As blogs become more and more mainstream, issues are coming up that blog software is not quite ready to take on. One of them is formatting issues created by copying and pasting content from Microsoft Word, Explorer, Outlook or even from Firefox!

The issue is that users are creating or finding content with other programs, then copying and pasting it into the WYSIWYG editor in their blog software. When that happens, the editor does it’s best to keep the same formatting including fonts, font sizes, line spacing, colors and much more. Any content copied from a Microsoft document will also come across with hidden, Microsoft only, tags such as the <o:p> and [endif] tags. This formatting then overrides the blogs default font, size and formatting tags giving your blog an inconsistent look and feel.

Here are a few examples:

The first one is what the code looks like when copied from Word. Can you tell what it says?

The second one is what the code should look like in Wordpress’ WYSIWYG editor. Much nicer.

Here are a few of the inconsistent layout options that can result. There are different fonts, sizes and use bolding.

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.

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.

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…

FeedBurner is the only service (that I know of) that will re-publish a blogs feed in order to get feed stats. Being such a great service, many users use it only to figure out how many readers their blogs have. However, FeedFlare is a great addition to any FeedBurner feed as it builds interaction and social media links into each post.

FeedFlare allows publishers to easily build “interactivity” into the content they create, making it simple for subscribers to tag, email or share their content with others. Publishers can include a variety of services including a live display of the number of comments to each post, the ability to email the author directly and show the number of blogs that link to their item.

To enable FeedFlare, login to your FeedBurner account, go to the Optimize tab then choose FeedFlare from the left column. You can then check items that you want to display in your feed.

I suggest adding at least the following:

• Email This - Send the post via email to a friend or a co-worker.
• Comments Count - You may be able to increase click thoughs if people know there are comments on your post.

One of the most common problems with blog posts, email or just life in general is spelling. Sure, everything now has spell check built in, yet it doesn’t stop misspellings. Instead of fighting it, try using it to your advantage.

Names are one of the common misspellings that are easy to do. Did Jordan Sparks win American Idol? No. Jordin Sparks did. However, thousands of people are searching for Jordan and it’s pretty easy to get additional traffic off the minor typo.

Wikipedia also has a rather large list of commonly misspelled words.  I bet that a lot of people are searching on quite a few of them and getting frustrated because they can’t get any good results. This is where you could step in.

I know what your thinking, you don’t want to create typos as it’ll make your site look bad. Yes, there is always that chance but you could always pre-date your posts so that they don’t show up on the front page of your blog. Set the date as last month so that your normal visitors don’t see them, but yet search engines will be able to find and index them.

Every have odd things happening with your Wordpress blog? Plugins work one minute but then not the next? It could be that you need more PHP memory.

I first noticed this issue when I moved a blog from one host to the next. I had three main issues:

1. The Wordpress Dashboard showed only the right had menu. No news in the main column.
2. My Google Sitemap plugin was now prompting me to download the options-general.php file when I tried to re-create it.
3. Spam Karma worked, but when I tried to manage items, it wouldn’t load anything but the main menu.

Knowing there was something wrong, I tried to contact the host of the blog. They kept telling me that they didn’t give support for third party scripts or plugins. I understood them, but didn’t feel that they were really listening to me. After a bit of searching, I found a possible fix; increase the PHP memory.

PHP is what is used to run Wordpress. It’s usually allowed a certain amount of memory to run scripts and do its thing. If your blog is big enough, or if your scripts are complex enough, it may reach it’s memory limit and quit the script. That’s what was happening in my case.

The SEO Title tag is a plugin that I’ve known about for a while, but never messed with. Boy was I missing out.

What SEO Title Tag does is add the ability to customize your blog’s title tags per post. No longer are they tied directly to the post title. You can customize almost any title tag across your blog giving your site a possible edge in search engines.

One can customize individual posts, categories or pages. The default Wordpress title tags are OK, Optimal Title makes them better, SEO Title Tag makes them into whatever you want them to be.

There is also the ability to customize the separator, create a shot blog name to show on post pages, remove the blog name from post pages, use category descriptions as titles on category pages and tie the Title tags into UTW (Ultimate Tag Warrior).

Title tags are easy to customize too. They can be mass customized though the plugin options under the Manage tab or you can also create the titles as you create your post as it adds a custom ‘Title Tag’ field to the post screen.

I had a client recently ask me about a blog that was using TypePad’s domain mapping feature and it was causing duplicate homepage URLs for the blog. The first was to http://blog.clientsite.com and the second was to http://blog.clientsite.com/blog/. They were concerted that their Technorati rank and linking efforts were being compromised. And, of course, they wanted a fix.

I did some digging around it and it turns out that it’s the way the domain mapping was setup in TypePad that was causing the issue. It can be fixed, but there are consequences.

In the client’s TypePad account there are actually two blogs, each with a unique URL.

1. http://blog.clientsite.com/blog/
2. http://blog.clientsite.com/my_weblog/

Out of the two blogs above, #1 is setup as the ‘home blog’ meaning that it can be accessed via the main URL (http://blog.clientsite.com/) and the unique URL (http://blog.clientsite.com/blog/).

When the domain mapping was setup, the entire account was mapped to blog.clientsite.com, thus the home and unique blog URLs were included.

If just #1 was mapped to blog.clientsite.com, then no /blog/ folder would have show up.

The FeedBurner plugin has got a new name and a new owner. Steve Smith from OrderedList.com handed off the plugin to the FeedBuner crew. It wasn’t a multi-million dollar deal like you hear with internet companies these days, but FeedBurner did rename the plugin in Steve’s honor. It’s now the FeedSmith plugin.

If you’re not familular with the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin, what it does is automatically reidrects your Wordpress’ feeds to the FeedBurner version. You don’t need to update your template or give out your FeedBurner URL, just update the setting via your Wordpress admin and it’ll do the rest. Quite handy and works well.  It’s a must install on my list.

Congrats to Steve!

[tags]FeedBurner,FeedSmith[/tags]