90% of WordPress blogs he sees are spam. But for those who aren’t spammers and want to do better in Google….

“WordPress automatically solves a ton of SEO issues…WordPress takes care of 80-90% of SEO.”

Still, he recommends a few extra plugins:

• Akismet — reduce spam comments
• Cookies for Comments — reduce spam comments
• FeedBurner FeedSmith
• WP Super Cache — improve performance

“We crawl roughly in order of PageRank…higher ranked sites get crawled faster and deeper.”

“What is PageRank? The number and importance of links pointing to you.” But “avoid BO (backlink obsession). You want to be relevant and reputable.”

Relevant is what you say on your page/site.

Reputable is what others say (link) about you.

Be relevant: Blog about what you love. Blog about what you’re really good at doing (or, I suppose, what you want to be really good at). Blog in your own voice. Write often, write every day.

Think about the keywords that users will type. Include them naturally in your posts

Avoid jargon mismatch. Be sure to include language that non-expert users may use to find information. Include relevant information for beginners on the front page. Try Google Keyword Tool to understand what people are searching for.

Recommends /%postname%/ permalinks. And use slightly different terms in the permalink and title. Other URL tips:

• Use categories that are also good keywords
• keywords in URL paths
  • dashes best
  • next best is underscores
  • no spaces is worst
• Should I change old URLs? No.

Ferris’s law: don’t do it if it’s not fun.

Gaining Reputation?

• Be interesting
• Update often
• Apply Katamari Philosophy — start small, build up, don’t over reach. Start in a niche, then “ambigining” that niche.

Build an audience:

• Provide a useful service
• Do original research or reporting
• Give great information
• Creative niche
• Write some code
• Live blogging
• Make lists
• Create controversy
• Meet folks on Twitter, Facebook, etc
• Make a video

Consider using:

• Google website optimizer (a/b testing)
• <!– google_ad_section_start –> and <!– google_ad_section_end –>

In your content:

• Identify and leverage “evergreen” content
• Show related content
• Avoid shortcuts and scams
• Avoid paid posts

Keep your WordPress updated! Don’t let spammers hack your site.

LifeHacker: productivity porn, read about it more than you do it

Above is Peter Linsley speaking about Google Image Search at SMX West in February, 2009.

Meanwhile, Stefan Juhl suggests some JavaScript to break your site out of the image search result pages:

Many Google image search users are quickly clicking on to the direct image URL and thereby not seeing the page with the image. Also, it seems that many of the users don’t hesitate to click back to the image SERPs when they don’t see the image “above the fold” – probably because of Google image search framing the page with the picture and thus making it almost too easy to do so.

<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript">
if (top.location != self.location) top.location.replace(self.location);
</script>

After adding this to the one of my websites I saw a quite big increase in pageviews. It turned out that the visitors happily continued to browse around the website.

It turns out that there are a lot of differences between Google’s regular web crawler and the Google News crawler. And though very few of us will find our content included in Google News, it still seems like a good idea to make our content conform to their technical requirements. Here are a few of them:

• In order for our crawler to correctly gather your content, each article needs to link to a page dedicated solely to that article. We’re unable to index articles from news sections which consist of one long page rather than a series of links that lead to articles on individual pages.
• If your articles are located in a drop down box, we won’t be able to crawl them. Google News is unable to crawl articles only accessible through a drop down menu.
• Google News does not recognize or follow Flash, graphic/image or JavaScript links which link to articles. Our automated crawler is best able to crawl plain text HTML links.
• Google News doesn’t crawl articles in PDF format, although this content is included on Google Web Search. Our automated crawler is currently best able to crawl plain text HTML sites.

Anything that can help stop this kind of madness is worth a good long look (yes, I don’t like the DiggBar any more than John Gruber, despite Digg’s assurances it’s safe), so I’ve had rev=“canonical” on my mind (yes, that’s rev, not rel). Chris Shiflett thinks it will save the internet, but Matt Cutts suggests what I’ve always thought: why not resolve short URLs to their long form and store/display them that way?

Who cares if there are n+1 different services providing short URLs point to the same resource? If we build our applications to resolve the short ones until they stop returning 301s or 302s (or a few other 300-series codes), then we’ll always have something that’s pretty close to the canonical URL. The short URL doesn’t need to be saved or indexed, it needs only be used in the transmission of the data (and then really only in the context of Twitter).

Digg’s attempts to put a frame over everybody else’s website, however, is evil. It it’s not only violates the user’s URL bar (and the publisher’s URL), it breaks any rational attempt to identify the canonical URL for the destination. They’ll tell you it’s okay, they use rel=“canonical”, but rel=“canonical” doesn’t work cross-domain, so that doesn’t mean much. And all this framing stuff makes me wonder why anybody would think Digg (or any other site whose business is based on monetizing the work of others) would respect a site’s rev=“canonical” preferences.

