News about Building Findable Websites

Now that it is official and I have made my first post, I can tell you all about something really cool that I have been asked to do.

I have been asked by Aarron Walter, the author of Building Findable Websites and a great teacher, to be an officer / discussion group moderator for the Building Findable Websites Facebook group.

Once a week I will be posting a discussion topic dealing with Findability and keeping an eye on the discussion that follows.

The book BFW is a really great resource for developers that want to help their site to be more Findable and have better SEO but do not want to read a marketing book. The book walks the developer through practical and useful information about what you can (and should) do to your site code and design to help the Findability.

So head over and take a look at the Facebook group, and if you like what you see click the link below to buy the book.

Drop me a comment and let me know what you think of the group, and if you have the book what you think or if not are thinking of getting the book.

“Building Findable Websites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond” (Aarron Walter)

Thanks for reading

Link Fun Friday 02/29/08 The Leap Edition!

Here is this week’s round up of fun links I have found this week. I hope you enjoy them.

This week’s links:

• Add Translation Links to your Web Site or Blog at CreativeTechs Tips. This is a great tutorial on how to give your users the ability to translate your Wordpress blog in their native language using Google’s translation services.
• Google AJAX Search API at the Google Code Blog. This one talks about how to add a custom google search to your blog.
• Separate Trackbacks from Comments on Your WordPress Blog at Daily Blog Tips. A great way to set up your comments to separate the trackbacks from the real comments on your Wordpress Blog.
• 10 Things That Bloggers Tend to Forget, But Shouldn’t! also at Daily Blog Tips. A good overview of things for new and old blogers to remember.

Hope you find the links helpful. If you do drop, me a comment. If you did not, also drop me a comment and tell me why.

As always thanks for reading.

Ad’s Ad’s Ad’s

I created a post a while back that spoke of my thoughts on adding Ads to Findability Today. In that post I talked about how I thought that if I did this it would belittle the content on the site.

After thinking that through and having some great conversations with people, I decided to dip my toe into the water of making money with ads on my WordPress Blog.

Now what I mean by dipping my toe into the water is I have decided to only add Google AdSense ads to the bottom of the post. I think this way I can see if they work and still not feel like I have put them there just to make money. I still believe that with anything you do when you blog that you must at all times keep your message and the readers in mind, or the content stops being relevant. That is when people will stop reading what you have to say.

So, as I keep an eye on the traffic and the ads I would love to hear what you all think. Do you find them a distraction? Do they bring down the value of the information on the site? Drop me a comment and let me know what you think.

Link Fun Friday!

This is the first installment of something that I want to make a weekly thing. It is a list of links I have come across that I want to share but do not think are the type to write a full post on.

Now that is not to say that the information in the links is not good stuff. It is stuff I liked reading but just did not want to write about.

One more thing before we get to the links, not all of them are or will be “new” links. They are just links that I have come across this week.

On to the links:

• Web Metrics Demystified at Occam’s Razor by Avinach Kaushik
• Web Analytics Demystified at Occam’s Razor by Avinach Kaushik
• Tips on How to Apply for a Blog Job at ProBloger by Darren Rowse
• Twitterfeed.com This is how new posts to my WordPress blog get posted to my Twitter feed so the people that are following it can see the new post.

Hope you enjoy the links. Drop me a comment and let me know what you think of the links and the idea of a Link Fun Friday.

What to look for in a WordPress Pro

As a follow up to the post on When to hire a WordPress pro, I want to talk about what you should be looking for when you go out and hire a WordPress pro.

Ask around. Word of mouth is the best way to find someone. If they get a good recommendation from other bloggers that you know and trust, then there is a good chance that they will be a good fit for you also. Just spend some time asking.

If you do not personally know anyone that writes a WordPress blog, then post a comment on the ones you read and ask for recommendations. With this method you will get some people that just recommend themselves. They may be good at what they say they are.

Now the way to find out if they area any good is to ask for examples of their work. Also ask if you can contact people that they have done work for and see what they say. If for some reason they will not let you contact past clients, then I would stay away from them. (I know that they may have good reasons to not want to you to do this but I still would not want to work with them personally)

If you are looking to have a project on a large scale or on a business blog then posting on a job board is the way to go for you. There are tons of them popping up all over. Some you have to pay a little to post, but on others like Craig’s List you can post for free. Just remember to be very specific about what you want to have done. Remember to include the time frame in which you would like it completed.

The next question will be how much will this cost you. That is something that will vary from job to job and from WP Pro to WP Pro. I can tell you that most people that work on WordPress blogs are part of a community and want to help. Not to say that they will charge you nothing, but you will get a fair rate and a lot for the money that you do spend.

