WordPress founder looks into blogging’s future | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

As I was doing my reading this morning I came across an article on news.com calledWordPress founder looks into blogging’s future | Tech news blog - CNET News.com.
It talks about the founder of Wordpress (23 year old Matt Mullenweg) and his keynote presentation at the conference BlogWorld that is taking place right now in Las Vegas.

The thing that stands out in the article for me is that Google is reporting that of all of the http calls it did last year, .8% were to Wordpress headers. That is a huge number for a single install of a creative publishing platform.

I get asked all the time, “Why do you try and have the things you write about be geared for Wordpress”? Well, the reason is obvious to me. It has a large install base, and the software is not only well suported by the creators, (they only have 18 people on staff), but the community around them is fantastic. I want to be part of that community.

If you have any interest in blogging or a well run company, then you should take the time and read the article on news.com.

Also please take the time to drop me a comment and let me know what you like and dislike about my little blog. Thanks and keep reading.

10 Steps to Success on the ‘Net Without SEO

I came across an older article about the death of SEO called 10 Steps to Success on the ‘Net Without SEO. I agree with most of the article.

In the end he is right about the fact that the old theories and corporate thought of what SEO is about are dead. That is why we have Findability. Everything that the author suggests you can do without doing any SEO is just what we now call findability.

If you just do the things that he talks about and the things that I talk about in this blog or on any site, it will not only bring more traffic to your site, but also give the people that come to your site a better user experience. Is that not what we want in the big picture?

Tadeusz Szewczyk has some realy good points like:

• Discover your niche
• Use Wordpress
• Create a killer CSS design and submit it to CSS galleries
• Allow trackbacks, use dofollow
• Socialize, write comments and link other blogs
• Include social media on your site, use social media yourself
• Write your own content, say something new, express yourself
• Compile what you know or what others said and publish it
• Contribute to your favorite online publications
• Add new content at least every second day

So please take some time and read what he has to say. Then come on back and let me know if you agree or not, and if you do any of the things that he talks about

Official Google Reader Blog: Subscriber Stats, Summed Up

I came accross this post today - Official Google Reader Blog: Subscriber Stats, Summed Up. The post is from October 15th, so it is a bit old but still has a good point to be made.

They talk about the new way that Google will be caculating the amount of people that are subscribed to a feed. This is a good way to know how many people are reading your feed. These are people that do not on a regular bases come to the site but read it through a rss reader of some kind (web based or a desktop piece of software)

They make a great point at the end of the post:

What this all means if you’re a feed publisher is that if you’re interested in getting the most comprehensive overview of your subscribers, you should be using a service like FeedBurner or Google Webmaster Tools. On the other hand, if you’re a Reader user, we hope you take advantage of the numbers that we now show next to search results, so that you can pick the most appropriate feed to subscribe to.

If you are not usung FeedBurner you should. I have added it to this blog and did not have to change a thing in the setings. More so, there is a plug in you can get from FeedBurrner that will take care of most of the heavy lifting form Wordpress for you.

I had subscribed to my own feed before I added the plug in ( so should you; this way you can see what your readers are seeing and fix any problems that may come up). After adding the plugin and following the instructions on the page I was woried that I would lose the feed. Not a chance. It just kept on working and all was good. Now I can go to FeedBurner and look at my stats of who is reading the feeds and what type of application they use to read it. All great information

Are you using Feedburner? If you do not then why? Do you know of a different service that you like? Drop me a comment and let me know.

SEO

SEO or Search Engine optimization can be tough if you don’t know some simple tricks like the ones I have listed below:

• Write with web standards and you are 90% there.
• Look at your site as a spider would
• Identify your keywords
• Select URLs using your keywords
• Write copy that has 5% - 7% keyword density
• Include a site map
• Use robots.txt to have sections NOT crawled
• Get inbound links
• Register your site with search engines
• Promote your site in proper places like Forums and discussion boards
• Promote inbound linking to your post
• Offer fresh content on a regular basis
• Reply to comments with comments

Please remember that whatever you do to your page, if you think it could be wrong or “black hat”, then it probably is.

What kind of (If Any?) SEO are you doing on your blog? Let me know by dropping me a comment and let’s talk about it.

WordPress 2.3.1 May Have a Vulnerable To Hackers

Helo all!

I was looking at a SEO blog I read and I found this article SEO Egghead by Jaimie Sirovich » Latest WordPress 2.3.1 Apparently Vulnerable To Hackers. Looks like in the current version of Wordpress people can upload HTML and hijack your blog and make it do what they want. Not Good!

This is the only place I have seen this, so I do not have a lot to back it up. I did run the plug-in from Jaimie’s blog on my blog and got responses that I belive let me know that my blog was ok.

