While I do have some issues with Wordpress, it is one of my favorite CMS tools, because it’s easy to use, manage, and customize. In this post I’m going to give you a bit of insight into how I manage a Wordpress website.I’m going to assume you have already chosen the topic for your website. If you haven’t, you might want to check out this post from SEOMoz to help you. While most people use Wordpress as a blogging tool, I prefer to use it as a CMS for magazine or newspaper style site. Why Wordpress and not another CMS? It’s easier to administer, easier to get writers to upload and format their own content, and it has RSS and other social tools built in or that can be integrated very easily with plugins.

Keyword Research – You’ll need to do your keyword research. Decide what’s important and divide your content into different categories: evergreen content, primary content, secondary content, head & tail content, current events, and possibly even linkbait/social media content.

Evergreen Content – Some people call it evergreen content, some call it flagship content. Whatever you want to call it, this is the best content your website will have and should be written by your best writer. This will also probably be the most expensive content to produce, so you’ll have to do it in stages. Every time I put a piece of evergreen content up, I use  a plugin like crosslinker to automatically create internal links for specific words. Sure I could create the links manually, but crosslinker saves me time and picks up every instance in the past and any in the future. Little steps like this can reduce your maintenance.

Primary and Secondary Content – Look at your keywords and try to prioritize this content in order of importance. This will help you schedule the content production out over the next few months/years. Sometime I’ll use crosslinker for these posts but sometimes I won’t. It’s a case by case decision.

Head & Tail Content – I’m sure there’s another name for this but that’s what I call it. Let’s say I want to create an article titled “Best Family Friendly Restaurants in New York City.” In that article, chances are good that I’m going to have some editorial content to open and close the article, but the middle will have a brief description highlighting individual restaurants and links to those restaurants. But what if, instead of  linking to the individual restaurants, I linked to another internal page on my website with a more detailed review of the restaurant? If I wrote each of the individual restaurants (tail pieces) first, then writing the head would be a lot easier. Also if I gave the “head” article a social/linkbait feel it can increase the number of page views, since most social media articles tend to be hit and run type of traffic. As a result, this tactic gets me more bang for my buck.

Current Events – Having an editorial calendar is really a must IMHO. You can keep track of events that affect everyone like national holidays, but you should also include specific things to your vertical, like the Daytona 500 for your racing website. You can also branch out and look for other non traditional tie-ins (maybe a celebrity in your field is a contestant on Dancing With the Stars this year). By knowing what is coming and when, you aren’t living on the edge.

Social Media and Linkbait – While this is a lot more competitive than it was in the past, IMHO it’s still a no-brainer. It’s the most cost effective way of driving links, traffic, and sending social signals that people are visiting your website to search engines like Google. You need to work linkbait into your content creation schedule. Use situations like current events and head and tail creation wherever possible. If your industry can support it, you can create it as often as once every 1-2 weeks. At the other end of the spectrum once every 2-3 months is the longest I’d let it go. Some websites like Weburbanist go with 100% linkbait. It’s important to find the right time frame that works for you.

Schedule Content Creation – Now that you have an idea of what content you need and the order of priority,  if you need any of it on specific dates, you can start sending content out to your writers. I’ve had great results with the ProBlogger Job Board in the past. I like to send out a month’s worth of requests at a time. I also like to use a plugin like WP Status Notifier to send an email to myself or anybody else involved in the final review process (such as an editor) whenever a new post is uploaded and moved from “draft” status to “pending” status.

Scheduled Posts – If you’ve scheduled your content creation, once the article posts are ready it’s easy to schedule them in advance. This is another really important time saver and a way to cut down maintenance on your website. I use a plugin called future calendar, which puts a calendar on my post page and color codes the days that have posts scheduled. I like to keep things scheduled 2-8 weeks in advance. If you travel a lot like I do or just don’t like living on the edge this makes it much easier to sleep at night. You wont be able to do this 100% of the time as there are news/current events items that will have to be posted live/realtime, but otherwise it’s really helpful.

Dashboard Tools – I have a few plugins I use on the dashboard that help me keep and handle on things. Dashboard Scheduled Posts shows me a list of the next scheduled posts. Dashboard Pending Review shows me posts that are pending review. I’ll line up scheduled posts, pending review, and recent drafts one on top of the other on the dashboard, it gives me a quick glance of the editorial status of the website.

Comments – I’m not a big fan of comments, but other people feel they help build community. I see them as a maintenance point. The choice is up to you.

Sitemaps, Spiders and Crawling – Providing a clean and easy crawling path is one of the hallmarks of a site that is SEO friendly. The Dagon Sitemap generator automatically creates an HTML sitemap for your site and updates it every time you add a page or post (it’s all about reducing maintenance). Google XML sitemaps generates an XML sitemap and pings all of the services every time you add a post page (working towards zero maintenance again). If you want to track spiders crawling, spider tracker is helpful, but I wouldn’t leave it on all the time. Two other plugins that can help with crawling are wordpress breadcrumbs and robots meta plugin, both from Joost de Valk. If you haven’t already I highly reccomend reading his SEO for wordpress guide and subscribing to his newsletter. Both are excellent.

