O:9:"MagpieRSS":19:{s:6:"parser";i:0;s:12:"current_item";a:0:{}s:5:"items";a:10:{i:0;a:14:{s:5:"title";s:39:"Fusion Marketing Experience in Brussels";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/Ci92tgJAPCY/";s:4:"guid";s:24:"http://yoast.com/?p=3924";s:8:"comments";s:149:"http://yoast.com/fusion-marketing-experience-in-brussels/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=fusion-marketing-experience-in-brussels#comments";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:145:"http://yoast.com/fusion-marketing-experience-in-brussels/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=fusion-marketing-experience-in-brusselsfeed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"10";}s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Thu, 24 Mar 2011 10:56:47 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:27:"Online MarketingConferences";s:11:"description";s:789:"<p>Yesterday I gave a presentation about Content Marketing &#038; SEO at the Fusion Marketing Experience conference in Brussels. It was more of a high level presentation than the technical kind of presentation some of you might be used too, but I thought it would still be worth while to share here. Also, below that, some [...]</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/fusion-marketing-experience-in-brussels/">Fusion Marketing Experience in Brussels</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";s:1617:"<p><img src="http://yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/fusion-marketing-experience-logo.gif" alt="Fusion Marketing Experience Brussels - Logo" title="Fusion Marketing Experience Brussels - Logo" width="180" height="184" class="alignright size-full wp-image-3925" />Yesterday I gave a presentation about Content Marketing &#038; SEO at the <a href="http://www.fusionmarketingexperience.com/">Fusion Marketing Experience</a> conference in Brussels. It was more of a high level presentation than the technical kind of presentation some of you might be used too, but I thought it would still be worth while to share here. Also, below that, some interviews I did while at the show.</p>

<p />
Bas van den Beld interview Olivier Branchard, aka <a href="http://twitter.com/thebrandbuilder">The Brand Builder</a>, and myself on <a href="http://www.stateofsearch.com/do-search-and-social-match-a-talk-with-joost-de-valk-yoast-and-olivier-blanchard-thebrandbuilder/">Search &#038; Social</a>:</p>
<p></p>
<p>And Chris Tompkins from Go Media interviewed me as well:</p>
<p></p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/fusion-marketing-experience-in-brussels/">Fusion Marketing Experience in Brussels</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/Ci92tgJAPCY" height="1" width="1"/>";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:140:"http://yoast.com/fusion-marketing-experience-in-brussels/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=fusion-marketing-experience-in-brussels";}s:7:"summary";s:789:"<p>Yesterday I gave a presentation about Content Marketing &#038; SEO at the Fusion Marketing Experience conference in Brussels. It was more of a high level presentation than the technical kind of presentation some of you might be used too, but I thought it would still be worth while to share here. Also, below that, some [...]</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/fusion-marketing-experience-in-brussels/">Fusion Marketing Experience in Brussels</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1617:"<p><img src="http://yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/fusion-marketing-experience-logo.gif" alt="Fusion Marketing Experience Brussels - Logo" title="Fusion Marketing Experience Brussels - Logo" width="180" height="184" class="alignright size-full wp-image-3925" />Yesterday I gave a presentation about Content Marketing &#038; SEO at the <a href="http://www.fusionmarketingexperience.com/">Fusion Marketing Experience</a> conference in Brussels. It was more of a high level presentation than the technical kind of presentation some of you might be used too, but I thought it would still be worth while to share here. Also, below that, some interviews I did while at the show.</p>

