PureBlogging

Lisa Barone from BruceClay.com gives a recap of the SEO advice provided by Matt Cutts at the Wordpress Wordcamp this past weekend. There are some interesting tidbits included.

Here are the highlights:

• Don’t put your blog at the root page of your domain in case you decide to do something other than a blog in the future.
• Name your directory “blog” not “Wordpress”.
• Use category names that are good keywords.
• Use the SEO Title plug-in to make your keywords more prevalent.
• If you want to get into Google News, you’ll need to add multiple authors.
• The file extension used in your URL won’t affect your rankings, unless it’s “exe”.
• Use Alt attributes when adding images, videos, audio files, etc. to your posts.
• Google does not care about the number of slashes in a URL… so URLs like blog/year/month/day/title are not a problem.
• Underscores and hyphens both will be treated as word separators by Google.

There are other SEO tips for bloggers included so I recommend you check out the entire article.

Aaron Wall, the owner of Threadwatch, has announced that the blog/forum will be closing down on Friday. He cites a number of reasons for the decision: edgy news, gossip, decentralization, spam, and having other priorities in life.

Threadwatch has been a mainstay of the SEO/SEM industry for nearly three years and today’s news was quite a surprise to the community, many of whom are asking Aaron to reconsider. I too am sad to see it go because it was a good place to get the latest news and keep up with some of the more controversial topics of the industry.

Best of luck to Aaron and the other Threadwatch moderators.

Rank Checker is a new SEO tool from SEOmoz that can help you determine exactly where your blog or site ranks for your chosen keywords.

I’ve just put the finishing touches on something new that I think is a killer addition to our current arsenal of SEO tools. It’s basically a tricked-out version of the “Where’s it Rank?” PHP script that I offered up for free (source code) several months back. The tool is pretty straightforward: you enter a URL, keyword, and what search engine you’d like to search and it will automatically check your rankings and report back.

Some of the features include:

• Supports Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask
• Allows you to check rankings on all the foreign TLDs on the major SEs (google.co.uk, de.yahoo.com, etc)
• You can either be forwarded to the actual SERPs or simply have the tool report back the rankings it found
• Rankings can be added to your rankings archives
• Ranking archives can be viewed, sorted, and downloaded as a CSV file
• When rankings are found it reports whether they have increased or dropped (when compared to previous rankings) and this change is stored in your archives

Rank Checker is free to use but you will need to create a free SEOmoz account if you don’t already have one. Also, the free version is limited to 5 keywords a day.

Every blogger would like to get more search engine traffic so here’s a list of WordPress plugins that can help make your blog more search engine friendly.

1. Google Sitemap Generator - Generates a compliant XML sitemap for your WordPress blog that is supported by Google, YAHOO, Ask, and MSN Search.
2. Permalink Redirect - Helps you avoid duplicate content penalties by making sure that pages and posts are always accessed via the permalink. If a requested URI is different from the permalink, a 301 permanent redirect will be issued.
3. SEO Title Tag - This plugin makes it easy to optimize every title tag for every post, static page, or category page on your blog.
4. Dup Prevent - Helps you avoid being penalized by Google for duplicate content by inserting NOINDEX meta tag in pages that might trigger Google’s duplicate content filters. (Update: It seems that WPSEO.com is having technical difficulties but you can also try All in One SEO Pack which offers the same functionality plus additional features.)
5. WWW Redirect - This plugin allows users to have more control over the URI in which search engines and users access their blog. By doing so, you’re giving search engines and users a consistent link for accessing your content.

What are some of your favorite WordPress SEO plugins?

This post was written to take part in Darren’s latest Group Writing Project.

As bloggers (or any webmaster for that matter) it is important to be as up-to–date as possible on the factors that search engines use to determine search results. SEOMoz released an extremely detailed document entitled “Search Engine Ranking Factors V2” that outlines the opinions of 37 SEO experts regarding how Google’s algorithm works.

While they do not try to reverse-engineer Google’s algorithm, it is still a valuable look at what factors the experts believe can help and hurt your SEO efforts. Below I have listed the top 5 positive and negative factors as determined by the study:

Top 5 Positive Factors

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Global Link Popularity of Site
3. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
4. Link Popularity within the Site
5. Age of Site

Top 5 Negative Factors

1. Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
2. Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content on the Index
3. External Links to Low Quality/Spam sites
4. Participation in Link Schemes or Actively Selling Links
5. Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages

Of course this short list doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the mountain of information provided. Be sure to check out the entire document at SEOMoz.

Need some SEO advice? SEO Clinic is a free SEO review service where Search Engine Journal editors, as well as, guest SEO experts provide website owners with tips on link building, site navigation, usability, copywriting, social media optimization and other techniques designed to improve search engine rankings.

Be sure to check out the SEO Clinic review of TechSmith to get an idea of how the process works and the quality of the information provided.

If you would like to participate, submit your info and maybe they will choose your site.