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.

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.

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.

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.

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.