Everyone seems to have a blog these days, so you’ve got to make yours stand out and be better. I’m not talking about drastically changing what you have necessarily; sometimes small tweaks are all it takes to make your blog better.

Here are a few simple things to think about:

1. Turn off comment registration

Are you asking people to sign-up to comment? If so, then you’re loosing out on comments. Putting a hurdle in the conversation between you and your readers may be enough for them to tune out.

2. Update subscribe terminology

How are you trying to attract subscribers? Is it just with an orange feed button? Maybe your link says ‘RSS’ or ‘Subscribe.’ It’d be a good idea to look at it from a non-technical perspective and update it to be more meaningful. Something like ‘Subscribe to new posts’ or ‘Subscribe to Updates.’ Not everyone knows what RSS is so we may need to be more specific.

3. Add email subscription options

I’m pretty sure that there are tons of people out there that don’t get RSS, but they do get email. So making sure that they understand that they can get updates via email may increase subscribers faster than just giving out the feed.

4. Update ‘no comments’ to ‘comments’

Why does everyone advertise that they have no comments on their posts? Getting comments is hard, but we don’t need to let everyone know that there aren’t any either. Simply changing the terminology from ‘no comments’ to ‘comments’ takes the negative out of the equation and now it’s just a link to the comments form.

5. Unhide sharing links

I like to share good posts, and so do many others, so you should make it easy. Services like ShareThis or AddThis have a tendency to hide the social buttons until someone rolls over them. I say bring them out, at least for Twitter & Facebook, so people can see them and click them without having to search for them.

6. Create a translation button

Not everyone speaks English so why not add a translate button for other languages? It’s quick and easy and can open up your content to a whole new world of people.

7. Cleanup the ads

I get ads, I really do. Blog owners want to make money off their ads and pay for their hosting or iPads. But ads can distract from the content if they are placed front and center. Think about integrating ads in a way that doesn’t kill usability.

8. Organize sidebar

How many widgets are in your sidebar? Are there ads and counters and social plugins and everything else? The sidebar should not be your junk drawer, clean it out and simplify.

9. Check your theme

How does your theme look? Is it a sad knock-off of the default WordPress theme? Is it 5 years old and showing its age? The WordPress theme directory has thousands of themes that can give a quick facelift. Better yet, create your own and be original.

10. Write better content

Blogs are all about content. It’s about what you write and how valuable it is to your target audience. If you’ve been writing safe, mediocre posts, then now’s the time to step it up. A better blog post may take more time to write, but it’s worth it.

Your blog is your virtual home and it’s a good idea to keep it up and make it user-friendly. Not only will your visitors appreciate it, but chances are, so will search engines. And, in the end, that’ll make you happier too.

Search is a bit part of any online presence. Most people focus on getting people to their site, but what happens after they are there? Does your blogs search perform as well as it should?

If you are using WordPress’ default search, then what you are getting is a pretty bad search experience. It seems that WordPress’ default search returns results based on date, not on relevance, which makes finding anything very difficult.

To make WordPress’ search much better, grab the Search Unleashed plugin.

Search Unleashed allows you to:

• Define what you want included in search results. IE: Pages, Comments, Posts, Authors, Tags
• Use search operators and wild cards.
• Replace category and tag archives with search results.
• Highlight matching terms on search result pages.
• Customize your type of search engine.
• See what users have been searching for.
• Search within categories.

The best part about the plugin is you just need to install and activate it. There is no need to edit your theme or worry about customizing anything. It just works.

Take your WordPress blog search to the next level with Search Unleashed. You, and your visitors, won’t be disappointed.

If MacGyver has taught us anything, it’s that you don’t need big expensive tools to get the job done. The same goes for blogging.

There are plenty of free blogging tools and resources to do everything from creating SEO friendly sites to keyword research and analytics. Why spend the money on a tool when you could use that money on internet marketing services or to grow your company?

Here are 13 free blogging tools and resources that MacGyver would be proud of.

WordPress

MacGyver would surly use the most popular, customizable, powerful, and completely free, blogging software on the internet. WordPress offers a large number of feature and hundreds of plugins that will make any blog successful. From newbies to web design professionals, WordPress is a great choice for ease of use, search engine optimization and price.

Google Analytics

MacGyver’s got to keep tabs on his site and know where his traffic is coming from.  For this, Google Analytics is a no brainer. No need to spend hundreds on an analytics package, Google Analytics as all the features you need at a price that can’t be beat.

