I am still working on some stuff with dynamic tracking links, but if you are using WordPress for PPC you might also need to think about dynamic content.
I know there are a number of WordPress Themes and plugins that claim they are intended for use with PPC, but they are not going to solve dynamic keyword insertion, and that could have a massive effect on conversion rates & quality score.
It is no huge secret that I have had this WordPress blog hacked twice this year but some consolation is that I am not alone.
Alex recently launched a DVD course on WordPress security that is available for FREE + shipping
Stop – I know what you are thinking – FREE + Shipping these days normally comes with lots of strings attached, forced continuity often hidden etc. Whilst Alex does cross-sell a few related products, the main offer is genuinely free.
Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.How many people have old fishing rods in their shed or loft? I bet they even know how to use them, but for some reason a takeaway Chinese, microwave dinner, or eating out is a much more convenient way to eat. Sure, catching fish is satisfying, relaxing and fresh fish on a charcoal grill is extremely appetising. Then of course there is the fun of playing with fishing line...
Photo by John2008
Whilst the test I performed over the last few days isn't ideal, recently, just for a few days I actually switched off my email subscriptions. Email subscriptions has never accounted for the largest percentage of my subscribers, but I have always recognised them among my most responsive readers. I assure you the decision wasn't taken lightly, especially with a number of major launches to write about which were highly targeted to my core audience.
One of the promotions I was testing was for Jeff Johnson's WordPress SEO Blogging Software.
The post was written on Friday, not the ideal time to publish, but
What a difference 24 hours make.
A few days ago I was honestly prepared to rip a product to shreds. It wasn't that it was a bad product, but it wasn't as well prepared as it should have been, and from what I can tell it was due to an honest communication error between a well respected online marketer and his programming team.
But before I talk about the product itself, I am going to give you a little history lesson.
A few years ago I purchased a script called WordPress Elite. It was pretty useful, and allowed you to point the
Over a year ago I questioned the use of tagging on WordPress.com to spread link equity around as "a rising tide".
If you use similar tags to a high profile blogger, it can help with faster indexing and rankings, at least from what I have observed.
In many ways the effect is similar to linkfarms, using the tagging as a central hub. Many commentators complain when they see Technorati tag pages appearing in the Google SERPs, because Technorati doesn't have a huge amount of editorial control over the content of those pages, they are more like search results.
In that situation however
I have learnt a huge amount from Ken Evoy over the years, he provides some of the best free ebooks to learn about affiliate marketing and pre-selling ever written.
His SiteBuildIt system has created many successful online businesses and was doing this long before WordPress became popular.
In his email to affiliates today he announced a new sales page attacking blogging head on.
Blogging has reached lemming status. Without even thinking, many small businesses equate blogging with having a Web site. This is obviously wrong for small businesses with something to sell (ex., services, e-book sellers, etc.).
But it's also the wrong choice for
Lot of blogs, either using plugins or a little custom PHP code publish articles that are intended purely for their subscribers, with the content appearing only in their RSS feeds, or in emails generated from the RSS Feed.
Lets look at this from a number of points of logic
Andy Beal today to kicked off his Blog Marketing Tips For Probloggers series with an interesting look at post titles.
What Andy suggests is that you write a title to captivate or grab your readers attention, and then using the SEO Title Tag plugin, (though All in One SEO Plugin or Headspace 2 would equally work) optimize the titles further for best SEO results.
Thus you would add additional keywords and possibly change the keyword order.
This is something I have done a few times, but is not a universal strategy.
For at least a few days after you have
Whilst writing the last post about a marketing book survey I was also testing out a new Firefox plugin that is currently in beta, Zemanta
It adds editing functions to various popular online blogging interfaces, Wordpress (both .org and .com), Blogger and Typepad. These are the type of functions you could probably add a plugin for if you are using Wordpress on your own hosting, but wouldn't be available for Blogger, Typepad and Wordpress.com users.
That makes it something worth taking a careful look at for niche marketers, even if you use WordPress for most of
If you don't know what you are doing with nofollow, noindex and robots.txt you can royally mess* things up (face to face I would use a stronger term). Even if you do know what you are doing, you can still mess things up.
I can understand why Matt Cutts might want to change what noindex does, it is not just Koreans making occasional mistake, for instance I just noticed the whole WebProNews video blog is currently noindex nofollow. I am sure that is a mistake, it is easy to make in Wordpress… just one click and save.
All in one
I honestly want to believe that you are a good internet citizen, and your attacks on search engine optimization and now affiliate marketers are honest, and without any form of prejudice.
So while you are attacking affiliate marketing, please ensure you have first of all cleared up all the problems in the paid links debate, such as what seems to be a company, where you are on the board of directors, buying links.
