We all want to rank high in the search engine rankings. But often we just don’t know how. WordPress, the premier open source blogging software, is pretty good for SEO out of the box, but like all things it can be better.

Enter SEO Ultimate, from SEO Design Solutions. This plugin is the key ingredient to get your site properly SEOed in WordPress. Below is a video the developer produced showing off his product:

• Title Rewriter – Lets you format the <title> tags of posts, pages, categories, tags, archives, search results, the blog homepage, and more.
• Noindex Manager – Lets you add the noindex meta robots instruction to archives, comment feeds, the login page, and more.
• Meta Editor – Lets you edit the meta descriptions/keywords for your posts, pages, and homepage. Also lets you enter verification meta codes and give code instructions to search engine spiders.
• Canonicalizer – Inserts tags for your homepage and each of your posts, Pages, categories, tags, date archives, and author archives.
• 404 Monitor – Logs 404 errors generated on your blog.

Try it out. I like it so far. If you are still stumped and need some help please give us a call to setup a one-on-one consultation.

Google’s Matt Cutts did a video for the Webmaster Central YouTube channel yesterday answering a question on over-optimization of a Website. In essence he said no, the you can’t over use the NOFOLLOW tag, but often times in the search for better placement on the search engines people tend to spam a bit. They over use their keywords and make their site not user friendly. So in the end there are ways to hurt yourself in the search engines but only if you take a more black-hat approach to optimization.

What are your thoughts? Post them below.

WebPro News’ Mike McDonald talked with Rebecca Lieb of Econsultancy on the future of Search and how it will evolve in the future. She thinks that there will be a lot more optimization with “digital assets,” video, images etc., as well as an increased synergy with social media.

More WebProNews Videos

Wil Reynolds from Seer Interactive have an interesting view point on the NOFOLLOW attribute on blogs and sites. He says that if the site has large readership you should still try to guest post on that site regardless if there is link-juice-love going to your site or not.

He explains:

Here’s Matt Cutts’ view on NOFOLLOW back in February on the Webmaster Tools YouTube channel:

And finally here is a video done at SMX Advanced in Seattle with Matt Cutts’ on the devaluing of the NOFOLLOW attribute:

What are you thoughts on the NOFOLLOW attribute and its impact? Post your comments below.

Everyone wants to be at the top of the Search Engine Rankings. Unfortunately there are only a maximum of 10 spots on each page (less if there is some type of universal search). Out of all of the SEO tips out there one is steadfast and true — Links count. Quality Links that is.

I’d like to hear what you have to say. Post your comments below.

SEO powerhouse Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz talked with Lindsay Walker of Canada’s Web Shop about Bing and how SEO people can start utilize the new Microsoft property increase their brand visibility and rank.

Check out the video below. I’d like to hear what you think of Bing. Post you comments below.

SEOmoz Interview – Lyndsay Walker on Bing from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Matt Cutts on a recent video installment on Google’s Webmaster Tools YouTube channel, answered a question about uploading a backlog of content to a blog at once.

The Question:

“If you have a lot of blog content for a new section of a site (100+ pages), is it best to release it over a period of time, or is it fine to just unleash 100 pages?”

Google’s Analytics team has put together a great video to help people fully understand the power of their analytics program. It’s worth checking out. I’d like to hear what you think and how you use analytics for your Website. Post them below.

Recently Google screwed up. The search giant found a bug that shared unshared documents in Google’s famed Google Docs with others. According to their figures only affected 0.05% of users, the the implications are huge for the idea of putting everything in the cloud.

Dear Google Docs user,

We wanted to let you know about a recent issue with your Google Docs account. We’ve identified and fixed a bug which may have caused you to share some of your documents without your knowledge. This inadvertent sharing was limited to people with whom you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document. The issue only occurred if you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, selected multiple documents and presentations from the documents list and changed the sharing permissions. This issue affected documents and presentations, but not spreadsheets.

To help remedy this issue, we have used an automated process to remove collaborators and viewers from the documents that we identified as being affected. Since the impacted documents are now accessible only to you, you will need to re-share the documents manually. For your reference, we’ve listed below the documents identified as being affected.

We apologize for the inconvenience that this issue may have caused. We want to assure you that we are treating this issue with the highest priority.

The Google Docs Team

Granted there is an inherent risk to putting your documents online, but a snafu like this could have cost companies using the Google “operating system” tons of money.

The draw to using the Cloud for computing is simple. You can access your documents and files from anywhere in a “secure maner.” Now Google says it’s fixed the problem, but should we trust that it won’t happen again? I’m not so sure.

What are your thoughts. Post them in the comments.

Okay, now I am a fan of John C. Dvorak. I’m a big fan of Cranky Geeks and TWIT and his blog. But I do think he is a bit full of cow poop sometimes. Especially when he decides from one bad experience withe “SEO” that SEO and those practicing it are a bunch of crackpots. Now I respect his opinion, but I really think Dvorak is shooting from the hip here with no real aim. Now I have to admit that he is a bit of an aquired taste, and though many might think he’s a total jerk and crank, I feel that he’s just a bit off with this accusation. Mark Jackson over at Search Engine Watch has a great column responding to Dvorak‘s crankyness. Here’s a excerpt:

An article in a major publication last week disparaged SEO, calling it “snake oil” once again. How did the columnist decide SEO doesn’t work, and that its practitioners are a bunch of snake oil salesmen? Well, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named (I hasten to give him any attention, as that’s what he and his editor are after) had rewritten his URLs to make them search engine friendly, but lost traffic in his efforts.

Here’s his exact quote:

Search engine optimization (SEO) has turned into a big business, and from what I can tell it’s the modern version of snake oil. The unproven nonsense spewed by so-called “SEO Experts” simply doesn’t work. And worse, it’s screwing up the elegance of the Web.

Ugh. Here we go again.

First off, dear readers, I exchanged e-mails with his editor-in-chief, and even offered to rebuke this column in a column of my own on his Web site. I just can’t let false claims such as his stand uncontested. When people write columns like this, it affects our industry.

We, as an industry, accept that many people have jumped on the SEO bandwagon, calling themselves SEOs when they have a difficult time even writing compelling title tags. We know that some people will quickly respond to RFPs, get a prospect to cut a few checks, and deliver little in return. Then, there are those of us who have studied for years to understand what good SEO is and worked hours helping our clients achieve measurable results.

OK, time to respond to the column. Begrudgingly, I’ll link to it so you can read it for yourself. At least we can discuss something that works for SEO: good URL structure.

Optimizing URL Structure

The columnist refers to the “fact” that long URLs don’t work. Here’s what he wrote:

My blog had typical, efficient WordPress default URLs, such as http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=3100 or some such thing. Now on my current blog, that particular URL — which used the simple story ID number to access the post — has been supposedly SEO-optimized behind this URL: http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2005/10/20/hollywood-unions-want-cut-of-itunes-pie/.

From what I can tell, this guy did at least one thing wrong — and possibly two — with this one element of proper SEO. I wish I could speak with him directly to confirm my suspicions, and perhaps even teach him a thing or two about what real SEO involves (much more than just one thing).

First, there’s really nothing “wrong” with his original URL structure (/blog/?p=3100). There are only two trailing backslashes.

So what if the URL has a couple of dynamic characters in it (the question mark and equals sign are referred to as “dynamic” characters). Search engines nowadays do fine indexing and ranking these. So long as you’re keeping your content as close to the root as you can, you should be in good shape.

However, it’s not “optimal.” How do we make this optimal? We “optimize.”

via Ignorance: The Trouble with People Who Claim SEO is Snake Oil – Search Engine Watch (SEW).