Firefox

Security issues? Not on MacGyver time. He needs a web browser that is not only safe, but also a web browser that turns into a blogging & SEO machine. Especially with extensions such as:

• SeoQuake – Keep tabs on page rank, inbound links, number of indexed pages and more.
• ScribeFire – A blogging client that allows you to write posts without leaving the page you are browsing.
• Pinger – Because a broken link is embarrassing, this tool checks to ensure all the links on a page are valid.
• yExplore – Quick access to many other SEO tools and page information.
• SEO for Firefox – Another SEO tool to get all sorts of ranking and linking information.

Adobe Browser Lab

Even though MacGyver doesn’t like IE6, he still has to make sure his site looks good in all browsers. Adobe Browserlab is a free tool for checking designs across multiple browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Mac, Windows) to ensure it looks awesome and is usable.

Feed Reader such as Google Reader or Bloglines

For spying on the competition there is no easier tool that a feed reader. You’ll want to subscribe to your competitions blog to ensure that you know what they are up to. It’s also good on keeping up with industry news. You never know when Duct Tape might come out with new features.

Google AdWords Keyword Tool

For investigating new and interesting keywords that MacGyver should be optimizing his blog for, Google AdWords Keywords Tool is a good place to start. No expensive monthly subscription here, all you need is a Google Account. Looking for other keyword research tools?

Social Networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Who wouldn’t want to be friends with MacGyver? Social networks helps him connect with his allies and build a following who will help him promote his posts or who might come to his aid when he needs some assistance. It takes time to build them out, but building good connections will pay off in the long run.

Social News & Bookmarking such as Digg, Delicious & StumbleUpon.

Yet another avenue to promote good content and attract more visitors. It’s not always easy to become popular on social news sites, but with interesting content and patients, they could become one of the largest traffic drivers.

Blog Directories

You never know who might be using blog directories these days. Getting a free listing is one more area to gain awareness and expand the reach of a blog. Sure, search engines are all the rage, but an additional free link in a decent directory is beneficial.

Image Sharing such as Flickr and PhotoBucket

I’m sure MacGyver would have some great photos so photo sharing sites like Flickr would be a good spot to put them and reap the benefits of their built in community. Thousands of people do photo searches ever day and showing up in those results may be another way to drive people back to your blog.

FeedBurner

Tracking visitors in analytics is one thing, but not everyone visits the site; some only read the feed. That’s why we’d need to use FeedBurner to track those that subscribe to the blog’s feed. FeedBurner also has the ability to setup feed to email subscriptions as well for those that haven’t grasped feeds yet.

Google Webmaster Central

To ensure that no hackers put spyware on MacGyver’s site, and to ensure that it’s being properly crawled by the Google, Google Webmaster tools is a great resource. The amount of information that Google gives back can be used to improve the site for users and search engines. Yahoo and Bing also have webmaster tools, however they don’t give as much information at this time.

Creative Commons Search

Sometimes blog posts just need an image to polish them up.  Creative Commons Search is great for finding images and content that a blogger may want to utilize to make their posts more appealing. Creative commons search has websites, images, audio, and video that can be re-purposed for free.

So you see, you don’t need to spend a lot of money on tools and resources to make your blog successful. Yes, you’ll have to learn the tools and take the time to analyze the information, but there are a number of free tools out there that can get the job done.

Guest posters are a good idea for all blogs. Different people have different ideas, different writing styles, and different ways to connect to visitors.

Not only is it a good idea for your readers, it’s a good idea for your blog.

The more authors a blog has, the more content that will get generated, the more active the blog will appear and, when that happens, search engines can give more rankings and traffic. All of this leading to more sales, revenue, or whatever the blogs KPI is.

More bloggers help out a blog in more ways than one and growing a blog with multiple authors, or guest posters, is a win-win situation.

And with that, BloggerDesign is happy to have Michelle Bowles, a copywriter at TopRank Marketing, publishing her first post here tomorrow! Check back to see what tips she has for bloggers.

As blogs grow, and new content gets created, old blog posts can quickly get lost in the archives. As much as bloggers try to keep everything organized, it’s hard to ensure that all posts get the exposure they deserve. However, there are ways to help ensure that older posts get additional exposure.

1. Related Posts

On individual post pages, add links to other related posts. This shows visitors that there is more content on your blog that might be of interest to the reader. I’d suggest showing 5 posts as it gives a little variety without giving to many options.

Tip: Try out the Yet Another Related Posts Plug-in to integrate related posts into a WordPress blog.

2. Top or Popular Posts

In the sidebar, create a section for the blogs most popular posts. Again, pulling in 5 posts from the entire history of the blog and showcase what users feel are the best posts on your blog.

Tip: Read How To Find Your Most Popular Posts for plug-ins and ideas for obtaining posts.

3. Recent Comments

Having a list of the 5 most recent comments, with links back to those posts, can highlight which posts are getting the most chatter. These may be newer posts, or they may be older ones, either way, we are drawing more attention to additional posts and possibly gain more comments.