<p />
Bas van den Beld interview Olivier Branchard, aka <a href="http://twitter.com/thebrandbuilder">The Brand Builder</a>, and myself on <a href="http://www.stateofsearch.com/do-search-and-social-match-a-talk-with-joost-de-valk-yoast-and-olivier-blanchard-thebrandbuilder/">Search &#038; Social</a>:</p>
<p></p>
<p>And Chris Tompkins from Go Media interviewed me as well:</p>
<p></p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/fusion-marketing-experience-in-brussels/">Fusion Marketing Experience in Brussels</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/Ci92tgJAPCY" height="1" width="1"/>";}i:1;a:14:{s:5:"title";s:36:"Meta Description for Search & Social";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/dDSQ1U3zRBM/";s:4:"guid";s:24:"http://yoast.com/?p=3908";s:8:"comments";s:125:"http://yoast.com/meta-description-seo-social/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=meta-description-seo-social#comments";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:121:"http://yoast.com/meta-description-seo-social/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=meta-description-seo-socialfeed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"47";}s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Tue, 15 Mar 2011 16:27:48 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:3:"SEO";s:11:"description";s:776:"<p>Auto-generate your way to SEO success? Meta descriptions elements have many uses and can be constructed in several ways. A good meta description entices the user to click, both by the fact that it contains enticing, well readable text and by the fact that it contains the sought for keywords, as that get's bolded in [...]</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/meta-description-seo-social/">Meta Description for Search &#038; Social</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";s:5052:"<h2>Auto-generate your way to SEO success?</h2>
<p><img class="alignright size-full wp-image-3909" title="Auto generate the meta description for SEO Success?" src="http://yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/seo-success.jpg" alt="Auto generate the meta description for SEO Success?" width="250" height="167" />Meta descriptions elements have many uses and can be constructed in several ways. A good meta description entices the user to click, both by the fact that it contains enticing, well readable text and by the fact that it contains the sought for keywords, as that get's bolded in the search results.</p>
<p>Last week at SMX there was a panel titled "What's really important for technical SEO?". In it was <a href="http://www.hochmanconsultants.com/">Jonathan Hochman</a>, who I later found to be a smart and very likable person, but in the session he touched on one of my pet peeves: he mentioned retro-fitting an old CMS to have meta descriptions, by auto-generating the meta description using the first 150 characters of each article.</p>
<p>As regular readers of this blog know, I hate that. It's the single feature in All in One SEO that I hated so much I decided to start building something better, being my own <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/">WordPress SEO plugin</a>. You see, while my first paragraph above is pretty good, most bloggers would actually start their article with the second paragraph. The first 150 characters of that paragraph are absolutely not usable as a meta description, and don't even contain the focus keyword for this post: "meta description", so it wouldn't get a bold for that term, nor would it be enticing to click on.</p>
<p>The reason I hate this "auto generation" idea so much, especially for content sites, is that it makes people think that SEO is something you can do on auto-pilot. You simply can not. While a good SEO plugin can help you take care of the technical boundaries that might exist, creating link worthy content is the process that will help you get rankings, all the time. Auto generating a meta description has never served any purpose to anyone just yet.</p>
<p>In an <a href="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/meta-description-and-content-management-systems-%E2%80%93-seo-and-social-media-factors/28579/">article on SearchEngineJournal</a> today about meta descriptions and content management systems, <a href="http://twitter.com/ann_donnelly">Ann Donnelly</a> points out that while that might be true for SEO, it's not true for social, as a bad snippet there would get you low click throughs too. I couldn't agree with her more, except that the same 150 chars above, would be a very bad snippet for Facebook or other social platforms too. She distinguishes two processes when there is only one: write a decent description / excerpt for your posts, all the time.</p>
<p>In my WordPress SEO plugin the meta description gets a lot of emphasis. It gets that emphasis for a reason: it changes things. A good meta description, combined with a good title and a good post URL make for a result that people will want to click on.</p>
<div><img class="size-full wp-image-3910" title="Snippet preview, including the meta description, from my WordPress SEO plugin" src="http://yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/snippet-preview.jpg" alt="Snippet preview, including the meta description, from my WordPress SEO plugin" width="600" height="71" /><p>Snippet preview, including the meta description, from my WordPress SEO plugin</p></div>
<p>This is of course entirely different when you're talking about an e-commerce system. You can use many variables from your products there to create good, readable meta descriptions that offer information the searcher and sharer would be looking for.</p>
<p>Lastly; if you worry so much about meta descriptions, please do worry about what the rest of your snippet will look like too. The URL for this post is:</p>
<p>http://yoast.com/meta-description-seo-social/</p>
<p>The URL for Ann's post on SEJ:</p>
<p>http://www.searchenginejournal.com/meta-description-and-content-management-systems-%E2%80%93-seo-and-social-media-factors/28579/</p>
<p>I don't think I have to argue that mine is a lot easier and nicer to share in social <em>and</em> to look at in a search result page. You see, good SEO takes thinking about all of these aspects and can not be replaced by a simple substring command.</p>
<p>Update: from the comments, this useful video of Matt Cutts describing how Google uses the snippet:</p>
<p></p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/meta-description-seo-social/">Meta Description for Search &#038; Social</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/dDSQ1U3zRBM" height="1" width="1"/>";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:116:"http://yoast.com/meta-description-seo-social/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=meta-description-seo-social";}s:7:"summary";s:776:"<p>Auto-generate your way to SEO success? Meta descriptions elements have many uses and can be constructed in several ways. A good meta description entices the user to click, both by the fact that it contains enticing, well readable text and by the fact that it contains the sought for keywords, as that get's bolded in [...]</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/meta-description-seo-social/">Meta Description for Search &#038; Social</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:5052:"<h2>Auto-generate your way to SEO success?</h2>
<p><img class="alignright size-full wp-image-3909" title="Auto generate the meta description for SEO Success?" src="http://yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/seo-success.jpg" alt="Auto generate the meta description for SEO Success?" width="250" height="167" />Meta descriptions elements have many uses and can be constructed in several ways. A good meta description entices the user to click, both by the fact that it contains enticing, well readable text and by the fact that it contains the sought for keywords, as that get's bolded in the search results.</p>
<p>Last week at SMX there was a panel titled "What's really important for technical SEO?". In it was <a href="http://www.hochmanconsultants.com/">Jonathan Hochman</a>, who I later found to be a smart and very likable person, but in the session he touched on one of my pet peeves: he mentioned retro-fitting an old CMS to have meta descriptions, by auto-generating the meta description using the first 150 characters of each article.</p>
<p>As regular readers of this blog know, I hate that. It's the single feature in All in One SEO that I hated so much I decided to start building something better, being my own <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/">WordPress SEO plugin</a>. You see, while my first paragraph above is pretty good, most bloggers would actually start their article with the second paragraph. The first 150 characters of that paragraph are absolutely not usable as a meta description, and don't even contain the focus keyword for this post: "meta description", so it wouldn't get a bold for that term, nor would it be enticing to click on.</p>
<p>The reason I hate this "auto generation" idea so much, especially for content sites, is that it makes people think that SEO is something you can do on auto-pilot. You simply can not. While a good SEO plugin can help you take care of the technical boundaries that might exist, creating link worthy content is the process that will help you get rankings, all the time. Auto generating a meta description has never served any purpose to anyone just yet.</p>
<p>In an <a href="http://www.searchenginejournal.com/meta-description-and-content-management-systems-%E2%80%93-seo-and-social-media-factors/28579/">article on SearchEngineJournal</a> today about meta descriptions and content management systems, <a href="http://twitter.com/ann_donnelly">Ann Donnelly</a> points out that while that might be true for SEO, it's not true for social, as a bad snippet there would get you low click throughs too. I couldn't agree with her more, except that the same 150 chars above, would be a very bad snippet for Facebook or other social platforms too. She distinguishes two processes when there is only one: write a decent description / excerpt for your posts, all the time.</p>
<p>In my WordPress SEO plugin the meta description gets a lot of emphasis. It gets that emphasis for a reason: it changes things. A good meta description, combined with a good title and a good post URL make for a result that people will want to click on.</p>
<div><img class="size-full wp-image-3910" title="Snippet preview, including the meta description, from my WordPress SEO plugin" src="http://yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/snippet-preview.jpg" alt="Snippet preview, including the meta description, from my WordPress SEO plugin" width="600" height="71" /><p>Snippet preview, including the meta description, from my WordPress SEO plugin</p></div>
<p>This is of course entirely different when you're talking about an e-commerce system. You can use many variables from your products there to create good, readable meta descriptions that offer information the searcher and sharer would be looking for.</p>
<p>Lastly; if you worry so much about meta descriptions, please do worry about what the rest of your snippet will look like too. The URL for this post is:</p>
<p>http://yoast.com/meta-description-seo-social/</p>
<p>The URL for Ann's post on SEJ:</p>
<p>http://www.searchenginejournal.com/meta-description-and-content-management-systems-%E2%80%93-seo-and-social-media-factors/28579/</p>
<p>I don't think I have to argue that mine is a lot easier and nicer to share in social <em>and</em> to look at in a search result page. You see, good SEO takes thinking about all of these aspects and can not be replaced by a simple substring command.</p>
<p>Update: from the comments, this useful video of Matt Cutts describing how Google uses the snippet:</p>
<p></p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/meta-description-seo-social/">Meta Description for Search &#038; Social</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/dDSQ1U3zRBM" height="1" width="1"/>";}i:2;a:14:{s:5:"title";s:17:"Link Building 101";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/AS9Z0X_WRE4/";s:4:"guid";s:24:"http://yoast.com/?p=3885";s:8:"comments";s:105:"http://yoast.com/link-building-101/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=link-building-101#comments";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:101:"http://yoast.com/link-building-101/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=link-building-101feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"79";}s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Wed, 02 Mar 2011 15:35:55 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:26:"SEOLink BuildingPaid Links";s:11:"description";s:729:"<p>Most people understand by now that links have a very real influence on rankings in search engines. How it works and in which ways a link can influence your ranking is often unclear though, resulting in many myths. This link building 101 tries to explain the basics of link building and to refute some of [...]</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/link-building-101/">Link Building 101</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";s:8550:"<p><img src="http://yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/arrows-300x227.jpg" alt="Link Building 101" title="Link Building 101" width="300" height="227" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-3887" />Most people understand by now that links have a very real influence on rankings in search engines. How it works and in which ways a link can influence your ranking is often unclear though, resulting in many myths. This link building 101 tries to explain the basics of link building and to refute some of the myths around it.</p>
<h2>How does a link help your site?</h2>
<p>A link to your site "helps" in four ways:</p>
<ul>
<li>It adds value to the "receiving page", allowing it to improve its visibility in the search engines.</li>
<li>It adds value to the entire receiving domain, allowing each page on that domain to improve its rank ever so slightly.</li>
<li>The text of the link is an indication to the search engine of the topic of the website and more specifically the receiving page.</li>
<li>People click on links, resulting in so called "direct traffic".</li>
</ul>
<p>The value of a link for the receiving page is determined in part by the topic of the page the link is on. A link from a page that has the same topic as the receiving page is of far more value than a link from a page about an entirely different topic.</p>
<p>On top of that, a link from within an article is worth way more than a link from a sidebar or a footer. Furthermore the more links there are on a page, the less each individual link is worth.</p>
<h2>So what makes a good link?</h2>
<p>Imagine, you're working on a link building campaign and you get to choose where to place a link and what page to point it at. You'll have to consider the following questions:</p>
<ul>
<li>How strong is the site / page that's going to link out?</li>
<li>Which receiving pages on my site make most sense as far as topic is concerned?</li>
<li>Which page of this set of sensible pages would deliver the best ROI when it's ranking?</li>
<li>Which page is most sensible for the visitor of the linking page, clicking on the link?</li>
</ul>
<p>The last question is often the one best to ask of yourself: link building delivers, if done well, better rankings and more direct traffic. You have to keep in mind though that in most cases those visitors coming to you directly from the other site will behave differently from people coming from the search engines. Say you get a link from a site aimed at elderly women, these people will behave drastically different from the diverse public you'll get from the search engine when the page starts ranking. In your design of the page, you'll have to account for both.</p>
<p>How strong a site and/or a page is, can be judged on several criteria, PageRank being one of them, though often not very accurate. <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/mozrank">MozRank</a> is useful at times, but the most useful and sensible check often is the following: does the page that you want a link from, rank in the top 20, 30 or even 50 for terms related to the page you'd want it to link to? If the answer to that is yes, a link on that page is usually a good idea.</p>
<h2>The anchor text</h2>
<p>If you've decided which page you're going to be linking to, the second question arises: which anchor text will you be using? The anchor text in itself influences two things:</p>
<ul>
<li>The anchor text indicates to the search engine what the topic might be of the page the link points at and it can therefor help that receiving page rank for that term. If you want to rank for "WordPress SEO", you'd want to have links to that page with anchor texts like "WordPress SEO", "SEO for WordPress", etc.</li>
<li>The anchor text also has an effect on how many people will be clicking on the link. While from the above bullet you might have gathered that "click here" is a horrible anchor text, as you probably don't want to rank for it, it does tend to get clicked well and therefor gets you more visitors.</li>
</ul>
<p>Of course, don't overdo this. If all links, or a too large percentage of links to your site and / or page have the same anchor text, you'll look like a spammer. So if you're actively link building, vary your anchor text.</p>
<p>As you see, these are not trivial decisions, ones you have to make on a site by site and page by page basis. You don't always have the luxury of controlling anchor text and to be honest, that's a good thing; way too much sites out there would have a far over optimized "link profile" if they had such a level of control. Because you have to make these decisions on a site by site basis, buying a "backlink package", something still far too common these days, is often a wrong decision.</p>
<h2>Are there any rules about links?</h2>
<p>There are two kinds of rules that influence SEO and thus link building. First of all, there are the rules of the search engines, with Google having said most about links. Then there's the law about advertising, these laws differ per country but especially within the EU they tend to have the same "ring".</p>
<h3>What Google says about links and link building</h3>
<p>In their article on <a href="http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer%3D66356">link schemes</a> Google gives some examples of links that can influence your ranking negatively. This deals with both links to and from your site (f.i.: don't link to spam sites). They're most clear about <a href="http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer%3D66736">paid links</a> though: they're a violation of their guidelines and can lead to a ban of your website.</p>
<p>This isn't to say that such links would have an immediate negative effect. In fact, in the short term they might even boost your rankings, as quite often Google has to take manual action to discount those links, as not in all cases Google see whether a link has been paid for or not. But, especially keeping in mind the recent debacles with <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html">JC Penney</a> and <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704520504576162753779521700.html">Overstock.com</a>, both of whom have been penalized by Google <em>and</em> publicly scolded for their behavior by the press, this tactic is seldom worth while.</p>
<p>Google recently published an article on <a href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/06/quality-links-to-your-site.html">quality links</a> on the Google Webmaster Blog, it's worth reading to get their perspective.</p>
<h3>The law about links</h3>
<p>I've talked about the Dutch specifics in an article on <a href="http://www.marketingfacts.nl/berichten/20101221_reclame_richtlijnen_vs_links_in_2011/">Marketingfacts recently</a>, which in trun goes back to <a href="http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/6982-the-asa-will-investigate-seo-practises">an article on eConsultancy</a>: if something is an ad, it has to be visibly (for the visitor) marked as such. A paid link could under these new rules be called an ad and would therefor have to be disclosed. I don't see a court case just yet, but it's a good thing to keep in mind.</p>
<h2>Want to read more about link building?</h2>
<p>Outside of this link building 101 a lot is being written about the topic and a large part of it is, excusez le mot, crap. Because of that I'd like to point you at some sources that I <em>do</em> consider worth while:</p>
<ul>
<li>
		<a href="http://wiep.net/">Wiep.net</a><br />
		The blog of my fellow countryman Wiep Knol, an amicable guy and <em>great</em> link builder.
	</li>
<li>
		<a href="http://www.ericward.com/">Eric Ward aka LinkMoses</a><br />
		When I went to my first class in high school in '94, this guy was already doing link building. His insights are therefor based on a treasure trove of experience.
	</li>
<li>
		<a href="http://www.linkspiel.com/">LinkSpiel by Debra Mastaler</a><br />
		She has more of a wider marketing approach to link building and is therefor very usable for each and everyone.
	</li>
</ul>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/link-building-101/">Link Building 101</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/AS9Z0X_WRE4" height="1" width="1"/>";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:96:"http://yoast.com/link-building-101/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=link-building-101";}s:7:"summary";s:729:"<p>Most people understand by now that links have a very real influence on rankings in search engines. How it works and in which ways a link can influence your ranking is often unclear though, resulting in many myths. This link building 101 tries to explain the basics of link building and to refute some of [...]</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/link-building-101/">Link Building 101</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:8550:"<p><img src="http://yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/arrows-300x227.jpg" alt="Link Building 101" title="Link Building 101" width="300" height="227" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-3887" />Most people understand by now that links have a very real influence on rankings in search engines. How it works and in which ways a link can influence your ranking is often unclear though, resulting in many myths. This link building 101 tries to explain the basics of link building and to refute some of the myths around it.</p>
<h2>How does a link help your site?</h2>
<p>A link to your site "helps" in four ways:</p>
<ul>
<li>It adds value to the "receiving page", allowing it to improve its visibility in the search engines.</li>
<li>It adds value to the entire receiving domain, allowing each page on that domain to improve its rank ever so slightly.</li>
<li>The text of the link is an indication to the search engine of the topic of the website and more specifically the receiving page.</li>
<li>People click on links, resulting in so called "direct traffic".</li>
</ul>
<p>The value of a link for the receiving page is determined in part by the topic of the page the link is on. A link from a page that has the same topic as the receiving page is of far more value than a link from a page about an entirely different topic.</p>
<p>On top of that, a link from within an article is worth way more than a link from a sidebar or a footer. Furthermore the more links there are on a page, the less each individual link is worth.</p>
<h2>So what makes a good link?</h2>
<p>Imagine, you're working on a link building campaign and you get to choose where to place a link and what page to point it at. You'll have to consider the following questions:</p>
<ul>
<li>How strong is the site / page that's going to link out?</li>
<li>Which receiving pages on my site make most sense as far as topic is concerned?</li>
<li>Which page of this set of sensible pages would deliver the best ROI when it's ranking?</li>
<li>Which page is most sensible for the visitor of the linking page, clicking on the link?</li>
</ul>
<p>The last question is often the one best to ask of yourself: link building delivers, if done well, better rankings and more direct traffic. You have to keep in mind though that in most cases those visitors coming to you directly from the other site will behave differently from people coming from the search engines. Say you get a link from a site aimed at elderly women, these people will behave drastically different from the diverse public you'll get from the search engine when the page starts ranking. In your design of the page, you'll have to account for both.</p>
<p>How strong a site and/or a page is, can be judged on several criteria, PageRank being one of them, though often not very accurate. <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/mozrank">MozRank</a> is useful at times, but the most useful and sensible check often is the following: does the page that you want a link from, rank in the top 20, 30 or even 50 for terms related to the page you'd want it to link to? If the answer to that is yes, a link on that page is usually a good idea.</p>
<h2>The anchor text</h2>
<p>If you've decided which page you're going to be linking to, the second question arises: which anchor text will you be using? The anchor text in itself influences two things:</p>
<ul>
<li>The anchor text indicates to the search engine what the topic might be of the page the link points at and it can therefor help that receiving page rank for that term. If you want to rank for "WordPress SEO", you'd want to have links to that page with anchor texts like "WordPress SEO", "SEO for WordPress", etc.</li>
<li>The anchor text also has an effect on how many people will be clicking on the link. While from the above bullet you might have gathered that "click here" is a horrible anchor text, as you probably don't want to rank for it, it does tend to get clicked well and therefor gets you more visitors.</li>
</ul>
<p>Of course, don't overdo this. If all links, or a too large percentage of links to your site and / or page have the same anchor text, you'll look like a spammer. So if you're actively link building, vary your anchor text.</p>
<p>As you see, these are not trivial decisions, ones you have to make on a site by site and page by page basis. You don't always have the luxury of controlling anchor text and to be honest, that's a good thing; way too much sites out there would have a far over optimized "link profile" if they had such a level of control. Because you have to make these decisions on a site by site basis, buying a "backlink package", something still far too common these days, is often a wrong decision.</p>
<h2>Are there any rules about links?</h2>
<p>There are two kinds of rules that influence SEO and thus link building. First of all, there are the rules of the search engines, with Google having said most about links. Then there's the law about advertising, these laws differ per country but especially within the EU they tend to have the same "ring".</p>
<h3>What Google says about links and link building</h3>
<p>In their article on <a href="http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer%3D66356">link schemes</a> Google gives some examples of links that can influence your ranking negatively. This deals with both links to and from your site (f.i.: don't link to spam sites). They're most clear about <a href="http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer%3D66736">paid links</a> though: they're a violation of their guidelines and can lead to a ban of your website.</p>
<p>This isn't to say that such links would have an immediate negative effect. In fact, in the short term they might even boost your rankings, as quite often Google has to take manual action to discount those links, as not in all cases Google see whether a link has been paid for or not. But, especially keeping in mind the recent debacles with <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html">JC Penney</a> and <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704520504576162753779521700.html">Overstock.com</a>, both of whom have been penalized by Google <em>and</em> publicly scolded for their behavior by the press, this tactic is seldom worth while.</p>
<p>Google recently published an article on <a href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/06/quality-links-to-your-site.html">quality links</a> on the Google Webmaster Blog, it's worth reading to get their perspective.</p>
<h3>The law about links</h3>
<p>I've talked about the Dutch specifics in an article on <a href="http://www.marketingfacts.nl/berichten/20101221_reclame_richtlijnen_vs_links_in_2011/">Marketingfacts recently</a>, which in trun goes back to <a href="http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/6982-the-asa-will-investigate-seo-practises">an article on eConsultancy</a>: if something is an ad, it has to be visibly (for the visitor) marked as such. A paid link could under these new rules be called an ad and would therefor have to be disclosed. I don't see a court case just yet, but it's a good thing to keep in mind.</p>
<h2>Want to read more about link building?</h2>
<p>Outside of this link building 101 a lot is being written about the topic and a large part of it is, excusez le mot, crap. Because of that I'd like to point you at some sources that I <em>do</em> consider worth while:</p>
<ul>
<li>
		<a href="http://wiep.net/">Wiep.net</a><br />
		The blog of my fellow countryman Wiep Knol, an amicable guy and <em>great</em> link builder.
	</li>
<li>
		<a href="http://www.ericward.com/">Eric Ward aka LinkMoses</a><br />
		When I went to my first class in high school in '94, this guy was already doing link building. His insights are therefor based on a treasure trove of experience.
	</li>
<li>
		<a href="http://www.linkspiel.com/">LinkSpiel by Debra Mastaler</a><br />
		She has more of a wider marketing approach to link building and is therefor very usable for each and everyone.
	</li>
</ul>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/link-building-101/">Link Building 101</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/AS9Z0X_WRE4" height="1" width="1"/>";}i:3;a:14:{s:5:"title";s:47:"11 Top WordPress Plugins Every Blog Should Have";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/jChO-krtxVY/";s:4:"guid";s:24:"http://yoast.com/?p=1133";s:8:"comments";s:113:"http://yoast.com/top-wordpress-plugins/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=top-wordpress-plugins#comments";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:109:"http://yoast.com/top-wordpress-plugins/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=top-wordpress-pluginsfeed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:3:"223";}s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Wed, 16 Feb 2011 14:00:27 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:9:"WordPress";s:11:"description";s:768:"<p>WordPress in itself is a decent system but it can be made into a rock solid blogging beast. Adding plugins can make WordPress into the Swiss Army Knife of blogging: just pull out whatever functionality you need for your specific blog! Many people have asked me for my list of top WordPress plugins. Of course [...]</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/top-wordpress-plugins/">11 Top WordPress Plugins Every Blog Should Have</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";s:7715:"<p><img class="alignright" src="http://yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/swiss-business-knife.jpg" alt="The Best WordPress Plugins out there" width="250" height="187" />WordPress in itself is a decent system but it can be made into a rock solid blogging beast. Adding plugins can make WordPress into the Swiss Army Knife of blogging: just pull out whatever functionality you need for your specific blog!</p>
<p>Many people have asked me for my list of top WordPress plugins. Of course I've written quite a few <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress/">WordPress plugins</a> myself, but I'd thought I'd share with you what I use and recommond as the top WordPress plugins for just about any site I build, analyze &amp; optimize.</p>
<ol>
<li><strong><a href="http://yoast.com/w3-total-cache/">W3 Total Cache</a></strong><br />
I seriously cannot live without this plugin, as it makes the sites I build perform to my expectations, instead of slowly crawling. And yes, I think every site should be cached to get the maximum performance for each and every user, not just when you start hitting social sites.</li>
<li><strong><a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress/google-analytics/">Google Analytics for WordPress</a></strong><br />
While it's my own plugin I seriously recommend everybody use this for tracking their blogs visitors, it does "standard tracking", but it helps as well with analyzing 404 errors, seeing how authors perform, and much much more.</li>
<li><strong><a href="http://joelstarnes.co.uk/pagemash/">pageMash</a></strong><br />
My site uses a lot of pages to get the <a href="http://yoast.com/site-structure-seo/">site structure</a> I want, and sometimes you want to move around some pages. The default WordPress way of doing that is hard (you have to give each page a menu order by hand) but pageMash is excellent for that, with a nice Ajaxy interface in which you can just drag and drop pages. Have a look (click for larger image):<br />
<a href="http://yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/pagemash.png"><img src="http://yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/pagemash.png" alt="Pagemash, a top WordPress plugin" width="292" /></a><br />
I've been using PageMash for years, in fact it was in my original Top WordPress Plugins post back in October 2008. On some sites though, I've replaced it with <a href="http://eskapism.se/code-playground/cms-tree-page-view/">CMS Tree Page View</a>, which also has a great interface and was a bit easier to work with on sites with even more pages.</li>
<li><strong><a href="http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/">Redirection<br />
</a></strong>Adding in redirects in WordPress is, well, impossible. Redirection makes it possible and for that sole reason is with me on most of my sites. After having some issues with it at first with 3.0 it seems to be working flawlessly again, and I couldn't imagine running a blog without it yet.</li>
<li><strong><a title="Visit plugin homepage" href="http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/">WP-DBManager<br />
</a></strong>Not only is this plugin perfect for doing automated backups, it can also do things like database optimization and the admin pages for it allow you to do the occasional query from within WordPress!</li>
<li><strong><a href="http://vaultpress.com/">VaultPress<br />
</a></strong>I used to rely on all sorts of plugins to do my security, now I just rely on VaultPress. It makes backups of your blog, checks your site for weird anomalies and fixes them as you go along happily blogging. If you make money from your site and / or it's worth a lot to you, don't miss this one.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/clean-notifications"><strong>Clean Notifications</strong></a><br />
There are a couple of things in WordPress that have annoyed me from the start and one of them are the emails it sends out for comments, pingbacks etc. Clean Notifications, another one of those top WordPress plugins that has been with me for what seems like ages, cleans those up nicely and turns the emails into nice readable emails without clutter.</li>
<li><strong><a href="http://ten-fingers-and-a-brain.com/wordpress-plugins/comment-email-verify/">Comment e-mail verification</a></strong><br />
I don't like adding hoops for people to jump through when they're leaving a comment on my site, but I have recently started requiring people to verify their email address once they leave their first comment. It's helped me heaps in controlling spam on my blog, and the comment e-mail verification plugin is the plugin that allows me to do that. Read more on my comment flow here: <a href="http://yoast.com/prevent-anonymous-comments-wordpress/">preventing anonymous comments in WordPress</a>.</li>
<li><strong><a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mrss/">MediaRSS</a></strong><br />
One of those plugins that you never "see" but should always be quietly there, doing it's work, is MediaRSS. It adds MediaRSS tags to your RSS feed, making the first image in the post the thumbnail for services that support it and other things. A simple one without any configuration needs: install, and go!</li>
<li><strong><a href="http://themergency.com/blackbird-pie-wordpress-com-and-new-twitter/">Blackbird Pie</a></strong><br />
So many conversations get started on Twitter these days that you often want to refer back to them in your blogposts. Just linking to a tweet is such a bland method of doing that though, when Blackbird Pie makes it really easy to do it so much smoother. Check out this tweet about my <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/">WordPress SEO plugin</a>, for instance:&nbsp;</p>
<p><!-- tweet id : 15107261231800320 --></p>

