WordPress is arguably today’s most popular blogging platform – for reasons that the most brilliant Web programmers and developers or novice bloggers and startup business marketers can appreciate. Actually, WordPress is popular for reasons that even search engine giant Google can appreciate. Matt Cutts – the well-known SEO guru and Webmaster behind Google (which, by the way, has Blogger as its own blogging platform) – even went so far as to praise WordPress, saying that: “WordPress takes care of 80 to 90 percent of (the mechanics of) Search Engine Optimization (SEO).” But we’re getting ahead of ourselves – let’s go into more detail about SEO later. For now, let’s go through the list of highlights of WordPress as a blogging platform. Getting Started The process of signing up for WordPress is simple and easy enough. The most awesome part? It’s free. WordPress is open-source software, which means that you don’t have to pay any license fees to use the core – Read the full article
Google, under fire these last several weeks for allowing webmasters, marketers, and spammers manipulate its search engine, recently made changes to the way it ranks search results. The move, announced and detailed in a blog post Thursday at the official Google blog, signified an effort by the company to push down low-quality websites and pages that appear on its search engine results pages (SERPs), while rewarding sites with original, high-quality content and information as well as “in-depth reports” and “thoughtful” analyses. “In the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries—and we wanted to let people know what’s going on,” wrote Amit Singhal, Google Fellow, and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer. “This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites, or sites that are just not very useful.” The change in ranking algorithms also supports – Read the full article
Now that Google Instant has aged a bit and search professionals have had the opportunity to test its effect on SEM campaigns, the general verdict seems to be that Instant has not had a dramatic effect on SEO. Like Google Caffeine earlier this year, Instant seems to be aimed at improving user experience rather than search results. Indeed, in spite of all the SEO anxiety accompanying each change made by Google, the fact remains that their recent upgrades have focused largely on three main factors: * Greater personalization * Better targeting * Increased efficiency And while these are all things that professional SEOs are already optimizing for, now may be a good time to look beyond search results and consider how Google’s changes are affecting search behavior. With the release of Google Instant, it seems clearer than ever that Google wants to make search as easy and as intuitive as possible – and the way it’s doing that is by – Read the full article
At the recent PubCon in Las Vegas, Matt Cutts from Google delivered a presentation on what to expect in the year 2010. One of the bullet points discussed how, over at Google, there has been strong lobbying to introduce a new ranking factor into the algorithm: site speed. Soon, Cutt said, site or page speed may be a factor in the organic ranking algorithm. It can happen as early as next year, although we believe Google has been testing this as part of the algorithm for some time. This is a new insight to how Google determines page rankings. How fast a page loads is already a factor in the AdWords quality score; making it matter in the organic ranking algorithm should reward sites with fast load times, and which use fast servers. Right now there are over 200 ranking factors in the algorithm, each of them weighted differently. And while adding page loading speed to the mix won’t dramatically – Read the full article
YouTube recently introduced new features that give generations of video content creators new ways to connect with billions of viewers every day. The first is YouTube Direct, an open-source tool that lets users embed the upload functionality of YouTube directly into their own sites. YouTube Direct is designed to bridge closer connections between individual users and news, media, and business organizations. Image via Now Public “Almost any event that takes place today has a chance of being captured on camera,” a statement reads on the Google blog. “As YouTube has become a global platform for sharing the news, media organizations have been looking for a good way to connect directly with citizen reporters on our site….” That’s why YouTube direct lets users upload videos directly into the application, such that others can request, review, verify, and rebroadcast their clips. Of course, these videos stay live on YouTube, so that users can reach other viewers while getting a chance for broader – Read the full article
Web stuffMatt Cutts is a head of spam prevention at Google. He has a blog that keeps me up to date with tools for search optimization (SEO and SEM) and whats up at Google. He also has some videos on you tube, that are great for understanding certain elements on search.Google webmaster and official Google blog are great additions to the list.Searchengineland is all about the internet business to hear what is going on around town as well as best accepted practices and constant updates to current search engine strategies for SEO and SEM.Google has the official blog and the webmasters blog. EnvironmentA fresh squeeze is a great blog about being Green in chicago. Only a few posts a month. Green Bean is about green buildings in Chicago.Tree Hugger is a great blog about the environment. They usually have 20 posts a day.
WordPress was first released in 2003 by Matt Mullenweg. Yes, it’s that long ago. Before Facebook even happened. Since then, it has grown to host, as of late last year, around 15 percent of the world’s top 1 million websites. It has also been downloaded over 65 million times! But if you’re still looking for reasons that will convince you to build – or redevelop – your website using the WordPress platform, we won’t shy away from giving you several: WordPress isn’t just for blogging. It’s flexible enough to power your business website, your e-Commerce site, your product and services page, your social networks (check out our recent post on BuddyPress), your anything. It’s simple and pretty easy to use. If you know how to use Microsoft Word, you’ll know how to use WordPress, which has its own WYSIWYG editor to aid users who prefer not to use codes (like HTML). Training a client on WordPress site administration is also – Read the full article
Small businesses have a daunting task as they compete with larger companies that boast more resources and staff. How can a small business compete for a share of the search engine market with so much stacked against them? Here are some tips on creating an SEO strategy for your small business: Learn from the Competition Promodo’s SEO specialist Anna Moseva suggests starting your small business SEO strategy with a thorough analysis of the competition. You’re probably familiar with piecing together keywords on Google in order to figure out what people are searching for and what’s already out there by way of content, but Moseva advises that you take the top 20 results in Google and analyze their Alexa Rank with the SEO Quake plugin for Firefox. Once you know the top sites among your competition, you can analyze the kind of traffic they generate and which keywords and adwords are linked to their sites at SEM Rush. This technique will – Read the full article
