So, just before I hop off on a 2 week holiday to France, I wanted to share something personal with you. In a long standing tradition of SEO’s and Affiliate marketers who show off their new ride, going from John Chow and Shoe on the affiliate side to Marcus and Dave on the SEO side, I’d like to tell you about my new pair, well actually trio, of wheels. I got myself a bakfiets. Or as you’d probably call it in English: a “Freight bicycle”…

Matt Cutts is a Software Engineer who heads the web spam team at Google. Matt has been using WordPress for years and feels WordPress makes search engine optimization easier and easier with each update. On today’s show he highlights the fundamental principles of success for blogging with WordPress. And addresses questions like:

• How do I get started?
• What tools do I need?
• Why choose WordPress?
• Which WordPress plugins do I need?
• Do meta tags matter?
• How do I know what content readers want?
• How do I generate unique content – the way Google wants it?
• What about duplicate content?
• Have I been banned or penalized? Why haven’t I been indexed?
• Do 301 (permanent) redirects “lose” any page rank?

Want more? Matt promised to return in the future to tackle more of your questions sometime after his trip to Mt…

Let me give you some advice first: listen to this podcast with your Google Analyics account open and in front of you. Justin Cutroni, this weeks guest, is an asbolute expert on Google Analytics, and he shows by explaining in a very easy way the most fascinating new functions that Google Analytics has to offer and which reports you as a blogger can use to improve your blogging.

The show discusses loads of features, from Advanced Segments and Custom Variables (and how nicely they’re integrated into yours trulies new version 4 of his Google Analytics WordPress plugin) to the new Intelligence and Alerts tab…

I’ll openly admit to not liking PPC. I’ll even go as far as saying that, while I do understand its uses, I loathe, yes, hate it. The fact of the matter is that the part of SEO I like and excel at is the technical side of things, and the structure side. The keywords? I know how to research them, and I know how to use them, but writing ads and maintaining large campaigns isn’t my thing. That, and nothing else, is why you’ll rarely see me do a post on PPC, or hear me talk about it…

Google Analytics has gotten so many new features in the last year, that the only way I could incorporate those into my Google Analytics plugin, which has been downloaded 927,443 times, was by doing an almost complete rewrite. That’s why today, I’m proud to announce version 4.0 of this plugin.

What’s new with this Google Analytics plugin?Asynchronous tracking

First of all, this new version 4…

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Pete Cashmore is founder and CEO of one of the world’s most popular blogs – Mashable.com, which happens to be powered by WordPress! Since 2005 Mashable has been a leader in social media and technology news coverage in addition to hosting events like the recent media summit and social media day. In tip-packed show, Pete shares with us:

• Why he selected and continues to use WordPress,
• The secret formula of success for blogs,
• How to work with and develop teams,
• How to develop communities,
• How to measure growth and monetize,
• How to build a brand

In news:

• The MU forums are moving
• BuddyPress 1…

I updated my Emergency WordPress access script today, because of some issues we’d discovered at OrangeValley and some bugs submitted by users. When I updated the post, I realized I should be emailing all the commenters, as some of them had had the same issue, and most of them would want the updated script.

Quite a while back I’d written a plugin for exactly that purpose, called email commenters…

When you’re developing XML sitemaps, no matter on what platform, it’s pretty hard to debug them sometimes to be proper XML. You have to validate all the time and you can’t do a quick “glance” over to see whether your sitemap has the URL’s you were expecting.

As mentioned before I’m working on my WordPress SEO plugin, and it’ll do sitemaps, three kinds of sitemaps actually: video, news and normal…

I don’t usually post too much on the ins and outs of the SEO industry. I’m in it I guess, but there are other blogs way more geared to report on that. However, for this merger that just happened, I’ll make an exception. I’m talking about a new company called BlueGlass.