<div>
<div><span>The WordPress SEO plugin by @<a href="http://twitter.com/yoast">yoast</a> is like an SEO bowl of Ben &#038; Jerry's icecream. So good in so many ways. <a href="http://twitter.com/search?q%3D%23seo" title="#seo">#seo</a> <a href="http://twitter.com/search?q%3D%23wordpress" title="#wordpress">#wordpress</a></span>
<div><a title="tweeted on 15 December, 2010 18:13" href="http://twitter.com/#!/thelukemcdonald/status/15107261231800320">15 December, 2010 18:13</a> via <a href="http://twitter.com" rel="nofollow">Tweetie for Mac</a></div>
<div><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/thelukemcdonald"><img style="width:48px; height:48px; padding-right:7px; border:none; margin:0" src="http://a0.twimg.com/profile_images/1145945960/IMG_0615-2_normal.jpg" /></a></div>
<div><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/thelukemcdonald">@thelukemcdonald</a>
<div>Luke McDonald</div>
</div>
<div></div>
</div>
</div>
<p>        <!-- end of tweet --></p>
<p>That looks pretty darn cool, don't you think?</li>
<li><strong><a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/">WordPress SEO plugin</a><br />
</strong>Last but not least is my own WordPress SEO plugin. While it's still in beta and will do far more when it's completely done, it's already the best SEO plugin out there, in my own humble opinion of course. I use it literally everywhere.</li>
</ol>
<p>Note: if you think: there are a LOT of comments on this post, that's true. The original version of this post was published in 2008, I just decided to update and re-post!</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/top-wordpress-plugins/">11 Top WordPress Plugins Every Blog Should Have</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/jChO-krtxVY" height="1" width="1"/>";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:104:"http://yoast.com/top-wordpress-plugins/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=top-wordpress-plugins";}s:7:"summary";s:768:"<p>WordPress in itself is a decent system but it can be made into a rock solid blogging beast. Adding plugins can make WordPress into the Swiss Army Knife of blogging: just pull out whatever functionality you need for your specific blog! Many people have asked me for my list of top WordPress plugins. Of course [...]</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/top-wordpress-plugins/">11 Top WordPress Plugins Every Blog Should Have</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:7715:"<p><img class="alignright" src="http://yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/swiss-business-knife.jpg" alt="The Best WordPress Plugins out there" width="250" height="187" />WordPress in itself is a decent system but it can be made into a rock solid blogging beast. Adding plugins can make WordPress into the Swiss Army Knife of blogging: just pull out whatever functionality you need for your specific blog!</p>
<p>Many people have asked me for my list of top WordPress plugins. Of course I've written quite a few <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress/">WordPress plugins</a> myself, but I'd thought I'd share with you what I use and recommond as the top WordPress plugins for just about any site I build, analyze &amp; optimize.</p>
<ol>
<li><strong><a href="http://yoast.com/w3-total-cache/">W3 Total Cache</a></strong><br />
I seriously cannot live without this plugin, as it makes the sites I build perform to my expectations, instead of slowly crawling. And yes, I think every site should be cached to get the maximum performance for each and every user, not just when you start hitting social sites.</li>
<li><strong><a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress/google-analytics/">Google Analytics for WordPress</a></strong><br />
While it's my own plugin I seriously recommend everybody use this for tracking their blogs visitors, it does "standard tracking", but it helps as well with analyzing 404 errors, seeing how authors perform, and much much more.</li>
<li><strong><a href="http://joelstarnes.co.uk/pagemash/">pageMash</a></strong><br />
My site uses a lot of pages to get the <a href="http://yoast.com/site-structure-seo/">site structure</a> I want, and sometimes you want to move around some pages. The default WordPress way of doing that is hard (you have to give each page a menu order by hand) but pageMash is excellent for that, with a nice Ajaxy interface in which you can just drag and drop pages. Have a look (click for larger image):<br />
<a href="http://yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/pagemash.png"><img src="http://yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/pagemash.png" alt="Pagemash, a top WordPress plugin" width="292" /></a><br />
I've been using PageMash for years, in fact it was in my original Top WordPress Plugins post back in October 2008. On some sites though, I've replaced it with <a href="http://eskapism.se/code-playground/cms-tree-page-view/">CMS Tree Page View</a>, which also has a great interface and was a bit easier to work with on sites with even more pages.</li>
<li><strong><a href="http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/redirection/">Redirection<br />
</a></strong>Adding in redirects in WordPress is, well, impossible. Redirection makes it possible and for that sole reason is with me on most of my sites. After having some issues with it at first with 3.0 it seems to be working flawlessly again, and I couldn't imagine running a blog without it yet.</li>
<li><strong><a title="Visit plugin homepage" href="http://lesterchan.net/portfolio/programming/php/">WP-DBManager<br />
</a></strong>Not only is this plugin perfect for doing automated backups, it can also do things like database optimization and the admin pages for it allow you to do the occasional query from within WordPress!</li>
<li><strong><a href="http://vaultpress.com/">VaultPress<br />
</a></strong>I used to rely on all sorts of plugins to do my security, now I just rely on VaultPress. It makes backups of your blog, checks your site for weird anomalies and fixes them as you go along happily blogging. If you make money from your site and / or it's worth a lot to you, don't miss this one.</li>
<li><a href="http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/clean-notifications"><strong>Clean Notifications</strong></a><br />
There are a couple of things in WordPress that have annoyed me from the start and one of them are the emails it sends out for comments, pingbacks etc. Clean Notifications, another one of those top WordPress plugins that has been with me for what seems like ages, cleans those up nicely and turns the emails into nice readable emails without clutter.</li>
<li><strong><a href="http://ten-fingers-and-a-brain.com/wordpress-plugins/comment-email-verify/">Comment e-mail verification</a></strong><br />
I don't like adding hoops for people to jump through when they're leaving a comment on my site, but I have recently started requiring people to verify their email address once they leave their first comment. It's helped me heaps in controlling spam on my blog, and the comment e-mail verification plugin is the plugin that allows me to do that. Read more on my comment flow here: <a href="http://yoast.com/prevent-anonymous-comments-wordpress/">preventing anonymous comments in WordPress</a>.</li>
<li><strong><a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mrss/">MediaRSS</a></strong><br />
One of those plugins that you never "see" but should always be quietly there, doing it's work, is MediaRSS. It adds MediaRSS tags to your RSS feed, making the first image in the post the thumbnail for services that support it and other things. A simple one without any configuration needs: install, and go!</li>
<li><strong><a href="http://themergency.com/blackbird-pie-wordpress-com-and-new-twitter/">Blackbird Pie</a></strong><br />
So many conversations get started on Twitter these days that you often want to refer back to them in your blogposts. Just linking to a tweet is such a bland method of doing that though, when Blackbird Pie makes it really easy to do it so much smoother. Check out this tweet about my <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/">WordPress SEO plugin</a>, for instance:&nbsp;</p>
<p><!-- tweet id : 15107261231800320 --></p>