Tip: Use the built in WordPress widget or get a recent comments plug-in to enable this functionality.

4. Random Post

You can add a random link to the blog navigation that when it’s clicked on, WordPress will choose a post at random to show. This works great for blogs with a lot of good information that doesn’t necessarily get outdated over time. Then again, sometimes it’s just fun to go back in time and see how things have evolved.

Tip: The Random Redirect plug-in will help in creating a random link on your blog.

5. Social Icons

Having social icons on each blog post helps encourage readers to promote those posts for you. As an example, if someone comes to your site from a search engine, lands on a post from 5 months ago, and likes it, we want to encourage them to Tweet it, bookmark it, or use one of the many social networks to drive more traffic to the post.

Tip: Sociable is a nice plug-in for creating a list of social bookmarking icon links at the end of each post. The Social Bookmark Generator works well for creating a list of links or a drop down menu.

6. Internal Linking

Internal linking is an easy way for a blog owner to control which older posts get additional exposure. When writing a post, cite what has been said in the past with links in the content. Readers may find that the supporting posts are evidence that you’re an authority figure on the topic too.

Tip: No plug-in required, just link to other posts in the content.

Most blogs can benefit from using one, or more, of the items above to help showcase posts that may have fallen into the abyss of the archives. Bloggers write a lot of good content and anything that we can do to promote additional posts will benefit not only the blog, but the readers as well.

What other ideas do you have to promote older posts? Share them in the comments below.

It seems that that there could be a lot more done with WordPress’ internal search. More results, better options, filters, or something to make the user experience better. So I started looking for options.

One option I found was Lijit. Lijit offers the ability to allow your users to search your blog, bookmarks, photos, videos, social networks such as Twitter, and other sites from one search box on your site. It seemed like what I was looking for, so I installed it.

The downside to Lijit is that it can give other sites more visibility via advertising or the web searches tab. And taking traffic off your site isn’t always a good idea. The upsides though are that you can include many blogs, social networks and all sorts of different things into your search results. Lijit makes it all about your network of sites, not just about one blog.

So far I’m not overly impressed with Lijit as I don’t see any Twitter results and I see sites like TechCruch which I don’t have listed in my settings. I’m hoping the bugs get worked out in the next day or two.

Another option is Google Custom Search. Google is a great option as it’s a format that most people already know. You can add sites as you see fit, change the layout a little, and you get all of Google’s pre-defined search modifiers. There is even a Google Custom Search WordPress plug-in to make the install easy.

A third option I came across was Viewzi. Viewzi not only searches your blog, but video sites and photo sites too. I had Viewzi installed in the sidebar, however it never loaded results and the WordPress plug-in conflicted with WordPress and it had to be de-activated. Oddly enough, when the plugin was de-activated, it worked fine. So there seems to be some bugs, but it also seems to be working. It’ll be in the sidebar for a while while we test it out and you are free to take it for a spin.

With all my searching, I’m still at a loss for a search replacement that really takes the search results page to the next level. Something that gives filtering options, a nicer layout, or just better usability over all. The default WordPress search is fine, but seems lacking.

Have you come across any good search alternatives?

A while back we covered a plug-in called Subscribe To Comments.  It’s a great way to ensure that when visitors comment on your blog posts, they receive follow-up comments and stay a part of the conversation.

After using Subscribe To Comments for over a year, there was one major issue, fake email addresses.  Whether they are from people who didn’t want to leave their real email address, or from spammers, the number of bounce backs can become overwhelming.

The good news is there are developers out there that have taken the Subscribe To Comments plug-in to the next level.  They require a user to validate their email address before subscribing to the comments.  This ensures that they wanted to subscribe and that their email address is valid.

The two plug-ins that I’ve seen are Gurken Subscribe to Comments and Subscribe to Double-Opt-In Comments.  I’ve started to use Gurken Subscribe to Comments and like the added functionality.

One thing that I did notice however is that you need to make sure to customize the subscription confirmation emails that go out.  The default one went into Gmail’s spam folder, as it was very light on content.  Take the time and write out a nice email to help keep it out of peoples spam boxes and inform the user as to why they are getting the verification email.

If you are currently using Subscribe To Comments, I’d suggest changing over to Gurken Subscribe to Comments and working with that on a go forward.  Not only will it make things easier for the person getting all the bounce backs, but it’ll also ensure that users want to be subscribed to comments and offer a better opt-in notification.

The grass is growing, the flowers are blooming and that means it’s spring! As people start the spring cleaning on their garages, it’s also a great time to do some spring cleaning on your blog and give it a tune-up.

A lot of things can happen to a blog over time and blog maintenance is a task that probably doesn’t get done as often as it should. When is the last time you tested your comments? Or filled out your own forms? Maybe looked at the site in Internet Explorer?!