I have just nicked the surface of the places you can find and hire a WordPress Pro. Do you know other places? Drop a comment and let us know. Also remember that this is what I do, so if you just want to drop over to my comment page and drop me a note I will get back to you and see if we can work together.

As always Thanks for reading.

Scraping and me!

I first want to say to my readers that only read Findability Today through RSS feeds, that I am sorry. The reason for me saying this is that I have had to add a header to my feeds that say I wrote the post for Findability Today. The reason I did this is that I am finding more and more of my posts being scraped from the rss and posted on blogs that are then claiming that they created the content.

For those of you that do not know what Scraping is, it is when someone subscribes to your RSS feed and syndicates that feed on their blog and then takes credit (or not give the creator credit). This is not only just bad karma, but it is also theft. I spent the time to create this content and post a feed of it for you all the readers to freely read and (hopefully) learn from. I did not do all of this research and writing so someone can take it and steal it just to put content on their blog to drive traffic so they can make money off of the adds.

Now to be fair I do read sites that scrape feeds, but they give the creator of the content full credit. I have no problem with this, and I would have no problem with someone doing that with my feeds. I should also say that not all scraper sites are looking to make money off of ads, some are hoping for a higher Google Page rank.

What can a creator of content on a WordPress blog do to stop people from stealing their content? Not much really. One of the things that I use is a plugin that allows me to add a footer (or as I have set it up now a header) to your RSS feed saying that I created the content. What this will hopefully do is when the feed is scraped and posted to the scrapers blog is instead of the first line talking about the subject it will say something like “This content was created by Topher for FindabilityToday.com only.”.

My personal hope is that this will do one of two things. First, it will let the people that read this on a site other than mine to know who really wrote the content, and that it was not created for the site they are reading it on. Second I have a wild dream that by doing this it will discourage people from posting the scraped feeds on the blog because it does not look good on their blogs. I am not holding my breath that the last one will work at all.

I have been asked “What harm is all this if when people click on the ‘read more’ link they come to your site?”. For me it is an image thing, one of the blogs that is stealing my feed labels itself a black hat SEO site(if you do not know black hat SEO uses techniques that can some times be classified as slimy and google looks down on and penalizes you for using them). That is something I do not want to be part of, and I do not want it to look like I condone or practice the things that are associated with Black Hat SEO. I am willing to give up some traffic to make sure that the content I write is used correctly and not giving me or the blog a bad name.

So what do you all think? Am I making a mountain out of a mole hill? Have you had to deal with this? Is there a better way to stop it, or least slow it down? Drop me a comment and let me know.

Thanks for reading.

The next 5 things to Help your Findability / SEO

A follow up from the last post about Findability / SEO and your WordPRess blog.

1) Add the title tag to all the links on the page.

The reason for this is to add more information for the search engine spiders to find and read. When you do this it will add more keywords and information about the page / post into their search results. What that means to the person searching is that the words they type into the search engines have a greater chance of finding the article that you have written.

2) Proper placement of the H1, H2, H3 tags on titles on the page.

The reason to do this is to let the search engine spiders know what the most important information on your WordPress blog is, and then you tell it the 2nd and the 3rd most important. The reason you want to do this is so that the spiders will rank this information and use it to help the users to search for the most important and relevant information on your blog.

3) Have the web site verified as W3C compliant (w3c.org).

The reason to do this is that a WordPress blog that is written with W3C compliant code not only makes it easier to optimize for Findability / SEO, but also, compliant code lets a search engine read the whole blog without any problems. If the search engines can do that then there is a more complete picture and record of your blog in the log, and this will help the searchers return more complete and higher placed search results.

4) Add and fill in the atl attribute to all images.

Again, the reason to do this is it gives the search engine spiders more information about the content in the blog. This will not only show up more in searches for keywords, but also in image searches. Google is saying that more and more people are searching for written content that includes images. I have not added images to this blog because I do not think they add anything to the content I write.

5) Add an XML site map (if one does note exist).

The reason for this is to give the search engine spiders a clear road map in the format that they like and will use. With this information the spiders will crawl and index your blog quicker and more efficiently. This will help get time sensitive information in to them sooner, and it will show up in searches faster. With WordPress it is easy to do this with this plugin Google (XML) Sitemap Generator. After set up of the plugin you can rerun it every now and then so that if you have made changes to your blog you can inform Google of the changes.

Hope this helps. If it did drop me a comment. If you all liked this let me know and I will write up 5 more tips.