<div>
<div><span>The WordPress SEO plugin by @<a href="http://twitter.com/yoast">yoast</a> is like an SEO bowl of Ben &#038; Jerry's icecream. So good in so many ways. <a href="http://twitter.com/search?q%3D%23seo" title="#seo">#seo</a> <a href="http://twitter.com/search?q%3D%23wordpress" title="#wordpress">#wordpress</a></span>
<div><a title="tweeted on 15 December, 2010 18:13" href="http://twitter.com/#!/thelukemcdonald/status/15107261231800320">15 December, 2010 18:13</a> via <a href="http://twitter.com" rel="nofollow">Tweetie for Mac</a></div>
<div><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/thelukemcdonald"><img style="width:48px; height:48px; padding-right:7px; border:none; margin:0" src="http://a0.twimg.com/profile_images/1145945960/IMG_0615-2_normal.jpg" /></a></div>
<div><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/thelukemcdonald">@thelukemcdonald</a>
<div>Luke McDonald</div>
</div>
<div></div>
</div>
</div>
<p>        <!-- end of tweet --></p>
<p>That looks pretty darn cool, don't you think?</li>
<li><strong><a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/">WordPress SEO plugin</a><br />
</strong>Last but not least is my own WordPress SEO plugin. While it's still in beta and will do far more when it's completely done, it's already the best SEO plugin out there, in my own humble opinion of course. I use it literally everywhere.</li>
</ol>
<p>Note: if you think: there are a LOT of comments on this post, that's true. The original version of this post was published in 2008, I just decided to update and re-post!</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/top-wordpress-plugins/">11 Top WordPress Plugins Every Blog Should Have</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/jChO-krtxVY" height="1" width="1"/>";}i:4;a:14:{s:5:"title";s:41:"Intelligent Site Structure for better SEO";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/O1zkLLaO1xo/";s:4:"guid";s:24:"http://yoast.com/?p=3847";s:8:"comments";s:107:"http://yoast.com/site-structure-seo/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=site-structure-seo#comments";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:103:"http://yoast.com/site-structure-seo/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=site-structure-seofeed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"57";}s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Wed, 09 Feb 2011 14:00:07 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:3:"SEO";s:11:"description";s:756:"<p>Search engines are still one of the most important traffic drivers to sites these days, which is why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is incredibly important. While SEO is often thought to be just a set of some technical tricks - and as a professional SEO, I confess to spending a lot of time with clients [...]</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/site-structure-seo/">Intelligent Site Structure for better SEO</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";s:12636:"<p>Search engines are still one of the most important traffic drivers to sites these days, which is why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is incredibly important. While SEO is often thought to be just a set of some technical tricks - and as a professional SEO, I confess to spending a lot of time with clients fixing technical issues - a site's structure, is just as important. Your site's structure determines whether a search engine understands what the topic of your site is and how easily it will find and index content relevant to your site's purpose and intent.</p>
<p>By creating a good structure, you can use the content you've written that has attracted links from others, and use your site's structure to spread some of that "linkjuice" to the other pages on your site. On a commercial site, that means that you can use the quality content you've written to boost the search engine rankings of your sales pages too. Did I get your attention now? Ok, now we've covered what and why, let's get on to how.</p>
<h2>Developing a good site structure</h2>
<p>When developing a new site, or restructuring an existing one, it helps to draw out your site's structure in something like Visio, or even putting it in Excel. What you'll want to do is put all the pages and sections in there as a tree, something like that shown in Figure 1 (based on my own old site structure):</p>
<div><img src="http://yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/sitestructure-1.jpg" alt="a typical site structure" title="a typical site structure" width="598" height="169" class="size-full wp-image-3849" /><p>Figure 1: A typical site structure</p></div>
<p>Now as you can see this structure is unbalanced, as the Code section constitutes more than half of the entire site. You should make sure your site structure looks like a reasonably balanced pyramid. I'd advise you to have something between 2 and 7 main sections, depending on how content heavy your site is, and no section should be more than twice as large as any other section.</p>
<p>As well as the code section being way too big, there's another couple of points to consider about Figure 1. First, there are three pages that are basically about me: "About Me", "Projects" and "Websites". In addition, upon checking out my site statistics I found that the WordPress pages were responsible for about 30% of my site traffic, yet they were down on the third and fourth level.</p>
<p>The benefit of using a tool like Visio or OmniGraffle, as I did, is that it's quite easy to rearrange stuff, and it's easy to get a good "feel" for whether the new structure is going to work. I've often used a desk or a wall and a lot of post-it notes for this purpose too, and that has also worked fine for me.</p>
<p>So I started to rearrange the sections and came up with the section structure seen in Figure 2.</p>
<div><img src="http://yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/sitestructure-2.jpg" alt="improve site structure" title="improve site structure" width="550" height="376" class="size-full wp-image-3850" /><p>Figure 2: A more refined section structure.</p></div>
<p>As you can see I decided to move some pages "up" the tree, and I removed some pages. When you're rethinking your site structure you'll often find that some pages are not really beneficial to your users. Deleting them is the best thing you can do if that's the case.</p>
<p>Another choice I made was to move the blog to the homepage. My homepage was utter nonsense, and basically yet another "About Me" page. And though I like myself, that's not what I was hoping people came to my site for. My blog is the basis of my site, so I decided to make it the cornerstone of this structure too.</p>
<h3>Naming your sections</h3>
<p>Once you're satisfied with your site structure, have a look at the names you've come up with for your sections. If you have enough content about a subject for it to be able to have its own section, you can bet people are searching for it as well. That's why it's very wise to make sure your section names use the keywords people are searching for!</p>
<p>For example, if you're like me and you've written WordPress plugins and created a section for them, you should not call that section "WordPress". What would you search for? "WordPress plugins", right? So name it that (which doesn't mean you can't call it WordPress in your menu structure if that works better, just make sure the page title and breadcrumb links are "WordPress plugins"). You can do quite a bit of research on which keywords people search for. Some freely available tools are:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.google.com/trends" alt="Google Trends">Google Trends</a></li>
<li><a href="https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal" alt="The Google AdWords Keyword tool">The Google AdWords Keyword tool</a></li>
<li><a href="http://adlab.msn.com/contextSim/Default.aspx" alt="The Microsoft Keyword Group Detection homepage">Microsoft's Keyword Group Detection</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Pick the right names for your sections and subsections, and you're halfway there. Now use the same techniques to pick the titles for your pages, and make sure to keep them short and clean. My sections now have names as shown in Figure 3.</p>
<div><img src="http://yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/sitestructure-3.jpg" alt="Site Structure with Sensible section names" title="Site Structure with Sensible section names" width="547" height="134" class="size-full wp-image-3851" /><p>Figure 3: Site Structure with Sensible section names.</p></div>
<p>Now we've covered the two most important parts of defining your site structure, we'll turn our attention to some other important points to consider.</p>
<h3>Other Things to keep in mind</h3>
<p>There are another couple of things to keep in mind when working out the structure of your site.</p>
<p><strong>Forums, and other user-controlled content</strong>: If one part of your site is producing way more content then another part, and the quality of that highly productive part is poorer, you may not wish to mix the two. For instance, let's say your front page is like A List Apart, updating every few weeks with very high quality articles gathering loads of links. Another section of your site is your forums section, which produces loads of new threads every day, of questionable quality.</p>
<p>Your forum is probably going to deteriorate the rankings for your front page, because you're constantly "flowing" ranking strength from your high quality front page into your forums. So the best thing you can do with them is move them to a subdomain of your site.</p>
<p>This is less of a problem when you have a blog on your site, which you control. The quality of that will be less questionable, and you may want those blogposts to rank well.</p>
<p><strong>Redundant categories and tags</strong>: Sooner or later you're going to fall into this trap - I know I have - of having multiple categories on your site/blog, and constantly assigning the same two categories to certain posts. Let's say you have the "browsers" and "Opera" categories, and Opera is the only browser you write about. Now when you look at the category overview page for the "browsers" category, you will be seeing the exact same content as when you look at the "Opera" category page - the two tags are basically redundant.</p>
<p>When you're using tags, this happens even more. You're probably wondering "what's wrong with that?" Well, let's say a few people wanted to link to all those posts, because they liked them so much. You've just lost control over which category they will link to - the first one might pick the "browsers" category, and the second person might pick the "Opera" category. If this happens multiple times, you're "throwing away" good links.</p>
<p>Let's say you have 2 links to your "browsers" category page, and 2 links to your "Opera" category page. A less popular competitor has 3 links to his single "browser category" page, because he doesn't have a redundant "Opera" category. In a real simple world where every link is equal, your competitor would now rank above you.</p>
<p>It's very important to make sure you're not showing the same content on multiple pages, because that's not helping your rankings.</p>
<h2>Internal link structure</h2>
<p>If you did it all right with your new site structure, it should look like a pyramid. Now you should consider how you're going to connect the sections of this pyramid together. Look at those sections as small pyramids inside your larger pyramid. Each page in the top of that pyramid should link to all its sub pages, and the other way around.</p>
<p>Because you're linking from pages that are closely related to each other content-wise, you're increasing your site's possibility to rank. You're "helping" the search engine out by showing it what's related and what isn't.</p>
<p>Take figure 4 as an example.</p>
<div><img src="http://yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/linkstructure.jpg" alt="Link Structure" title="Link Structure" width="491" height="482" class="size-full wp-image-3848" /><p>Figure 4: You also need to consider how the pages link to each other within each section.</p></div>
<p>You should make sure you keep your links between each page relevant to those pages. For example, if you linked from subpage 3 to plugin 2 all the time, the search engine might think that subpage 3 was related to plugin 2, whereas it's only related to plugin 4.</p>
<h2>From your new site structure to URLs</h2>
<p>Once you've created your new site structure, you can go forth and create the URLs for this structure. Each page's URL should describe the content of that page, yet be as short as possible. If you have determined what keywords you want to rank for, you might include the most important ones in your URLs.</p>
<p>Things to keep in mind while implementing your new URLs</p>
<ul>
<li>If you're using multiple words, separate them with hyphens.</li>
<li>Mixed case URLs are an absolute no-no, as Unix and Linux servers are case sensitive. Having mixed case URLs drastically increases the<br />
possibility of typos - have you ever tried remember a URL that /LoOks/LiKe/ThiS/ ?</li>
<li>Numbers might be easy for your CMS, but not for your users. Remembering a URL with a number in it is hard, so the chance people will remember<br />
it and link to it is smaller - don't use numbers in URLs.</li>
<li>Make URLs guessable if you can. If people can remember your URLs they can also talk about it with their friends more easily.</li>
<li>Make sure you redirect all your old pages to their new equivalents using 301 redirects. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect, and this way<br />
search engines will move all the link value from the old URL to the new one.</li>
<li>Make sure content is available under one URL and one URL only, for example by implementing print stylesheets on your pages. There's no valid reason anymore to have a different page for printing purposes because all major browsers support print stylesheets.</li>
</ul>
<p>For more info on URLs and the problems they can cause, see my article on <a href="http://yoast.com/articles/duplicate-content/">duplicate content</a>. </p>
<h2>Conclusion: work on your site structure</h2>
<p>A good site structure is a requirement for Search Engine Optimization. It allows both your users and search engines to find content within your site more easily. A good structure is well categorized, and pages within it only link to other pages on the same topic.</p>
<p>Using the right URLs for the pages within that site structure increases the chance that people will remember and link to your URL, and heavily increases your ability to rank in the search engines as well.</p>
<p><strong>Note:</strong> I originally wrote this article in October 2007 for <a href="http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/intelligent-site-structure-for-better-se/">dev.opera.com</a>. When I came to the conclusion I needed an article on the topic, I found this old one. Nothing has changed since it's appearance, so other than adding a a few reference links here and there, I've not changed a thing.</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/site-structure-seo/">Intelligent Site Structure for better SEO</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/O1zkLLaO1xo" height="1" width="1"/>";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:98:"http://yoast.com/site-structure-seo/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=site-structure-seo";}s:7:"summary";s:756:"<p>Search engines are still one of the most important traffic drivers to sites these days, which is why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is incredibly important. While SEO is often thought to be just a set of some technical tricks - and as a professional SEO, I confess to spending a lot of time with clients [...]</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/site-structure-seo/">Intelligent Site Structure for better SEO</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:12636:"<p>Search engines are still one of the most important traffic drivers to sites these days, which is why Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is incredibly important. While SEO is often thought to be just a set of some technical tricks - and as a professional SEO, I confess to spending a lot of time with clients fixing technical issues - a site's structure, is just as important. Your site's structure determines whether a search engine understands what the topic of your site is and how easily it will find and index content relevant to your site's purpose and intent.</p>
<p>By creating a good structure, you can use the content you've written that has attracted links from others, and use your site's structure to spread some of that "linkjuice" to the other pages on your site. On a commercial site, that means that you can use the quality content you've written to boost the search engine rankings of your sales pages too. Did I get your attention now? Ok, now we've covered what and why, let's get on to how.</p>
<h2>Developing a good site structure</h2>
<p>When developing a new site, or restructuring an existing one, it helps to draw out your site's structure in something like Visio, or even putting it in Excel. What you'll want to do is put all the pages and sections in there as a tree, something like that shown in Figure 1 (based on my own old site structure):</p>
<div><img src="http://yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/sitestructure-1.jpg" alt="a typical site structure" title="a typical site structure" width="598" height="169" class="size-full wp-image-3849" /><p>Figure 1: A typical site structure</p></div>
<p>Now as you can see this structure is unbalanced, as the Code section constitutes more than half of the entire site. You should make sure your site structure looks like a reasonably balanced pyramid. I'd advise you to have something between 2 and 7 main sections, depending on how content heavy your site is, and no section should be more than twice as large as any other section.</p>
<p>As well as the code section being way too big, there's another couple of points to consider about Figure 1. First, there are three pages that are basically about me: "About Me", "Projects" and "Websites". In addition, upon checking out my site statistics I found that the WordPress pages were responsible for about 30% of my site traffic, yet they were down on the third and fourth level.</p>
<p>The benefit of using a tool like Visio or OmniGraffle, as I did, is that it's quite easy to rearrange stuff, and it's easy to get a good "feel" for whether the new structure is going to work. I've often used a desk or a wall and a lot of post-it notes for this purpose too, and that has also worked fine for me.</p>
<p>So I started to rearrange the sections and came up with the section structure seen in Figure 2.</p>
<div><img src="http://yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/sitestructure-2.jpg" alt="improve site structure" title="improve site structure" width="550" height="376" class="size-full wp-image-3850" /><p>Figure 2: A more refined section structure.</p></div>
<p>As you can see I decided to move some pages "up" the tree, and I removed some pages. When you're rethinking your site structure you'll often find that some pages are not really beneficial to your users. Deleting them is the best thing you can do if that's the case.</p>
<p>Another choice I made was to move the blog to the homepage. My homepage was utter nonsense, and basically yet another "About Me" page. And though I like myself, that's not what I was hoping people came to my site for. My blog is the basis of my site, so I decided to make it the cornerstone of this structure too.</p>
<h3>Naming your sections</h3>
<p>Once you're satisfied with your site structure, have a look at the names you've come up with for your sections. If you have enough content about a subject for it to be able to have its own section, you can bet people are searching for it as well. That's why it's very wise to make sure your section names use the keywords people are searching for!</p>
<p>For example, if you're like me and you've written WordPress plugins and created a section for them, you should not call that section "WordPress". What would you search for? "WordPress plugins", right? So name it that (which doesn't mean you can't call it WordPress in your menu structure if that works better, just make sure the page title and breadcrumb links are "WordPress plugins"). You can do quite a bit of research on which keywords people search for. Some freely available tools are:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.google.com/trends" alt="Google Trends">Google Trends</a></li>
<li><a href="https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal" alt="The Google AdWords Keyword tool">The Google AdWords Keyword tool</a></li>
<li><a href="http://adlab.msn.com/contextSim/Default.aspx" alt="The Microsoft Keyword Group Detection homepage">Microsoft's Keyword Group Detection</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Pick the right names for your sections and subsections, and you're halfway there. Now use the same techniques to pick the titles for your pages, and make sure to keep them short and clean. My sections now have names as shown in Figure 3.</p>
<div><img src="http://yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/sitestructure-3.jpg" alt="Site Structure with Sensible section names" title="Site Structure with Sensible section names" width="547" height="134" class="size-full wp-image-3851" /><p>Figure 3: Site Structure with Sensible section names.</p></div>
<p>Now we've covered the two most important parts of defining your site structure, we'll turn our attention to some other important points to consider.</p>
<h3>Other Things to keep in mind</h3>
<p>There are another couple of things to keep in mind when working out the structure of your site.</p>
<p><strong>Forums, and other user-controlled content</strong>: If one part of your site is producing way more content then another part, and the quality of that highly productive part is poorer, you may not wish to mix the two. For instance, let's say your front page is like A List Apart, updating every few weeks with very high quality articles gathering loads of links. Another section of your site is your forums section, which produces loads of new threads every day, of questionable quality.</p>
<p>Your forum is probably going to deteriorate the rankings for your front page, because you're constantly "flowing" ranking strength from your high quality front page into your forums. So the best thing you can do with them is move them to a subdomain of your site.</p>
<p>This is less of a problem when you have a blog on your site, which you control. The quality of that will be less questionable, and you may want those blogposts to rank well.</p>
<p><strong>Redundant categories and tags</strong>: Sooner or later you're going to fall into this trap - I know I have - of having multiple categories on your site/blog, and constantly assigning the same two categories to certain posts. Let's say you have the "browsers" and "Opera" categories, and Opera is the only browser you write about. Now when you look at the category overview page for the "browsers" category, you will be seeing the exact same content as when you look at the "Opera" category page - the two tags are basically redundant.</p>
<p>When you're using tags, this happens even more. You're probably wondering "what's wrong with that?" Well, let's say a few people wanted to link to all those posts, because they liked them so much. You've just lost control over which category they will link to - the first one might pick the "browsers" category, and the second person might pick the "Opera" category. If this happens multiple times, you're "throwing away" good links.</p>
<p>Let's say you have 2 links to your "browsers" category page, and 2 links to your "Opera" category page. A less popular competitor has 3 links to his single "browser category" page, because he doesn't have a redundant "Opera" category. In a real simple world where every link is equal, your competitor would now rank above you.</p>
<p>It's very important to make sure you're not showing the same content on multiple pages, because that's not helping your rankings.</p>
<h2>Internal link structure</h2>
<p>If you did it all right with your new site structure, it should look like a pyramid. Now you should consider how you're going to connect the sections of this pyramid together. Look at those sections as small pyramids inside your larger pyramid. Each page in the top of that pyramid should link to all its sub pages, and the other way around.</p>
<p>Because you're linking from pages that are closely related to each other content-wise, you're increasing your site's possibility to rank. You're "helping" the search engine out by showing it what's related and what isn't.</p>
<p>Take figure 4 as an example.</p>
<div><img src="http://yoast.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/linkstructure.jpg" alt="Link Structure" title="Link Structure" width="491" height="482" class="size-full wp-image-3848" /><p>Figure 4: You also need to consider how the pages link to each other within each section.</p></div>
<p>You should make sure you keep your links between each page relevant to those pages. For example, if you linked from subpage 3 to plugin 2 all the time, the search engine might think that subpage 3 was related to plugin 2, whereas it's only related to plugin 4.</p>
<h2>From your new site structure to URLs</h2>
<p>Once you've created your new site structure, you can go forth and create the URLs for this structure. Each page's URL should describe the content of that page, yet be as short as possible. If you have determined what keywords you want to rank for, you might include the most important ones in your URLs.</p>
<p>Things to keep in mind while implementing your new URLs</p>
<ul>
<li>If you're using multiple words, separate them with hyphens.</li>
<li>Mixed case URLs are an absolute no-no, as Unix and Linux servers are case sensitive. Having mixed case URLs drastically increases the<br />
possibility of typos - have you ever tried remember a URL that /LoOks/LiKe/ThiS/ ?</li>
<li>Numbers might be easy for your CMS, but not for your users. Remembering a URL with a number in it is hard, so the chance people will remember<br />
it and link to it is smaller - don't use numbers in URLs.</li>
<li>Make URLs guessable if you can. If people can remember your URLs they can also talk about it with their friends more easily.</li>
<li>Make sure you redirect all your old pages to their new equivalents using 301 redirects. A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect, and this way<br />
search engines will move all the link value from the old URL to the new one.</li>
<li>Make sure content is available under one URL and one URL only, for example by implementing print stylesheets on your pages. There's no valid reason anymore to have a different page for printing purposes because all major browsers support print stylesheets.</li>
</ul>
<p>For more info on URLs and the problems they can cause, see my article on <a href="http://yoast.com/articles/duplicate-content/">duplicate content</a>. </p>
<h2>Conclusion: work on your site structure</h2>
<p>A good site structure is a requirement for Search Engine Optimization. It allows both your users and search engines to find content within your site more easily. A good structure is well categorized, and pages within it only link to other pages on the same topic.</p>
<p>Using the right URLs for the pages within that site structure increases the chance that people will remember and link to your URL, and heavily increases your ability to rank in the search engines as well.</p>
<p><strong>Note:</strong> I originally wrote this article in October 2007 for <a href="http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/intelligent-site-structure-for-better-se/">dev.opera.com</a>. When I came to the conclusion I needed an article on the topic, I found this old one. Nothing has changed since it's appearance, so other than adding a a few reference links here and there, I've not changed a thing.</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/site-structure-seo/">Intelligent Site Structure for better SEO</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/O1zkLLaO1xo" height="1" width="1"/>";}i:5;a:14:{s:5:"title";s:26:"HTML Sitemap for WordPress";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/VYbj8voGxvQ/";s:4:"guid";s:24:"http://yoast.com/?p=3839";s:8:"comments";s:115:"http://yoast.com/html-sitemap-wordpress/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=html-sitemap-wordpress#comments";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:111:"http://yoast.com/html-sitemap-wordpress/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=html-sitemap-wordpressfeed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"63";}s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Tue, 08 Feb 2011 11:10:58 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:45:"SEOWordPressusabilityWordPress SEOXML Sitemap";s:11:"description";s:733:"<p>HTML sitemaps (as opposed to XML sitemaps) are often mentioned as being useful for SEO. They certainly are if you use them wisely (and especially Bing seems to like them at times), but I like them even more for the fact that users like them a lot. There's plenty of plugins out there that will [...]</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/html-sitemap-wordpress/">HTML Sitemap for WordPress</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";s:5787:"<p>HTML sitemaps (as opposed to XML sitemaps) are often mentioned as being useful for SEO. They certainly are if you use them wisely (and especially Bing seems to like them at times), but I like them even more for the fact that <em>users</em> like them a lot.</p>
<p>There's plenty of plugins out there that will help you make an HTML sitemap. It's not a feature in my <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/">WordPress SEO plugin</a> just yet, but it might become one. The issue is though, that in most cases, you'll want to do specific things with your sitemaps, include or exclude certain pages / post types, show certain taxonomies, etc. That's why I tend to advice people to create a Sitemap Page template in their theme and use that.</p>
<p>In fact, I advise you to use a theme partial, so you can reuse your HTML sitemap template on your <a href="http://yoast.com/404-error-pages-wordpress/">WordPress 404 error pages</a> too. To do that, follow these steps: first of all, create a <em>partials</em> folder within your theme folder. In that <em>partials</em> folder, create a file called <code>sitemap.php</code>.</p>
<p>Paste the following code into that file and adapt as needed for your site:</p>

