Wordpress.com is all the rage, but Blogger has been around for quite a while and there are a few perks to using it. Here are a few I could come up with.

1. Editable Templates - No extra fee here, you can customize your Blogger templates to meet your needs.
2. Easier Widgets - This one comes from Anthony who feels that the ability to add widgets (or page elements) to Blogger is easier than over at Wordpress.
3. AdSense - Blogger makes adding ads quite easy. Before you know it, you’ll be making a quarter a day!
4. Video Upload - Currently in draft mode, but Blogger is going to allow direct video uploading into your post. The functionality is much like you already do for images. Sadly it doesn’t also publish to YouTube from what I can tell.
5. FeedBurner - FeedBurner functionality is built right in now that Google owns FeedBurner. More integration is probably coming too.
6. Publish via FTP - This is a big one, the ability to FTP your files to a directory on your own site is great. This means you can host your own blog, on your own site, regardless of your server setup.

When trying to describe link bait to someone outside the industry, it’s a bit hard to get the idea across. The problem is that link bait can be funny, sad, shocking, amazing and a bunch of other adjectives. Really, it’s not necessarily about what you create, it’s about the WOW factor.

The WOW factor is measured by your readers and how good they feel the story is. There is no way to know exactly how the public will react, even though sometimes you can estimate pretty well.

Think of it like the news. Millions of news events happen all the time, but how many do you actually see on TV? The big ones of course show up. With link bait, this is like taking someone that’s tops in your industry and having them do anything. More than likely, they’ll get lots of links out of it no matter how great it was. They have the following and so the WOW factor was imminent.

Then there are local stories that effect the people. I live in Minneapolis, so lots of news is about this area. If you are in a certain industry a good story can penetrate across your industry quite well. However, it still depends on how your readers can relate to the story. Do they feel it has value to them or their readers? Its it really worth sharing?

I’ve recently been reading a book, yes a real book, about search engine optimization and PHP. It’s a great overview on a handful of things you can do to optimize your PHP website.

It’s from Jamie Sirovich and Christian Darie over at SEO Egghead and is written programmer to programmer. If you don’t have a handle on PHP, then this book is probably not for you. But if you have some programming skills and want to learn more about SEO, I highly recommend this book.

Chapter 16 is all about optimizing Wordpress for search engines. It walks you though the install and gives practical tips, code snipits and plugin recommendations to help any Wordpress blog become a bit more search engine friendly.

Some blog related topics include permalinks, social bookmarking, feed buttons, emailing blog posts, XML sitemaps integration and duplicate content issues.

Other topics throughout the book include basic SEO, link bait, black hat SEO, geo-targeting and much more. I did learn a few cool tricks and will keep the book handy for future projects.

I really enjoyed the book and have recommended it to some of my friends. If you have some PHP programming skills and want to learn more about search engine optimization, than I highly recommend Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP.

Yesterday I gave out the Sphinn buttons, today you get a bookmarklet!

Sphinn This

To use the bookmarklet right click on the link above and bookmark the link. If you are in Firefox or Safari, you can also just drag it to your bookmarks bar. Then, when you are on a site with a great SEO/social media story, simply go to your bookmarks and hit the ‘Sphinn This’ button. You’ll then be sent to Sphinn.com’s submit page with the URL automagically inserted.

Enjoy!

[tags]Sphinn,Social-Media,bookmarklet[/tags]

You can now add a Sphinn button to your site to let visitors quickly submit your post to Sphinn, the SEO Digg clone from Search Engine Land.

Here is the button:

Feel free to download it and host it yourself. It also does measure up to Danny Sullivan’s button standards.

Wordpress Code:
<a href="http://sphinn.com/submit?url=<?php echo get_permalink() ?>"><img src="http://bloggerdesign.com/downloads/sphinn.png" border="0" alt="Sphinn" title="Add to Sphinn"></a>

JavaScript Code:
<script type="text/javascript">
var URL = window.location.href;
document.write("<a href='http://sphinn.com/submit?url="+URL+"'><img src='http://bloggerdesign.com/downloads/sphinn.png' border='0' alt='Sphinn' title='Add to Sphinn'></a>")
</script>

I’ll be working on getting the Sphinn button into the social bookmark tool too in the upcoming week or so.

