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

Wpromote’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Division has reached some new highs and started to explode with great rankings and a lot of new clients.

Our feeling is that it is time to:

STAND UP AND FIGHT for your rankings.

The internet is the newest jungle out there and it is bigger then the Amazon, hell even Amazon.com is getting close to the size of its own jungle!

SEARCH                      ENGINE                                    OPTIMIZATION

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SUCCESS STORIES

Plastic Products Manufacturing,  who specializes in the creation of brochure holders and various other plastic products, has been enjoying their rather successful blog management campaign from Wpromote.

A sound proofing expert client, has been displaying #1 Google results for terms such as sound engineered drywall, sound proof plywood, sound engineered drywall, sound engineered ceilings and more.

www.ShreddingHouston.net - On-Site Shred is currently ranking much higher for desired terms, is ranked #1 in GOOGLE for Houston Paper Shredding, Shredding Houston, and Onsite Shredding.

Our Playground and Playsets client has been ranking #1 for the very broad and difficult to target term ‘swings‘.

ScanDigital.com, whose expertise in Photo Scanning and Digital Video Conversion, has been doing extremely well in their highly competitive search space. Things just keep getting better and better for ScanDigital!

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Team SEO News at Wpromote: The addition of several new clients (including some interesting car products and golf pro sites) has necessitated an expansion of our SEO team. To accommodate this necessity, we’ve added some new rockstar writers: Amir, our amazing intern Brett, and the newly helpful John. With Christian holding up the fort for most of our off-site SEO and link building efforts, and my nerdy attention to detail with regards to the on-site implementation and overall direction of our team, the new growth of Wpromote’s SEO division is looking more promising then ever. Though, if you really want to get excited,  you should definitely stay turned to www.wpromote.com/seo.

This, coupled with some upcoming announcements, and soon to be available downloads from the creations of our magnificent programming team makes the future keep looking brighter and brighter here at the best place to work in California (that I know of), Wpromote Inc.

You should watch for us on the big screen while we all watch the Dodgers beat Florida tomorrow night from the stands. Or, just watch the game and support our LA team. Luckily the Dodgers are in a league separate from the Blue Jays, because if they weren’t, there would be some serious problems.

Till next time,

Aaron Kronis - SEO Director at Wpromote Inc.
www.wpromote.com/seo

Google, in its never ending quest for web dominance has just announced its new algorithm designed to index flash content. This comes as a huge delight to many web developers who develop websites in Flash, since previously; flash content was not indexable by search engines. In the past, developers had to present content in a variety of different ways to ensure the site was properly indexed, if they chose to develop the site in Flash. This new algorithm will be able to index textual content contained within SWF files, such as Flash menus, buttons and banners, and self-contained Flash websites.

While this is obviously a great enhancement to Google’s already substantial indexing algorithms, I feel that a complete reliance on flash degrades the overall quality of a site. Don’t get me wrong, Flash can be spectacular, but in and of itself…not so much.

As cliché as it is to say, regarding web design the best route is generally everything in moderation. A well rounded site with solid textual content in addition to Flash content designed to enhance the aesthetic aspect of the site is going to benefit from this new algorithm. The problem arises with sites which rely completely on Flash content. Flash should never be a substitute for good old fashioned text based content, but rather, an additional aspect to a site’s overall content. A completely Flash site can now be expanded, by creating comprehensive SWF text files essentially describing your Flash content.

Flash has become an integral part to successful web design and this implementation by Google is going to further help the Flash community grow. This is a great addition to Google’s arsenal of indexing tools and it will be interesting to see this play out. I wonder if there will be significant changes in organic listings under certain search terms due to the inclusion of Flash content to the indexing process. This could definitely throw a wrench in the gears of small business sites because they may not have the expertise or financial ability to create/add Flash content to their sites. The importance of Flash content and how it factors into an overall ranking is yet to be seen, but there is no doubt that “the times, they are a changin’.”

Photo Courtesy of Cartage.org

I’m sitting in a red colored modern desk chair in ventilated room the size of a California king mattress. There’s a large white plastic desk in front of me that is shaped, after avid inspection, inordinately similar to the orbit of Halley’s Comet. Amongst the four sky blue walls surrounding me rests a television display, to which my once prized but now kind of boring laptop is connected. “The blue room,” as it is most commonly deemed here in the Wpromote office in El Segundo, CA, usually houses those looking to watch The People’s Court while they eat lunch. I’m elated to inform you that I’ve taken the liberty of inhabiting our special and relaxing “blue room” to momentarily separate myself from my friends and co-workers, and write my first addition to the Wpromote Blog.