It’s a good idea to take a step back and look at your site, as others do, from time to time to ensure everything is working, and displaying, as it should.

Here are a few things to help with your blog tune up and spring cleaning.

1. Upgrade your software.  If you aren’t running the latest version of your blog software, you may be missing out on features, security patches or bug fixes.  Upgrading could make for an improvement in performance for both blog authors and visitors.
2. Upgrade your plug-ins.  Just like with blog software, the plug-ins you run get updated from time to time to fix, update and improve.  Check those plug-ins to see if anything needs to be updated.
3. Remove plug-ins.  Sometimes a plug-in is a great idea, but you find out over time that you don’t really use it.  So why not remove it?  The less your blog has to load, the more responsive it’ll be.
4. Test in other browsers.  Take a look at your stats and see what the top browsers and platforms are to your site.  Then test your blog in those browsers to see if everything works as it should.  People sometimes look at everything through their browser, but forget that there are many others out there.
5. Test on smaller, or bigger, screens.  Every computer screen is different.  Some are bigger, some smaller; some have high resolutions while other low.  Again, it’s good to look in the analytics software to see what most people are running and check out the blog as they see it.  You may be surprised at how some designs break.
6. Fill out forms.  Contact forms, comments forms, lead forms, all should be tested to ensure they are working properly.  But don’t stop there, whom does the form go to internally and what’s the process to follow-up with the email?
7. Check 404 error page.  If someone does follow an invalid URL, what do they see?  Do they see your blog with a nice error message?  Or a generic server error page that may turn them away?
8. Check Google Webmaster Tools.  If you’ve got your blog verified, check with Google to see if they have any issues crawling your site.  You don’t want to miss out any traffic.
9. Search your blog.  Doesn’t matter for what, but you want to ensure the search is still working properly and the results page looks good.
10. Click around.  Just take a stroll through your blog.  Look at archives, random posts, and categories, whatever.  If something jumps out at you as an issue, then address it.
11. Check your title tags and meta descriptions.  Are they still optimized?  Do they look good?  If someone reads them, would it draw them into the site?
12. Check your external links. Just because the sites you were linking to six months ago worked fine doesn’t mean they still do.  Double check any blogroll or other links in your blog template to be sure they still go where they should.  You just want to be sure you know where you are sending your visitors.

Overall, it’s a good idea to take a step back once a year, or month, to look at your blog from a different perspective.  There are a lot of things that change over time and if you’re not looking for them, you may not know what’s really going on with your blog.

What other things should be checked?  Share your thoughts in the comments.

We’ve talked about the benefits of owning your own blog, but what if you’ve already got a blog someplace else and want to move it to your own, hosted, WordPress blog?  You can do that.

WordPress offers a number of easy import options for most major free or paid blogging platforms out there.  This makes it easy to move away from other software to your own, hosted, WordPress blog.

WordPress currently offers the ability to import:

• Blogger
• Blogware
• DotClear
• GreyMatter
• LiveJournal
• Movable Type
• TypePad
• Textpattern
• WordPress
• OPML Files
• RSS Feeds

Each one of these options can be access by logging into your hosted WordPress blog and visiting the Tools -> Import section.  From there, WordPress will give specific step-by-step instructions on what to do.

Additional blogging platforms can also be imported, but are not officially supported. This includes:

• b2
• b2evolution
• Blosxom
• Drupal
• e107 CMS
• Excel/CSV Spreadsheet
• Jogger.pl
• Live Space (MSN Space)
• Mambo
• Motime – Splinder
• Pivot
• Plone
• PostNuke
• Nucleus CMS
• Radio Userland
• Roller
• Typo
• web-log.nl
• Xanga
• Zoomblog
• [X]HTML

Information on how to import this content can be found at: http://codex.wordpress.org/Importing_Content

When it comes to sites like MySpace or Facebook, importing the content can be trickier.  You can try the RSS approach or see if the social network offers an export function, but you may end up having to copy and paste the content into your new site.  Currently, social networks don’t make it easy to get out what you put in.

The down side to moving all your content to your own hosted blog is you’ll loose any inbound links, rankings in search engines, and any exposure those posts may have built up at the original location.  However, in time, the benefits of owning, and controlling, your blog are much greater over time.

With the explosion of social networking and free blog sites, it is easier than ever to create your own blogs with just a few clicks of the mouse. The questions that don’t get asked are, do I own the content I create? If I upload images, are they still mine? What happens if this service goes away?

Where as social networking sites are great, ultimately they are at the hands of other companies. What they choose to do with their services, you have no choice but to go along with it, or delete your account.

Here are 13 reasons why you should purchase hosting and own your own blog.