<div><div><pre>&lt;h2 id=&quot;authors&quot;&gt;Authors&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
<span>&lt;?php</span> 
wp_list_authors<span>&#40;</span> 
  <span>array</span><span>&#40;</span>
    <span>'exclude_admin'</span> <span>=&gt;</span> <span>false</span><span>,</span>
  <span>&#41;</span>
<span>&#41;</span><span>;</span> 
<span>?&gt;</span>
&lt;/ul&gt;
&nbsp;
&lt;h2 id=&quot;pages&quot;&gt;Pages&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
<span>&lt;?php</span>
<span>// Add pages you'd like to exclude in the exclude here</span>
wp_list_pages<span>&#40;</span> 
  <span>array</span><span>&#40;</span>
    <span>'exclude'</span> <span>=&gt;</span> <span>''</span><span>,</span>
    <span>'title_li'</span> <span>=&gt;</span> <span>''</span><span>,</span>
  <span>&#41;</span>
<span>&#41;</span><span>;</span>
<span>?&gt;</span>
<span>&lt;/</span>ul<span>&gt;</span>
&nbsp;
<span>&lt;</span>h2 id<span>=</span><span>&quot;posts&quot;</span><span>&gt;</span>Posts<span>&lt;/</span>h2<span>&gt;</span>
<span>&lt;</span>ul<span>&gt;</span>
<span>&lt;?php</span>
<span>// Add categories you'd like to exclude in the exclude here</span>
<span>$cats</span> <span>=</span> get_categories<span>&#40;</span><span>'exclude='</span><span>&#41;</span><span>;</span>
<span>foreach</span> <span>&#40;</span><span>$cats</span> <span>as</span> <span>$cat</span><span>&#41;</span> <span>&#123;</span>
  <span>echo</span> <span>&quot;&lt;li&gt;&lt;h3&gt;&quot;</span><span>.</span><span>$cat</span><span>-&gt;</span><span>cat_name</span><span>.</span><span>&quot;&lt;/h3&gt;&quot;</span><span>;</span>
  <span>echo</span> <span>&quot;&lt;ul&gt;&quot;</span><span>;</span>
  query_posts<span>&#40;</span><span>'posts_per_page=-1&amp;cat='</span><span>.</span><span>$cat</span><span>-&gt;</span><span>cat_ID</span><span>&#41;</span><span>;</span>
  <span>while</span><span>&#40;</span>have_posts<span>&#40;</span><span>&#41;</span><span>&#41;</span> <span>&#123;</span>
    the_post<span>&#40;</span><span>&#41;</span><span>;</span>
    <span>$category</span> <span>=</span> get_the_category<span>&#40;</span><span>&#41;</span><span>;</span>
    <span>// Only display a post link once, even if it's in multiple categories</span>
    <span>if</span> <span>&#40;</span><span>$category</span><span>&#91;</span><span>0</span><span>&#93;</span><span>-&gt;</span><span>cat_ID</span> <span>==</span> <span>$cat</span><span>-&gt;</span><span>cat_ID</span><span>&#41;</span> <span>&#123;</span>
      <span>echo</span> <span>'&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;'</span><span>.</span>get_permalink<span>&#40;</span><span>&#41;</span><span>.</span><span>'&quot;&gt;'</span><span>.</span>get_the_title<span>&#40;</span><span>&#41;</span><span>.</span><span>'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;'</span><span>;</span>
    <span>&#125;</span>
  <span>&#125;</span>
  <span>echo</span> <span>&quot;&lt;/ul&gt;&quot;</span><span>;</span>
  <span>echo</span> <span>&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&quot;</span><span>;</span>
<span>&#125;</span>
<span>?&gt;</span>
&lt;/ul&gt;</pre></div></div>

<p>Now, wherever you need that HTML sitemap "bit" in your WordPress theme, use this:</p>

<div><div><pre><span>&lt;?php</span> get_template_part<span>&#40;</span><span>'/partials/sitemap'</span><span>&#41;</span><span>;</span> <span>?&gt;</span></pre></div></div>

<h2>HTML Sitemap WordPress Page Template</h2>
<p>You could do this, for instance, for a sitemap page template. To create a sitemap page template using this code, duplicate your <code>page.php</code> file and rename it to <code>page-sitemap.php</code>. Now open it, and below the call to <code>the_content();</code> that's in there, add the <code>get_template_part()</code> bit mentioned above. Now go to the first line of the file, and after the opening <code>&lt;?php</code> (but before <code>get_header()</code>), add this comment:</p>

<div><div><pre><span>/*
Template Name: Sitemap Page
*/</span></pre></div></div>

<p>That'll make WordPress recognize it as an HTML Sitemap template. This will allow you to write some introductory text for your HTML sitemap, after which the full sitemap shows. </p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/html-sitemap-wordpress/">HTML Sitemap for WordPress</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/VYbj8voGxvQ" height="1" width="1"/>";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:106:"http://yoast.com/html-sitemap-wordpress/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=html-sitemap-wordpress";}s:7:"summary";s:733:"<p>HTML sitemaps (as opposed to XML sitemaps) are often mentioned as being useful for SEO. They certainly are if you use them wisely (and especially Bing seems to like them at times), but I like them even more for the fact that users like them a lot. There's plenty of plugins out there that will [...]</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/html-sitemap-wordpress/">HTML Sitemap for WordPress</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:5787:"<p>HTML sitemaps (as opposed to XML sitemaps) are often mentioned as being useful for SEO. They certainly are if you use them wisely (and especially Bing seems to like them at times), but I like them even more for the fact that <em>users</em> like them a lot.</p>
<p>There's plenty of plugins out there that will help you make an HTML sitemap. It's not a feature in my <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/">WordPress SEO plugin</a> just yet, but it might become one. The issue is though, that in most cases, you'll want to do specific things with your sitemaps, include or exclude certain pages / post types, show certain taxonomies, etc. That's why I tend to advice people to create a Sitemap Page template in their theme and use that.</p>
<p>In fact, I advise you to use a theme partial, so you can reuse your HTML sitemap template on your <a href="http://yoast.com/404-error-pages-wordpress/">WordPress 404 error pages</a> too. To do that, follow these steps: first of all, create a <em>partials</em> folder within your theme folder. In that <em>partials</em> folder, create a file called <code>sitemap.php</code>.</p>
<p>Paste the following code into that file and adapt as needed for your site:</p>

<div><div><pre>&lt;h2 id=&quot;authors&quot;&gt;Authors&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
<span>&lt;?php</span> 
wp_list_authors<span>&#40;</span> 
  <span>array</span><span>&#40;</span>
    <span>'exclude_admin'</span> <span>=&gt;</span> <span>false</span><span>,</span>
  <span>&#41;</span>
<span>&#41;</span><span>;</span> 
<span>?&gt;</span>
&lt;/ul&gt;
&nbsp;
&lt;h2 id=&quot;pages&quot;&gt;Pages&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
<span>&lt;?php</span>
<span>// Add pages you'd like to exclude in the exclude here</span>
wp_list_pages<span>&#40;</span> 
  <span>array</span><span>&#40;</span>
    <span>'exclude'</span> <span>=&gt;</span> <span>''</span><span>,</span>
    <span>'title_li'</span> <span>=&gt;</span> <span>''</span><span>,</span>
  <span>&#41;</span>
<span>&#41;</span><span>;</span>
<span>?&gt;</span>
<span>&lt;/</span>ul<span>&gt;</span>
&nbsp;
<span>&lt;</span>h2 id<span>=</span><span>&quot;posts&quot;</span><span>&gt;</span>Posts<span>&lt;/</span>h2<span>&gt;</span>
<span>&lt;</span>ul<span>&gt;</span>
<span>&lt;?php</span>
<span>// Add categories you'd like to exclude in the exclude here</span>
<span>$cats</span> <span>=</span> get_categories<span>&#40;</span><span>'exclude='</span><span>&#41;</span><span>;</span>
<span>foreach</span> <span>&#40;</span><span>$cats</span> <span>as</span> <span>$cat</span><span>&#41;</span> <span>&#123;</span>
  <span>echo</span> <span>&quot;&lt;li&gt;&lt;h3&gt;&quot;</span><span>.</span><span>$cat</span><span>-&gt;</span><span>cat_name</span><span>.</span><span>&quot;&lt;/h3&gt;&quot;</span><span>;</span>
  <span>echo</span> <span>&quot;&lt;ul&gt;&quot;</span><span>;</span>
  query_posts<span>&#40;</span><span>'posts_per_page=-1&amp;cat='</span><span>.</span><span>$cat</span><span>-&gt;</span><span>cat_ID</span><span>&#41;</span><span>;</span>
  <span>while</span><span>&#40;</span>have_posts<span>&#40;</span><span>&#41;</span><span>&#41;</span> <span>&#123;</span>
    the_post<span>&#40;</span><span>&#41;</span><span>;</span>
    <span>$category</span> <span>=</span> get_the_category<span>&#40;</span><span>&#41;</span><span>;</span>
    <span>// Only display a post link once, even if it's in multiple categories</span>
    <span>if</span> <span>&#40;</span><span>$category</span><span>&#91;</span><span>0</span><span>&#93;</span><span>-&gt;</span><span>cat_ID</span> <span>==</span> <span>$cat</span><span>-&gt;</span><span>cat_ID</span><span>&#41;</span> <span>&#123;</span>
      <span>echo</span> <span>'&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;'</span><span>.</span>get_permalink<span>&#40;</span><span>&#41;</span><span>.</span><span>'&quot;&gt;'</span><span>.</span>get_the_title<span>&#40;</span><span>&#41;</span><span>.</span><span>'&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;'</span><span>;</span>
    <span>&#125;</span>
  <span>&#125;</span>
  <span>echo</span> <span>&quot;&lt;/ul&gt;&quot;</span><span>;</span>
  <span>echo</span> <span>&quot;&lt;/li&gt;&quot;</span><span>;</span>
<span>&#125;</span>
<span>?&gt;</span>
&lt;/ul&gt;</pre></div></div>