[tags]sphinn,search-engine-land,social-bookmark,digg[/tags]

If you missed the announcement just before the Fourth of July holiday weekend, FeedBurner Pro is now free. That’s one of those good things about a Google acquisition; things become free. All users now get Pro stats and MyBrand for feeds.

Honestly, I never quite saw why the Pro features were so great. MyBrand is a cool thing, but I prefer to promote and use my own feed URL that has been redirected to the FeedBurner version.  I do this with the FeedSmith Wordpress plugin from FeedBurner.

The two additional stats items do sound nice though. Reach estimates the number of users that interact with our feed (including feed search engine or news filter sites) and we get better click though stats.

Now everyone is a Pro at FeedBurner thanks to Google.

[tags]FeedBurner,Google[/tags]

As blogs become more widely used, so does the idea of a blog search engine. I’m getting asked more often about how to rank high in sites such as Technorati and Google Blog Search. Where as it’s really easy to rank high, it never lasts.

Blog search engines rank blogs on a few different factors including authority, relevance and time. Time is the biggest one. If I post right now about “blog optimization” I’ll be #1 in Technorati for that phrase! However, if someone posts five minutes after me, I’ll be bumped out of first place. As the day goes on, and more people post with the phrase “blog optimization” in their posts, I’ll continue to move down the list. As you can see, it’s really easy to be #1 but you’ll never say there.

Another factor blog search engines can include is authority. They’ll measure the number of inbound links, how many people are subscribed to your blog and different factors based on the blog search engine you are using. They’ll then decide who’s popular and give the user the ability to filer out the less popular blogs and only show results from those with some authority. I kind of wish the main search engines would do this too.

One nice option that FeedBurner offers is the ability to send out blog updates via email. This is a vital option as there are many more people that understand email but don’t understand feeds.

Just turning on email subscriptions is a good start. Customizing the email that goes out is even better. FeedBurner allows you to edit the subject, fonts, sizes, colors, message and add your own logo. There are really only a few options, but you can better brand your emails with the options available.

To customize your FeedBurner emails, log into your FeedBurner account and click on your feed. Then click on the Publicize tab and then Email Subscriptions in the left column. If this option is not activated, do so now.

Then, click on the Email Branding link. On the branding screen, you’ll have the option to change the following:

1. Email Subject/Title - Work on the wording to encourage your visitors to open the email.
2. Logo URL - This is where you get to put in a visual que to re-enforce your site’s identity. I’d highly suggest this for all.

If you’ve ever wanted to add a contact form on your blog, but didn’t know how or thought it was to much work, then cforms is exactly what you need.

cforms is a Wordpress plugin that allows you to easily create contact forms on your blog. This is important as you want your users to be able to interact with you. This will help make the blog more personalble and friendly plus give your users the ability to contact you with items you may be interested in, problems they come across or inquire about your services.

cforms features include:

• Supports multiple forms.
• Customize each form with it’s own fields and receiver or recievers.
• No HTML knowledge required.
• CSS Themes.
• Submits via AJAX with a fall back to normal POST if necessary.
• WYSIWYG button for easy implementation into any post.
• Upload features.
• Customizable thank you message or ability to redirect to a specific page/post.
• Autoresponders.
• Email messages can be customized with variables from form.
• Easy Install.
• Spam Protection.
• Database keeps all contacts.
• Plus More…

I’m constantly looking for a nice, quick and easy blog stats. Google Analytics is a great program, but it’s a bit complex for my daily checks. I’ve tried quite a few and recently Performancing Metrics came back online. It’s not really a new service, but it is a great step forward.

Performancing Metrics now uses Clicky stats as its core. It wasn’t built from the ground up, but rather re-branded. I’m not sure what it offers as unique, but regardless, it’s still a nice stats program with the promises of unique features yet to come.

So what makes Performancing Metrics different? Well it’s more about what is happening now then rather aggregating data. It’s great for seeing what’s happening today, but not great for finding out what happened over the past month.

The dashboard shows incoming links, unique visitors, searches and top content. None of it is older than today and it’s a nice overview.

Digging into the analytics a bit you can get visitor information like country, web browser, screen size and OS among others. The actions tab will let you see the visitor’s information including the time and date, what they clicked on, the web browser and OS they used and referring information. It’ll even count downloads, outbound links and FeedBurner subscribers.