Wordpress - Blogging - Seminar : 10 Ways to Optimize your Wordpress Blog

Seminar hosted by Silicon Valley Bloggers Meetup Group

Speaker: Linda
Linda started online in 1999
Started on eBay selling eBooks
Then started doing web design
Then learned Wordpress

Wordcamp - every year in May (can sign up), Wordpress is based in SF

askmepc-webdesign.com -> Linda's website

sign up on wordpress.com, and they will give you a code to activate Askimet (antispam for wordpress)


***Permalinks


***Ping List  (search engines don't crawl that fast, people say ping lists triple their site traffic)

email Linda and she will send you her ping list
also send her an email for her "blacklist words list" and her "blacklisted sites"


Gravatar.com
(gravatar is the same as avatar)


Dont start turning things off until you are fairly known, don;t start filtering things before you are even found


There are many wonderful plugins for Wordpress


WordpressCentral.org


In the "Edit Post" tab, you can even predate dates !! (or make it look newer)


Wordpress is a Content Management System (CMS), not just blog software


In browser:   view -> page source   ......... if you see "wp theme" etc, that would indicate that it is a Wordpress blog


A lot of people like the "Thesis" theme
(Linda uses "studio press" themes from Brian Gartener)

Web Development - Analytics

Google’s analytics (Google Analytics) grew out of a company called ………

Google bought the company

Bing Toolbox is something equivalent to google analytics on bing (also recommend submitting your site to bing)

Yahoo used to have quite good analytics

Omniture , a company owned by adobe, does analytics, for an (expensive) price

SEO Search Engine Optimization Seminar Notes

Web Development - Site Management / Optimization - Free and Useful Tools

Google Words

Google Analytics

Google Ad Words

Google Web Master Tools

SEO Search Engine Optimization Seminar Notes

Web Development - Bounce Rate

Bounce rate: the number of people who come to your site, but find that it is not what they are looking for, and just quickly leave

SEO Search Engine Optimization Seminar Notes

Web Development - Search Engines - "Poodle Predictor"

"Poodle Predictor"  site

SEO Search Engine Optimization Seminar Notes

The following is an intro from the site:

Poodle predictor is a tool that attempts to give you an idea of how your site will show up in the search-engine results, before it's too late, and they have already cached it.
This helps you avoid making mistakes that will either prevent your site from getting a decent listing, or will show a useless description of you site in the search-engine results.
To do this, we have attempted to replicate the rules used by the main search-engines, as they spider your site.
Naturally they are not all identical, and they don't make their search algorithms publicly available, so Poodle predictor's results will never be identical with the search-engines results.

(obtained from http://www.gritechnologies.com/tools/about_poodle.html)

Web Development - Fonts

The user's browser can display any font that the user has on their machine

if you want to be safe:

Look up(search): "web-safe fonts"  (comic sans is one of them)

SEO Search Engine Optimization Seminar Notes

Web Development - "Organic"

Organic listing: something that is not paid (artificially placed at the top), not local (also artificially placed in front), but is something that the search engine "organically" found and listed

SEO Search Engine Optimization Seminar Notes