Errors and Links – Any site that has been around for more than few months will likely have things that moved and/or throw errors. The redirection plugin will let you set up redirects and also give you a 404 report, and set up redirections in one spot. I also use the broken link checker plugin to identify outgoing links  that don’t work anymore. I can edit the link or just remove it.

Utilities and Tools – Here are a few miscellaneous tools I use. Insights plugin lets you do searches and create links from the post page without opening a second tab. Optimize DB helps clean up your Wordpress database. Photo Dropper searches flickr for creative commons photos inserts and links them quickly and easily from your edit post page. WP Email and WP Print adds email a friend and printer friendly pages utilities to your website.

Logo – One of the easiest things you can do to make your website is give it a professional logo. Patrick Winfield of 10e20 created the logo on this website, and I love it. I’ve also used Prizelogos.com in the past and been very happy with the results. If you are on a tight budget GotLogos.com is another option. They charge $25-$100 depending on your needs, but they can be a bit hit or miss though. I’d recommend trying to get a square element somehow that you can use for a favicon and social media icon. It’s all about the power of branding.

Design – Having a clean, professional-looking design can go a long way toward making your website look more authoritative and trustworthy. I’m a huge fan of using Thesis as a starting point (read the full thesis review for more info). Thesis is a framework but it also has a lot of design elements built in. Also by building up a library of hooks and thesis customizations, you can leverage your work for future projects.

Backups – Having an automated backup solution is key. My favorite plugin is wp db backup. It can be used for on demand backups or scheduled backups that get sent to an email. The other thing you’ll want to backup is your theme and uploads file. I’ve seen plugins that do both automatically but once your blog gets big or the directories get large the plugin fails, so set yourself a once a month reminder and you’re all set.

That’s my big plan for how I set up and keep a wordpress website running. If you’re running wordpress you might also want to check out How to Speed up Wordpress, Wordpress SEO Plugins, or some of my other wordpress posts for some more tips.

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

How I Create and Manage A Wordpress Website

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If you’re like most people at the beginning of each year, you’ll review your business, look at where you are spending money, and look for things to cut or ways to save a few bucks. That’s why I’m going to bring up something we all have to deal with: web hosting. In all the time I’ve been building websites, I’ve probably tried about 50 hosting companies. To be honest most of them sucked–a lot. Two that I liked were Westhost and Pair; however, when those hosting companies experienced the “digg effect,” the hosting buckled. In the worst circumstances, the hosting company shut the site down, which kinda defeated the purpose. So about a year and half ago, at the recommendation of Michelle Robbins, I switched to TigerTech, and it’s been one of the best decisions I ever made. After moving my first website to TigerTech and having a social story “hit,” I got an email from TigerTech. It said they had  noticed the server was under heavy load and offered some performance based changes they thought I  could make to improve things.  They even offered to do it for me (with authorization, of course). When was the last time your current hosting company did something like that?

Here’s the best part: for the first few days of 2010, they are offering a discounted price of $20.10 for your first year of hosting. That’s right. $20.10 for a full year. If you don’t like them you can move out. But the offer is only valid through January 15th at 5pm pacific time. You can see the full offer on TigerTech’s website.

Can TigerTech stand up to the load? Well, they run Search Engine Land, Sphinn, Matt Cutts blog, and this blog, and I’ve never had a problem with their hosting. Currently they only offer shared hosting. I wish they had a reseller hosting option and a dedicated server option as well. Hopefully they’ll read this post and consider it in the future.

Disclosure: This is not a sponsored post; however, it does contain affiliate links. I’m confident about recommending TigerTech since I use them myself. I will be taking advantage of this offer and moving about 10 websites in the next week.

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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While there are a lot of advantages to having a large social graph (aka friending everyone and their bots), there are also advantages to having a more tightly managed social graph. If you keep your address book/contact list filled with people you talk with on a regular basis, you can use facebook to help fill in your missing data.

My Contacts

I use google apps for domains as my primary email program. Now that they don’t add everyone to your “my contacts” grouping just because you’ve talked with them once, the google contacts part has actually become useful.  I’ve got ~1300 people in my address book but only 162 with the “my contacts” designations (side note: funny how that’s pretty close to Dunbar’s Number).

I’m an iphone user, so I’ve got Google Sync keeping my contacts sync’d and backed up into the cloud. I don’t have to worry about one or the other getting out of sync or about losing a phone/number email if I lose my phone or a computer dies on me.

But this is child’s play. Let’s kick things up a notch.

