It’s the time for sharing, so I thought I’d share a dirty little Blog SEO secret with you. The secret is that the technical part of Blog SEO is actually easy and doesn’t necessarily drive a high return. Some people might tell you it’s hard, but it’s really not. If the CMS you’re using is optimized properly, technical changes can win you a couple of percentages in traffic sometimes, but hardly ever the huge boost in ranking you’re looking for…

In doing my work as an SEO, I constantly encounter people who do not “get” the concept of duplicate content. It’s as old as the search engines themselves, and SEO’s have been fixing it since day one, but we apparently still need to do more about it. That’s why I decided to take some time and write a guide to help you learn what it is, how to identify and how to solve it:

Duplicate content: causes and solutions

The complete guide to duplicate content is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast – Tweaking Websites…

My take on this might be clear to you, if it’s not: I am building the most complete WordPress SEO plugin out there and I recently wrote a post on the topic. There’s certainly parts of this, like proper heading structures and clean HTML that are task of the theme, but titles and descriptions are content, not design, and should thus be handled by plugins. Says enough about my opinion, right?

What I wanted to share with you today is how different theme authors treat this topic…

A hefty discussion has been going on about people’s motivations to develop Open Source software, starting with Alex King’s blog post and followed up by many others including Weblog Tools Collection. I disagree wholeheartedly with some of Alex’s statements. Chris Olbekson did a post I agree with more, and he also asked for my opinion on Twitter:

RT @yoast @chris_olbekson might do a write up…

Some of you might have noticed: Yoast.com has changed, as usual because I, its founder, have changed. The site has gotten a new design over the last few days, and new copy on quite a few of its static pages. The reasons for the redesign were plentiful, but most important: the site had to look more professional, and as less of a “hobby” blog. Judging by the initial reactions on Twitter, it worked…

We are back! And this week we catch up with Ryan Imel. The Editor-in-Chief of WP Candy, he transformed what was once a tutorial site for the past years into a fast-paced breaking WordPress news site. Ryan is a serial entrepreneur having created projects like COMMENTbits and others.

To kick things off this week we talk shop with Ryan as he tells us about the brand new iPhone app – WPCandy WordPress News – wpcandy…

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This show was posted a bit late due to a miscommunication, we’re sorry about that.

Andrew Nacin

This week we are joined by Andrew Nacin. Andrew is one of the WordPress core developers and a member of the commit team, he also works as an independent WordPress consultant and, as he aptly describes his daily activities; “I wrangle contributions, develop new features, and try to fix more bugs than I create”…

Any WordPress site administrator will know WordPress has an auto update system for plugins. Not many people seem to think through how this works and what it means, which is why a lot of people started to say stuff when I “fixed” the BlogPress SEO situation earlier today. Let’s walk through this essentially pretty easy system.

You have a set of plugins installed, WordPress gathers the name, slug (directory name), version number and some other things, and sends that to WordPress…

I thought BlogPress SEO was bad, turns out, it’s worse. It’s malware. I had already discovered that it sent the admin email to the plugin’s author, but today, mtekk uncovered that it was adding an option to log in, solely with that email address. Yes that’s bad. I checked out the plugin code again, and noticed something that could solve all this.

You see, WordPress, by default, checks for updates to every plugin on WordPress…

John O’Nolan is currently working as Deputy Head of the UI group for WordPress on the development of the user interface, essentially designing the complete look and feel of the WordPress platform. Outside of his work for WordPress he is an independent web designer, entrepreneur and writer. He also contributes to a web design podcast on ExplicitWeb, and is a founder of Phosr, an upcoming web application developed for photographers…

Ryan Imel

Ryan Imel, Editor-in-Chief of WP Candy transformed what was once a tutorial site for the past years into a face-paced breaking WordPress news site. Ryan is a serial entrepreneur having created projects like COMMENTbits and others. On the show we review Ryan’s goals for the transformation and how he feels value is provided to the readership. Upon visiting WP Candy, users will find the latest and greatest news, WordCamp recaps, reviews, podcasts, interviews, podcasts, plugins, themes and of course tutorials as always…

Brian Clark

This weeks guest was Brian Clark of Copyblogger. Copyblogger recently merged with StudioPress to form Copyblogger Media, and as Brian was also already involved with the Scribe SEO plugin too, that was added to the group as well. This means the Copyblogger Media group is now a serious powerhouse of WordPress knowledge, which is what we discussed with Brian.

Due to some technical issues the show ended a bit early, which is why we’ll do another show with Brian soon on the topic of SEO for your blog…

Getting people to share your posts or pages on Facebook is important, but also hard enough as it is. If they do share your product, you’ll want them to use the correct image too of course. This is even more important when you run an e-commerce sites off of WordPress, as then you’ll usually have multiple images on your pages and Facebook won’t always pick the best one by default.

One of the attendees of Made in 48 Hours, Lynda Harvey, who runs the Wine Place, asked me how to make sure when someone shared one of her wine pages on Facebook, it would show the wine image…

Let me tell you why I consider BlogPress SEO to be spam and why I think no one should ever use it. Every other week, I’ll get an email from people asking me to review their plugin. I like doing that, and sometimes I’ll even mention a plugin that gets emailed to me in a post or on the WordPress Podcast. Sometimes, the plugin isn’t any good, and sometimes it’s outright spam.

BlogPress SEO falls in the latter category…

Apparently, the way event tracking tracking works in Analytics, and how it impacts bounce rate, is still not understood as widely as I expected it to be, and I’m not the only one to think that. So let me explain to you how bounce rate is influenced by (properly set up) event tracking, and how to do that setup.

