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Dirty little secret of Blog SEO

admin — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 09:35:05 +0000

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…

The complete guide to duplicate content

admin — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 15:41:56 +0000

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…

Yoast: Should Themes or Plugins do your SEO?

admin — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 16:33:17 +0000

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…

Yoast: Open Source, Motivations & Business

admin — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 21:51:21 +0000

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…

Yoast: Yoast redesigned & bye bye OrangeValley

admin — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 10:23:25 +0000

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…

WordPress Podcast: iPhone Candy with Ryan Imel

admin — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 07:56:14 +0000

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…

Yoast: WordPress SEO Update

admin — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 20:30:15 +0000

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WordPress Podcast: Developing for WordPress with Andrew Nacin

admin — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 20:35:06 +0000

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”…

Yoast: WordPress plugin updates and how I (ab)used it

admin — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 19:50:38 +0000

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…

Yoast: BlogPress SEO: solved

admin — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 07:46:57 +0000

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…

WordPress Podcast: WordPress UI improvements with John O’Nolan

admin — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 09:24:33 +0000

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…

WordPress Podcast: A Taste of WPCandy: Your Breaking Community News Source

admin — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 17:46:23 +0000

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…

WordPress Podcast: Interview with Brian Clark of Copyblogger

admin — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 07:35:17 +0000

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…

Yoast: Facebook Share (for WP E-Commerce sites too!)

admin — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 19:52:14 +0000

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…

Yoast: BlogPress SEO Plugin: Spam!

admin — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 15:29:59 +0000

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…

Yoast: Event tracking, bounce rate and affiliate marketing

admin — Sun, 17 Oct 2010 21:05:32 +0000

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…

Yoast: Quick WP Tip: edit_term_link()

admin — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 14:00:50 +0000

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…

Yoast: Quick WP Tip: get_queried_object()

admin — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:25:48 +0000

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…

Yoast: WordPress SEO now in public beta

admin — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 21:44:53 +0000

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…

Yoast: Want to test my WordPress SEO plugin?

admin — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 12:03:31 +0000

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…