SEO in The Desert

By Richard V. Burckhardt

It’s been a while since my last post about WordPress plugins, so it’s about time to update some of the top ones on my current list. I haven’t had a chance to test all of these on WordPress 3.0, but all work fine in 2.92.

WPing.fm - This plugin, as you can probably figure out, works with Ping.fm. Every time you edit or publish a post (you decide to do one or both) it is sent to Ping.fm, which sends it to Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, MySpace and a ton of other social sites (again, you set all of these up). Great for pushing out new posts across the social world.

Raw HTML in WordPress - For those of us blogging about SEO, web design or development, this plugin solves a world of headache. Since WordPress won’t allow you to display raw code in a post without totally borking it, this plugin wraps itself around the HTML so that it displays as, well, raw code in your post. For example, take a look at my post Top 10 SEO Must Do Tips and you’ll see this plugin in action in tip #4.

Page Links To - This one is a must for any blogger’s toolkit. This plugin allows you to redirect a page or post somewhere else. For instance, let’s say you want to create a link to an external site in your main menu where your pages are listed. You can create the page, name it what you like and have this plugin redirect the link to that off site location. The link in your main menu will have whatever text you set up for the page, but when clicked on, the link will 301 redirect to the URL of your choice rather than open the page (a 302 redirect is available, too, for those rare times it is needed).
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By Lena Morrish and Dima Nikolayenko

With all the buzz about social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace, many people are wondering whether emails and email marketing will be a thing of the past. This is highly doubtful since emails are still one of the most used forms of communication for both individuals and for businesses, which still leaves email marketing pretty high on the list of market strategies of today. The question is not whether you should use either emails or social network sites for marketing, but rather one of how to make websites and all of their tools work with social networking sites.

Whenever you are researching how to start and run an Internet business, you should include research into integrating your business with social network sites. There are many ways these sites enhance your email marketing campaign and drive traffic directly to your site. read more »

By Richard V. Burckhardt

Social news sites are about content for the reader, not self promotion.

This is part two of my series on Optimization for Social Media Integration, this time covering social media news.

The top two social media news sites today are Digg and StumbleUpon, so I’ll concentrate on these. However, Propeller.com, Reddit.com, Mixx.com (do-follow links) and Buzz.Yahoo.com are all worth a look.

The main thing to remember about social media sites is that the news on these sites is chosen by the users, making popular items even more so because bloggers look at this content for cool, link-worthy stuff and then re-post or write about them. The stories get great visibility and natural editorial links. In addition, the content is targeted, making it great for boosting your ranking and authority.

In brief: Digg utilizes outside voting, requires LOTS of votes for an item to go popular, generating less illegitimate content. StumbleUpon features toolbar voting, send page to a friend ability (which pretty much forces a view) and even includes the option to buy more views at a whopping 5 cents each.

Here are some general guidelines to make your social news more popular and to provide those nice surges of traffic to your blog or site. These spikes can be fantastic! read more »