Once upon a time we thought ads were bad, bad, things on blogs.
Once upon a time BlogWell didn’t take so much time to maintain 
As it is now taking more of our time – and we do want to continue as we have a pretty neat little community here – we’ve decided to try and make a few dollars via advertising.
We will do our best to make sure they are not huge epileptic fit inducing experiences for you, but if you find anything that’s offensive, or just doesn’t fit, please let us know.
Woo Hoo!
We made the BIGLIST of SEO and SEM blogs this week, so a humungous Thank you! to the TopRank team for including us.
If you don’t know what the Biglist is, take a look – it’s worth your time and definitely a great resource. You’ll find a well maintained and frequently updated list of blogs that cover a variety of Internet marketing topics such as SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (pay per click), blog marketing, marketing with social media, online public relations.
My plan is to hunt down Lee Odden [so badly want this shirt] the next time we’re in the same place together and hit him up for advice on blog and feed optimization.
Fingers crossed you’ll be reading a post in the near future.
So, if you’ve got specific blog/feed SEO questions, please leave them in the comments and I’ll gladly include them if I can grab him.
Code monkeys, SEO monkeys, blogging monkeys – we need more of all of them!
Thanks to Kevin Muldoon for pointing this out; see more fun blogging images at Blogging Tips
There have been so many great posts written about WordPress last month, and rather than rewrite what’s already out there, I thought I’d point you to my favorites. If you know of any terrific posts I’ve missed, please let me know!
The State of the Word
Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word presentation at WordCamp 2008 in San Francisco. Video (approx 47 minutes).
WP Super Cache 07 can expose you to duplicate content penalties
A bug in the WP Super Cache plugin affects every blog that uses it in “ON” or full “Super Cache” mode, and has URLs that end with the “/” (forward slash) character. If the plugin is on “half on” mode, you’ll be fine. Read Donncha‘s post if you want to know how to fix it.
Pimping your WordPress theme for humans
Read Rae Hoffman’s eight tips to pimp your WordPress theme; that is, make it more SEO friendly.
Most desired WordPress Hacks
This post focuses on 11 commonly requested theme hacks when developing WordPress sites.
How to easily make WordPress archives that rock
An archives page is an essential part of a blog, so if you don’t have one, you should consider creating one. If you don’t know how to, read this.
How to upgrade WordPress using subversion
A detailed explanation and how-to on upgrading WordPress using Subversion
Designing for WordPress
Chris Coyier offers a three-part series (including video tutorials) on creating a WordPress theme.
Create a WordPress theme from scratch
Another three part tutorial series, this time from Kailoon, covering: structuring, designing in Photoshop, slicing, coding into fully CSS based html, and finally WordPress implementation.
Author comment styling in WordPress
This step-by-step tutorial shows you how to edit the default WordPress theme to make author’s comments stand out from the rest.
Building a better blogroll
This tutorial shows you how to improve upon the concept of a blogroll by not just listing sites, but dynamically pulling recent headlines from them. The post walks you though the technologies, design, markup, CSS, and ends with fixing IE to ensure the thing works.
Widget best practices
A checklist of widget best practices from Stephan Spencer
WordPress Theme Releases
There were nearly 50 themes released for WordPress in August according to Ajay at Weblog Tools Collection. If you’re thinking about changing your blogs look, head on over. Or, just subscribe to their feed to stay up-to-date.
Clean up your backend
Michael Gray suggests 15 WordPress plugins to help you clean and maintain a secure and orderly backend.
30+ Plugins to make your WordPress blog more social
Whether you want your readers to bookmark your site across various services or get to know you better, this post by Sean Aune shows you where to start when it comes to selecting plugins for social media and WordPress.
8 easy SEO plugins for WordPress
Joost de Valk shows you which plugins to use if you want to increase your blogs performance in search engine rankings. According to Joost, some of the blogs he did this on had 50% more traffic from search engines within two weeks.
Theme Authenticity Checker
Ever wondered whether you’ve got malicious or unwanted code on your blog? This TAC plugin scans all of your theme files for advertisements or dangerous JavaScript inserted into legitimate themes by third party theme download sites.
WordPress Developer Assistant
Ever wondered where that action or filter hook gets called, or thought how great it would be if you could output a full listing of PHP gloabl variable values on each page so debugging would be easier? Then, this is for you. WordPress Developer Assistant is a toolkit that makes life as a WordPress developer easier.
Archives by Selected Categories
This plugin generates a list of posts separated by category (you can choose to display all, or just select categories). Most recent posts are listed first, and dates are listed beside the post.
Woopra WordPress plugin
A new WordPress Integration Plugin which brings Woopra statistics right into your WordPress dashboard.
UserAgent Spy WordPress plugin
UserAgent-Spy is a WordPress plugin which displays the user’s Operative System and Web browser in the comments section.
Broken links Remover wordpress plugin
Allows you to fix bad/broken links, both text links(anchor tags) and image links (img tags). It blocks the display of such links on your WordPress post/page, until you fix them.
Yoast Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are the links, usually above the title post, that look like “Home > Articles > WordPress SEO”. They allow your users to easily navigate your site and they allow search engines to determine the structure of your site more easily. If you’re not using it, you should be.
Twitter Tools 15b2
New beta version of Twitter Tools is ready for testing. Twitter Tools is a WordPress plugin that creates integration between your blog and your Twitter account.
According to Michael Gray, SEO and Social Media Consultant for Atlas Web Services, when it comes to link building, your first priority should be looking to get links from trusted, authoritative, and popular sites.
He likens it to high school “If the popular kids say nice thing about you, it’s better than the not so popular kids saying nice things about you. If the English teacher says you’re smart, it’s more important than the janitor saying the same thing.”
But, just how do you find these sites that you want links from? And how do you do you approach the link building process?
Directories are one of the core link building exercises every website should engage in according to Gray, and he recommends you begin with Yahoo, Best of the Web, and Business.com.
Additionally, look for directories that cover your niche, and then evaluate them for quality by looking at its statistics.
Good tools to use for analyzing directories are:
Then consider these questions:
The best way to get the attention (and links) from authoritative sites is to create content specifically targeted to them. For instance, Engadget has a competition every year for the best cake design.
“If I was a baker, or game maker, I’d be making cakes every year and submitting them,” Gray explains. You’ve got to think a little smarter.
By mining the back links of your competition for links from research sites, trade organizations, etc., you’ll get an idea of what the more authoritative sites are linking to.
Then, go to those sites and look for dead links. When you find a dead link, try to replicate or improve on the content, write your own article, publish it on the Web, and then let the author know about the broken link; of course, you can point out your new article at the same time.
Additionally, if you find an authoritative site that links to a piece of content that is related to your niche, why not recreate a similar article; one that improves on the original – perhaps with more detailed content – then let the author know about it.
TIP: Local sources; local governments, local resources, libraries are often overlooked opportunities
Additionally, consider using RSS Footer (WordPress plugin). It makes it easy to add a line of content to the beginning or the end of each post in your feed, and allows you to display a link back to your blog.
This post contains content from Michael Gray’s presentation during the Link Building Basics session at Search Engine Strategies San Jose, 2008.
Additionally, I had the opportunity of speaking with Michael about link building for Tech Talk Radio. You can listen to our chat by downloading episode 194.
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