podcast_cr If you ask any of my friends I am passionate about blogging. I even have a vanity license plate that says “Blogger.” So, I admit I am a bit of a fanatic.

However, being the fanatic blogger that I am, I also get the priviledge of being annoyed by certain elements of blogging that probably doesn’t bother the majority of the blogosphere.

The BUM Award Back in the day, companies would come up with awards and then give these awards to certain websites. The whole purpose of the award was to stroke the ego of the website and to build links to the company giving the award out. I have decided that if I were to create my own imaginary award I would call it: Blogger Unknown to Many or BUM.

Not just anyone would receive my BUM award—for there certainly are many unknown bloggers out there. No the BUM Award would have to go to the blogger who: 1) actually really was an expert in his/her field (not just a self-proclaimed guru) 2) provided stellar content, amazing value, and knew what he/she was talking about, and 3) no matter how good their blog was or how knowledgeable they really were—the vast majority would still have no idea who they were.

The blogger I would give the BUM Award to this year is Joost de Valk, who blogs over at yoast.com. If you are a die hard blogger (particularly on wordpress) than you probably think I am crazy to believe that Joost deserves the BUM Award. A lot of the well known wordpress plugins are either developed by Joost or maintained by him. He also is one of the most advanced Internet marketers out there. His combination of programming knowledge and SEO is far superior than most bloggers on the web.

blog-pitch It has been an interesting journey trying to find the purpose of MyMarketer.net. If you look at some of my earlier posts, you will see that I am all over the board. Mixing personal, with hobby, and professional. It actually took me a year to really find my voice with mymarketer—and then I sold it.

I thought it would be easy to pick up my voice with another domain, but I was wrong. First, it took me sometime, and several domains, before I could find a place to call home. However, it wasn’t mymarketer.net. I worked hard to find the unique voice for that domain.

Finally, when I found it, the company that had purchased MyMarketer decided to give it back to me—and I started the process all over again.

03-17-09_wordpress-theme I help develop a lot of custom wordpress themes (you can see some of my work in the gallery). One common mistake that a lot of developers make is having images in post be styled according to wordpress standards. Case in point, the theme for MyMarketer is a free theme. When I tried on the theme all the images in my posts no longer held their formatting.

I came across this problem with one of my freelance projects and asked the developer of the project his thoughts. Here is the email he sent:

Actually we need to add extra CSS classes for customized themes, so the final CSS rules would be:

trash-can So, almost a month after Yoast.com’s plugin contest I finally heard a response concerning my plugin submission—no. Actually, it wasn’t quite so direct, below is the response:

“Hi Guys,
apologies for the delay! Joost and I decided to make the eventual winner work harder for their prize, so we asked a couple of the entrants to go back and take their ideas to the point where we can release them. If we haven’t contacted you yet, I’m afraid you are out of the running, but many thanks for having a go! We expect to announce the winner and launch the plugin/theme in a week or so.”

I didn’t hear from them, so I am out. I do understand not winning the contest, WordTravel was a very basic plugin. However, I do have plans on expanding WordTravel to a more versatile plugin, so keep a watch for some upcoming releases. I wish Yoast.com’s plugin finalists the best in the refining of their plugin/theme! ~Paul W.

wordpress-plugin DOWNLOAD WORDTRAVEL
Compatible with WordPress 2.5 through 2.7.1

WordTravel was built with the sunPress plugin in mind. The sunPress plugin helps manage holiday websites by utilizing sunshine.co.uk’s travel affiliate program. Basically, by combining both plugins you have a powerful holiday website that also has the ability to highlight special deals like no other travel website on the web.

Even though WordTravel was built as a supporting plugin for sunPress you can also use WordTravel independently from all plugins for your own purposes. We wanted WordTravel to be a nice compliment for any travel blog or site.

WordTravel One of my favorite bloggers, Joost de Valk, launched a wordpress plugin contest for Sunshine.co.uk, a travel booking company. The prize he is offering is a MacBook Air, and I must admit that I have been thinking of converting to a Mac for sometime (sorry Bill, I don’t want to be a PC).

The plugin I finally decided to create focuses on the marketing side of travel. Why do you go to a travel/vacation website in the first place? Most of my friends I asked shared that they were looking for either a good deal or a particular vacation package.

The plugin I devised (with the programming help of Milan Kaneria) gives a traveling website the power to focus on their most important call to actions with their users. Whether it is cheap airfare, a vacation package, or just information about different locations around the world, this plugin offers a visual but unobtrusive solution to keeping in touch with the user while on the site.

identy-theft I still have several blogs that are on WordPress 2.6.1. Recently, I received the following notification from my host:

“Please note that versions of WordPress older than 2.6.5 have known vulnerabilities and can be potentially exploited to deface your website (or any under the same user account), send spam, run phishing scams, or similarly detrimental (and possibly illegal) activity.”

