Utah SEO – Jordan Kasteler

Use a robots.txt file to ensure that your site is crawled and the pages that you don’t want crawled wont be crawled.
Evaluate your template for usability and clean the code up. Rename images, rename the directories and file names if needed. Also delete any extra code that doesn’t do what you’re looking for.

Code Optimization – Rearrange the Title of your blog post structure and ad in H1 tags if they currently don’t exist.

Duplicate Content – Use the new canonical URL tag for your blog posts.

Permalinks – Change your permalinks for each blog post, a good structure is to use your title as the URL or use a category.

Pagination – Moving from one page to another, there are some plugins that you can use to establish a clean pagination structure.

Cleaning up your categories – it’s easy to add descriptions within a category, by adding some PHP code.

No-Following blog posts – Using the “more” feature (use the “Add link attribute” plugin) you can ensure that you have a good anchor text structure.

Custom 404 pages – creating custom 404 pages can mean that you will capture “dead” traffic.

User Generated Content – very important for your blog. Enticing comments by using a “DoFollow” link is good, but you may be spammed.

Internal Linking – very important! Add internal links for blog posts that have received many external links. The “Most
Popular” blog post plug is a great way to build internal linking.

Security – Use your HTACCESS file to add more security.

David Wallace – Co-Founder at SearchRank – WordPress Plugins

Title Tags & META Tags – Allin One SEO Pack: automatically creates META description tags. Creates meta tags from the excerpts section. This plugin will solve the duplicate content issues.

Social Bookmarking – ShareThis: Great tool for social bookmarking and allowing people to email your content. This is highly customizable and you can choose which networks to include.

Twitter – Twitter Tools: automatically broadcasts content to your Twitter account. Easily sharable content on different Twitter accounts.

Mobile – WordPress Mobile Edition: really clean content rewriter for mobile phones.

Comments – By default WP adds a No-Follow, but it makes sense to add a “Do Follow” plugin because it creates a community. The plugin SubscribeToComments is a great tool to entice people to come back to your website. Comment Spam Protection plugins are excellent in cutting down blog spam – the “Math Sum” plugins work well!

Sitemaps – Sitemap Generator Plugin for WordPress: Categoy page excluding and multiple page level functionality, comment counts, and permalinks tools. Google XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress: Great plugin to ping google with new pages, and calculates priority, then pings the different search engines.

Slugs – SEO Slugs: Removes “stop words” such as “a” or “the” – this plugin gives you a great keyword rich URL.

Additional Plugins – Avatars, Category Order, Meta Robots.

Rick Turoczy – Silicon Florist – Barebones SEO for WordPress

Get involved with a “Word Camp” in your local area to learn about some of the new WordPress tools and offerings. Dont just think about WordPress as a blogging platform, start to think about it as a Content Management System (CMS) – your site can have the benefit for the WordPress optimization.

Q& A –

Why should I block my Archive Categories?

David: If your category pages show pages in entirety, then you would need to block category pages. If you use Excepts as blog posts on the category pages, then you have nothing to worry about.

Tactics that bring more spam to your website – what about Akismet?

David: I don’t use Akismet because it doesn’t catch most of the spam. Adding the Math Captcha will take care of the problem.

Changing your “Submit” to javascript will defeat most comment spam bots.

How can you use all of the plugins without slowing down your blog?

David: Using plugins that are essential to your blog will keep things cleaned up, don’t over do it.

Rick: From a client perspective, reduce “plugin bloat” by keeping administrative rights to yourself so that plugins don’t overtake your blog.

For the SEO Pluin – how do you choose keywords?

David: Adding excerpts will do fine and accomplish what you’re looking to do.

For the ShareThis Plugin – is that more effective than targeting specific sites?

Josh – It depends on your content, if digg is your community, then a digg button should be placed.

Using WordPress as a CMS – when should you move into a real CMS?

Rick – if you begin to string several solutions together – move to something like Drupal or Expression Engine.
Scott Fish is the Director of SEO at EngineWorks, located in Portland, Oregon.

The post SEO For WordPress – Blog Optimization appeared first on SEMpdx.

Speaking on this panel is Todd Friesen, Tony Adam – Yahoo, Marty Weintraub – aimClear and moderating is Anne Kennedy – Beyond Ink.

