You can’t deny that Apple is re-defining the mobile web. The iPhone and iPod Touch are full fledged web browsers and there are lots of people using them. So, why don’t you take 5 minutes and optimize your Wordpress blog for the iPhone and iPod Touch?

Step 1 - Install iWPhone. This plugin and theme combo automatically detects the iPhone or iPod Touch and serves up a specific theme optimized just for those screens. All you have to do is install it and activate it. When an an iPhone or iPod stops by, your site will be ready.

Step 2 - Install iPhone Mobile Admin. This plugin re-works the admin side of your blog specifically for the iPhone or iPod Touch. It makes it quite handy if you have one of these devices and want to login and post or manage your blog on the go. It should work with other mobile phones too if you don’t have an iPhone. There is also WPhone if iPhone Mobile Admin doesn’t fit your needs.

Blog are just like any computer in the fact that they are only as good, and secure, as the software on them. Keeping your blog software up to date is important, but so is keeping your plugins and third party code updated.

Updating your blog’s plugins can give your blog a few advantages:

• Additional features if the plugin is a major update.
• Security fixes.
• Optimized plugin code that runs faster and more efficient.
• Better compatibility with the blog software or other plugins.
• Better compatibility with third party sites if it’s part of another service.

Don’t feel bad if you don’t update your plugins as it’s quite hard to keep them up to date; especially if you have a lot of them. Some plugins have update notifiers in them, others now tie back into Wordprss.org to look for updates. But that’s just the update notification, they all require some time and effort to download and update.

De-activing plugins is a lot easier, unless you actually have to modify the code, and doing so has its benefits.

• It can speed up the blog as it has fewer scripts to run or plugins to load.

Social media optimization is a big right now. There are a lot of sites that want to be featured on Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook or one of the many other social networks. However, getting there isn’t always that easy. The first steps though is ensuring you have social media links on your blog to make sharing that content easy. My favorite tool of the moment for this is ShareThis.

ShareThis use to be a plugin for Wordpres that injected social media icons, and an email this, link into your posts. It worked very well but was Wordpress only until recently. It’s since been re-launched as a service that’ll work across any blogging platform or website.

Signing up for a ShareThis account is really easy. They just ask for your email address and a password. This information is then used to track the ShareThis button performance on your site. It’ll keep track of who’s clicking which options, your most popular content and other visitor information. However, the reports are not yet available for the public but should be by the end of the year.

Being in SEO, there are lots of things to consider with a blog to make it more search engine friendly. One of those is the title tags and meta description. I’ve going through a few plugins in the past, but until Clive told me to check out All in One SEO Pack, I didn’t have one that did it all.

At first, I was a little nervous of All in One SEO Pack. The title of the plugin sounded a little egotistical. However, I tried it out and have been very happy with it.

All in One SEO Pack has a few great features. The first is re-arranging the title tags so that the post title comes before the blog name. You can also put in custom title tag templates for the homepage, posts, categories, archives, tag archives, pages and search pages. Or, you can write your own title tags per post.

In the past I used Optimal Title, which was nice, but you couldn’t have custom title tags and you had to modify the template to make the plugin work. It simply just put the post name before the site name. Then I switched to SEO Title tag.

With the release of Wordpress 2.3, tags are now a standard part of all Wordpress bogs. However, many new bloggers don’t know the difference between tags and categories so I thought I’d elaborate.

Categories are the different areas of your blog. They are the sections that you want to break your blog into. Categories will continue to gain more and more posts over time as you post on them often. Think of them like the main services or main product categories on a website.

If you have a site all about sports, your categories may be: Football, Baseball, Golf, Basketball and Hockey.

Tags are words or phrases that are specific to individual posts. They are items that will give the post additional exposure. Tags differ from categories as they are words or phrases that are less often used.

Example tags for the sports site, on a golf post about the Tiger Woods video game, may be: Tiger Woods, EA Sports, Playstation 3, PGA Tour, XBOX, Wii, Video Game.

Have you ever wondered where people were clicking at your blog? Now you can track every click with the Click Tracking Wordpress plugin.

It’s designed to recored every click, no matter where it is on your website. Links, images, forms or just random spots.