“The current version of WordPress (available at wordpress.org or via DreamHost’s One-Click feature) is 2.7. It is important that you update WordPress as soon as possible to secure your sites. If these are old or unused copies of WordPress, please remove them from the server or move them out of the active domain directory.”

spam When I first started blogging my friend Janet helped setup my blog. One thing she did for me was to create my wordpress comment blacklist. I really appreciated this, because it is never fun to have to write all the filthy words that you can think of. However, over the years, I had to add to her list and create more words that she didn’t think of. I also added spam websites that were found on other comment blacklists.

All this effort has given me a list of 300+ words and sites that don’t ever make it to my blog. I thought I would pass on Janet’s kindness and offer you my list to download. One thing to know about WordPress’s Comment Blacklist is that it will match your blacklisted words inside other words. So, if you put “sex” on the list it will also block “sexy.” Since, I never want to discourage my readers in expressing how sexy they find my writing I don’t add that word to my black list =).

If you have any words to add to the list let me know. Happy spam fighting. ~Paul

Today I was asked to provide a quick tutorial on how to incorporate SEO Copywriting into a blog post. It’s amazing the journey I have traveled just in the last year on this subject. A year ago, I would have heavily emphasized on keyword density, LSI, and pyramid writing. Now, I am a firm believer that SEO Copywriting follows more the traditional route of good writing. If you have a solid article that is centered on a couple of your keywords you will be fine. However, there are a couple more tips that will help you do better in the search engines. There are definitely more than just these seven, but these tips are the top ones on my list. Hope they help. ~Paul W.

7 SEO Writing Tips

1. Post Title: Just like your Page Title Tag your Post Title is very important. Have your title compelling but be sure to add your the keyword you are focusing on into the title. If your theme is optimized correctly with H1 and H2 tags than you will see these posts pick up traffic in the search engines quicker. Interesting note, I have found that the closer I have my keyword to the beginning of the title the better I do in the search engines.
2. Post Permalink: Underneath the post title is where you can edit the actual URL of the post, also know as the permalink. I personally edit the url to only have the keyword I am focusing on. This technique works really well in Yahoo. With Yahoo exact keyword matches still help you move up in the rankings (I’ve seen people snag top 10 rankings doing this method). So, if your keyword is “Physician Jobs,” and your title is “Physician Jobs – The Truth Behind The Stethoscope!” you would want your url to be: http://blogname.com/physician-jobs. Important Note: Be sure that your overall blog permalink settings are correct. Go to Settings—>Permalinks and select any of the settings that show “sample post” in the example. I personally use the custom setting and just put in /%postname%/, but having the date or month before this setting is just fine.
3. Content: Within your content you want to sprinkle the keywords you are focusing on throughout the text. There really is no magic number to how often you should use the keyword. A good rule thumb is to have the keyword in every paragraph. If that is not possible, don’t sweat it. However, do try to have the keyword at least four to five times in a 500 word post (roughly one keyword per 100 words).
4. Anchored Text: The visible, hyperlinked text on a web page is considered anchored text. It’s often underlined and/or a different color than the rest of the copy. It’s important to have your keyword at least once as an anchored text in your post. It doesn’t hurt to have multiple anchored texts of the same keyword. However, make sure that the anchored text doesn’t point to the same web page.
5. Tags: Tags refer to micro-categories for the blog. This is a great place to add misspellings and other variations of the keyword. I personally haven’t dived into tagging but I have friends who have seen great success making sure they tag every post (learn more about my beliefs on tags).
6. Categories: I mainly use the categories for focusing on the overall keywords of the blog. Categories offer the search bots a plethora of keyword rich content centered around specific categories. You can always add categories that are not focused around your keywords but always be sure to add your post to at least one keyword category.
7. Page Title & Post Description : I am a big fan of the HeadSpace plugin. Once you install this plugin you find under the visual editor in each of your posts a field called HeadSpace, which has a page title and description. The Page Title should just have your keyword; whereas, I use the Description by copying two two sentences from my post (that have my keyword) and inserting in. These are incredibly important since this is what you will find in the search engines. Note: A lot of other bloggers use the All In One SEO plugin. This will work as well. I just started with HeadSpace and have never had reason to leave.

Related Posts:

• How To Keep Your Blog Alive
• The gFTC (Google Federal Trade Commission)
• The Gift of My Comment Blacklist
• How I Make Money Blogging
• Where My Blogging is Going