How event tracking influences bounce rate

My buddy Avinash tweeted a link to a comment he left on a post that’s actually an interview with him on the Bruce Clay blog…

I’ve started optimizing tags, categories and custom taxonomies a lot more lately now that I can do all these neat things with them in my WordPress SEO plugin, and since I’m a busy guy I want to be able to do that quickly. So I wanted to edit my templates for those taxonomies to include an edit link. Looking through the WordPress source I could only find an edit_tag_link function, and I wanted it to work on custom taxonomies too…

Getting the queried object in WordPress can be done in two ways: the hard way, and the easy way. Unfortunately for me, I only found out about the easy way a couple of days ago… The class wp_query has a function get_queried_object() that can be quite useful. Let me show you the old code I used:

if ( is_tax() || is_tag() || is_category() ) {
// Because WP doesn’t set taxonomy and term on
// category and tag pages we need to grab them here…

Cross posted from my newsletter because people asked me too:

I’ll be honest. I had not expected so many of my newsletter readers to start testing, but I’m deeply thankful that they (you) did. All your testing and your reports towards me allowed me to squash many many bugs, documentation inconsistencies and more over the last three days, resulting in one of the biggest changelogs I’ve ever written for a single release…

I’m getting closer and closer to releasing my WordPress SEO plugin. Turns out it’s not as easy as I thought to get this right straight off the bat, and it’s thus taking more and more time. I have also learned in my recent years of developing though, that getting a version out and feedback in is actually very beneficial. So let me tell you about what it will do and how you can test it.

The initial version will ship with:

• post title and meta description meta box to change these on a per post basis
• Google search result snippet previews
• focus keyword testing
• meta robots configurations (obsoleting my robots meta plugin)
• RSS footer / header configuration (obsoleting my RSS footer plugin)
• Permalink clean ups (replacing and improving my old permalink redirect plugin)
• breadcrumbs support, with configurable breadcrumbs titles (obsoleting my breadcrumbs plugin)
• XML Sitemaps
• Basic import functionality for HeadSpace2 and All in One SEO

As you can imagine, this requires quite a bit of testing…

Toni Schneider

Toni Schneider is the CEO of Automattic, the core team behind the WordPress project. Since leaving Switzerland for Silicon Valley, he has been working with and successfully exiting startups. Before leaving Yahoo! to join Automattic, Tony was a WordPress user and part of the community. On today’s show we touch on:

• The huge Windows Live Spaces migration to WordPress…

As you all know, the first link on a Google search page has, on average, a 40% click through rate.  Another 50%+ of the clicks go to the subsequent links on the page, with remaining clicks being scattered over subsequent pages. Most people will, in fact, search for another term rather than clicking through to Page 2 of a Google Search.

Your rankings matter… That’s why I said yes to being sponsored to review yet another rank monitoring service, because I think this one adds some cool new features that I hadn’t seen before…

So I’m in Sofia, Bulgaria right now. They write in Cyrillic and talk Bulgarian here; meaning I’ve never felt like a stranger this much ever in my life. In a good way though because the people here are awesome. There’s Dobromir and Ivan, the two organizers, Nikolay from Automattic, Stefanos from Greece and entirely too many other nice and smart people.

My presentation today was a bit more about the basics of SEO than what I used to do in the past…

Mike Pantoliano of Distilled had a good post over at SEOmoz about how to turn Google Analytics into your own rank tracker. We have been playing with the cd= parameter at Yoast before to track SEO rankings, as Mike also notes, and his improvement on the idea is a welcome one.

In the comments, my buddy Richard Baxter immediately suggested this would be a good addition to the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin…

Google will always say they won’t penalize you for affiliate links per se, but for thin content around it. I can make this into a long story, but let’s make it short: there’s very good reasons for me and several other highly respected SEO’s and affiliates around the world to think otherwise. Let me show you how to hide them.

In yesterday’s WordPress Podcast, Nathan Rice of StudioPress pointed us at a new plugin they’ve developed called Simple URLs…

At the very beginning of this episode there’s a short interview with Toni Schneider, the CEO of Automattic, and Dharmesh Mehta, Director of Product Search. Only an hour before we recorded this interview they were on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt to announce that all the Microsoft Live / MSN Spaces users would be moved over to WordPress.com.

Toni Schneider (Automattic) and Dharmesh Mehta (Microsoft) on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt

We talked about what this meant for future work between Microsoft and Automattic / WordPress, and whether any of this would impact WordPress…

So, I love the idea of open source development. The adage of “in the eyes of many, all bugs are shallow” has always appealed hugely to me. Heck, I want other developers to fix the bugs I created. It just makes sense, doesn’t it? They use my stuff; if they encounter a bug and are able to fix it, they send that fix back. That’s the idea, that’s why we use the GPL. It’s time to teach some people about courtesy amongst open source users…

Keyword research is the basis of all search marketing. It is the art of explaining what you do in the language that people use, and thus it should probably be the basis of all your marketing activities, both on and off the web. As an SEO, I use keyword research to determine what we should be ranking for. The issue is that I’ve often found that part to be a bit annoying, as people tend to want to rank for entirely impossible terms…

How bad hosting can lead to losing SEO rankings

Downtime of your website can lead to vastly decreased performance in organic search. I’ve been saying this for years, and have had some small examples to show for it. Now though, I’ve got a great example that I wanted to share with you. The client in this case was Independer.nl and they lost a very important ranking (for the word autoverzekering, Dutch for car insurance) for half a day due to unscheduled downtime…

When you’ve had someone build a website for you, it turns out to be common practice for that “someone”, usually a web developer or a web designer, to add a “design by” or “website developed by” footer link to your site. Let me make my point clearly: if they haven’t given you a discount to add that link, you should remove the link entirely. The topic came up during Made in 48 hours, and I thought I’d do a post on the topic to explain myself more…