Wordpress 2.3 = Seo Goodness Mmmm…

1. Native tagging support - Gone are the days of using 3rd party plugins such as Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins. Tagging is now integrated into Wordpress 2.3! If you’ve already been using a tagging plugin you can bring your data into the new system. The tagging system is also wicked-fast, so your host won’t mind

Loonie Surpasses the US Dollar

The falling US Dollar is certainly affecting more than just Americans, with its effects reaching far and wide into both the online and offline realms. With the Greenback being the most preferred currency for all transactions online, you can certainly expect changes in sales and demand in online businesses, as well as any revenue you generate online.

A Tale of Baguettes and Tears

There’s two sides of the coin to this story, and while is rather rosy, our’s is almost as bleak. While some of us are rushing off the States for a weekend shopping spree, others shall be working hard to recoup their losses in online revenue. A bit dramatic perhaps, but our Canadian exporters will surely share in lamenting this fluctuating dollar.

Delicious (they have dropped the del.icio.us) has just launched version 2.0 to a by invitation only preview group. Boasting 3 million registered users and 100+ million unique URLs bookmarked, Yahoo! owned Delicious is in for some major changes.

Founder Joshua Schachter was quoted saying that we can expect a complete code rewrite, along with a decidedly different interface, broken down into four sections; Home, Bookmarks, People and Tags.

Michael Arrington has a post with detailed screen shots of some of the new features which include:

Google’s online Powerpoint clone is live. Those who regularly receive PPT files filled with images of cute animals will be thrilled. Right…

If you decide to use Google Presentations it’s good to keep something in mind which also applies to PowerPoint:

Do not put what you say on the screen

Australian research shows that the brain is limited in what in can process how. If the exact same information comes to us in verbal and written form at the same time, our brain sort of phases out.

Here’s the question: why do you want to rank high on Google? Why isn’t your first interest Yahoo or Live Search (formerly MSN)?

It seems a strange question. With Google having grown out to become the heart of the web, the starting point for all online activity, who wouldn’t want to rank high on Google first, right?

Sure — but why? If you’re a high school teen who has just setup her first web site it might be very, very important to see a page counter click up: 1 visitor, 2 visitors, 3 visitors (hi mom!), 4….

In what to me amounts to the high impact SEO story of the year, Ammon Johns has announced that he is stepping down as an administrator and moderator of Cre8asite Forums.

Ammon Johns (1966) is a household name in the SEO community. Active in SEO and SEM since 1997, Ammon was one of the first proponents of the holistic approach which has ROI instead of “just” high rankings as its goal. Instead of sending more visitors to a site (the classic SEO model), Ammon worked to send qualified traffic where “every single one of them is a genuine, prequalified sales prospect”.

My friend Peter Papadimitriou at Globecraft sent me the following email he received from Google:

Dear Peter Papadimitriou,

We are happy to announce a new feature that will allow you to
easily reach additional qualified customers who are searching
Google from their mobile phones.

In the next few days, your search ads will be eligible to run on
Google Mobile Search pages (like they currently do on Google.com).
We are offering this feature - and any resulting clicks - for
free through November 18, so you can experiment with the rapidly
growing mobile platform while still reaching qualified customers.

A quick recap. Google is a multi-billion dollar US-based company which derives the majority of its revenue from advertisement on the web. These ads are shown on property outside of Google’s control as well as alongside search results which lists snippets from content Google doesn’t own.

In 2005 Google introduced an attribute webmasters were free to use on links of their choice to help flag that link as “not trusted” or “possible spam”. This attribute is called “no-follow”.

Today was a big day!  Well for me anyhow.  Just to give you a little background a big part of my job is to not only to strategize off page SEO campaigns that support all of the onpage SEO efforts for SEP’s clients, but to report on all of these efforts. 
Traffic, engagement, conversion, authority all easy…links oh those blessed one way natural links this is what we are all really after, this is hard! 
In the past the only way I knew to track the inbound links that were created by an off page campaign was using some special syntax in queries that our SEP Wis walks me through every time (I do not pretend to fully understand). 
Along with this I would also try and use AltaVista.  But AltaVista seems to report the highest number of inbound links but as I have found out not all links are visible. (go figure).   Another tool was Technorati; Technorati is good for finding fresh links to a given site very quickly.
But in general, the overall numbers of results are estimated at the very start, and this can become misleading. Not all results are reachable from the search engines, so a false illusion can be given.  Until today!!
SEP’s Wis has found out a simple traceable and free method that will stream line all of this.  Google Alerts.  Yes Google Alerts are not new but here is what is new setup your alert to report on “link: www.acme.com” this will let you know what new one way links are being created! It also works for the crawlers with using “site: www.acme.com”.

When the Toronto Star published an article several weeks back announcing that roughly 700,000 Facebook users belong to the Toronto city network, my phone rang off the hook from clients asking what their Facebook strategy will be.

SEP has been working with Social Media, at a variety of levels, for some time, so the announcement that General Motors Europe is launching a “social media newsroom” caught my attention.

Essentially, GM Europe’s new website will allow downloads of its photography from Flikr, a link to their video collection in YouTube and news to be “republished, commented on, shared and tagged by a large community where the boundaries between news provider and news consumer continue to blur,” it said in a statement.