<p>Now, wherever you need that HTML sitemap "bit" in your WordPress theme, use this:</p>

<div><div><pre><span>&lt;?php</span> get_template_part<span>&#40;</span><span>'/partials/sitemap'</span><span>&#41;</span><span>;</span> <span>?&gt;</span></pre></div></div>

<h2>HTML Sitemap WordPress Page Template</h2>
<p>You could do this, for instance, for a sitemap page template. To create a sitemap page template using this code, duplicate your <code>page.php</code> file and rename it to <code>page-sitemap.php</code>. Now open it, and below the call to <code>the_content();</code> that's in there, add the <code>get_template_part()</code> bit mentioned above. Now go to the first line of the file, and after the opening <code>&lt;?php</code> (but before <code>get_header()</code>), add this comment:</p>

<div><div><pre><span>/*
Template Name: Sitemap Page
*/</span></pre></div></div>

<p>That'll make WordPress recognize it as an HTML Sitemap template. This will allow you to write some introductory text for your HTML sitemap, after which the full sitemap shows. </p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/html-sitemap-wordpress/">HTML Sitemap for WordPress</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/VYbj8voGxvQ" height="1" width="1"/>";}i:6;a:14:{s:5:"title";s:39:"Killer Performance Tips from the Expert";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/fPEb5LgHMF0/";s:4:"guid";s:24:"http://yoast.com/?p=3831";s:8:"comments";s:125:"http://yoast.com/expert-web-performance-tips/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=expert-web-performance-tips#comments";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:121:"http://yoast.com/expert-web-performance-tips/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=expert-web-performance-tipsfeed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:1:"2";}s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Mon, 07 Feb 2011 19:56:12 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:58:"Webdesign &amp; developmentWordPressspeedWordPress Widgets";s:11:"description";s:783:"<p>My business &#38; podcast partner Frederick Townes, who also happens to be the CTO @ Mashable.com, has finally finished a long awaited (by me at least) post covering lots of the performance tips he's applied at Mashable (I hope you've seen their awesome redesign) and in other projects to make the sites faster despite having [...]</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/expert-web-performance-tips/">Killer Performance Tips from the Expert</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";s:1532:"<p>My business &amp; podcast partner <a href="http://yoast.com/author/frederick/">Frederick Townes</a>, who also happens to be the CTO @ <a rel="no follow external" href="http://mashable.com/">Mashable.com</a>, has finally finished a <a href="http://www.w3-edge.com/weblog/2011/02/optimize-social-media-button-performance/">long awaited (by me at least) post</a> covering lots of the performance tips he's applied at <a href="http://mashable.com">Mashable</a> (I hope you've seen their awesome redesign) and in other projects to make the sites faster despite having lots of widgets etc.</p>
<p>His tips in particular are useful for optimizing the performance of social media buttons and ads etc, but keep in mind there are lots of aspects of WordPress to optimize, like <a href="http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/">SEO</a>, <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-performance-optimization/">database performance</a> and <a href="http://yoast.com/40-wordpress-optimisation-tips/">more</a>.</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/expert-web-performance-tips/">Killer Performance Tips from the Expert</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/fPEb5LgHMF0" height="1" width="1"/>";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:116:"http://yoast.com/expert-web-performance-tips/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=expert-web-performance-tips";}s:7:"summary";s:783:"<p>My business &#38; podcast partner Frederick Townes, who also happens to be the CTO @ Mashable.com, has finally finished a long awaited (by me at least) post covering lots of the performance tips he's applied at Mashable (I hope you've seen their awesome redesign) and in other projects to make the sites faster despite having [...]</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/expert-web-performance-tips/">Killer Performance Tips from the Expert</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:1532:"<p>My business &amp; podcast partner <a href="http://yoast.com/author/frederick/">Frederick Townes</a>, who also happens to be the CTO @ <a rel="no follow external" href="http://mashable.com/">Mashable.com</a>, has finally finished a <a href="http://www.w3-edge.com/weblog/2011/02/optimize-social-media-button-performance/">long awaited (by me at least) post</a> covering lots of the performance tips he's applied at <a href="http://mashable.com">Mashable</a> (I hope you've seen their awesome redesign) and in other projects to make the sites faster despite having lots of widgets etc.</p>
<p>His tips in particular are useful for optimizing the performance of social media buttons and ads etc, but keep in mind there are lots of aspects of WordPress to optimize, like <a href="http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/">SEO</a>, <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-performance-optimization/">database performance</a> and <a href="http://yoast.com/40-wordpress-optimisation-tips/">more</a>.</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/expert-web-performance-tips/">Killer Performance Tips from the Expert</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/fPEb5LgHMF0" height="1" width="1"/>";}i:7;a:14:{s:5:"title";s:25:"How To Monetize Your Blog";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/mWsdtmXF5OI/";s:4:"guid";s:30:"http://wp-community.org/?p=860";s:8:"comments";s:63:"http://wp-community.org/2011/02/07/monetize-your-blog/#comments";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:59:"http://wp-community.org/2011/02/07/monetize-your-blog/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"27";}s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Mon, 07 Feb 2011 19:48:59 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:16:"PodcastAffiliate";s:11:"description";s:317:"So, you want to be a professional blogger? But what exactly do you need to do to make money from this? This week we take a deeper look at how to start generating revenue from your blog. Whether you have &#8230; <a href="http://wp-community.org/2011/02/07/monetize-your-blog/">Continue reading <span>&#8594;</span></a>";s:7:"content";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";s:2615:"<p>So, you want to be a professional blogger? But what exactly do you need to do to make money from this? This week we take a deeper look at how to start generating revenue from your blog. Whether you have a fledgling WordPress blog or are a well seasoned blogger with an entire community built up, there are a number of avenues you can go down. But which is best? And how do you <em>actually</em> make it all happen?</p>
<ul>
<li>There are always some growing pains as every new blog strives to get its feet off the ground, not least of which is trying to generate revenue. We start off this week by taking a closer look at the stages of development a site goes through as it matures.</li>
<li>Joost gives an insight into the journey of his own site, <a href="http://yoast.com/">Yoast.com</a>, and gets down to the nitty gritty of what worked for him and what didn’t.</li>
<li>Joost lifts the lid on <a href="http://www.google.com/AdSense">Google AdSense</a>, and explains its pros and cons.</li>
<li>Affiliate marketing; we explain the importance of having both high readership <em>and</em> the trust of those readers. We recommend taking a look at <a href="http://www.pepperjamnetwork.com/">PepperJamNetwork</a> and <a href="http://www.cj.com/">Commission Junction</a>.</li>
<li>We explore other avenues within traditional banner advertising, including some surprising and very neat little hints and tips!</li>
<li>The value of the personal brand: In the long haul, this could be the most beneficial thing you do. We explain the how and the why. Joost tells us how his blog has lead to consultancy work for some top customers.</li>
<li>Frederick talks through the benefits of monetising old blog content by selling it as an eBook. Producing products that can be ‘built’ once and sold multiple times has huge benefits.</li>
<li>The importance of <em>scarcity</em>!</li>
<li>Who you take advertising from is important – if they are ads for less than respectable services or products it could be incredibly detrimental to your personal brand and the reputation of your blog. There is no escaping accountability, and especially not on the web!</li>
<li>Why you should tread carefully when asking your readers for money.</li>
</ul>
<p>The bottom line? Make money, but always keep your readers in mind!</p>
<p>Some useful links:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://mashable.com/">Mashable.com</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.css3.info/">css3.info</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.chrisbrogan.com/">Chris Brogan</a></li>
</ul><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/mWsdtmXF5OI" height="1" width="1"/>";}s:10:"feedburner";a:2:{s:8:"origlink";s:54:"http://wp-community.org/2011/02/07/monetize-your-blog/";s:17:"origenclosurelink";s:133:"http://media.blubrry.com/wordpresspodcast/media.rawvoice.com/seorockstars/www2.webmasterradio.fm/mp3/wordpresspodcast/11/WP020211.mp3";}s:7:"summary";s:317:"So, you want to be a professional blogger? But what exactly do you need to do to make money from this? This week we take a deeper look at how to start generating revenue from your blog. Whether you have &#8230; <a href="http://wp-community.org/2011/02/07/monetize-your-blog/">Continue reading <span>&#8594;</span></a>";s:12:"atom_content";s:2615:"<p>So, you want to be a professional blogger? But what exactly do you need to do to make money from this? This week we take a deeper look at how to start generating revenue from your blog. Whether you have a fledgling WordPress blog or are a well seasoned blogger with an entire community built up, there are a number of avenues you can go down. But which is best? And how do you <em>actually</em> make it all happen?</p>
<ul>
<li>There are always some growing pains as every new blog strives to get its feet off the ground, not least of which is trying to generate revenue. We start off this week by taking a closer look at the stages of development a site goes through as it matures.</li>
<li>Joost gives an insight into the journey of his own site, <a href="http://yoast.com/">Yoast.com</a>, and gets down to the nitty gritty of what worked for him and what didn’t.</li>
<li>Joost lifts the lid on <a href="http://www.google.com/AdSense">Google AdSense</a>, and explains its pros and cons.</li>
<li>Affiliate marketing; we explain the importance of having both high readership <em>and</em> the trust of those readers. We recommend taking a look at <a href="http://www.pepperjamnetwork.com/">PepperJamNetwork</a> and <a href="http://www.cj.com/">Commission Junction</a>.</li>
<li>We explore other avenues within traditional banner advertising, including some surprising and very neat little hints and tips!</li>
<li>The value of the personal brand: In the long haul, this could be the most beneficial thing you do. We explain the how and the why. Joost tells us how his blog has lead to consultancy work for some top customers.</li>
<li>Frederick talks through the benefits of monetising old blog content by selling it as an eBook. Producing products that can be ‘built’ once and sold multiple times has huge benefits.</li>
<li>The importance of <em>scarcity</em>!</li>
<li>Who you take advertising from is important – if they are ads for less than respectable services or products it could be incredibly detrimental to your personal brand and the reputation of your blog. There is no escaping accountability, and especially not on the web!</li>
<li>Why you should tread carefully when asking your readers for money.</li>
</ul>
<p>The bottom line? Make money, but always keep your readers in mind!</p>
<p>Some useful links:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://mashable.com/">Mashable.com</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.css3.info/">css3.info</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.chrisbrogan.com/">Chris Brogan</a></li>
</ul><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/mWsdtmXF5OI" height="1" width="1"/>";}i:8;a:14:{s:5:"title";s:38:"Turn your commenters into subscribers!";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/xsSwiL8IM28/";s:4:"guid";s:24:"http://yoast.com/?p=3806";s:8:"comments";s:133:"http://yoast.com/comment-email-subscription-form/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=comment-email-subscription-form#comments";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:129:"http://yoast.com/comment-email-subscription-form/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=comment-email-subscription-formfeed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"64";}s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Mon, 31 Jan 2011 20:34:30 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:13:"Joost de Valk";}s:8:"category";s:30:"WordPressEmailWordPress Themes";s:11:"description";s:771:"<p>Only a small percentage of your visitors leave a comment. This group of people is probably also interested in subscribing to your newsletter, if you have one. So I created a method to add a "subscribe to my WordPress newsletter" checkbox to my comment form a couple of weeks ago. The result? 40 new subscribers [...]</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/comment-email-subscription-form/">Turn your commenters into subscribers!</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:7:"content";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";s:8958:"<p>Only a small percentage of your visitors leave a comment. This group of people is probably also interested in subscribing to your newsletter, if you have one. So I created a method to add a "subscribe to my <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-newsletter/">WordPress newsletter</a>" checkbox to my comment form a couple of weeks ago. The result? 40 new subscribers in less than 2 weeks. That's over 1,000 new subscribers each year if it continues to grow in this fashion.</p>
<p>This isn't for the faint of heart, if you're not a programmer this might be a bit tough to do, but I'll outline how it works:</p>
<h2>Adding a comment meta value</h2>
<p>Using the reasonably new comment_meta API, we're gonna add a piece of data to comments, that stores whether people want to subscribe to the newsletter or not. I did that by adding the following function to my <em>functions.php</em> file:</p>