One of the nice things on an iPhone is having someone’s picture pop up when they call. It makes it much easier to decide who to completely ignore screen and call back later.  Now let’s be honest: it’s kind of annoying to go through and put pictures for all of your contacts even if you only have a few people in your contact list. Fortunately there’s an app called MyPhone+. For $2.99 it will go to facebook, look for a matching email address, pull in the person’s facebook picture, and assign it to the contact. Now if your friends are in the habit of putting pictures of their kids as their profile picture on facebook this isn’t really helpful.  Either you have to memorize which kid belongs to which friend, or you have to throw your hands in the air and let a bunch of random kids run amok through your phone.  Still, the app is really versatile. You can do the sync as many times as you want,  you can change the setting to allow some information to be overwritten and some to be locked, and you can also upload your contacts directly to facebook from the app.

Here’s another facebook timesaver. If you go to your facebook page with your facebook contacts’ phone numbers, you can import those numbers into your address book. Use the address booker greasemonkey script, export the CSV, and import the info. You don’t need to do it every day; once a month should be fine. The goal is to get away from having information in multiple places. You want to centralize it in one location so you can find it quickly when you need it.

It would be really nice if facebook, linkedin, and plaxo provided a way to sync your contact info (the way google is able to sync with your contacts directly) so you didn’t have to resort to things like greasemonkey scripts. Also it would be nice if Google would import/sync the picture from your address book when one didn’t exist.
photo credit: Mike Cattell

Advertisement: LinkWheeler was created to offer a well priced and extremely effective form of SEM – The linkwheel. Don’t pay a fortune for useless SEO services, get LinkWheeler!

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

How to Make Your Address Book More Useful with Facebook

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While there are a lot of advantages to having a large social graph (aka friending everyone and their bots), there are also advantages to having a more tightly managed social graph. If you keep your address book/contact list filled with people you talk with on a regular basis, you can use facebook to help fill in your missing data.

My Contacts

I use google apps for domains as my primary email program. Now that they don’t add everyone to your “my contacts” grouping just because you’ve talked with them once, the google contacts part has actually become useful.  I’ve got ~1300 people in my address book but only 162 with the “my contacts” designations (side note: funny how that’s pretty close to Dunbar’s Number).

I’m an iphone user, so I’ve got Google Sync keeping my contacts sync’d and backed up into the cloud. I don’t have to worry about one or the other getting out of sync or about losing a phone/number email if I lose my phone or a computer dies on me.

But this is child’s play. Let’s kick things up a notch.

One of the nice things on an iPhone is having someone’s picture pop up when they call. It makes it much easier to decide who to completely ignore screen and call back later.  Now let’s be honest: it’s kind of annoying to go through and put pictures for all of your contacts even if you only have a few people in your contact list. Fortunately there’s an app called MyPhone+. For $2.99 it will go to facebook, look for a matching email address, pull in the person’s facebook picture, and assign it to the contact. Now if your friends are in the habit of putting pictures of their kids as their profile picture on facebook this isn’t really helpful.  Either you have to memorize which kid belongs to which friend, or you have to throw your hands in the air and let a bunch of random kids run amok through your phone.  Still, the app is really versatile. You can do the sync as many times as you want,  you can change the setting to allow some information to be overwritten and some to be locked, and you can also upload your contacts directly to facebook from the app.

Here’s another facebook timesaver. If you go to your facebook page with your facebook contacts’ phone numbers, you can import those numbers into your address book. Use the address booker greasemonkey script, export the CSV, and import the info. You don’t need to do it every day; once a month should be fine. The goal is to get away from having information in multiple places. You want to centralize it in one location so you can find it quickly when you need it.

It would be really nice if facebook, linkedin, and plaxo provided a way to sync your contact info (the way google is able to sync with your contacts directly) so you didn’t have to resort to things like greasemonkey scripts. Also it would be nice if Google would import/sync the picture from your address book when one didn’t exist.
photo credit: Mike Cattell

Advertisement: LinkWheeler was created to offer a well priced and extremely effective form of SEM – The linkwheel. Don’t pay a fortune for useless SEO services, get LinkWheeler!

This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

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Now that Pubcon is over I’m going to let you in on a tool that helps me keep track of, organize, find, and use the information I get from conferences, trade shows, and seminars:  Evernote.

The company describes Evernote as an external brain. Your external brain. It remembers things so you don’t have to. Evernote is a clipping service with a browser based client, web interface, desktop application, and smart phone interface (it works on the iphone, blackberry, and others). Evernote is also cloud based, so information that’s added from your smartphone is sync’d to your desktop automagically. But enough promotional chatter. Let’s get down to some real world usage.

Once you’ve got an evernote account set up, you’re going to create a notebook for the conference. Think of it as a big bucket for holding all the Pubcon stuff. By default your notebooks are private, but you can share them with select people or the entire internet, which is what I’ve done with my Pubcon 2009 Notebook. Go ahead–take a look.