Simple fact of The Google Economy: people can’t find stuff if it’s not indexed in major search engines. A slow site might not seem as bad as blocking the crawlers that search engines use to index your content, but it does seriously affect the depth and frequency of crawling they do.

The above is Google’s report of their crawling activity on a site I’ve been trying to optimize server performance on. Comparing the response time in the bottom graph to the number of pages crawled at the top offers some clear evidence of the relationship between the two. Most people seem to think server performance only matters if your site gets Dugg (old people say Slashdotted). Now even I’ll think again.

Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability sold out at Amazon today on the first day of release. There’s a reason: it’s good.

Morville’s work is the most appropriate follow-on to the usability concepts so well promoted by Steven Krug in his Don’t Make Me Think and Jakob Nielsen in Designing Web Usability. Findability, Morville argues, is a necessary component in the success and propagation of an idea or detail or fact. Business and non-profits alike will benefit from understanding the value of findability.

I noted this gem about why non-profits need to pay attention to their search engine placement and web traffic previously, but it’s worth noting again:

At [the National Cancer Institute], the [web development] team had to look beyond the narrow goals of web site design, to see their role in advancing the broader mission of disseminating cancer information to people in need.

The National Cancer Institute, it turns out, was poorly ranked in many relevant searches. Though it may seem obvious now, it doesn’t matter how authoritative their information is, it has no value until it’s found. Nach: findability.

My copy has has notes scribbled in the margin and a bunch of dog-eared pages marking things I need to revisit. No, you can’t borrow it when I’m done with it, go get your own.

tags: ambient, ambient findability, designing web usability, don’t make me think, find, findability, finding, global marketplace, google, google economy, googling, hidden web, jakob nielsen, new books, peter morville, search, search engines, search results, seo, steve krug, steven krug, the effects of findability, the hidden web, the search, top rank, usability, web usability

I’m only just getting into Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability, but I’m eating it up. In trying to prep the reader to understand his thesis — summed up on the front cover as “what we find changes who we become” — Morville relates his difficulty in finding authoritative, non-marketing information about his daughter’s newly diagnosed peanut allergy:

I can tell you from personal experience that Google does not perform well when it comes to health. [...] Google sent me to specialized sites such as peanutallergy.com, a shallow and grossly commercial web site pushing favored brands of nut free chocolate and soynut butter. Yahoo! and MSN didn’t perform any better. I did eventually find what I needed, but only by drawing on my advanced searching skills and familiarity with authoritive sources like the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control. If I weren’t a librarian who lives on the Web, I would have failed to find the right answers.

But don’t mistake Morville. He’s not blaming the search engines, and he’s certainly not blaming himself, for failing to find the information he needed. He’s blaming the people and organizations responsible for collecting, gathering, producing, and archiving this information.

A few pages later, he talks about some consulting he did with the National Cancer Institute. It turns out that the organization’s cancer.gov web site got top rank for a search on “cancer,” but fell off the front page when Googling specific cancers like “prostate cancer” or “mesothelioma.” Anybody who understands the Long Tail probably already suspects that searches for “cancer” are hugely outnumbered by the sum of all the searches for specific cancers, and Morville spends considerable time on that. The real question, however, is why did the cancer.gov folks miss this point? The problem is that very few people understand “findability.”

Because, like so many other design teams, they viewed their responsibility from a top-down perspective. Can users find what they need from the home page? It’s an important question, but it ignores the fact that many users don’t start from the home page. Powerful search tools, directories, blogs, social bookmarks, and syndication services are moving deep linking and content sampling from the exception to the rule.

At NCI, the team had to look beyond the narrow goals of web site design, to see their role in advancing the broader mission of disseminating cancer information to people in need.

From where I sit, in a library, that means us too. As stewards of knowledge, it is our responsibility to make sure we catalog it in ways that optimize its availability and findability on the web. That means understanding the Google Economy and taking advantage of it.

If you’ve read this far, you definitely need to go order the book.

tags: ambient findability, find, findability, google, google economy, googling, hidden web, long tail, non-commercial information, peter morville, search, search engines, search results, seo, the hidden web, top rank

I don’t want to admit to being interested in marketing, but I am. Here’s a few links…

Blogs:

• Church of the Customer
   
• Seth Godin
   
• Aaron Wall’s SEO Book.com
   
• Threadwatch.org
   

Randomness:

• Writing, Briefly
   
• Google’s search result quality evaluation guidelines
   
• definition of the Google Economy at Wikipedia
   
• The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR
   

tags: building buzz, internet marketing, marketing, search engine optimization, seo, web marketing, google economy, googleeconomy