1. Control
Whether you like it or not, MySpace, Facebook and Blogger all have rules and limitations that you have to abide to. It may not seem like a big deal at first, but as you decide to grow your blog, and expand your brand, they’ll soon become apparent.

2. Customization
Not all services allow you to make the site your own. Tumblr, Facebook and WordPress.org all have some sort of customization abilities, but is it enough? Just adding your logo or picture in the sidebar can be outside the limits of some free services.

3. Changing Social Networks
Remember when MySpace was huge? Then Facebook came along. Now people are just Twittering away. All the content that gets built up at individual social network doesn’t transfer over to new ones and ends up becoming lost on a service you no longer use.

4. Social Networks Go Way
What happens if Blogger or MySpace decides to go away? I doubt that will happen anytime soon, but free online services come and go. Look at AOL Hometown or Yahoo Mash. Everyone that had spent time building up those sites and profiles have all had all their hard work disappear. Sometimes with little to no notice.

5. Monetization
Making money with a blog is a great way to pay your hosting costs or make a few additional dollars on the side. However placing ads is not always a possibility on all free services. Sites like MySpace have their own ads to make their own money and you, as a content creator, have to have them displayed on your profile without seeing a dime.

6. Terms of Use
Have you ever read the terms of use of social sites? They have the right to modify your content, censor you, or shut you down at any time. And you’ve agreed to it!

“The MySpace Services are for the personal use of Members and may be used for promotional purposes as well, but direct commercial endeavors may only be used if they are specifically endorsed or authorized by MySpace. MySpace reserves the right to remove commercial content in its sole discretion. Illegal and/or unauthorized use of the MySpace Services, including collecting usernames, user id numbers, and/or email addresses of Members by electronic or other means for the purpose of sending unsolicited email or unauthorized framing of or linking to the MySpace Website, or employing third party promotional sites or software to promote profiles for money, is prohibited. Commercial advertisements, affiliate links, and other forms of unauthorized solicitation may be removed from Member profiles without notice or explanation and may result in termination of Membership privileges. MySpace reserves the right to take appropriate legal action for any illegal or unauthorized use of the MySpace Services.”

7. Privacy
Privacy is a big deal. Facebook fans all got up set when Facebook modified their privacy policy recently.  So much so that Facebook put back the old privacy policy. When it all comes down to it, the service decides what they own, what you own and what they do with your information.

“Facebook may use information in your profile without identifying you as an individual to third parties. We do this for purposes such as aggregating how many people in a network like a band or movie and personalizing advertisements and promotions so that we can provide you Facebook. We believe this benefits you.”

8. Authority
Sure sites like Bebo and Friendster are easy to setup, but if you want to build your own brand, or market yourself, you need to prove that you are creative, talented and put forth the effort to do what it takes. An OK website, at your own domain, is much better than a decent site with Geocities in the URL.

9. Analytics
Understanding what posts you’re creating are good traffic drivers, how your visitors are getting to your site, and how they use your site, are all important factors in marketing a successful blog. With social services like Facebook, analytics information is not available.

10. Visibility
Social networks visibility is often limited to those that you connect to and who are participating in that particular service. Buy running your own blog, don’t have to connect with people to get feedback. A great Hi5 scrapbook (aka blog) post may get good visibility within the Hi5 network, but what about the rest of the internet?

11. Simplicity
Most hosts now have the ability to do one click-installs of WordPress and WordPress has the ability to do one-click installs of plugins. In no time you can setup, customize and start creating your own unique blog.  Even for as little as $25 a year.

12. Integration
Between adding your blog feed to your social networks, and adding social network widgets to your blog, you can integrate all your services and create a central hub to market and promote yourself.

Now, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t network in some of the many social sites, but direct those users back to your blog for good posts, reviews or additional conversation.

Use social sites for networking and research and use your own, hosted, blog for content generation and as a place to market yourself.  In the long run, the benefits of owing your own blog will outweigh and out last any social networking site.

With the number of blogs growing dramatically every day, it can sometimes be hard to know if a blog is worth reading or not.

If you are a web surfer looking for new blogs here are a few trigger points that can help you determine if a blog is worth reading or not. If you are a blogger, generating content, use this list as an audit to help ensure your blog is attracting visitors, not turning them away.

Design – The blog design is the visitors first impression.  Is it well designed or is there to much clutter?  Is it a custom design or a basic template?  The blog design is very important, much like how the way one dresses can impact how others perceive them even before talking to them.

Post Frequency – Is there one post a day, week or month?  Maybe ten or more a day.  It’s hard to say what is the best post frequency, but blog owners don’t want to flood readers with posts yet they don’t want to leave them hanging for weeks on end with nothing new.  The best is to try and keep a blogging schedule.  Set aside 2 hours one day (or a few days) a week to write a post.  This can help keep a steady pace.

