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!

…

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…

I’ve got some small updates, from both myself, WordPress.org and some friends, including some very cool tutorials:

• The Salesforce plugin we released last week, WordPress to Lead, got so much attention that my head is still buzzing… It got featured on Mashable, TechCrunch and loads and loads more blogs and news sites. Very very cool to see such a reply to one of my products. We’ve got loads more ideas for v2, but we’d still love your feedback, preferably on the original post…

Creating Communities with WordPress

Chris Pirillo has been a voice, early adopter and harbinger on the web for over a decade. He joins us on this week show to discuss the evolution that his career has taken as open source tools like WordPress also evolved since WordPress MU v1.0. We explored how to build community, manage communities and what specifically is the secret to making unique sites/communities on the web…

Lorna Li, an Online Marketing Manager at Salesforce.com reached out to me on a definitive list of must-have WordPress plugins for her green marketing blog and other websites she was working on. During our conversation about the world of WordPress plugins, I thought, wouldn’t it be great to have a contact form builder that captures leads and delivers them directly into Salesforce CRM?

At OrangeValley, we’re avid users of Salesforce CRM…

I’ve been a bit slow on picking up on Facebook, I’ve had an account for ages but Yoast.com never had a Facebook fan page. My buddy Roy kept poking me though and telling me that I was missing out.

So now it has: Yoast on Facebook. So I would really like if you join me there, either directly through the link before or by just clicking Like on the widget in the sidebar below

Join Yoast on Facebook is a post from Joost de Valk’s Yoast – Tweaking Websites…

If you do a lot of WordPress development work, you’re bound to receive WordPress database sometimes that you don’t have an admin account for. We at OrangeValley at least, do have that issue. We usually test, if possible, on a database the client provides us with. We used to have to go into the database and change an existing user, or add a new one by hand, and well, that wasn’t too optimal.

Quite a while ago I came across a script (mentioned before in a WordPress Scripts post) called emergency…

I haven’t talked half as much about Gravity Forms as I should. It’s still my number one lifesaving plugin, and in the latest release they’ve done loads and loads of cool things. One of the things I’ve been meaning to show off is the MailChimp integration. My newsletter is sent out with MailChimp and they’ve been a sponsor of my blog and newsletter for quite a while now and, well, simply put, I love them…

Affiliate marketing starts with finding products you can stand behind, review and then sharing useful information with your audience. As you the trust of your blog readership grows so too do your opportunities to grow income. Social media services like twitter are great for doing more than just broadcasting. This weeks guest Chris Garrett provides numerous useful tips on how to develop and convert your audience into buyers once you’ve established trust…

Just wanted to jot down a quick blog post with my thoughts about two blog posts about speed. Matt Cutts has been writing both on his own blog and on the official Google Webmaster Central Blog to tell everyone what we knew was coming: site speed is now an official ranking factor.

Now I want to remind you that I’ve been writing about site speed for quite a while. I wrote about WordPress template optimization (a quite dated post now, btw) back in january 2008…

So it might seem like this blog is low on updates, which it is in text posts, but Frederick and myself are doing the weekly WordPress Podcast (which I really have to update the pages for). If you subscribe to the Yoast RSS feed or to the WordPress Podcast feed, you’ll get those podcasts delivered straight to you. Of course, you can subscribe through iTunes too!

Recent guests included Nick Nelson of VPS…

This weeks guest was Al Carlton of SelfMadeMinds.com and Coolest Gadgets, amongst many other blogs. We talked about how Al outsources everything on his blogs, so much that he doesn’t even have to write on them himself anymore. Some of the things he mentioned doing:

• He hires writers (through for instance the Problogger job board).
• He outsources design (through various designers and f…

Reliable web hosting is fundamental to the success of a web site. Not all web hosts understand that that the web has changed and now applications like WordPress are how today’s interactive sites are powered and managed. On this show we interview Nick Nelson of http://vps.net/ and discuss:

• The role your web host plays in growing your site,
• Things to look for when finding a web hosting provider,
• The role of your site’s speed in Google Rankings,
• Some quick tips on identifying what is slowing down your site

Also, in news:

• Web Site Monitor is a great plugin for making sure your site is online and available [plugin]
• GD Star Rating was recently updated [plugin]
• NextGen Gallery also had an update [plugin]
• Alex King’s WordPress Help Center has some new improvements [plugin]
• StudioPress (the theme developers) released the Enterprise 1…

This weeks guest was Andy Peatling of the BuddyPress.org Project. BuddyPress is a social networking plugin for WordPress which ads many of the features found on sites like Facebook to WordPress blogs in as few as 10 minutes. We discussed how BuddyPress came about, some of the ways it’s used, some tips on getting started, customizing it and most importantly the features it provides. In news, there were a few nice plugin releases/updates and as always quick update on the WordCamp schedule…