It is widely discussed that buying links in Wordpress themes is something that might be a signal of web spam, and the same should be true for buying links
I could finish that title in all kinds of ways
Yes it is time for another controversial SEO post, sit back and enjoy.
Every single time I write a post mentioning PageRank, I get comments about PageRank not being important for ranking.
These comments very rarely differentiate between toolbar PageRank and the PageRank of whatever kind Google stores on their servers and upgrades on an extremely frequent basis for every page. I know from first hand experience that the toolbar PageRank has very little to do with rankings, and is manually manipulated based on Google's commercial goals.
The Ranking Factors article at SEOmoz in many ways skirts around
For the last few weeks Blogcatalog have been driving full steam with new features, and today announce a partnership with SezWho, the comment and reputation ranking platform.
I have been slacking a little over the last month on the updates, so time to play catch up.
First of all some big news, Blogcatalog has now surpassed MyBlogLog in traffic levels, if you believe Alexa data. They are in exactly the same niche, and share plenty of users, so whilst I don't trust Alexa data extensively, this is a significant achievement considering it wasn't long ago when people had trouble differentiating the two services.
It looks like Bidvertiser have worked fast to address the problems many bloggers noted about their new feed advertising solution a short while ago and have come up with a way so that you can now use Bidvertiser using your existing feeds, and still use Feedburner as before, so that it doesn't affect your stats, and most importantly your feed readers.
From the Bidvertiser Blog
To address this, we have now launched 3 unique solutions:
1. WordPress Plugin to allow you to seamlessly embed the BidVertiser Ads in your feeds. You can download the plugin from your publisher account.
2. Solution for FeedBurner
As I had hoped, ( http://community.izea.com/blog/2007/12/an-invitation-t.html ) Ted Murphy had a chance to chat with Google's Matt Cutts at Pubcon
It seems Google want all links within content that "wouldn't exist without payment" to use nofollow, but seems to be focusing on services like PayPerPost, and not other forms of links which wouldn't exist without compensation.
Andy Greenberg of Forbes got it totally wrong when he wrote Google Scares The Search Crowd
In many ways Google should be a little worried about the blogosphere reaction.
I was the centre of attention more by chance and timing than anything else, as I am sure it wouldn't have taken my worthy SEO colleagues long to make a list of sites that have been hit by PageRank penalties and spot some patterns.
As almost everyone discussing the subject was linking to me, and I was trying to keep up with the Blogstorm, moderating trackbacks and comments, and even trying to respond
I have lots of things I am planning to change on this blog, with some extremely radical changes in look and feel, and changes to the overall linking structure. Those changes have really been waiting for Wordpress 2.3 because it just makes things a lot easier doing the work just once, however there are a few things I would like to highlight that I think people will appreciate, and even a few things that I have experimented with that have proven to be… an absolute failure.
This is actually part of a blog improvement meme just started by my long-time
Already on the DealDotCom blog, but many people might not have subscribed to them.
This is a useful plugin until the guys from DealDotCom come up with a solution of their own. They should really be delivering banners of various sizes to us every day without having to change any code, and an RSS or XML feed to play around with. It needs to be a graphic without using any javascript, so it can be used anywhere.
Anyway for now, you might find this DealDotCom plugin useful
Now if this was my plugin, I would be requiring an email address to download
John Andrews currently has the top rated article on Sphinn with a truly brilliant display of link baiting and social media awareness.
I am not sure I am going to be able to knock him off the top spot, and this very post will probably gain him a few more votes, but I would like to think that one of my older articles could at least be a contender.
There are a number of reasons why my old post on Wordpress SEO and Dynamic Linking might not have
I don't think so but…
We have seen how blog discussions can have both a massive positive and negative influence on large company share value, especially with Apple.
… is to mess bloggers around.
I have just been reading some disturbing news from Trisia – she has been going through hell because her web host, Lunar Pages was claiming that her server was being a CPU resource hog, yet she wasn’t running any particular plugins that were an unusual drain on system resources to her knowledge, and Trisia is much more Wordpress savvy than your average blogger.
Read more on Lunar Pages – The Worst Mistake A Webhost Can Make……
I have kept quiet on the Wordpress Sponsored Themes debate… for too long, but it was a decision I took a few months ago. Wait until the dust settles and then look at what specific rules are made, and then how they are enforced.
Read more on Wordpress Sponsored Themes – How To Game The System…
This is not the definitive guide to Wordpress SEO, and I highly doubt I am the right person to write one, in fact I am not sure who would be. That being said this partial guide on a couple of aspects of Wordpress SEO might offer a broader perspective on what is possible than I have seen previously published.