My name is Brett Dierker. Let me tell you why I’m feeling a little like a communist.

In this addition, I wish not to join my colleagues in their success of informing our readers of the latest and juiciest internet and technology news (this is purely because I don’t feel I’d be able to holistically articulate a current event as well as they have). Instead, I would much rather force upon the reader a glimpse into a train of thought of a Wpromote Intern – a source whose reputability could and should be questioned. What I am set out to do here can be outlined with a question: When I come to work, am I working more for our clients, or more for my co-workers?

Without hesitation, I can say that the major motivating force behind my daily work is how it will be received by my department and co-workers. This, on the surface, is inherently shallow – but I feel like there may be some weight and purpose to working for your co-workers instead of directly for your clients. For clarity’s sake, I leave you with an anecdote.

When I first started to work for Wpromote in the summer of 2007, the first thing I noticed was the very apparent and almost overwhelming sense of camaraderie in the office. It seemed at that time that the various departments, all tightly knitted together (with quite a heavy workload), had little room for error or miscommunication. Our management was quick to accommodate any blips or interpersonal blemishes, because they were keen in their realization that grudges or drama between the few employees of a place that deals with many clients could be incredibly detrimental. Also, there was this uncanny work ethic that was prevalent in everyone, and I honestly couldn’t figure out where they were getting their motivation. I still to this day don’t know why the rest of my co-workers work so hard, but do know from that point on (and still to this day), I’ve received most of my motivation from my aspiration to lighten the load of my friends and co-workers and to make them more comfortable (and enjoyable).

So, say one of my tasks for the day is modifying a client’s meta titles & descriptions. I’m not sitting here stoked out of my mind because that client is going to rank higher in search engine result pages - I’m more stoked that I’ve adequately lifted a portion of the workload from my department. Now, I’m not sure if this is a “bad” thing, but I feel justified arguing for it in following manner: With the utmost sincerity, out of all the clients I’ve indirectly worked for, I’ve never had the pleasure to actually converse with any of them. I could only hope that if I were to actually chat with them, that we could share kind greetings and congratulatory salutations for our respective contributions to each other.

But, more than likely, the situation above is not going to happen. In good stead, I share kind greetings and congratulatory salutations with my various bosses & friends. I mean, is it so uncommon to want work for the people you see every day, to accomplish the collective goal of company growth? Over the past two years working with Wpromote, like it or not, I’ve learned that the best way to do business is to show strength of character not primarily to clients, but to your fellow employees instead. This place doesn’t run solely because of one person. With the type work we do, the assignments we get, there’s no room for just one hot shot. It runs because we feed off of each other’s work ethic, and want to prove to each other that we all have something substantive and novel to contribute. The product is absolutely phenomenal.

It’s refreshing to, every once in a while, analyze why you do some of the things you spend so much of your day doing. I’ve found that there are few occurrences more terrifying than getting lost in complacency and monotony, and I feel comfortable saying that I’m ever so lucky to work in an environment that fosters the contrary of such.

Until next time,

This Year’s Seattle Search Marketing Expo (SMX Advanced) conference was great, aside from the uncomfortable red chairs it went off without a hitch.

⁃ Monday night started with a Microsoft sponsored party that had great catering, a DJ and great hors d’oeuvres. It took place close to the conference at the Olympic Sculpture Park.

They were offering to take pictures of people for fancy luggage tags (branded by Microsoft of course) which was funny to watch as people were drinking from an open bar and taking silly photos.

Many of the well known SEO companies were present and it was a nice start to the conference, I found some people I had met at SXSW and SMX Long Beach and the networking had begun.

It did rain the entire time, but that’s alright as we were inside the whole time anyway. Looking for cabs could get you wet and annoyed, but at least there were lots of ‘Vancouverish’ trees everywhere and it was a beautiful location on at the Bell Harbor Convention Center.

The three major search Engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN Live finally announced some clarifications on how they treat the Common REP (Robots Exclusion Protocol) Directives.

See YAHOO!’s blog about REP Directives.

