.com firm, this title tag plugin itself has been evolving. In the earlier versions you could title the post you were writing with a title tag that would appear in the <title>title</title> section of code automatically as WordPress didn’t leave that option. Now the plugin has been extended to allow you to retitle multiple posts from a single interface plugin page in the administrative area of WordPress.

WP-Backup

Before I do anything major to the blog, I always back it up first. This plugin allows an easy quick backup, as well as a scheduled backup that will email the contents of the blog to you or place it in a directory on the server automatically depending on how you configure it. For example, when there is a new version of WordPress available and you see that ‘Your WordPress is out of Date’ message, this is a good time to use the WP-Backup Plugin to backup the contents of your blog. Next you will perform the upgrade with the next plugin, InstantUpgrade.

InstantUpgrade

This plugin allows you to upgrade WordPress with one click. It is very handy and saves you the hassled of having to download, transfer files and perform the upgrade. With the frequency of WordPress updates, it has really become a time saver for me. I generally support a large number of WordPress blog installations which all need to be upgraded when the time comes. This saves time. Bottom Line.

So if you are still wondering whether or not you should be running a blog on your website, then keep reading this blog and our new SEO section which will contain more and more information about Search Engine Optimization and what it can do for your natural organic search results. Just think how many people search Google every day with unique phrases looking for information, ‘YOUR information!’. It is your job if you do SEO to make sure it is properly indexed in Google and ready to rock their browsers with all that mind-blowing content, or at least something useful.

Your Friendly Neighborhood Rockstar SEO

Save this Post!

Hide Sites

Ahhh, the information age! Everything you’ve ever wanted to know is just a wireless cafe away, and no stone was left unturned! If you’re subtle with an iPhone, you can absolutely dominate Trivial Pursuit or impress family and friends watching Jeopardy (please note: you made need a 3G for this–results may vary). What could possibly go wrong?

I wouldn’t dare infer that I was the progenitor of the idea, but for years I have grumbled about the detrimental effects the internet has had (and will have) on people, culture, and society-at-large. Perhaps I’m just a cynic–or maybe I took Brave New World a bit seriously–but sometimes it just feels like we’re rushing (read: being propelled?) towards some catastrophic end. As our access to information has skyrocketed in the past decade, our retention of knowledge has plummeted. At least that’s what I’ve observed in my tiny sliver of the pie chart that is life.

Well, I’m glad to say I finally found sweet vindication in an article published in this month’s issue of The Atlantic written by socio-tech-business extraordinaire Nicholas Carr. Bluntly titled, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” the article outlines many of the dystopian proclamations I myself have championed over the years, but also provides a superb historical context for these issues. Ever wonder how people reacted to the introduction of the typewriter, the printing press, or even the written word itself? How about the mechanical clock? Carr cites intriguing contrarian opinions on them all.

It may be too late for any of us to seriously contemplate the ills we endure using Microsoft Word or wristwatches; after all, we were raised under their influence. Now that our younger friends and siblings are coming of age with an ingrained relationship to Google, Myspace, YouTube, and beyond, we are in a unique position as the last generation capable of comparing a pre-Google society to a post-Google one. Do we still have the attention span for that?

It usually takes a violent revolution for new regimes to take power, but a shift in ideology or societal norms is far less conspicuous. In 2004, Google co-founder Sergey Brin told a Newsweek interviewer “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Just last year, co-founder Larry Page was quoted saying that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.” Personally, I find it alarming that this infinitely influential duo embraces such controversial views so openly.

Mr. Carr acutely articulates the fallacy in that line of thinking, stating: “It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized…there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.” Personally, I find it alarming that this infinitely insightful article will fly under the radar of the majority of internet users.

This probably all seems a bit heavy handed. You might ask yourself, “Does an angel die every time i click the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button?” while others may decry this little blog as a bunch of doom and gloom. (In reality, most of you probably didn’t make it past my Jeopardy link in the first paragraph, further illustrating my point) The easy response is: “If you think Google is making you stupid, stop using it.” Well, sure. I could jump off the Google train, and spend years coughing up the dust it sprays in my face as it goes barreling off in the name of Progress… But I always have such a difficult time with those green wedges!

Save this Post!

Hide Sites

More than you may realize, these days many of the blogs you read are actually written for one purpose.

Search Engine Rankings

Often a writer will be given a keyword phrase such as ‘Blog Search Rankings‘ and be told to write a 500-700 word post about that. The sole purpose of this is to help their site rank higher for that search term. The only real way to improve rankings and this is the kicker: is to build great sites.