I tested the plugin on two different blog and have gotten the same results; nice click tracking but how accurate are the results? It seems that clicks are recored all over the place a not centralized on any specific area. There are small hot spots, but not necessarily on top of a button or link. So, to have a hotspot without an action makes me wonder how accurate it really is.

On the plus side, it is a free plugin and it can give a good overview of click data. I didn’t see a slow down in page render time either. So, whatever it’s doing, it’s not effecting the site performance.

I also found it hard to track clicks on the homepage of the blogs as the content keeps changing. You can get an idea of menu items, but not the general content. It’s best to look at individual post pages for the best results.

When is the last time you stopped to think about the health of your feed? Maybe it’s time to head over to the Feed Validator and ensure it’s in peek performance.

While checking a sites feed the other day I ran across a validation error. It seems that Firefox’s built in feed reader couldn’t render the feed. Google Reader got around the issue, but I wasn’t sure about other readers. One way or another, the feed was in need of a fix.

A quick run though the Feed Validator and it spit out the problem; a blank line before the XML declaration.

The nice thing about the Feed Validator tool is that it gives you helpful hits on what to look into. It said:

Solution

• Check your wp-rss2.php and wp-atom.php files for blank lines outside of <? and ?> bracketed sections.
• Check your wp-config.php file for blank lines outside of <? and ?> bracketed sections.
• Check your theme’s functions.php file for blank lines outside of <? and ?> bracketed sections.
• One by one, disable plugins and revalidate until you isolate the one causing the problem.

While out at SES San Jose, I couldn’t pass up the SEO Through Blogs & Feeds session. On the panel were Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts, Rick Klau from FeedBurner (now Google), Doug Hay of Expansion Plus Inc. and Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR.

Here are a few of the blog optimization tips they gave out.

• Ensure your feeds are showing the full post, not just excerpts.
• Up the number of items in your feed from 10 to 20 to give users more.
• Consider promoting other feeds such as categories & comments.
• Be sure your blog has a good internal linking structure. This can be done through category names, tag names or linking to your other posts inside new posts.
• The date archives are kind of pointless, instead, use good categories or tags to organize content.
• Promote your top 10 posts.
• Add nofollow to date based archives and comments links to help redirect search engines to other, more valuable, areas of your blog.
• Claim your blog at Technorati.
• Use the SEO Title Tag plugin.
• When naming your blog, use keywords if possible as that’ll help out in the log run.

The title tag is probably one of the most important items on your blog posts. It not only attracts visitors, but is also used to help determine how the post ranks. However, what’s good for search engines, isn’t always good to attract users. The good news is that with Wordpress blogs, you can target the best of both worlds a lot easier.

To do this, you’d create a post with a title that is targeted towards getting people from blog search engines or grab their attention in feed readers. Something that jumps out a little or that makes the reader want more.

Then, using SEO Title Tag, you can customize the page title for search engines. This may be a bit more formal and include a few more keyword phrases. Still very relevant to the content, but maybe not as edgie as the actual post title.

As an example, your post title (the one that shows up in feed readers and blog search engines) can be: How I Royally Screwed My Site on Google. Now, for the actual page title you could say: Hidden Text - My SEO Experience and Google Lesson Learned.

Getting the feed for a particular label in Blogger is much harder than it should be. Really, Blogger should just give them to us, but instead, they send us to help documents that may not help.  To make it even better, just because your label feeds use to work, they may no longer work as I found out the other day for a client. I did my research and here is how you can get your own label feeds on Blogger blogs.

If you have a Blogspot blog:
http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/labelname

Just be sure to change blogname to match your blog. The labelname is what appears in the URL of your blog label page.

Example URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/search/label/personalization
Example Feed: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/personalization

If you host your own blog:
http://www2.blogger.com/feeds/blogid/posts/default/-/labelname

The trick here is that you need to find your blog id. To do this, login to your Blogger dashboard and click on the new post link. In the URL bar your blog ID will show up and it’ll look something like this:
http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=1234567980123456789

Example URL: http://www.yourblog.com/label/personalization
Example Feed: http://www2.blogger.com/feeds/1234567980123456789/posts/default/-/personalization

If you have spaces in your label, your feed URL would look like the following.