Writings on web design and higher education from Missoula, MT

It would seem that spammers are getting even more tricky. Today I noticed my first trackback spam.

I guess when I upgrade Wordpress and apply a new theme (long over due) I won’t allow trackbacks to be posted in the comments. Such a shame, spammers are really ruining the internet in every possible way.

An SEO company whose services I have used in the past just underwent a redesign of their site architecture. Now powered entirely by the blogging software Wordpress, Netconcepts has turned their entire corporate website into a blog.

As Stephan Spencer, CEO of Netconcepts, said in his blog, I don’t think anyone has ever done this before for a major corporate site. Personally, I think it is mostly a PR stunt, with many of the advantages they claim being easily obtainable on several mainstream CMS platforms.

Stephan claims that now he can get exposure to more search engines because his site is a blog. Poppycock! Any good quality CMS out there (like what I use, Modx CMS) can output an RSS feed for recent content, sections, or whatever you like; this enables any website to be placed in blog search engines, which should be more aptly named RSS search engines (the non-blog portion of my site is in Technorati, for instance.)

Furthermore, I think Netconcepts is going a bit overboard here about marketing their site to any and every search engine. I would challenge them to produce two clients a year from these blog search engines… I just don’t think that’s where people that need to hire consultants do their looking. Even if they did, the most popular blog search engine, Technorati, is date focused, so their website exposure has already faded from the charts (a search for SEO yields nothing of them, and even a search for the tag Netconcepts produces only one result, in Stephan’s personal blog nonetheless!)

But their move to Wordpress is no joke either; it has some real benefits that many companies should consider:

• Tagging allows them to increase the breadth of their site without writing more content, allowing for more placings in the search engines. They call this the Long Tail of search.
• Being in the RSS search engines puts them in the face of the blogosphere, where bloggers may pick up on some new articles and discuss them.
• If they are smart, they will try to leverage the wordpress forum and become a featured corporate site. The traffic generated from such an announcement would be prime, not only involume, but also in quality (each of the Wordpress users a potential client and new inbound link).

If I was a fly on the Netconcepts wall this week, I would love to pick up on whether they are feeling restricted in their site architecture now that they don’t have a more flexible CMS (I know that is why I moved away from Wordpress as a CMS) and if the traffic they generate from RSS search engines actually lead to sales. If their conversion rate remains high, I am sure we can expect a report out on their site within a few months that will probably be syndicated across the SEO landscape.

What do you think of this new turnaround in CMS structure? Can it provide results?

In the world of SEO the title tag really is king, not to mention the fact that users see the title tag as the label to their bookmark. Because of this, a developer must spend much time making sure the title tag is well formed.

Luckly, the user’s mind and a search engine work very similarly to each other. The first words are the most important, and often the only ones looked at. Because of this, the true nature of your content must be first in the title tag. For pages this is the title of the page, for posts, the title of the post, and for my home page, a place where there is a hodge-podge of information, I decided it should be my name (so I actually show up in search results for my name). This means I have to first write a bit of PHP code to distinguish these different types of situations, and print some info in the title tag for each of them. Here is what I came up with: Read the rest of this entry »

I decided to implement the Fold Page Menus plugin for Wordpress on my site to allow me to give users a deeper navigational display than I previously had. It worked great, but with one problem, and I’d like to share my solution with the community.

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I switched over my feeds to feedburner today. I did this for several reasons, but most importantly of which is feedburners ability to track subscribed users and optimize compatibility between readers software. You won’t have to update the feed URL because I installed a great Wordpress plugin by Steve at Ordered List. If you are running Wordpress and are thinking of using feedburner too, I highly suggest taking a look at this option.

I noticed a while ago that there are two forms of punctuation that I like to use in my writing, the semicolon and th em dash (—). Semicolon is an easy one, because it is easily recognized in the standard character set, the em dash is another story altogether! Here I will show you how to add an em dash to your WP Quicktags in less than a minute (file transfer included!)

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I recently installed the lightbox plugin for WordPress. I think it adds some neat functionality to blogging in general, and I have found that it incorporates greatly with my flickr account.

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Tag clouds (a form of Folksonomy) seem to have creeped into web applications all over the internet. First seen on Flickr, tag clouds showed great promise as a novel way to view user trends and graphically showing relative the popularity of tags (think categories, but on steroids). The question I am interested in is: do tag clouds belong in the blogosphere?

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