To make your notebook useful, you’ve got to put stuff in it like the conference schedule. While you could just as easily bookmark the page,  Evernote’s advantage lies in its technique. It actually stores the data from the page so that, when the 2010 schedule goes up and erases what’s there now, you’ll have a permanent record of 2009. The next thing I added was live blogging session posts from Outspoken Media, 10e20, Top Rank Online Marketing, and Search Marketing Sage. Normally I would have added Search Engine Roundtable too, but they are using a new app that doesn’t render the text on the page. Evernote can’t read it.

Now that I’ve got all that content in my notebook, I can start doing searches. I heard the session about the Las Vegas Hotels using twitter was pretty interesting, so let’s do a search for [las vegas hotels twitter].   I get three live blogging recaps I can use for reference.

After the conference, you’ll get a CD with all the presentations; however, unless you remember where the information is or what its name is, sometimes it’s hard to find what you’re looking for. If you uploaded all the presentations to evernote, though, the content is fully searchable. Now there are some legal restrictions and some people don’t let their presentations go public, so for this notebook I only uploaded mine (since I’m pretty sure I can’t sue myself). However, if you keep your notebook private, you don’t have anything to worry about. Let’s say you remember something in a presentation about banned sites. Executing a quick search on [banned sites] brings up the presentation and the live blogging recaps.

You may be thinking, “Well this is all pretty neat, but can’t I do the same thing with a Google custom search engine?” You could if you only wanted to search text, but what about images? Evernote has some extra functionality. An example: maybe you’re really bad with names and faces. While evernote isn’t savvy enough to have facial recognition, if you are clever and take people’s pictures in front of their speaker cards, evernote can read the text. Can’t remember what Jennifer Laycock of Search Engine Guide looks like? A quick search for [Jennifer Laycock] will bring up the picture you took. If you click through you’ll see it actually reads the text from her name card and highlights it in yellow.

As long as you take the picture fairly straight on and not at an oblique angle, it works pretty well. Here’s another example. A search for [image indexing] returns a picture of  Bruce Clay in front of a slide with the words “image indexing” on it.

Maybe that’s still not awesome enough for you. Have you ever lost a business card? If you use Evernote to take a picture of the card, you’ll have a picture of it and be able to get back in touch with that really smart person. Are you bad about losing your receipts? If so, you can use evernote to take a picture of the receipt so you can find it when your bookkeeper needs it. If your smart phone has GPS, it will also record the location for you. You can also scan the receipt and import that way, but you lose the nifty mapping functionality.

There are lots of other ways that you can use Evernote but, as a conference reference guide, it’s a pretty powerful tool. Evernote comes at two levels: free and paid. The paid product is $45 per year, which gives you a huge increase in upload file size, more file types, and a few other things too. Full details are available on the premium membership page.

Disclosure: This wasn’t a paid or sponsored post. This post contains no affiliate links. I wish there was an affiliate program because I would absolutely join it. My membership wasn’t comped or discounted. I paid the full price for a premium membership. If the nice folks at Evernote like this post and want to send me some swag or a t-shirt (x-large) it would make me almost as happy as batch of warm chocolate chip cookies

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thanks to Michael Dorausch of Planet C1 Chiropractic for allowing me to include his photos.

photo credit: TheLizardQueen

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This post originally came from Michael Gray who is an SEO Consultant. Be sure not to miss the Thesis Wordpress Theme review.

How to Use Evernote to Create the Ultimate Post Conference Reference Guide

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Sage packs this video full of everything from a new gadget on Google’s Webmaster Tools to a free website service provided by Google Sites, which was formerly the Jot Spot. Matt Cutts also gets air time this week for his article on subscribed links and how to use them, and the Harvard Business Review notices how the internet-originated peer to peer (or P2P) business approach is influencing other societal structures, like banking.

Google’s Subscribed Link Feature and Webmaster Tools Gadget is a post from: Rankings.me

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The SEOENG Score is vital to achieving the best Search Engine Optimization for your website. Your webpage will leave your competition behind. Use SEOENG and free Search Engine Marketing tips and tools to build the best website in your target market.

http://www.SEOENG.com/

SEOENG Score – Search Engine Optimization SEOENG is a post from: Rankings.me

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Google engineer, Matt Cutts, steals the show with his Web 2.0 expo video “What Google Knows About Spam.” Sage extols the virtues of watching the video if you’re looking to avoid spam in your own site and also if you want to make sure you aren’t accidentally becoming the spammer yourself! Cutts provides tips on how to prevent spam and encourages site owners to register their sites in Google’s Webmaster Central area, which allows Google to notify you if something is wrong.

Matt Cutts’ Video Is Cream of the Anti-Spam Crop is a post from: Rankings.me

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