The plug-in can be a little confusing if you are not a coder. You can go to this link and copy the code off of the page and open up a plain text editor (texedit on the mac will work or word pad on windows), and pasted the copied text in. Then at the bottom of the text you will see an email adress. Change that to your email address. Then save the file as HTMLTaintCheck.php. It is important to save the file as a php file and not as a .txt or it will not work.

Once you have the file saved, upload it to your plug-in directory and go to the admin dashboard and activate it. What I did at this point was to go to the site live and look to make sure it did not screw anything up, and then I checked my email. I found an email from myself saying all was ok.

Then go in and deactivate it. I would check every day or so until Wordpress has come out with a patch for this. Remember, do not leave it running or you will get a ton of emails sent to you, over and over.

If you have any questions or comments on this or how to work out the plug-in just drop a comment and I will get to them as soon as I can.

Thanks for Reading

Recently found SEO links

I was doing some more research on SEO and came across these four web sites. After a quick skimming of the sites, I thought it would be a good idea to pass them on to all of you. The Unofficial Google Weblog It is not just about SEO and Google but also information and news about Google.com in general.

In other words, if it is happening to the beast that runs the web (well they might as well) you will read it on this site. It is a well laid out site that has the stuff you want to know with out a lot of fluff.

Search Engine Watch A hint and tips site that talks about all the search engines, big and small, some even I have never heard of. This one has a lot of ads to wade through, and all of the content is not free. There is some good stuff in the free content that makes it worth dealing with the ads.

SEO Chat The site is a bit hard to get around, and it is mostly an industry (the SEO industry) gossip page. There is a lot of “I know better than you do” on this one, but if you can look past it, you can get a lot of good tips on SEO and your site.

SEO Book This is a blog that is written by a SEO professional. He offers a PDF book that is touted to be every thing you need to get started. The book is 79.99. On his site, Aaron Walls is listed as being one of the first 100 Google qualified professionals in the world.

Hope this all helps. Go and check them out and decide for your self if these will be any help to you and drop me a comment and let me know.

Google Analytics Blog: Exciting Announcements at eMetrics

I was catching up on some feeds, and I came across this great post on the Google analytics blog Google Analytics Blog: Exciting Announcements at eMetrics Today.

I love this blog and I love this service. If you are not using this you need to be. The code is easy to add, and the information you get back has really helped me target where my readers are coming from and what they are looking at.

That said, this brings us to one of the new features that Google has added to there analytics service.

We’ll begin a limited beta test of the new Google Analytics Event Tracking capability. These new reports are designed to help you understand how people use and interact with Ajax, Flash and multimedia on your site without artificially increasing your pageview metrics.

Once this has become a full service for all of us to use, the amount of new information we will get will be outstanding. Knowing how our readers are interacting with Flash and Multimedia and such will unlock a part of the user experience that we were in the dark about until now.

They have made some more annoucments in this post so go and take the time and read them for your self.

Are you using Google Analytics, or a different statistics application? Drop us a comment and let me know what you are using and how it works for you.

Microformats and WordPress Themes

I was reading one of my favorite blogs today which is Lorelle on WordPress and came across a post about Microformats and WordPress Themes.

Microformats as you may or may not know is a way to format information on a web page that allows the users to download and make the information portable in other applications.

I do not use them very much on this blog, but the ideas are endless on how to use them. Anything from restaurant locations or your contact information to when your favorite band is playing next.

Remember part of the reason we have blogs is to get iformation out to people. With microformats you give your readers the power to move this information to a device or application that they like and use the information in a way that works best for them and not just for us.

This article does most of the explaning for you, but if you need more information you can go to Microformats.org, they are the mother ship for this subject.

If anyone is using microformats on your wordpress blog drop me a comment and let us know how you are using them and how they work for you.

wpSEO: More SEO for Wordpress | Web-Tools

wpSEO: More SEO for Wordpress | Web-Tools:

I found this on a great site Smashing Magazine It brings out some good points about the problems with making Wordpress moreSEO friendly and some great solutions on doing what you can to make your Wordpress blog as SEO friendly as possible.

Do you have any tricks for making Wordpress more SEO friendly? If so, drop it into the comments.

Thanks for reading.

The Return of Findability Today

Hello everyone.

It has been a long time between posts. As with every person out there, this is a part-time labor of love for me, and life got in the way.

We are now on a new server, have a new layout as well as a new commitment to deliver news and tips that I have found. Tips which I use to make not only this blog, but all of my projects as findable as possible and hopefully help you do the same with all of your projects.

Thanks for stopping in and as always tell your friends and drop me a note / comment and let me know what you like and what you don’t.