Read more on Wordpress SEO – Siloing vs Massive Ball Linking With Tags…
Everyone is slagging off Guy Kawasaki for his Truemors site (again). I think most of them need to have their head examined because the site is already a raging success and the venture is already profitable, though most of them are Tech bloggers and not SEOs or Niche Marketers.
Read more on Truemors – More Successful Than Most People Realise…
It is hard work giving money away, and it seems it is hard work voting for which Wordpress plugin author should receive $100.
Whilst it might appear that there was an increase of votes this time around, with 29 votes instead of 24, that doesn’t allow for the fact that 8 votes were added as a bonus. Thus there were only 21 fresh votes.
I have opened up the voting for the second round of my cash giveaway for Wordpress plugin authors.
Nominations for the Best Wordpress Plugin each month are made by my readers, and half my income from paid reviews is given away as donations to help support development costs of the best Wordpress plugins.
If you happen to click through to my site from your feedreader (I know it is a huge sacrifice) then you will see I have a new pet in my sidebar.
He is actually quite a smart little guy, because unlike you, he knows which posts on my blog you might have missed over the last 3 months, based on the number of comments that were posted, or in this case, lack of comments.
If you weren’t already aware, this week is reader appreciation week. Now the idea of reader appreciation is fairly good, give out some prizes, give a reader a link, etc etc.
Competition was fierce but with only 24 votes, the winner could easily have been decided in the last few hours.
I have checked the ballots and there doesn’t seem to be any scandals – rigged voting would have been news worthy and actually profitable, it just goes to show how honest people in the Wordpress community are.
I have opened up the voting for the first round of my cash giveaway for Wordpress plugin authors.
Nominations for the Best Wordpress Plugin each month are made by my readers, and half my income from paid reviews is given away as donations to help support development costs of the best Wordpress plugins.
I recently wrote that I don’t like Top Commenters plugins, in fact I used a very strong word… loathe. There are some benefits to introducing Top Commenters to give some level of special recognition, but whatever SEO benefits you think it might offer are discounted by having it placed in your sidebar across the whole of your site including your duplicate content pages.
Read more on How to Show Top Commenters Only On Your Index Page…
Spam Karma is one of my favorite plugins and despite rumours to the contrary, it is still being supported.
Dr Dave has just released a new version
Read more on Spam Karma 2.3 Still The Best Comment Spam System For Niche Websites…
Whilst the traditional saying is “Pretty in Pink” that saying is not universally true. Vlad clearly demonstrates how ugly a website can be when dressed in pink.
I earn money from this blog, but as I have hinted in the past, that isn't my primary goal. I write paid reviews for products that take a fair amount of time, but nothing compared to the amount of time Wordpress plugin authors spend on their creations, only to give them away for free and often still provide support.
Admittedly I have been a little lax with my donations to other authors, though I have invested money in plugin development, only to publish the plugins myself under a GPL license, thus in my own way giving to the community.
What I have
There are a number of fatal, hypocritical or naive flaws in almost every attack on paid posts by A list bloggers and it is time to show them their Achilles heel(s).
Read more on A List Bloggers in Crystal Palaces Shouldn’t Throw Stones…
I benefit from being a top commenter on a number of blogs simply because I am consistently active on those sites, and I have gained the benefit without changing my commenting habits.
Some of my blogging friends are aware of the problems, but have opted to use such a plugin anyway – I fully respect that decision, but many make that decision “blindly” without being aware of the possible consequences.
Read more on Multiple Reasons Why I Loathe Top Commenters Plugins…
I have always been attracted to the Subscribe-to-Comments plugin, but at the same time installing it has always filled me with dread. Whilst it can be a great community building aid, and a useful tool for regular visitors who like to interact, it can be a liability.
Read more on How to Setup Email Notifications to Avoid Your Wordpress Blog Being Suspended…
Do you worry about the danger of giving a 3rd party service control over the most important part of your blogging business – your subscribers?
Up until today there were only 2 realistic alternatives to retain some control over your RSS subscribers while using Feedburner for collecting stats.
Read more on The Perfect Way to Use Feedburner Without Giving Them Your Subscribers?…
I am sure a few other people might have spotted this already in their Wordpress console today. I am sure it is a bug that is going to be cleared up rapidly.
Read more on Desmond Decides That Ella Gets Too Much Attention – Wordpress | BBPress…
I have never used Moveable Type as a blogging platform. I found Wordpress to be better than Blogger in many ways, and moved a large number of my sites over to Wordpress (but only on my own domains). That being said, I am frequently asked what are the differences between Wordpress and Moveable Type, especially for a business blogger who might experience high traffic load.
