WordPress has become one of the most powerful and most-used blogging and Content Management Systems in the world in part due to its incredible flexibility and ability to be customized. So it is surprising to learn that the default installation is lacking in a few ways. But because of the great flexibility of WordPress, this is easy to fix in just a few minutes. After any WordPress installation, there is a series of steps that I take in order to optimize the site, before I even think about what it will look like. Remove or edit the Placeholder Content There is a placeholder post titled 'Hello World'. DELETE that, or edit it to be your actual first post. There is a placeholder page called 'About'. DELETE it or edit it to say what you want it to say. Delete the user 'admin' If you used a one-click installation or had someone do it for you, you

Posted In: Articles, SEO, WordPress, WordPress Tutorials.
Tags: SEO, web design resources, website starters, WordPress, WPJumpStart

Has anyone else been hearing the controversy over the new DiggBar? Digg has been one of the biggest names in blog and website listing sites for years. Most sites now have the share buttons or even a specific link to 'Digg This', allowing visitors to vote on a sitIf your article or site was 'Dugg' enough, it could result in a flood of traffic to your site. Recently, they unveiled a new DiggBar feature, which looks and sounds great. It provides a bar at the top of the browser allowing you to share content, 'Digg' the page your on, even create the all popular shortened url. The problem is that when your site is visited from a link on the Digg site, it is now hidden within this bar as if the visitor is on Digg. There is no record of the visit to your site, because it was actually a

Posted In: Articles, SEO.
Tags: diggbar, programming, SEO

I receieved an interesting question from one of my photographer friends Gustavo Fernandez today. "Why do some folk have their address as blog.domain.com vs domain.com/blog? Is there a benefit?" I started to write back, but in doing a couple quick searches in the name of research, I found enough interesting information that I decided to write a post explaining it all. Subdomains vs Subdirectories photo credit: Tim DorrFirst, let's define what we are talking about: "blog.domain.com" is a subdomain while "domain.com/blog" is a subdirectory or a folder within a domain. A subdirectory is used as a folder within one domain to organize smaller pieces of content, like a category of several pages. For most people they will only ever need subdirectories. A subdomain creates more separation than just a folder, basically creating a stand alone site that could easily be it's own domain. However, you may want to piggyback on the main domain name.

Posted In: Hosting, SEO.
Tags: Hosting, Resources, SEO, tips

In a post last week, PIFPhoto.com talked about Google's Keyword tool, one of the great free tools made available by Google for free to help analyze, enhance and promote your website. I left a comment mentioning a site called grader.com, which offers a number of great free tools to analyze your site's visibility to the search engines. It even offers suggestions for how to improve your site specifically. Lindsay at PIF, asked if I would be interested in writing a guest blogger article going into further detail on using the Website Grader. I was happy to take her up on the offer but the PIF site has undergone a redesign and now the post is no longer available. So I have recreated it below: There are three sections to the site: the 'Website Grader', the 'Twitter Grader' and the 'Press-Release Grader'. I have only used the website and Twitter sections, but

Posted In: Blog, How To, SEO.
Tags: products I endorse, Resources, SEO, tips, web apps

The term SEO very simply stands for Search Engine Optimization. Yet most people seem to think it is some magic formula that will drive customers to their site. While the term SEO is still thrown around and still relevant, it is usually misunderstood and I often hear a lot of really outdated and sometimes downright wrong ideas about what SEO is - especially from potential clients. I can't tell you the number of times someone has asked me how much I charge to add keywords to their site and make them rank #1 on Google. I can tell you that my answer every time has been that it is not as easy as just adding keywords and anyone promising a number one ranking on Google is trying to scam you. Rather than get into the scam aspects here, I will just point out this article on 'Black Hat' vs 'White Hat'

Posted In: Ideas, SEO.
Tags: how to, marketing, SEO

The biggest problem with all this craziness over SEO is that it gets confused with the real goal, which is simply to increase traffic to your site. If you could get meaningful traffic to your site without search engines, would SEO even matter? To take it to another level - think of this: increased traffic eventually leads to a better page ranking, so one of the ways to improve your sites SEO is to get traffic there. But isn't that why we want SEO? So where do we start? The Real Goal Let's start with our actual goal, which is not to rank #1 on Google, but to get more meaningful traffic to our site. Using SEO to rank higher in searches is merely one way of doing that. There are countless others. For example when I go to Geico.com, it is because I saw a TV commerical with a talking lizard,

Posted In: Ideas, SEO.
Tags: how to, marketing, SEO