Post Length – Are the blog posts short and sweet or long and detailed?

If a blogger posts long and detailed posts quite often, it may be to much for some to consume.  Remember, they probably read many other blogs too and can’t spend 10 minutes or more on one blog post.  On the flip side, I have seen some blogs post long and details posts, but only about one a week which gives the user a week to find enough time to read and engage with the entire post.

If the posts are short and sweet, then you can get away with more in a shorter period of time.  However, are the posts then quality enough to keep the readers interested?

The best best is to keep a mix of more frequent short and easy to consume posts with less frequent, maybe 1 a week, longer and more in-depth posts..

Post Quality – Do the posts convey a unique view point? Or do they just quote everything from another site with no original content of their own.  No one wants to read a summary of what other blogs are posting, it just doesn’t convey authority.  Quality of posts is usually determined by what the author brings to the conversation.

Comments – If you take a look at the blog posts on the site, are they getting comments?  Comments are not always easy to get, but any blog that has unique and quality content should be able to get at least a few a week.

Advertising – It’s understandable that some blog owners need to monetize their site with ads, however there is a line between monetization and usability that some sites cross.  Being continuously berated with flashing, obtrusive, and just plain annoying ads can destroy the best blog.

Granted, no one factor can determine the integrity of a blog alone.  Some blogs may look horrible, or have to many ads, but then you can just read the feed.  Some may not post often, but when they do, it’s great content.  It’s really up to the reader to decide if a blog is worth reading or not.

What other indicators do you use when looking at a blog and trying to determine if it’s a good blog?

With the release of WordPress 2.7 paged comments became a built in feature. By default, they are enabled on both new installs and upgrades.  Where it may be good for usability, it may not be good for SEO.

From a usability standpoint, paged comments are good for posts that get a lot of comments.  By default, WordPress cuts them off at 50 comments per page.  Users then don’t have to wait for over 100, or even 1,000, comments to load.  Yes I have seen posts with over 1,000 comments.  The time it takes for a page with lots of comments to load can be much longer than the user is willing to wait.  Breaking them into pages speeds up page loading time and makes the site more user friendly.

From an SEO standpoint, paged comments can hinder the post.  With paged comments, each page has a separate URL and the post itself is duplicated across each page.  This can cause duplicate content issues and visitors could be entering your site on comment page 3 of a post.  Ideally, they’d all enter on the main post page.

A blog owner could block comment pages from search engines, but the content being created by the comments on page two+ will then not be used to help drive traffic to the post.  Comments are actually a great way to get users to create additional content for a blog and we don’t want to loose that.

So what’s the best solution? My recommendation would be setup paged comments and put 100 comments per page.  This way, you’d first need a lot of comments on an individual post before comment pages start to appear.  Once you do have over 100 comments, then the focus should be more on usability as it’s pretty obvious that the post is popular.  There may still be a few SEO implications, but by this time, your users are more important.

If you still want to have paged comments, and are concerned that the SEO implications are to big to ignore, then check out Pressed Words’ SEO for Paged Comments plugin.  I haven’t tried it myself, but it claims to put post teasers on all of the comment pages and only show the full post on the main post URL.  This seems like a logical solution.

There are a lot of usability vs SEO discussions out there. Each should be taken on a case-by-case basis and the real solution is up to the site owner.  In the case of paged comments, putting 100 comments per page, and then creating paged comments, is the best solution as usability wins out in this scenario in my opinion.

Do you use paged comments on your blog?  Have you seen any issues?  Benefits?

Twitter seems to be taking over the web.  Everyone seems to have a Twitter account, or two, even President Obama.

With all the fanfare surrounding Twitter, there are many ways to integrate Twitter even more into your blog.  Here are a few tools get you started.

Tweet This – Tweet This is simply a link integrated into your blog posts that make it easy for users to click on and post your post to Twitter.  Think of it like a social bookmark icon, only for updating Twitter instead.  You may already even have this integration via a ShareThis or AddThis button.  It’s quick and simple and every blog should have this.

TwitterFeed – TwitterFeed can take your blogs feed and automatically post an update to your Twitter account when you make a new blog post.  This is handy when keeping your Twitter followers up-to-date on your blog.

Twittar – Twittar matches up your commenter with their Twitter account and pulls their Twitter icon into your comments.  This is much like the Gravatar service, only specific to just Twitter.  Personally, I think it’d be much better if Twitter integrated with Gravatar.

Twitter Sidebar Widgets – There is no shortage of ways to integrate your Twitter status into your blogs sidebar.  From simply pulling the feed and using the RSS widget already integrated into WordPress to custom Ajax widgets that create a full Twitter client in your sidebar.