The reason this interests me is that we have a weird issue in the search marketing / social media industry: most companies have 1, in some rare occasions 2 figureheads…

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Marcus just posted the trailer to SEOktoberfest 2010, and it’s going to be another awesome edition of this epic conference / party / network event. I wasn’t there last year (my daughter was about to be born, seems a valid excuse) but I’ll definitely be there this year! Check out the trailer:

Click here to view the embedded video.

You’ve seen it scroll by if you checked out the video, but here’s the speaker line up, and do realize when you look at it that more speakers will be announced later on:

1. Marcus Tandler
2. SEO Blackhat
3. Bob Rains
4. Johannes “Sistrix” Beus
5. Dave Naylor
6. Greg & Barbara Boser
7. rSnake
8. Frank Watson
9. Brent Csutoras
10. Avi Wilensky
11. me, myself and I

There will be 16 experts total, and only 18 attendees…

As mentioned in a previous post, recently I have started playing with Video SEO, and found it to be a part of SEO I quite like. It’s a very technical trade so far, so apologies for all the code in the article lying in front of you, but there just is no way around it: you’ll need to know about the technical part of these implementations.

Talking about that, it seems as though everyone is focussing on XML Sitemaps, while there’s actually not 1 but 4 methods of getting Google to recognize your video content…

I’ve been testing a lot with video SEO lately, and I’ll be doing a whole lot more of that testing, as video SEO seems to be a nice area to play in. Now I noticed my buddy Mark Robertson over at ReelSEO did a short, but nice interview with Matt Cutts on video sitemaps:

Now you’re probably asking: what on earth’s name does this stuff about video SEO have to do with WordPress? Well, it’s quite simple: one of my upcoming WordPress SEO plugin’s features will be to automatically generate video sitemaps, for video’s added with several supported video plugins, like the awesome Viper’s Video Quicktags…

Alex King is among the original contributors to the WordPress project (which has almost reached version 3.0) and a prolific plugin developer. As you might expect, over the years he and his team at Crowd Favorite have created numerous freely available products and tools for WordPress. A few of them include:

• Tagaroo: Suggests possible tags and flickr images for people, places, events etc…

Every once in a while I get an email about W3C validation. The people emailing me either point me at the fact that my own site doesn’t validate correctly (thank Facebook for most of that), or they ask me whether I think W3C Validation is important. Most of them ask even more specifically: whether I think W3C validation is important for SEO.

Since I’ve taken it upon me to create articles for each question that I’ve answered more than once, let’s have a look at the pros and cons of W3C validation…

I’ve just published Part II of my WordPress CMS series: Design & development of your WordPress CMS. Enjoy!

Part II of my WordPress CMS series is a post from Joost de Valk’s Yoast – Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don’t want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

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So I think I’ve not said it enough yet: W3 Total Cache is the best caching plugin for WordPress out there at the moment. To illustrate, I’ve made a short video outlining how I usually set it up (if the video is not working for you, check it out on Youtube):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Hope you enjoy it and make sure to install W3 Total Cache on your site or blog!

W3 Total Cache and why you should be using it is a post from Joost de Valk’s Yoast – Tweaking Websites…

When you change domains, for instance using my moving WordPress to a new domain guide, you’ll usually redirect your visitors with something looking like this:

Redirect 301 / http://new.example.com/

The only issue with this is that people might not notice that you’ve moved to a new domain, and thus might not update their links to you. As Matt Cutts confirmed a while back that 301 redirects do not pass full PageRank, and they seem to take a hell of a time to kick in these days, that’s somewhat of an issue: we’d rather have people update their links…

I’ve posted about them before, and will probably be telling everybody I can about them for a while to come: BuySellAds. It’s their second birthday today, and they made a pretty darn cool video to celebrate:

Click here to view the embedded video.

A very happy “birthday” to Todd and the crew at BuySellAds, thanks for helping me and those other great sites out there make money so we can continue to serve the community!