Google’s Webmaster Central Blog re: REP Directives.

MSN’s blog about REP Directives can be read here.

There were some different answers regarding how the SE’s treat things such as the ‘nofollow’ attribute in links.

The MSN crew at first didn’t seem clear on what their own standards were, however at the end they did clarify that they don’t do anything different for nofollow links at this time. I’m still confused by their confusion. Good old Microsoft!

Google: - Were very clear that they don’t use noindex, nofollow for discovery (finding new content to index or at least store somewhere)

Yahoo: - Confirmed they do use nofollow links for Discovery.

I think the way to go here is to follow the industry leader, Google and do what they say and suggest.

For example, Yahoo! was really pushing the use of Yahoo Site Explorer to provide rewrites for URLs that are not SEO-Friendly - This will drive tons of traffic to Yahoo Site Explorer but I think its a pain in the ass to be honest. Plus the Yahoo folks didn’t even know how to use the microphone or speak in a way you could hear them, at EITHER panel I saw different Yahoo! folks at.

Google’s reps put on their ‘Google faces’ and obviously had public speaking training and were very easy to understand. Google’s Maile Ohye recommended that you take care of your own canonicalization issues using cookies for session IDs and putting the exact URL in your sitemap of canonicalized pages.

Pictured here is Maile from Google with Michael from Penwell, Colin and Pete from the UK and Mike from San Diego. I rolled with this fun crew most of the time, pictured here at the SeoMOZ party. Kudos to Jane and Rand’s crew for always being easily accesible to discuss SEO and for giving out sweet shirts and hoodies. - Back to the technical stuff…so this this can seem rather confusing…USE the sitemaps and tell Google which versions of pages to use. The key here is to put the canonical version IN the sitemap, NOT the human readable version and 301 the canonical page to the SEO friendly URL.

i.e. http://www.example.com/prodinfo.asp?number=CF300%2D006 would go in the xml sitemap.

And you would 301 redirect to http://www.example.com/human-readable-page.html

Obviously…

There’s a long road ahead of us but at least the Search Engines are finally starting to try and work together to provide standards for webmasters to follow that are the same for each engine. Google is obviously way ahead of the pack on this one.

Another interesting and completely unrelated topic was when a presenter explained this: How do you explain the word ’spicy’ to a child that has never tasted spicy? It is pretty much impossible without ever tasting something spicy….he also mentioned how the dictionary is a circular reference…A book full of words describing other words…circular. You would be able to point to a tree and say that physical thing over there is a tree…but without that the words describing it are all defined inside the ‘circular reference’ of the dictionary. I never thought if it that way…one for all the nerds out there i guess…

BUZZWORD: Progressive Enhancement

Some of you may not know this term. The Wikipedia definition is as follows:

“a strategy for web design that emphasizes accessibility, semantic markup, and external stylesheet and scripting technologies. Progressive enhancement uses web technologies in a layered fashion that allows everyone to access the basic content and functionality of a web page, using any browser or Internet connection, while also providing those with better bandwidth or more advanced browser software an enhanced version of the page.” - Source - Wikipedia

It is now recommended to start websites over using this methodology to make them accessible at every level rather than try to implement backwards changes to your existing sites.

Buying old Domains:

Some cool ways to find and buy old sites without losing their historical strength in Google were discussed. The goal is to use a TRUST to keep the WHOIS information the same, and to also buy the hosting account from the owner as well.

The way to do this if you do NOT want to see the WHOIS information change is to do the following three things.

1. Get a Lawyer and establish an intent to create a trust.
2. Make sure the certainty of the property - Take inventory and it is a wise idea to include the hosting as part of what you are buying to avoid any WHOIS changes.
3. The Object is the beneficiary.

So what does this legalese mean?

- Well I’m not a lawyer but the general idea here it to use legal means to ensure that the WHOIS registration does not change and it is also highly recommended to also purchase the hosting account from the current owner of the domain.

If you are interested in this I recommend checking out Seoroi.com who presented this at SMX Advanced.

H1 tags - only one per page? that’s what all the SEO’s say, but really why? any proof?

So I had an opportunity to discuss an issue about H1 tags that my company was having with Matt Cutts who is very easy to talk with and obviously passionate about his work at Google. Even during one of the panels he was sitting with some of the folks I was hanging with and was very helpful with his little notepad describing how Google does specific things that would affect the sites he was asked about.

