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.

Blogging is about more than just the site owner, it’s about the users too. Where as comments are a great way to get feedback, so are polls. You can easily ask preferences, opinions or collect user data from your subscribers.

An easy way to add polls to any Wordpress blog is via the WP-Polls plugin. WP-Polls is an Ajax plugin that allows a site owner to create as many polls as they want and easily integrate them into their posts.

Some features of WP-Polls include

• Unlimited Polls
• Allows user to select more than one answer.
• Tracks IPs so no one can vote more than they are allowed.
• Poll start and end dates & times. Optional ‘No end date’ also available.
• Styling of poll bar to match with your site.
• Sorting options for poll answers and results.
• Customizable Templates
• Stats & More.

How do you use WP-Polls?

First, ensure that the WP-Polls plugin is installed and running on your Wordpress blog. You can tell for sure if you see the Polls menu option in the main menu after Options.

Being a designer/developer, I’m very handy at coding and designing all my own posts. Need the text red? No problem. Need other fun formatting? Not an issue. However, not everyone is quite as handy with code as I am. I’ve had many clients ask for additional formatting options when writing blog posts. Wordpress has come a long way in adding more formatting options, but there are quite a few people out there that want it all.

Having tested a handful of WYSIWYG plugins for Wordpress, the best one I’ve come across so far is FCKeditor. FCKeditor replaces Wordpress’ current editor with one that has a lot of additional features. To make it even better, it even writes pretty clean code.

Additional features, besides those found in Wordpress, include:

• Font face, sizes and colors.
• Its own built in image uploader along side of Wordpress’.
• Flash capabilities.
• Post Templates.
• Paste from Word & Paste plain text buttons.
• Find and Replace
• Forms
• Subscript and Superscript text.
• Link Anchors
• Custom Smilies
• Special Characters
• Page Break
• Custom Styles
• Tables
• & More

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.

For a new blogger, getting comments or trackbacks is exciting. However, some of them could be automated spambots filling up your comments with links to sites you wouldn’t want your visitors seeing. Spam plugins can do wonders at stopping spam, but some manual work is required. Here are a few tricks to help new bloggers identify possible spam.

1- What name did the commenter leave? Was it Sam or Jill? Or was it Used Cars or Baby Blankets? Most spammers use keyword phrases as they think it’ll help out their site; which it won’t.

2- What URL did they leave as their homepage? Does the URL look like a laundry list of keywords? http://www.shop-for-ipods.com/ipod-deals/best-ipod-prices.htm. Trying to hard is an indication that the link may be spam.

3- Was their comment generic? Sure, not everyone leaves detailed comments, but an indication of spam may be a comment such as “Great Website”,”I’m really glad I found your blog”, “This is really good content.” Chances are that these comments came from someone who never read your post.

Well it’s out, Wordpress 2.3 has hit the internet and it packs a few great new features along with internal code cleanup and bug squashing. Here are a few of the highlights to the release.

1) Advanced Editor
The WYSIWYG editor evolves and now includes eleven new ‘advanced’ functions. Just hit the little colored squares icon on the right of the main toolbar and you’ll get the additional buttons.

Included are:
Format dropdown for header tags.
Underline
Align Full
Text Color
Paste as plain text.
Paste from Word. Fixing my previous complaint.
Clear Formatting.
Clean Up Code. OMG I think I’m in love.
Special characters.
Undo and Redo.

2) Tagging
Ultimate Tag Warrior is no longer needed now that Wordpress will do tagging. Actually, Ultimate Tag Warrior had many more features so I guess it can’t be ruled out all together. But the new tagging functionality is nice. I can see people getting confused with tags and categories now as they are very similar.

A nice touch is the ability for Wordpess’ tagging system to import tags from other plugins. The Wordpress team was really thinking on this one.

Everybody loves the social media site Digg, or they think they do. It happens to be the social news site that everyone wants to get on because of it’s history, possible traffic and exposure that can come from it. However, Digg is not good for a lot of industries. Instead, look for a Pligg site that is a better match for your news.

What’s Pligg? Pligg is an open source social news & voting software. Basically Digg. Anyone can download it for free and install it on their servers. Sites are popping up all over the internet that are like Digg, only targeted to different topics. This means that their users may be a better match for your stories and you may have better success with a Pligg powered site than Digg.

Pligg is powering sites such as:
Sphinn - For SEO
Foxwire - Firefox & Thunderbird news.
Buddhist Events
Hot2Canada - Canadian News
Killer Startups - Covering internet startup companies.
Blogg Buzz - What’s hot on the internet right now.
Design Float - Design tutorials and tricks.
Dealigg - Social Bargain Hunting
Blogs4God - Christian Blogs
Vroomer - Auto News
The Knit Pligg
YardBarker - Sports

Looking at the success of a blog can be done in many ways and you should have a clear understanding of what you want out of the blog in order to get to those results. Here are a few blogging key performance indicators.

Self Satisfaction
This is great goal. Some people do really just post for the fun of it. They are not concerned with readership, money or anything like that. They just post because they want to. However, this goal usually becomes obsolete after a while. Eventually, you wonder why you’re blogging.

Community
Blogging can be a great way to connect with people and share information. Comments are a great way to interact with your visitors. For some, this is their goal, to be informative and helpful and gain respect. If this is your goal, consider how you are writing your posts. They should be open and honest and give readers the feeling that their input is valued. Ask questions at the end of the post and showcase top commentators on your site.

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.