Happy Birthday BuySellAds! is a post from Joost de Valk’s Yoast – Tweaking Websites…

Josh Holmes is a UX Architect Evangelist at Microsoft.com, where he works hard to bridge the gaps that exist in technology adoption and Microsoft and open source projects. In the past, Josh used DasBlogML and he migrated it to WordPress quite easily. On the show, Josh shared with us many of the projects and contributions Microsoft is making to the WordPress community. Among those plugins created by the Microsoft team is Windows Azure Storage for WordPress with is similar to Amazon Web Services or Rackspace Cloudfiles…

I picked the winner for the ShopHTML competition today, a winner who asked for a post I can not possibly do in one single post. So I’ve started an article series on the topic: using WordPress as a CMS, and am ready to release the first article to you already: going from your website’s goal to its site structure.

This doesn’t touch on WordPress as much as on general site design principles, but as these steps are often misunderstood and they very much determine whether your site is ever going to be successful, I decided it needed to be in there…

I was reading my backlog of feeds just now, and came across a couple of updated WordPress SEO plugins aimed at improving your site’s SEO. Some people are just plain ^%$#*& stupid, I’m sorry to say.

Let me show you what got me so wound up:

#1 Canonical Link Plugin

This Canonical Link plugin consists of the following code:

function canonicalink() { $request_uri = parse_url($_SERVER[’REQUEST_URI’],PHP_URL_PATH); echo “<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://{$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']}{$request_uri}” />”;
}
 
add_action(’wp_head’,'canonicalink’,1,1);

If you know PHP, you can see what it does: it parses the current URL, strips out URL variables (if you’ve got any) and displays the current URL as the canonical link element…

Today I gave a presentation at Meet Magento in the Netherlands, talking about SEO for Magento. Up until this point, all articles about that subject here on Yoast have been written by my colleague Joachim Houtman. Last week though, I started playing with Magento myself, in preparation for this presentation today, and I’ve added some things to our Blank SEO Template that I know some of you will enjoy…

Vanessa Fox is a seasoned speaker, blogger and now writer. While at Google she worked on Webmaster Central and led the way on creating lots of the great features that make it easier to understand how Google sees your sites. On this week’s show we discussed: her new book on marketing in the age of Google, common SEO pitfalls to avoid, and search engine optimization tips in particular about helping search engines discover your content, using related articles and internal linking and a smart XML sitemap strategy…

In last nights episode of the WordPress Podcast we discussed setting up a website for small businesses in WordPress. One of the things I touched on in that discussion is that we outsource a lot of our development work, especially slicing PSD’s to HTML or even directly to WordPress themes, both for Yoast and for OrangeValley.

I thought it might be useful for all of you to share with you which company we use for that…

Lorna Li is the Marketing Manager of Salesforce.com, the leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. Discussed on the show were several topics helpful for small businesses (SMB) getting started with a web site, including: selecting a domain name, keyword research … Continue reading →…

Lorna Li is the Marketing Manager of Salesforce.com, the leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. Discussed on the show were several topics helpful for small businesses (SMB) getting started with a web site, including: selecting a domain name, keyword research / discovery, site structure, how to get the right site design, choose the right web host, find consultants and even selecting the best plugins to save you time…

Two weeks back, while speaking at SAScon, I said in a panel there that “Facebook is the scariest shit I’ve seen in years”, related to their latest updates. I also said it was a lawsuit waiting to happen, coming from the European Union. I was right. Well, not entirely, it’s not a lawsuit yet. I referred to a blog post on State of Search by my buddy Bas about Privacy, Facebook & Google. He made a very good analogy to real life:

Imagine this: you are buying a bread in the supermarket which has discount passes…

Joost and Frederick discussed Google’s Webmaster Tools with this weeks guest http://www.johnmu.com”>John Mueller from Google. All the sections of Google Webmaster Tools were discussed, and their different uses for bloggers, from the new search queries and ranking overview to sitelinks, crawl errors, XML Sitemaps and the recently updated Google News Sitemaps (there’s actually a http://wordpress…