Tony Adam: Where to monitor your reputation

Check out the RipOffReport – this is one of the irst places to check out any negative mentions o your website or brand.
Using the “intitle:” command allows you to see if people have mentioned your brand in a negative way.

The Conversation is Everywhere – discover where people are talking about your brand and then watch!

Social media isn’t just on myspace or facebook, yahoo groups has a ton of groups that may be discussing your brand.

Paypal example – how can you begin to interact with user to make a negative situation a positive one?

Protect your personal brand – check out checkusernames.com which shows you 50+ sites where your brand name may or may not be registered. This is great a great preemptive reputation management strategy.

Give people a chance to give feedback to you or your company.
Be transparent, if you make a mistake, come out and admit it and be genuine.

Place content on social media sites that show up in the search results, like wikipedia. Clean up social media proiles where people have taken over your brand, work with them and share content for that proile.

Listen and monitor the audience.

Marty Weintraub – How to build a reputation monitoring dashboard product

You can build an igoogle dashboard that integrates feed data. Clients should monitor their brand search and keywords.

Steps
1. Create a Google account

2. Start a list: Brand, products, company names and executives, buzz words, (consider misspellings too). (MSN Keyword mutation tool) Use stream of consciousness to develop other words to monitor. Look through your Google analytics data; paid and non-paid keywords for more ideas.

4. Set up a products tab, and other tabs for each area that you want to monitor.

5. Category Segmentation – personnel, competition, industry phrases and events. Try using google’s adwords keyword tool – sort by highest search volumes and look for categorical keywords. Look for keywords that can help give you an edge and stay informed. Customer Centricity Queries – full phrases, misspellings, this is where you will find keywords to track!

6. Set up your Google alerts and set up alerts as a feed (not an email alert).

7. Add the feed to your google home page, you will see a gadget with your feed.

Extra tips – Twitter can be used simply by grabbing the “feed for this query” (simply add to your igoogle). Technorati also has a feed that can be pulled into your igoogle dashboard. BoardReader – “walled content” can be discovered using this site.

Interpretation tips – Don’t click on every link, hover-over links to get the general idea.

Todd Fiesen – Reputation Management from a Historical Perspective

Consider looking at only content that is ranking within the search engines, this should be your priority.

Building the argument for Reputation Management
1. Customer Review, this is huge! There’s a ton of sites that give consumer the tools that they need inorder to voice their opinion. Research has shown that 90% of consumers trust a 3rd party review. Many major companies will experience a negative event within the next few years that could impact share price.

Industry Stats to be aware of:

58% of searchers will visit a website after seeing a negative review.
81% of consumers research online before making an off-line purchase.
31% leave feedback online, and most of them are negative.
87% of people believe a CEOs reputation reflects the companies culture and trust (Zappos CEO example)
78% of executive recruiters “Google You” before they hire you.
35% of those executive recruiters have rejected a candidate based on what they find online.

So what can you do: Subdomains are a quick solution, consider boosting links for other positive sites.

Q&A –

What do you think about Yahoo! Pipes vs. iGoogle?

Marty: It’s iGoogle is easier to use and train people on. It’s super simple. Yahoo! pipes is much deeper, so it’s not a “do it yourself” solution and can require a lot of development.

Crisis Situations – has anything come up at Paypal?

We did an analysis and found out that we were loosing $4M per month based on the negative results in Google. Built pages such as MySpace and other SMM related sites that weren’t being crawled, so we boosted links to these sites.
Todd: Social media sites are really powerful, checkusernames.com is a great place to start!

How can I use subdomains (in more detail)?

Todd: an example includes a company that took all sub-sections of a site’s content and added subdomains for major areas. It’s possible to have 3-4 subdomains show up in the top 10 results if you have strong in-bound links to each.

What do you think about products like “Naymez”?

Todd: These sites work to a certain extent, and there are probably better areas to start, like Twitter. Stephan Spencer from NetConcepts has great content on this topic. LinkedIn is a great tool to use.
Marty: “Powerful internal links is your bounty for participation.”

Has anyone really actually paid RipOff Report to remove listings?

The panel confirms that there are many examples where this has occured. Yelp also is allowing people to “sponsor” positive results.

Live Blogging by Scott Fish, Director of Search Engine Optimization at EngineWorks in Portland, Oregon.

The post Monitoring your Reputation: Tools for Success appeared first on SEMpdx.