Read more on Wordpress VS Moveable Type – Six Apart Under Attack…
This plugin retroactively places the rel=”nofollow” tag on all links to Shoemoney.com – you don’t have to modify any links manually, and it is easy to switch off should you feel in the future that the site no longer contains offensive material.
Lorelle has posted a great introduction to Ultimate Tag Warrior. She covers almost all the basics on what makes UTW my favorite plugin.
She has also been reporting on feed stats. Now whilst I don’t want to be accused at looking at her “details” again, if you add her Wordpress.com subscribers to her Feedburner subscribers then her total is approximately 2500 subscribers. I am sure she also gains a lot more readers through various other interfaces on Wordpress.com who don’t use a feed reader.
Read more on Introduction To Ultimate Tag Warrior | Lorelle…
Lots of people are aware that there was a problem over the weekend with co-author requests being sent out, and some forced adding as authors to communities.
It was a long weekend in the US, but it seems the MyBlogLog team have already fixed it, rolled back any changes, and hopefully it won’t happen again.
Read more on MyBlogLog Spam Hack Update & Widget Performance | Linkbait Idea…
Wordpress by default, just like other blogging platforms, has automatically been adding the "nofollow" microformat extension to all links from user generated content such as comments and trackbacks. To support the growing rejection of NoFollow for blog comments, I have compiled this list of plugins that help you remove nofollow from your blog forever.
Digg has introduced some new buttons and here is how to use them with Wordpress.
It’s smart enough to detect whether your link is a Digg permalink or a URL and whether or not the content exists on Digg already. If it exists, you’ll get the familiar yellow Digg box with a real-time Digg count to suggest visitors Digg your story. If the story doesn’t exist yet on Digg, the first person to click on the Digg It link will be walked through the submission process.
Read more on New Digg Buttons With Wordpress (that don’t work?)…
Am I the only one who feels slightly disconnected from the conversation when blogs using Moveable Type, or a modified Wordpress installation don’t trackback.
If your blog doesn’t trackback, I am less inclined to link to you and join your conversation. I might just comment, but that doesn’t send my readers to see what you wrote either.
Read more on Trackbacks to Moveable Type and Hacked Wordpress Sites…
I just picked up a very useful tip on Dougal Campbells blog that I thought I should note down for posterity, especially with so many people planning to upgrade to Wordpress 2.1 in the near future.
Chris Pearson has just written a dynamite post on how to use custom CSS with a Wordpress theme.
It is especially important if you tweak your themes a lot, and the theme designer is highly active in upgrading themes with new features, and also helps if you tend to switch themes for various custom elements. A lot of plugins for instance ask you to add some CSS to your main CSS file, because they don’t inject it into your header automatically.
Recently I wrote about how you can customise some of the elements in your RSS feed for correct display.
I just found out about another alternative for those comfortable with CSS called Feed Styler. It allows you to apply CSS to various page elements automatically, effectively using 2 style sheets, one for your blog pages, and another for your feeds.
It achieves this by automatically adding inline CSS styling to various page elements.
Read more on Feed Styling Alternative and some Traffic Analysis…
Sociable has been due for an update for a long time. In popularity I am sure it is among the top 20 plugins in use, maybe even top 10 – it is certainly very visible on blogs, more so than the very discreet Share This plugin.
Read more on Sociable Beta | PlugIm | Bumpzee | Technorati WTF…
Macalua has just released a Top Posts By Category Plugin which seems like a great idea that could generate some additional traffic to posts already receiving high traffic.
Hmm, that would be a little bit like what Alister wrote about Knuttz recently.
I am not sure of the easiest way to leverage it.. maybe an invisible category “hot”.
I mentioned I was willing to create such a plugin, I was even cobbling the code together.
Then I noticed a mention over on Matt’s blog (just search for Matt) in the comments that somone had written one.
I am going to start off with
Matt was commenting on the Wikipedia announcement, and made the following statement.
Hmm excerpt? – Matt please forgive me, but it is so short I am going to include it all.
Read more on Wordpress Founder – Admits Nofollow Didn’t Work…
The news today seems to be that Wikipedia have added nofollow to external links.
I have seen a lot of sites mention that all the search engines respect nofollow. Actually they don’t. Anlaysis has shown that Yahoo certainly follow and index pages despite the nofollow tag.
Sometimes you make a mistake when blogging and get the facts wrong. How do you follow up with a correction?
I don’t know the exact terminology that press guidelines or rules use, but generally it is something like
UTW must be my favorite plugin
Christine has released an upgrade
Ultimate Tag Warrior 3.1415926
I also submitted it to Digg, so Give It Some Digging
Honestly I see so many junk plugins on people’s top 10 list that take almost no effort to create (though sometimes serve a useful purpose).
