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This is just a quick update before we get back to regular post.

I was asked to be on cnn.com Live yesterday to talk about Googles new web browser Chrome.

Below is two ways to watch it one is a link to the video on cnn.com/live and the other is the video it self embedded.

Enjoy and let me know what you all think about the browser and about my take on it.

Topher Kohan talking about Google Chrome

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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.

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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.

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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

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So my notes talked about a session given by Matt Cutts about white hat SEO and WordPress. Matt is the head of Google’s Webspam team and many say an expert on SEO when it involves Google.

I re-watched the presentation today, and wow it is just full of tips and tricks and just a bunch of good information coming right from the guy that can tell you if it matters to Google at all.

The link above has an embedded video which plays just fine, but if you go to Matt’s blog (one you should be reading any way) he has provided the PowerPoint Deck and links to the video and a synopsis if you do not want to watch the whole thing.

I know this is kind of old information, but the stuff he talks about is still relevant and we all can learn alot form it.

MY question for you all is are these kind of conference videos helpful or is it a poor substitute for the event and a waste of time? Drop me a comment and let me know what you think.

Thanks for reading.

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I won’t spend time going into all of the points made, but I will say that the things that are recommended are really great tips, and everyone should do them to their template / blog.

I even found some things I have over looked on my blog, and I am now taking the time to go in and make the changes and see what happens with my SEO numbers.

I like that with most of the recommendations that are made, all you need to do is install a plug-in and you are up and going. That said, there are some tips that involve you digging into the code to make some changes. I still recommend that they get done, so if you do not feel like you have the skills to do them, please do not try it. There is a chance that if you try it and delete or change things that you should not you could break your install of WordPress.

So as I have said before on this subject, if you do not feel like you can dig into the code, then please hire someone who is qualified to do it. So please contact me or someone else before you try it.

As I go through and add the things from this into my blog, I will be writing more and more posts that talk about not only the things in the guide, but also more SEO techniques that everyone should be doing to their blog.

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Why would I not want to try and get some sort of revenue through my site? I have this belief (right or wrong) that if you put ads on your blog it makes the advice you give out not worth as much.

Also I feel that if I include ad’s that this is no longer about me wanting to make this a blog for you the WordPress users but a blog about me wanting to make money.

Am I just being stupid about all of this? I am looking at redoing the template for the site. Should I add a section that will display ads of some kind?

Now, I go to a lot of blogs that have ads,  and they have great information and great advice. So am I just being stupid, and I should use ads or am I right in the fact that readers think this belittles the content on the site?

What do you all think? Drop a comment and let me know what you think and what way you think I should go.

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Meta data is one of the things that have a level of voodoo involved with it. There was a time in the web when loading up the meta information was a sure fire way to get your site ranked higher, and to get it included on as many search results as possible.

With this in mind it was ripe for abuse. Google saw that and let us know a while ago that they where putting less weight to meta data on a web page.

This post on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog lets us in on which meta data Google looks at and puts weight in when they crawl the page.

If you are using a template for your WordPress blog that you did not create yourself, there is more than a likely chance that there is just the default meta data in the header. This does not mean that you cannot dive into the header.php file (located under Dashboard > Presentaion > Theme Editor) and add the data in that you think works best for your blog.

But please do not delete anything you do not understand. This can really mess up how your blog looks or even if it will work at all. If you feel like you want to do this but are scared, please contact someone that works with SEO / Findability and WordPress (some one like me!).

One more thing. Whether you add the information in yourself or get someone else to do it, please remember to make the data relevant to your blog. If you do not, there is a good chance that in the long run you will get penalized for trying to cheat the system

Do you have the meta data in your blog? If not do you think you will add it yourself or get someone to help? Drop a comment and let me know.

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 Spinning Spammers are described as people who are taking posts from real bloggers and then running them through some type of algorithm. This may involve using a thesaurus to find synonyms for the words in questions or an automatic translation program to convert the work into another language and perhaps converting it back to English.

 There is a good explanation of it in this article also on Blog Herald

They then post it on a site, and you get a notice of a track back. If you are good and want to know who is linking to you (and you should), you can go and hand trace the link back to the page it came from. When you get there you will find a post that may kind of look like yours, but at the bottom it has a link that says something like “Go read the rest of the article at:” and it links back to your blog.

So why is this bad? You are getting an incoming link and that is what we all want, right? As the owner of the blog and the post, you did nothing wrong, and there is a good chance that you will see no repercussions from this at all. But there is a small chance that you could get flagged for posting duplicate content or some unkown penalty that Google has yet to come up with.

Besides that, they are stealing the work you have created and that is never good. You took the time to sit down and come up with an idea and write it down. In theory, you also spent time crafting it and changing it until it was just right. All they want is new content to up their AdSense rating and make more money.

How to stop it? Well there are some ways that Jonathan talks about. All of them are good, and I am sure they will work. The one I am trying out is the first one on his list which is the Digital Fingerprint plugin for WordPress. I have installed it and am running it now, and it looks like it works. You can set your fingerprint to anything you want, and they even give you an option to trace the prints right from your dashboard in WordPress.

 After it has been running a little longer I will give you all an update of how it is working for me. In the mean time what do you all think? Should we be worried about this kind of Spam / Content stealing? Are we wasting time trying to stop them? Let me know in the comments.

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