<div><div><pre><span>function</span> ymc_add_meta_settings<span>&#40;</span><span>$comment_id</span><span>&#41;</span> <span>&#123;</span>
  add_comment_meta<span>&#40;</span>
    <span>$comment_id</span><span>,</span> 
    <span>'mailchimp_subscribe'</span><span>,</span> 
    <span>$_POST</span><span>&#91;</span><span>'mailchimp_subscribe'</span><span>&#93;</span><span>,</span> 
    <span>true</span>
  <span>&#41;</span><span>;</span>
<span>&#125;</span>
add_action <span>&#40;</span><span>'comment_post'</span><span>,</span> <span>'ymc_add_meta_settings'</span><span>,</span> <span>1</span><span>&#41;</span><span>;</span></pre></div></div>

<h2>Add a checkbox to the comment form</h2>
<p>That wasn't too hard yet right? Next we add the checkbox to the comment form, wherever that is located in your theme, it's just plain (X)HTML:</p>

<div><div><pre><span><span>&lt;input</span> <span>type</span>=<span>&quot;checkbox&quot;</span> <span>name</span>=<span>&quot;mailchimp_subscribe&quot;</span> </span>
<span>  <span>id</span>=<span>&quot;mailchimp_subscribe&quot;</span><span>/&gt;</span></span> 
<span><span>&lt;label</span> <span>for</span>=<span>&quot;mailchimp_subscribe&quot;</span><span>&gt;</span></span>
  Subscribe to Yoast WordPress Newsletter (weekly email)
<span><span>&lt;/label<span>&gt;</span></span></span></pre></div></div>

<h2>Subscribe the commenter</h2>
<p>That's not really rocket science either. The next step is to take this data and work it. What we'll do is use the Mailchimp API to automatically subscribe people, and send them a confirmation email (we still need to make sure they double-opt-in). </p>
<p>First, let's grab the comment:</p>

<div><div><pre><span>function</span> ymc_subscription_add<span>&#40;</span> <span>$cid</span><span>,</span> <span>$comment</span> <span>&#41;</span> <span>&#123;</span>
  <span>$cid</span> <span>=</span> <span>&#40;</span>int<span>&#41;</span> <span>$cid</span><span>;</span>
&nbsp;
  <span>if</span> <span>&#40;</span> <span>!</span><span>is_object</span><span>&#40;</span><span>$comment</span><span>&#41;</span> <span>&#41;</span>
    <span>$comment</span> <span>=</span> get_comment<span>&#40;</span><span>$cid</span><span>&#41;</span><span>;</span>
&nbsp;
  <span>if</span> <span>&#40;</span> <span>$comment</span><span>-&gt;</span><span>comment_karma</span> <span>==</span> <span>0</span> <span>&#41;</span> <span>&#123;</span>
    <span>// DO WORK</span>
  <span>&#125;</span>
<span>&#125;</span>
add_action<span>&#40;</span><span>'comment_approved_'</span><span>,</span><span>'ymc_subscription_add'</span><span>,</span><span>10</span><span>,</span><span>1</span><span>&#41;</span><span>;</span>
add_action<span>&#40;</span><span>'comment_post'</span><span>,</span> <span>'ymc_subscription_add'</span><span>,</span> <span>60</span><span>,</span><span>1</span><span>&#41;</span><span>;</span></pre></div></div>

<p>The code above makes sure we only do anything with comments that have been approved. So if a comment is approved as spam, it gets ignored. It also makes sure the <code>$comment</code> variable is filled with the comment. Now once we've done this, we're going to check whether the commenter wanted to be subscribed to the newsletter, so within the DO WORK section above, we add this:</p>

<div><div><pre><span>$subscribe</span> <span>=</span> get_comment_meta<span>&#40;</span><span>$cid</span><span>,</span> <span>'mailchimp_subscribe'</span><span>,</span> <span>true</span><span>&#41;</span><span>;</span>
<span>if</span> <span>&#40;</span> <span>$subscribe</span> <span>==</span> <span>'on'</span> <span>&#41;</span> <span>&#123;</span>
  <span>// DO WORK</span>
<span>&#125;</span></pre></div></div>

<p>We're checking for "on" because that's how PHP stores a checked checkbox, and this way we can reuse the <code>$subscribe</code> variable later. Once we're sure the commenter wanted to be subscribed, let's get all the data we need to add a subscriber to our mailing list. To do that, we'll need to know:</p>
<ul>
<li>Our <a href="http://admin.mailchimp.com/account/api">Mailchimp API key</a></li>
<li>Our <a href="http://www.mailchimp.com/api/1.3/#overview_description">Mailchimp API endpoint server</a></li>
<li>The <a href="http://www.mailchimp.com/kb/article/how-can-i-find-my-list-id">Mailchimp list ID</a> for the list you want to add the commenter to</li>
</ul>
<p>Once you've got these three, we can create the post request:</p>

<div><div><pre><span>$apikey</span>   <span>=</span> <span>' &lt;your API key&gt; '</span><span>;</span>
<span>$listid</span>   <span>=</span> <span>' &lt;List ID&gt; '</span><span>;</span>
<span>$endpoint</span>   <span>=</span> <span>'http://&lt;your endpoint&gt;.api.mailchimp.com/1.3/?output=php'</span><span>;</span>
&nbsp;
<span>$request</span>   <span>=</span> <span>array</span><span>&#40;</span>
  <span>'apikey'</span> <span>=&gt;</span> <span>$apikey</span><span>,</span>
  <span>'id'</span> <span>=&gt;</span> <span>$listid</span><span>,</span>
  <span>'email_address'</span> <span>=&gt;</span> <span>strtolower</span><span>&#40;</span> <span>$comment</span><span>-&gt;</span><span>comment_author_email</span> <span>&#41;</span><span>,</span>
  <span>'double_optin'</span> <span>=&gt;</span> <span>true</span><span>,</span>
  <span>'merge_vars'</span> <span>=&gt;</span> <span>array</span><span>&#40;</span>
    <span>' &lt;merge tag for name&gt; '</span> <span>=&gt;</span> <span>$comment</span><span>-&gt;</span><span>comment_author</span><span>,</span>
    <span>'OPTIN_IP'</span> <span>=&gt;</span> <span>$comment</span><span>-&gt;</span><span>comment_author_IP</span><span>,</span>
  <span>&#41;</span>
<span>&#41;</span><span>;</span>
<span>$result</span> <span>=</span> wp_remote_post<span>&#40;</span>
  <span>$endpoint</span><span>.</span><span>'&amp;method=listSubscribe'</span><span>,</span> 
  <span>array</span><span>&#40;</span> <span>'body'</span> <span>=&gt;</span> json_encode<span>&#40;</span><span>$request</span><span>&#41;</span> <span>&#41;</span> 
<span>&#41;</span><span>;</span></pre></div></div>

<p>Note: setting double_option to false would forego the sending of an opt-in email, thereby immediately subscribing people to the list. Do not do this as it is illegal in most parts of Europe <em>and</em> in the US to do so. </p>
<p>As you can see, we're using the WP_HTTP wrapper function <code>wp_remote_post</code> to handle the post. At this time I'm not actually doing anything with the result, because I'm a sloppy coder. You should of course check the result and based on that do the following action:</p>

<div><div><pre>update_comment_meta<span>&#40;</span><span>$cid</span><span>,</span> <span>'mailchimp_subscribe'</span><span>,</span> 
  <span>'subscribed'</span><span>,</span> <span>'on'</span><span>&#41;</span><span>;</span></pre></div></div>

<p>This will prevent the code from trying to subscribe someone multiple times and overloading the MailChimp API.</p>
<h2>Conclusion: Subscribe those commenters!</h2>
<p>People are interacting with your site already, they're already giving you their email address, have them check that box, and make them subscribe to your list. I personally think it's a great enhancement that would make a lot of people happy. If you're not using Mailchimp but another email provider and are capable to do the same stuff with their API: please post about it, drop a comment here and I'll add a link!</p>
<p><em>Disclosure</em>: Mailchimp sponsors my newsletter and is a regular advertiser on my sites.</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/comment-email-subscription-form/">Turn your commenters into subscribers!</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/xsSwiL8IM28" height="1" width="1"/>";}s:10:"feedburner";a:1:{s:8:"origlink";s:124:"http://yoast.com/comment-email-subscription-form/#utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=comment-email-subscription-form";}s:7:"summary";s:771:"<p>Only a small percentage of your visitors leave a comment. This group of people is probably also interested in subscribing to your newsletter, if you have one. So I created a method to add a "subscribe to my WordPress newsletter" checkbox to my comment form a couple of weeks ago. The result? 40 new subscribers [...]</p><p><a href="http://yoast.com/comment-email-subscription-form/">Turn your commenters into subscribers!</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p>";s:12:"atom_content";s:8958:"<p>Only a small percentage of your visitors leave a comment. This group of people is probably also interested in subscribing to your newsletter, if you have one. So I created a method to add a "subscribe to my <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-newsletter/">WordPress newsletter</a>" checkbox to my comment form a couple of weeks ago. The result? 40 new subscribers in less than 2 weeks. That's over 1,000 new subscribers each year if it continues to grow in this fashion.</p>
<p>This isn't for the faint of heart, if you're not a programmer this might be a bit tough to do, but I'll outline how it works:</p>
<h2>Adding a comment meta value</h2>
<p>Using the reasonably new comment_meta API, we're gonna add a piece of data to comments, that stores whether people want to subscribe to the newsletter or not. I did that by adding the following function to my <em>functions.php</em> file:</p>

<div><div><pre><span>function</span> ymc_add_meta_settings<span>&#40;</span><span>$comment_id</span><span>&#41;</span> <span>&#123;</span>
  add_comment_meta<span>&#40;</span>
    <span>$comment_id</span><span>,</span> 
    <span>'mailchimp_subscribe'</span><span>,</span> 
    <span>$_POST</span><span>&#91;</span><span>'mailchimp_subscribe'</span><span>&#93;</span><span>,</span> 
    <span>true</span>
  <span>&#41;</span><span>;</span>
<span>&#125;</span>
add_action <span>&#40;</span><span>'comment_post'</span><span>,</span> <span>'ymc_add_meta_settings'</span><span>,</span> <span>1</span><span>&#41;</span><span>;</span></pre></div></div>

<h2>Add a checkbox to the comment form</h2>
<p>That wasn't too hard yet right? Next we add the checkbox to the comment form, wherever that is located in your theme, it's just plain (X)HTML:</p>

<div><div><pre><span><span>&lt;input</span> <span>type</span>=<span>&quot;checkbox&quot;</span> <span>name</span>=<span>&quot;mailchimp_subscribe&quot;</span> </span>
<span>  <span>id</span>=<span>&quot;mailchimp_subscribe&quot;</span><span>/&gt;</span></span> 
<span><span>&lt;label</span> <span>for</span>=<span>&quot;mailchimp_subscribe&quot;</span><span>&gt;</span></span>
  Subscribe to Yoast WordPress Newsletter (weekly email)
<span><span>&lt;/label<span>&gt;</span></span></span></pre></div></div>

<h2>Subscribe the commenter</h2>
<p>That's not really rocket science either. The next step is to take this data and work it. What we'll do is use the Mailchimp API to automatically subscribe people, and send them a confirmation email (we still need to make sure they double-opt-in). </p>
<p>First, let's grab the comment:</p>

<div><div><pre><span>function</span> ymc_subscription_add<span>&#40;</span> <span>$cid</span><span>,</span> <span>$comment</span> <span>&#41;</span> <span>&#123;</span>
  <span>$cid</span> <span>=</span> <span>&#40;</span>int<span>&#41;</span> <span>$cid</span><span>;</span>
&nbsp;
  <span>if</span> <span>&#40;</span> <span>!</span><span>is_object</span><span>&#40;</span><span>$comment</span><span>&#41;</span> <span>&#41;</span>
    <span>$comment</span> <span>=</span> get_comment<span>&#40;</span><span>$cid</span><span>&#41;</span><span>;</span>
&nbsp;
  <span>if</span> <span>&#40;</span> <span>$comment</span><span>-&gt;</span><span>comment_karma</span> <span>==</span> <span>0</span> <span>&#41;</span> <span>&#123;</span>
    <span>// DO WORK</span>
  <span>&#125;</span>
<span>&#125;</span>
add_action<span>&#40;</span><span>'comment_approved_'</span><span>,</span><span>'ymc_subscription_add'</span><span>,</span><span>10</span><span>,</span><span>1</span><span>&#41;</span><span>;</span>
add_action<span>&#40;</span><span>'comment_post'</span><span>,</span> <span>'ymc_subscription_add'</span><span>,</span> <span>60</span><span>,</span><span>1</span><span>&#41;</span><span>;</span></pre></div></div>

<p>The code above makes sure we only do anything with comments that have been approved. So if a comment is approved as spam, it gets ignored. It also makes sure the <code>$comment</code> variable is filled with the comment. Now once we've done this, we're going to check whether the commenter wanted to be subscribed to the newsletter, so within the DO WORK section above, we add this:</p>

<div><div><pre><span>$subscribe</span> <span>=</span> get_comment_meta<span>&#40;</span><span>$cid</span><span>,</span> <span>'mailchimp_subscribe'</span><span>,</span> <span>true</span><span>&#41;</span><span>;</span>
<span>if</span> <span>&#40;</span> <span>$subscribe</span> <span>==</span> <span>'on'</span> <span>&#41;</span> <span>&#123;</span>
  <span>// DO WORK</span>
<span>&#125;</span></pre></div></div>

<p>We're checking for "on" because that's how PHP stores a checked checkbox, and this way we can reuse the <code>$subscribe</code> variable later. Once we're sure the commenter wanted to be subscribed, let's get all the data we need to add a subscriber to our mailing list. To do that, we'll need to know:</p>
<ul>
<li>Our <a href="http://admin.mailchimp.com/account/api">Mailchimp API key</a></li>
<li>Our <a href="http://www.mailchimp.com/api/1.3/#overview_description">Mailchimp API endpoint server</a></li>
<li>The <a href="http://www.mailchimp.com/kb/article/how-can-i-find-my-list-id">Mailchimp list ID</a> for the list you want to add the commenter to</li>
</ul>
<p>Once you've got these three, we can create the post request:</p>