At the end of it all we pretty much agreed that, - Matt even said this - “You don’t need Matt Cutts”. The reason is that it is at this point pretty obvious when something is shady or not. If the work you are doing is for the search engines and not for the users and affects the user experience than it could be risky.

(Matt Cutts discussing use of multiple H1s on pages with Aaron Kronis) and using his diagram pad as always.)

We discussed the issue that our programming team here at Wpromote is having with regards to the use of H1s at the beginning of sections rather than reserving it for just the main page header.

Almost every SEO I know swears by ‘One H1 tag per page with the top keyword phrase for that site in it’ and here Matt said that it was alright to have MULTIPLE H1s on the page as long as you don’t stuff too many keywords into the H1 tags and design the site for the users.

My question to any SEOs out there (thanks to Merlin for pointing this out btw) is that other than all the SEOs saying to only have one H1 per page, where is this proven to be any different then if there are multiple H1s used at the heading of each section the way the H1 tag was designed. This reserves H1-H6 for usage if needed - great for automated pages and sites… the limit of the H1 to one usage can change the programming and possibly cause you to run out of Hx’s if you get up to the depth of H5 o H6 and have used up your H1 at the top of your pages. Not super critical but nonetheless not very well explained or documented in the SEO community.

Other things to note - if you are using IP Delivery (Cloaking) then the content you serve the search engines MUST be the same as the media you are normally serving users. i.e. the text of the flash better look like the text you send Google or you will be booted from the index. The question was asked “Can you describe the video that is in flash?” the answer from the Search Engines was ‘NO - you may use a static image however’.

- So if some of this was a little dry, there’s a lot of new exciting things going on in the SEO community and with the new tools that Wpromote are developing (thanks to CP) for our SEO division will really help us out with getting the best results for our clients. Welcome to the next generation of Internet Rockstars who know how to use Progressive Enhancement to build search friendly and great user-friendly websites.

I missed the SeoMOZ party but I had to get home…back to LA.

Taken on the final approach to LAX looking off the edge of the world.

-KRONiS

So simple a kid could use it!

Nowadays when people ask me a question and I don’t know the answer, by simply typing exactly what they have asked me into Google returns usually some type of relevant answer that may help me answer that question.

But seriously folks, how is your attention span compared to the next generation of the largest new market of consumers - the young 8-15 year olds out there who spend the most of their parent’s money on the latest movies, games, gadgets, you name it.

What I’m getting at is that it is about time things start to change. How much longer will be we inhibited by browsers. Why can’t an online community exist in a much more interesting medium than a text based one.

The future is coming soon and it will drastically change our use of the Internet as we know it today. Soon our desktops will be able to do things we never dreamed of in Hi-definition and with great clarity and speed. As the new technology emerges some of the questions that will come out of it are;

Music Industry - How come a song that was just released by Ashley Simpson costs $0.99 on iTunes and a classic hit song by the Beatles also costs $0.99. There is something really wrong with this and I feel that the Beatles track should be ‘valued by the its track record’.

VS

Ashley Simpson VS The Beatles

How in world do you do this? That’s the million dollar question. New delivery methods are undoubtedly on the way and the television channels we currently watch on TV networks will soon become merged into your desktop via Hi-Speed bandwith over IP. Why not just buy it FROM the artist instead of iTunes? For now its just easier.

The whole way we search is going to change too.

Why when I search am I limited to the algorithm that Google has created and has made all these companies become slaves to? Something gonna come soon and shake this all up.

Why when I search on images in Google am I limited to such a TERRIBLE interface?

The point here is that a browser really can’t cut it for certain types of searches…the way of the text-based search is going bye-bye and Google has about 3-5 years left at this model…which really can’t be changed other than adding video search. Unless Google develops a better browser soon they will become a lot less of what we are all seemingly praying to as ‘google gods’ for the time being.

What does this mean for the future of search marketing?

Drastic changes so we’d better be prepared.

If there is a better way for us to get content faster and search visually rather than with text, the entire concept of SEO will be out of date and I may need to switch industries or redefine how to help clients reach their customers online.

Just something to think about. Maybe we can figure this out some way and stay ahead of the 9 year old technology we currently embrace daily and are afraid to ‘piss off’ and get kicked out of.

Your friendly neighborhood SEO.

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 ‘