Here are just a few sidebar Widget ideas:

• WP Widget Twitter
• WordPress Twitter Widget
• Another WordPress Twitter Widget
• Twitt Twoo

TweetBacks – TweetBacks integrate Twitter updates about a certain blog post much like trackbacks or pingbacks.  This allows a blog author to easily see if other Twitter users are talking about their posts.

TweetSuite – TweetSuite takes TweekBacks a step farther and includes a Digg like button to show the number of Tweets the post has gotten, a most Tweeted widget and many more Twitter integration options.

Tweet Digest - This plugin will pull a daily digest of your Twitter updates and post them to your blog as a blog post.  That way, if some of your blog readers aren’t on Twitter, they can still see your status updates.  You can also setup the plugin to make a post each time you make an update to Twitter.  This may be a few too many blog updates though if you Twitter often.

Post to Twitter – This plugin will allow you to have a Twitter update box integrated into WordPress’ admin.  This would be handy for anyone who spends all day blogging and wants to make quick Twitter updates without leaving WordPress.

Twitip ID – Twitip ID adds another field to the comments area along with name, email and URL for the commentator’s Twitter user name.  This allows you and your readers to quickly see who has Twitter accounts and follow them.

Everyday there seems to be more and more Twitter applications and blog plugins created. What have you seen or have you used to integrate Twitter into your blog?

If you talk to companies that do blog optimization or promotion, you’ll soon learn that there are rules, or best practices, for blogging.  Things like have a good deal of post content, have a well designed site, internal linking is important, and categorize posts to name a few.  However, some blogs break the rules and still succeed.

Have you been to I Can Has Cheezburger?  Millions of people have.  It’s one of the most popular blogs on the web, yet it’s not following best practices.

Here are a few of the item they’re not doing.

• Design – The design is lacking.  They have a great logo, but there is so much going on that it’s hard to know what to focus on.  It’s also hard to distinguish the post title from the rest of the page.
• Content – The blog has one picture and a line of text.  Nothing that a search engine will really pick up on and not much for the visitor to go on.
• Categories – No categorization is in use that I can tell.
• Linking – There is no internal linking structure in the posts.
• Advertising – There is also an overabundance of advertising that is taking visitors away from the site. There is just so much going on.

However, on the flip side, here are some of the things they are doing right.

• Content – I’ve always thought that good content is the most important thing.  Even though there isn’t much to each post, it’s memorable, entertaining and makes the user want more.  One could easily loose a half hour or more on this site.
• Frequency – New posts get added many times throughout the day.  Chances are, come back in an hour and there will be something new.
• Community – Each visitor has the power to create their own image to be published on the site.  This makes for a never ending steam of content.
• Interaction – Users can vote on how good each post is; from one to five cheezburgers.  They also have custom email, Digg, Stumble, Reddit, Facebook and MySpace icons.  They encourage the visitors to take the code for the post and share it too. Lets not forget comments too.
• Accessibility – Not only is the blog available via the website and the feed, it’s also optimized for the iPhone, mobile phones, has a separate iPhone app, the posts syndicate to social networks and you can even buy a book!  They are reaching out to visitors via many different channels.

So what’s this prove? It proves that the best practices don’t always qualify for all blogs.  You should always start out using them, but, at some point your blog may become so popular, that you can break some of the rules and feel no effect.  Basically, your goals will change and so will your needs as your blog grows.  Advertising on I Can Has Cheezburger is a requirement to pay the high hosting bills do to the high traffic.  Where is it may hurt usability, the goal is to continue giving visitors what they want; more cats.

Now, don’t try and base your blog success on I Can Has Cheezburger.  Just because they are, or are not, doing something, doesn’t mean that it’ll work for all blogs.  You have to consider your target audience, your goals and how you are going to get traffic. After all, each blog is unique in content and in target audience and you need to find out what will work for your blog to meet its goals.

Some web hosts do not allow for plugins such as Akismet to function properly. This is because they turn off the PHP function fsockopen for security reasons.  When they do this, any plugin that connects to an outside source doesn’t function correctly.  The biggest issue then is the inflow of spam.

I’ve found two plugins that seem to help take control of spam comments and trackbacks when Akismet isn’t available.  Neither are perfect, but together they make a world of difference in the fight against spam.

The first is Cookies for Comments.  This plugin places a cookie into the visitors browser when they arrive at your site.  Once they leave a comment, the plugin checks to see if that cookie exists.  If there is no cookie, then it’s marked as spam.  From my testing, it works quite well.

The second is Simple Trackback Validation.  This plugin checks the site that is supposedly leaving the trackback and ensures that the IP is good and that the site is actually linking to yours.