<div><div><pre><span>$apikey</span>   <span>=</span> <span>' &lt;your API key&gt; '</span><span>;</span>
<span>$listid</span>   <span>=</span> <span>' &lt;List ID&gt; '</span><span>;</span>
<span>$endpoint</span>   <span>=</span> <span>'http://&lt;your endpoint&gt;.api.mailchimp.com/1.3/?output=php'</span><span>;</span>
&nbsp;
<span>$request</span>   <span>=</span> <span>array</span><span>&#40;</span>
  <span>'apikey'</span> <span>=&gt;</span> <span>$apikey</span><span>,</span>
  <span>'id'</span> <span>=&gt;</span> <span>$listid</span><span>,</span>
  <span>'email_address'</span> <span>=&gt;</span> <span>strtolower</span><span>&#40;</span> <span>$comment</span><span>-&gt;</span><span>comment_author_email</span> <span>&#41;</span><span>,</span>
  <span>'double_optin'</span> <span>=&gt;</span> <span>true</span><span>,</span>
  <span>'merge_vars'</span> <span>=&gt;</span> <span>array</span><span>&#40;</span>
    <span>' &lt;merge tag for name&gt; '</span> <span>=&gt;</span> <span>$comment</span><span>-&gt;</span><span>comment_author</span><span>,</span>
    <span>'OPTIN_IP'</span> <span>=&gt;</span> <span>$comment</span><span>-&gt;</span><span>comment_author_IP</span><span>,</span>
  <span>&#41;</span>
<span>&#41;</span><span>;</span>
<span>$result</span> <span>=</span> wp_remote_post<span>&#40;</span>
  <span>$endpoint</span><span>.</span><span>'&amp;method=listSubscribe'</span><span>,</span> 
  <span>array</span><span>&#40;</span> <span>'body'</span> <span>=&gt;</span> json_encode<span>&#40;</span><span>$request</span><span>&#41;</span> <span>&#41;</span> 
<span>&#41;</span><span>;</span></pre></div></div>

<p>Note: setting double_option to false would forego the sending of an opt-in email, thereby immediately subscribing people to the list. Do not do this as it is illegal in most parts of Europe <em>and</em> in the US to do so. </p>
<p>As you can see, we're using the WP_HTTP wrapper function <code>wp_remote_post</code> to handle the post. At this time I'm not actually doing anything with the result, because I'm a sloppy coder. You should of course check the result and based on that do the following action:</p>

<div><div><pre>update_comment_meta<span>&#40;</span><span>$cid</span><span>,</span> <span>'mailchimp_subscribe'</span><span>,</span> 
  <span>'subscribed'</span><span>,</span> <span>'on'</span><span>&#41;</span><span>;</span></pre></div></div>

<p>This will prevent the code from trying to subscribe someone multiple times and overloading the MailChimp API.</p>
<h2>Conclusion: Subscribe those commenters!</h2>
<p>People are interacting with your site already, they're already giving you their email address, have them check that box, and make them subscribe to your list. I personally think it's a great enhancement that would make a lot of people happy. If you're not using Mailchimp but another email provider and are capable to do the same stuff with their API: please post about it, drop a comment here and I'll add a link!</p>
<p><em>Disclosure</em>: Mailchimp sponsors my newsletter and is a regular advertiser on my sites.</p>
<p><a href="http://yoast.com/comment-email-subscription-form/">Turn your commenters into subscribers!</a> is a post from <a href="http://yoast.com/about-me/">Joost de Valk</a>&#39;s <a href="http://yoast.com">Yoast - Tweaking Websites</a>. 

A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on <a href="http://yoast.com/wordpress-hosting/">WordPress hosting</a>!</p><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/xsSwiL8IM28" height="1" width="1"/>";}i:9;a:14:{s:5:"title";s:39:"How To Grow The Engagement On Your Blog";s:4:"link";s:58:"http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/joostdevalk/~3/FhW_QwGTRZA/";s:4:"guid";s:30:"http://wp-community.org/?p=851";s:8:"comments";s:60:"http://wp-community.org/2011/01/31/blog-engagement/#comments";s:3:"wfw";a:1:{s:10:"commentrss";s:56:"http://wp-community.org/2011/01/31/blog-engagement/feed/";}s:5:"slash";a:1:{s:8:"comments";s:2:"20";}s:7:"pubdate";s:31:"Mon, 31 Jan 2011 10:46:20 +0000";s:2:"dc";a:1:{s:7:"creator";s:16:"Frederick Townes";}s:8:"category";s:7:"Podcast";s:11:"description";s:326:"This week we decided to dedicate the entire show to helping you bootstrap your blog! Just because something is free doesn’t mean people are going to want it, so we delve into some of the top tactics and tools for &#8230; <a href="http://wp-community.org/2011/01/31/blog-engagement/">Continue reading <span>&#8594;</span></a>";s:7:"content";a:1:{s:7:"encoded";s:3798:"<p>This week we decided to dedicate the entire show to helping you bootstrap your blog! Just because something is free doesn’t mean people are going to want it, so we delve into some of the top tactics and tools for drawing in those readers, and get to the bottom of what <em>really</em> matters.</p>
<p>The big issues:</p>
<ol>
<li>How to boost subscribers to your blog</li>
<li>How to increase the number of comments on your posts</li>
<li>How to turn your blog into a real community</li>
</ol>
<ul>
<li>Who do we recognise as <em>subscribers</em>? There is a huge array of subscribers, from those that use RSS feeds, to newsletter subscribers, commenters, regular site visitors, and not least those who ‘like’ your Facebook fan page or follow your brand profile.</li>
<li>Two vital ways of pulling return visitors to your site: RSS and email</li>
<li>In terms of cultivating subscribers and followers to your content, what are the key steps you need to go through?</li>
<li>We talk about how your blog post could act like as forum for great discussions by making the most of threaded comments.</li>
<li>Facebook plugins: The pros and cons of using plugins such as <a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/disqus-comment-system/">Disqus</a>, <a href="http://intensedebate.com/wordpress">Intense Debate</a> &amp; <a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook-comments-for-wordpress/">Facebook Comments</a>. We analyse the SEO issues they come with and debate their value in terms of providing leverage for your blog.</li>
<li>So, what are the high profile bloggers doing? We debate the increasingly popular <a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lightbox-2/">Lightbox</a> popups, and plugins such as <a href="http://www.popupdomination.com/?hop%3Dhishaman">Popup Domination</a>. Do they add value?</li>
<li>To grow your reach and subscribers you should be commenting elsewhere too. We talk through how, where and why you should be doing so.</li>
<li>Create evergreen content with great comments! We get to the bottom of how to master producing content like this and reap all the benefits.</li>
<li>If you are not so hot with creating great content, there are some useful tools you can use to pull in the subscribers</li>
<li>Once you have built momentum and amassed a handful of subscribers, what are the next steps and how can you make money?</li>
<li>WordPress 3.1 is around the corner, but what should you be looking out for? Check out all the updates on <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.1">codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.1</a></li>
</ul>
<p>We want to hear your ideas on what topics you would like us to talk about, and which guests you would love to hear from! Leave a comment with your suggestions below.</p>
<p>Useful links:</p>
<ul>
<li>Great blog post by Rand Fishkin on seomoz.org &#8211; <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/recommendations-blog-commenting-marketing-strategy">Recommendations For Blog Commenting As  A Marketing strategy</a></li>
<li>Yoast.com – Joost de Valk’s <a href="http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/">WordPress SEO post</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cathedral-Bazaar-Musings-Accidental-Revolutionary/dp/1565927249">The Cathedral and the Bazaar</a> – an interesting read if you have some time to kill</li>
<li>This is a true example of evergreen content. A top notch post written by Avinash Kaushik – <a href="http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/11/blog-metrics-six-recommendations-for-measuring-your-success.html">Blog Metrics, 6 Recommendations For Measuring Your Success</a>.</li>
<li>Check out <a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/">W3 Total Cache</a> by Frederick Townes</li>
</ul><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/FhW_QwGTRZA" height="1" width="1"/>";}s:10:"feedburner";a:2:{s:8:"origlink";s:51:"http://wp-community.org/2011/01/31/blog-engagement/";s:17:"origenclosurelink";s:133:"http://media.blubrry.com/wordpresspodcast/media.rawvoice.com/seorockstars/www2.webmasterradio.fm/mp3/wordpresspodcast/11/WP012611.mp3";}s:7:"summary";s:326:"This week we decided to dedicate the entire show to helping you bootstrap your blog! Just because something is free doesn’t mean people are going to want it, so we delve into some of the top tactics and tools for &#8230; <a href="http://wp-community.org/2011/01/31/blog-engagement/">Continue reading <span>&#8594;</span></a>";s:12:"atom_content";s:3798:"<p>This week we decided to dedicate the entire show to helping you bootstrap your blog! Just because something is free doesn’t mean people are going to want it, so we delve into some of the top tactics and tools for drawing in those readers, and get to the bottom of what <em>really</em> matters.</p>
<p>The big issues:</p>
<ol>
<li>How to boost subscribers to your blog</li>
<li>How to increase the number of comments on your posts</li>
<li>How to turn your blog into a real community</li>
</ol>
<ul>
<li>Who do we recognise as <em>subscribers</em>? There is a huge array of subscribers, from those that use RSS feeds, to newsletter subscribers, commenters, regular site visitors, and not least those who ‘like’ your Facebook fan page or follow your brand profile.</li>
<li>Two vital ways of pulling return visitors to your site: RSS and email</li>
<li>In terms of cultivating subscribers and followers to your content, what are the key steps you need to go through?</li>
<li>We talk about how your blog post could act like as forum for great discussions by making the most of threaded comments.</li>
<li>Facebook plugins: The pros and cons of using plugins such as <a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/disqus-comment-system/">Disqus</a>, <a href="http://intensedebate.com/wordpress">Intense Debate</a> &amp; <a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook-comments-for-wordpress/">Facebook Comments</a>. We analyse the SEO issues they come with and debate their value in terms of providing leverage for your blog.</li>
<li>So, what are the high profile bloggers doing? We debate the increasingly popular <a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lightbox-2/">Lightbox</a> popups, and plugins such as <a href="http://www.popupdomination.com/?hop%3Dhishaman">Popup Domination</a>. Do they add value?</li>
<li>To grow your reach and subscribers you should be commenting elsewhere too. We talk through how, where and why you should be doing so.</li>
<li>Create evergreen content with great comments! We get to the bottom of how to master producing content like this and reap all the benefits.</li>
<li>If you are not so hot with creating great content, there are some useful tools you can use to pull in the subscribers</li>
<li>Once you have built momentum and amassed a handful of subscribers, what are the next steps and how can you make money?</li>
<li>WordPress 3.1 is around the corner, but what should you be looking out for? Check out all the updates on <a href="http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.1">codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.1</a></li>
</ul>
<p>We want to hear your ideas on what topics you would like us to talk about, and which guests you would love to hear from! Leave a comment with your suggestions below.</p>
<p>Useful links:</p>
<ul>
<li>Great blog post by Rand Fishkin on seomoz.org &#8211; <a href="http://www.seomoz.org/blog/recommendations-blog-commenting-marketing-strategy">Recommendations For Blog Commenting As  A Marketing strategy</a></li>
<li>Yoast.com – Joost de Valk’s <a href="http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/">WordPress SEO post</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cathedral-Bazaar-Musings-Accidental-Revolutionary/dp/1565927249">The Cathedral and the Bazaar</a> – an interesting read if you have some time to kill</li>
<li>This is a true example of evergreen content. A top notch post written by Avinash Kaushik – <a href="http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2007/11/blog-metrics-six-recommendations-for-measuring-your-success.html">Blog Metrics, 6 Recommendations For Measuring Your Success</a>.</li>
<li>Check out <a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/">W3 Total Cache</a> by Frederick Townes</li>
</ul><img src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/joostdevalk/~4/FhW_QwGTRZA" height="1" width="1"/>";}}s:7:"channel";a:8:{s:5:"title";s:29:"Yoast & The WordPress Podcast";s:11:"description";s:64:"This is the combined feed of Yoast.com and the WordPress Podcast";s:4:"link";s:22:"http://yoast.com/feed/";s:8:"language";s:5:"en-us";s:9:"generator";s:29:"http://wordpress.org/?v=yoast";s:2:"sy";a:2:{s:12:"updateperiod";s:6:"hourly";s:15:"updatefrequency";s:1:"1";}s:10:"feedburner";a:4:{s:14:"emailserviceid";s:11:"joostdevalk";s:18:"feedburnerhostname";s:28:"http://feedburner.google.com";s:9:"feedflare";s:158:"Subscribe with PodnovaSubscribe with NewsGatorSubscribe with NetvibesSubscribe with PageflakesSubscribe with My Yahoo!Subscribe with ODEOSubscribe with Google";s:15:"browserfriendly";s:195:"This is the combined feed for Yoast.com and the WordPress podcast. Subscribe now to get WordPress & Magento tips & tricks, helping you optimize your site for speed, search engines and conversion!";}s:7:"tagline";s:64:"This is the combined feed of Yoast.com and the WordPress Podcast";}s:9:"textinput";a:0:{}s:5:"image";a:6:{s:5:"title";s:29:"Yoast & The WordPress Podcast";s:3:"url";s:73:"http://cdn.yoast.com/wp-content/themes/yoast-v2/images/yoast-logo-rss.png";s:4:"link";s:22:"http://yoast.com/feed/";s:5:"width";s:3:"144";s:6:"height";s:3:"103";s:11:"description";s:17:"Tweaking Websites";}s:9:"feed_type";s:3:"RSS";s:12:"feed_version";s:3:"2.0";s:5:"stack";a:0:{}s:9:"inchannel";b:0;s:6:"initem";b:0;s:9:"incontent";b:0;s:11:"intextinput";b:0;s:7:"inimage";b:0;s:13:"current_field";s:0:"";s:17:"current_namespace";b:0;s:19:"_CONTENT_CONSTRUCTS";a:6:{i:0;s:7:"content";i:1;s:7:"summary";i:2;s:4:"info";i:3;s:5:"title";i:4;s:7:"tagline";i:5;s:9:"copyright";}s:4:"etag";s:27:"Z6DEf2PyzN+p92B80HeRKrWsGXE";s:13:"last_modified";s:29:"Thu, 31 Mar 2011 14:01:11 GMT";}