I’m currently at Made in 48 hours lecturing a few hundred people about effective search engine marketing and search engine optimization. The event has been set up by Doug Richard, known to people in the UK as a former Dragon from Dragon’s Den and a serial entrepreneur, VC and teacher of small business and startups.

Doug has just announced Doug Richard’s Mentoring Club, which is a project we’ll be working on together to provide expert advice and on going support for Startups and Small Businesses…

The heading structure of your pages is one of the very important aspects of on-page SEO. It defines which parts of your content are important, and how they’re interconnected. Because they have different goals, a single post needs another heading structure than your blog’s homepage or your category archives. This post intends to give you the basic pointers to get your heading structure right for those three different cases…

I was reading an article on Sitepoint about custom write panels the other day when I got heavily annoyed. The direct reason for this was one of their code examples and the authors apparent incomplete knowledge of the WordPress API’s most basic functions and constants. In that example, he does the following:

define(
‘MY_WORDPRESS_FOLDER’,
 $_SERVER[’DOCUMENT_ROOT’]  
);  
define(  
 ’MY_THEME_FOLDER’,  
 str_replace(”",’/',dirname(__FILE__))  
);  
define(  
 ’MY_THEME_PATH’,  
 ’/’ …

Liz Strauss gave a masterclass tonight; at least, that’s how it felt to both Frederick and myself. We talked about communicating with your audience, and Liz shared some experiences about open comment nights. We discussed positioning yourself and your blog, and how important personal branding can be.

She told us about feedback loops, and how to use them to listen to your users / clients / audience…

It happens to every plugin author: you receive emails from people that your plugin isn’t working. There are about 7 reasons that – for me – seem to be the root cause of up to 95% of these emails, and I thought I’d write them down and show you how I try to handle them.

1. Missing hooks

It annoys the *peep* out of me when I find out that my plugin is in fact working fine, but the *peep* theme author didn’t think it necessary to add a wp_head or wp_footer call…

I got an email from Fred of One Project Closer this weekend, outlining how he had handled improving the load time of his blog, and I was so happy with it that I asked whether I could post it online, to which he graciously agreed. So you can now read it in full:

Joost,

I wanted to pass along a HUGE thank you for pointing me in the direction of VPS.Net.

About 2 weeks ago we decided it was time to move off of our Dreamhost shared hosting…

Let me be honest: I’m asking for your money There are ad spots free here on yoast.com, and I’d like to fill them. Due to a strange combination of circumstances, I’ve got a couple of ad spots free here at yoast.com at the moment, something I’m not very used to anymore.

Let me first explain why there are so many ad spots free all of a sudden: we ditched two advertisers because they were advertising things I couldn’t agree with…

With the wider introduction of the ga_debug.js script (Google Analytics Certified Partners had had access to that for a while so I’d been using it already); I finally had the chance to add a real debug mode to my Google Analytics plugin.

Since the debug script uses the console to display it’s information, I also added the option to immediately load Firebug lite. See how it works in the following screencast (ow and enjoy my new screencast intro, I’ll be doing loads more screencast in the coming months):

Click here to view the embedded video…

So you’ve switched over to a theme that comes with built-in functionality for titles and meta descriptions. Instead of using HeadSpace2, All in one SEO or another SEO plugin, you’re now using the theme’s built-in SEO functions and input boxes for title’s and meta descriptions. It just seems more logical doesn’t it? Loading one plugin less and using the theme’s functionality. It feels like that’s how it should be…

Collis Ta’eed is a veteran blogger and co-founded the Envato network of educational sites and marketplaces covering niches like freelancing and web app’s and much much more. Collis’ network of sites reaches hundreds of thousands of readers monthly, his marketplaces are responsible for enormous amounts of income for developers the world over and his tutorial sites are the hallmark how-to repository for much of the web community…

So last week I’ve started sharing a lot more of what I read on a day to day basis on Twitter, and I decided I had to share these links here on yoast.com as well. Below is a quite extensive list of links that I found interesting, ordered by topic. I’ll try to do these on a weekly basis from now on.

WordPress

• Code Snippets and Examples
  • The only proper way of adding a Facebook “Like” button to your WordPress blog
  • An article I wrote recently for Smashing Magazine: Lessons Learned From Maintaining a WordPress Plug-In
  • Gravity Forms PayPal integration
  • 16 Vital Checks Before Releasing a WordPress Theme
  • How to Display Human Readable Post Dates in WordPress
  • Control WordPress Content via Userrights or Time
  • A good Beginner’s Guide to the Thematic Framework
• Plugins
  • BuddyPress Courseware beta; a very cool plugin for schools & other educational institutions…

…

Canonicalizing URL’s is a very important  aspect of Search Engine Optimization but also of Social Media Marketing. This morning, when checking my feeds, I noticed an example that I thought could help you understand the what and the why of it. What I noticed was this: Smashing Magazine had put out one of their usually very popular “100 … WordPress themes” posts. This time called: 100 Free High Quality WordPress Themes: 2010 Edition…

In this second part of our interview with Matt (you have listened to the first part, right?), we discuss VaultPress; Automattic’s new backup system. Matt explains the features, pricing. Going from that we discussed hosting and their uptimes.

Then the discussion shifted to the community, and how that’s built. We discussed how to get core commit access, and how Matt’s multiple roles within the community could collide…

After reading this post about the “WordPress white screen of death” I wanted to quickly share with you a quick hack I do in almost all WordPress installs I manage, that allows me to quickly switch on debug mode when needed.

In the file wp-config.php, usually found in your WordPress root, do the following:

if ( isset($_GET[’debug’]) && $_GET[’debug’] == ‘debug’)
define(’WP_DEBUG’, true);

Now I can open any page, and if something goes wrong there, like a white screen of death, I add ?debug=debug to its URL and see what’s causing the trouble…

I’ve just pushed out release 4.0.7 of my Google Analytics for WordPress plugin. It contains a few minor bug fixes, and a little something I’ve been wanting to do for a while: a proper logo. It was designed especially for the plugin by Level Level, a Dutch WordPress specialist I’ve had the pleasure of working with before on the conversion of Dag.nl to WordPress. This is what the logo looks like:

The small version is used in the plugin heading on the admin page, a favicon version is used as a favicon for the admin page…

I get about 10 emails a day asking me for help with a website, not a specific plugin error or something like that, but more general requests for help, often relating to my WordPress SEO article. In the past I used to do this sometimes, for free. Recently I’ve begun treating those requests a bit differently: I’ll email back that I can do a site analysis and tell people what to improve, which plugins to use etc…

Joost and Frederick interview the founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, talking about loads of things. The entire interview was split in 2 because it was a bit lengthy, so you’ll hear part 2 next week.

In this part we discussed the ’3.org’ project: fixing everything about WordPress that is not WordPress itself, so we discussed WordPress profiles (check Joost’s here) and how they want to integrate those with WordCamps and some of the new APIs that the team is developing and improving…

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…

…

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…

…

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…