Wordpress 2.07 was just released. We get to update our Wordpress blogs for a week as Wordpress 2.1 is due on January 22nd.
Is it worth it? Yes both for the security and Feedburner fixes.
A new blogging platform has recently launched called Terapad, so I thought I would take a look.
It is designed to be a complete all in one solution, with not only blogging but also more advanced features such as forums and Paypal support.
I talk about how you can use UTW quite a bit from an SEO perspective, but it can also help with monetization. If you have keywords, you can use them for all kinds of things.
During an interview with Shoemoney(listen to it here), Matt Mullenweg mentioned that Wordpress 2.1 will be released on January 22nd.
It is available as a beta version, and a believe beta2 is due any day now. Lots of people in the Wordpress development community have been running Wordpress 2.1 beta on production blogs, and a lot of the code is shared with Wordpress.com.
For a few days I have noticed a small hiccup in my SERPs on Google, especially relating to my theories on how Google treat tags.
It seems it was Google just juggling numbers, because not only were terms such as “Wordpress Training” not showing my tag page near the top, but also terms such as “Wordpress Trademark” had disappeared completely.
Rand Fishkin has an interesting post on the benefits of linking to other people.
It is actually quite a sterile look on the practice, and doesn’t mention one important concept.
The latest stable release of Wordpress, version 2.06 was released quietly yesterday.
Most of the changes are under the hood in the way of security fixes, plus there shouldn’t be a need with Mark Jaquith’s plugin for those that were having server 500 problems with Wordpress 2.05.
The site is live, the plugin available for download.
I’m exhausted…
There are still a lot of things that need tweaking on the site before I promote it but thought I would at least mention it here before hitting the sack.
Read more on Disclosure Policy Wordpress Plugin Now Available…
You should always try to make it easy for people to link to you, especially if you are running a blog which isn’t using nofollow for trackbacks as additional encouragement.
Thus you should provide copy and paste linking.
I am making this post to give some “equal weighting” to the level of news coverage, that my previous post on the Worpress Trademark issue received.
This time around it is really good news
Sherman Hu’s Wordpress Tutorials site has just received a massive facelift.
It might be thought that this facelift was due to recent perceptions of the site.
Unfortunately the timeline just doesn’t reflect on the recent situation.
I have finally got my redirects from blogspot working perfectly.
Well almost…
It is not as good as a 301 redirect, as it will not transfer pagerank.
There is also a bug I found which means I will have to go through my imported content carefully checking page slugs.
Read more on Redirects from Blogspot | Bug in Wordpress Import…
On my blogs, I prefer not to use nofollow for comments and trackback.
It is my belief that if someone adds to the conversation on my blogs, the least I can do is offer them a backlink for their trouble.
I prefer people to write a post about me than to add me to their blogroll. I know a blogroll link theoretically gives me more Google Juice, but if they give 200 people a blogroll link, suddenly the value of that link from every page is greatly deminished.
Further to the situation with the Wordpress trademark that has caused such a public outcry, I have just read over on Cristian Mezei’s Seopedia that Google is Banning users From Adsense for using their trademark.
Here is a little something I just posted to the Wordpress Hackers mailing list.
If you are using a badly coded plugin to subscribe to comments on a blog, take this as a very serious warning.
In the comments discussing my objections to the current implementation of Google Reader on Robert Scobles blog, something very interesting cropped up.
Robert was vehemently questioning the morals of people in a blogging network.
Just a short plea to all Wordpress Theme authors.
Please make it easy to find who created a theme.
All you have to do is include the correct information at the top of your CSS.
A little something for discussion over on my Wordpress plugins blog. I actually have a full-time programmer working on Wordpress plugins for me.
I just asked the following question to the Wordpress Hackers mailing list, and thought it worth publishing it here to a wider audience.
I launched a new site today, along with a little seasonal gift
I have mentioned using Taggerati in the past, along with Blog Auto Publisher. This site has Taggerati implemented, although the tagging is currently being performed manually rather than by keyword list.
I have been a little quiet for the last week, mainly cobbling lots of things together, and brainstorming a load of projects for my newly out-sourced programmers.
Blog Success & Affiliate Tracking (pt2)
I love teasing Jack Humphrey as in many ways it is like the student testing his new prowess on the master that taught him. I learnt a lot from Jack in my early days and whilst when I first started online I couldn’t afford to join his then “Authority Site Center” that still didn’t prevent me emulating many of the systems that they had in place.
Read more on Blog Success & Affiliate Tracking (pt2)…