The downside to both plugins is that they either pull all questionable comments & trackbacks into moderation or they delete them.  This means that you’ll continue to get flooded with moderation requests or they’ll just be deleted and, if something is marked spam accidentally, you’ll never know.

Both plugins work well and have done a great job at protecting a blog when Akismet is not an option.

The good news for Akismet fans here is that there is news that in WordPress 2.7, Akismet may work without the fsockopen function via a HTTP API.  This would then allow for Akismet, and other pluigns, to work on additional hosting platforms where it currently cannot properly function.  Lets hope it works as good as it sounds.

For now, Cookies for Comments and Simple Trackback Validation are two great solutions to minimizing the flow of spam on hosting situations where Akismet is not available, or for those that choose not to use Akismet.

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.

Step 3 – Create a Webclip icon. This is the icon that will show up if someone adds your blog (or website) to the home screen on their iPhone or iPod Touch. If you don’t have a webclip, it’ll just grab your favicon and scale it up and make it look pixley and ugly.

That’s it, your WordPress blog is now optimized for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It’s cool again and you can brag that you are on the cutting edge of technology even without an iPhone.

While you are at it, you might want to optimize your blog for all mobile phones too.

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.
• Helps avoid conflict between plugins.
• Can help page rendering time if that plugin use to have to rely on a third party site to run properly.
• Less for you to have to worry about updating in the future.

Checking out BloggerDesign, I found more than a few things to get rid of. First to go were all the analytics code. Performacing, WordPress.com, Feedburner and 103Bees stats code was all removed. Google Analytics sill remains, but I didn’t think I needed five stats accounts running when really, I was only checking one often. I also removed four other plugins and upgraded eight.

Take the time once a month or once every few months and audit your blog. What plugins were cool at the time, but now you don’t use? What plugins to you rely on, and are they up to date to ensure proper functionality? Taking care of all aspects of your blog can make it easier on you and your visitors.

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.

Once you’re signed in, you can create your custom ShareThis button. Choose colors, social media buttons, icon and email feature. It’ll then output a piece of JavaScript to put on your site and start tracking right away.

The nice thing about ShareThis is it only takes up a small amount of screen space. Once the link is clicked on, the larger window with all the options shows.

Other social bookmark plugins have the same functionality but lack the tracking piece. It’ll be interesting to see how this works as it gets more users.

Another option that ShareThis has is the ability to incorporate a ShareThis button directly into your browser. Clicking on it will give you all the social media options and allow you to easily submit any page you navigate to to one of many social media sites. The button comes in the form of a Firefox Extension, Internet Explorer addon or even a bookmarklet for other browsers such as Safari and Opera.

Downsides to ShareThis is that you’re limited to the number of social services available. It has all the main ones but some users may want more. This is kind of a good thing though as to many options can be overwhelming for some visitors. You’ll also have to figure out where you want to add the code in your template. I’m not a huge fan of where I put mine, but I’ll test it out for a while. It didn’t work as well where I wanted it but that’s a design issue I have to work out. It does seem to take up more room that the old ShareThis button use to.

ShareThis looks to be a very useful addition to any blog, website or browser. It’ll help make your posts easier to promote in the social space and additional exposure is always good.

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.

SEO Title Tag is a step up from Optimal Title as you can customize title tags for every post individually. It also has a really nice mass customize area where you can change multiple title tags at once. However, you still have to modify your template to make the plugin work.

With All in One SEO Pack, there is no template modification needed. Just activate the plugin and it works. It’s missing that mass edit mode that SEO Title Tag has, but the additional features make up for that.

Additional features in All in One SEO Pack include meta descriptions, keywords and nofollow tags.

For meta descriptions, I was using an old version of Headspace2 to auto generate them. Now I can get the same functionality without the additional plugin by using All in One SEO Pack. If you’d like, you can also customize your meta descriptions per post.

The nofollow feature is kind of handy. You can check a box to put nofollow tags on all the archives or tag pages or category pages. This can help cut down on repetitive content that’s fed to search engines.

At the moment All in One SEO Pack is my title tag & meta description plugin of the moment. However each plugin author is working hard to out do each other. Even when writing this post I see that Headspace2 has got a lot of new features that sound pretty darn cool. Can it out perform All in One SEO Pack? I’ll have to test it and find out.

What plugin are you using to create search friendly title tags and other SEO functionality?

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.

Tags and categories are very similar in nature, however categories are meant to be the high level, overarching areas of your blog. Each category will contain many posts on one topic. Tags are assigned on a per-post basis and are words or phrases specific to that post and that may only be once in the entire blog.

Whether you use tags or categories, you can’t really go wrong. Both are organizational features and both will gain additional exposure in search engines. What’s important is that you are using them to organize your posts and increase the usability of your blog.