So, while choosing interesting topics to write about may seem like a better idea than writing about the sites main keywords, the very best way to do this is to write something interesting that ties back into the primary search phrase you wish to rank for.

So for example, if you wanted to write about ‘Blog Search Rankings’ as this post is mainly focused on, my approach in this article that you are reading is to be ‘helpful’ in some manner. It is a ‘how to’ style post that describes something useful that a reader may actually use.

On that note here are some ‘how to tips’ for blog writing that will help with your search engine rankings.

H1 tags

After you post your blog, in FireFox press either ‘Control-U’ or ‘Command-U’ to view the source. Older IE6 or other browser users may need to use the dropdown menu and select ‘View Source’. If your blogging software is configured correctly, hopefully the title of your post will be in an H1 tag. If it isn’t you may consider editing some of your preferences to make this so. The key about H1s is that you should only have ONE per page that highlights the most important keyword phrase for that page. For this post the only H1 tag you will find that is actually rendered is the one surrounding ‘How to Write Blog Posts that Rank Well in Search Engines’ at the top of this post.

H2, H3, H4 tags. - Any sub headings should be surrounded by H2 tags, and tertiary levels of headings should be H3, H4, etc. the further you go indenting. You can use your style sheets to determine what the respective heading will look like.

For example you could put:

<H2 class=”header-2-style”>

if you have a class called ‘.header-2-style’ predefined in your stylesheet.

This is something you can easily do while posting your piece and doesn’t have to be done later by some ‘SEO Expert’.

Link Titles, Title & Alt Attributes for Images

As many of you may already know, when you mouseover an image sometimes descriptive text will be displayed. This is from the ‘alt’ attribute in the <img> tag. More less widespread is the use of a ‘title’ attribute within the <img> tag.

i.e. <img src=”http://www.wpromote.com/affiliates/wpromote.jpg” title=”The Wpromote Logo” alt=”Wpromote Logo”>

Notice how there are both a title and an alt description. These serve two purposes…the title is for google and the alt is for the user who mouses over the image and gets a description.

For Hyperlinks the same concept of a title applies and not many people would ever think to do this intuitively. This is what you should use:

<a href=”http://www.wpromote.com” title=”Wpromote PPC Management Experts” target=”_blank”>Wpromote PPC Management</a>

Every link on your site should have a title. The title tells Google what your links are and will help with your rankings. Now if you want to hyperlink the image above to go to the site in the link example above…it may seem like a lot but this is really what you should put in the source code:

<a href=”http://www.wpromote.com” title=”Wpromote PPC Management Experts” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://www.wpromote.com/affiliates/wpromote.jpg” title=”The Wpromote Logo” alt=”Wpromote Logo”></a>

Here is the same example rendered:

Other Tips

If you use WordPress (I am currently using WordPress to edit this post) depending on which SEO(Search Engine Optimization) related plugins you use there will be options to create custom titles etc. If you use the ‘SEO Title Tag’ plugin from NetConcepts then you will have that option - i’d suggest cutting and pasting the post title in the ‘Title Tag’ field that appears AFTER the post when this plugin is turned on.

Tags

Be sure to add keywords that are in your post to the ‘Tags’ section in WordPress right after the post content section. examples: for this post I will include: Seo Title Tag Plugin, Title Tag Plugin, Blog Seo, Blog Search Rankings, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Wpromote and others. Try to put at least 5 tags in the tag section that are found in your post if possible.

Categories

Make sure you select an appropriate category for your blog post. If you don’t have one in your category list, then simply add one that makes sense and is ‘relevant’ (That word again) to your blog post. You can select more than one category if it applies, for this post I chose, SEO, Internet News and Wpromote. I noticed that there is no ‘blogging’ category so I created one and added it to that as well.

We’re Almost Done!

At the bottom of the page below the blog content post section below the tags and categories is an area for Advanced Options.
Under ‘Excerpt’ here is where you will write the description that comes up in the Google search engines when that post comes up for a result. The average length is 160 characters. You want 2-3 sentences that describe the contents of that specific post and preferable have the main keyword phrases for that page closer to the beginning of the description.

This is VERY important, more important than the link titles (which people never seem to take the time to do, thus making it easier to outrank their sites) and is almost as important as the Title tag for the page.

-Till next time

Save this Post!

Hide Sites