Thanks for reading

First 5 things to help your Findability / SEO

I was asked to look at a site and let them know what 5 things they could do to their site to increase its Findability / SEO. That got me thinking that a lot of people do not know the first five basic things to do.

We talk a lot about the next five things or five things you did not know. With that in mind I want to talk about the FIRST five things you should do on your WordPress blog to help out with Findability / SEO.

1) Write New and Unique content.

This is where it all starts. If you have strong, well written and unique content, then you will get people to come and read your blog. I know that sounds simplistic, and yes it is, but it is the truth!

2) Add new content often and regularly.

The more often you post the more people will come to your site. Why? Well the more you post, or if you hold yourself to a regular schedule, then search engines will spider your site more often. Therefor, you will have more information in the search engines. This allows people to find you a much more easily when they are searching.

3) Have a great key word phrase that is popular, but not too popular.

One of the first things you should do when setting up your site for Findability / SEO is to come up with a good keyword that works for your blog and the subject you write about. Then think of five more that do the same thing but are not as well known. Why? Well if you use a very popular keyword like coffee you will never get to the top of Google list because a company like Starbucks will have that all tied up. Instead of coffee use Whole bean coffee or cup of coffee. This way you can find a place in a bigger segment of readers.

4) Make sure your site is as accessible as it can be.

Having a well coded accessible site not only will allow the largest group of people to read it, but it will allow the search engines to make it through the site with little or no problems. This will allow them to index more of your content and return a better search result.

5) Use your keywords in your titles, domain name and your url.

This gives you a bunch of new places to put keywords that will not only help you with your search engine rankings, but also to give the people searching for things a new set of keywords to find in their search.

I hope this helps out those of you that are just starting your blog and even with people that have long time blogs that are just now starting to do the Findability / SEO thing to it.

Please drop me a comment if you have any questions. Also drop me a comment if you have tried any of these and let me know what kind of results you had with them.

When to hire someone to help you with your WordPress blog

Let’s face it. WordPress is really easy to use. They have a quick install guide from WordPress.org and many hosting companies include a one click install option. Then all you have to do is pick a template, and you are off and running.

Once you have it up and going, then most of the upgrades and add-ons you want are with plugins or just changing the default settings built into your WordPress blog.

So why would you ever want to pay someone good money to work on your blog? Lots of reasons. You want a custom template / Layout and you are not a coder or a graphic designer. In the course of implementing the Findability / SEO things I talk about on this blog, you realize that you do not have the skill set to dive into the code that is sometimes necessary to implement some of the tricks that I bring up.

Because of the ease of setup and use of the WordPress system, anyone with little or no web skills can set it up and make it look and work great. That is part of what I love about this system.

If you are the kind of person that is happy with things that come right out of the box and just work for you, then you will probably never need anyone to look at or touch it. Now, if you are the kind of person that wants to get 110% out of your install but do not think you have the skills, then you might just be the kind that wants to contact a WordPress professional.

A WordPress professional is someone that works with and is intimately knowledgeable on how WordPress works and ticks. With them doing it for you (or teaching you how to do it), you can really crank up what this blogging system can do for you.

All of that said, I believe that almost all of the tips I talk about on this blog can be used by anyone no matter what level of knowledge they have. Just remember that there are good people out there who know this system, and for a reasonable amount of money they will help you out and work on your blog.

In my next post I will talk about where to find a WordPress Pro and, what to expect when you work with them.

Have you ever hired some one to work on your blog? Would you ever hire some one to work on your WordPress blog? Drop me a comment and let me know.

Search on your Blog Part 3

For the third and final part of the articles on searching and your WordPress blog.

I came across this post Have you SEO’ed your search feature? on Marketing Hub. A lot of good information about rewriting the code on your search.

They have written a great post that talks about ways to improve the default code on the search section of your WordPress blog. The reason you would want to do this is to help Google index the search results of your blog, and that way you have a chance of get more pages index into the search engine. More pages index means a better chance of getting a good results when some one is trying to find your blog.

I will say that the things that are described in the post are a bit advanced. As I have said before, if you do not feel like this is something you can handle or are just plain scared to play around in the code, then do not try it. Find someone (like me) that knows what they are doing and hire them.

If you want to try this then I suggest reading through the post two or three times and making a copy of the page you are working on before you try it out.

The post has all of the code snippets you need and some good directions on where to put them.

Having done this to my WordPress blog, I have seen an increase in Google information about the searches, and I know this will increase the SEO / Findability of my blog. I am fairly sure it will do the same to yours.

Let me know if this was easy or hard for you to do. If you did it, how has it worked out for you?

Thanks for Reading