Blogging is fun and rewarding. There are so many good things about it, but comment and trackback spam can tarnish the process. I know that going in and removing 15 different ‘prescription’ comments is not a good use of a bloggers time as they could use it towards creating new posts. But how does one control it?

You can protect comments with a captcha plugin, Spam Karma or Askimet, but what about trackbacks?

Lately I’ve been testing out the Simple Trackback Validation plugin. It checks two items to ensure that the trackback is legit.

1. It checks the page that claims to be linking to your post to ensure it does.
2. Checks the IP address of the blog the tracback is coming from and the IP of the trackback. They should be the same. In order for these to be different, a spam bot must be auto generating the trackbacks.

It also has a feature to toss any questionable trackbacks into moderation.

So far in my testing I can’t already say if it’s working or not. No trackbacks have gone into moderation, yet trackback spam seems to be more under control, but not gone.

A reader asked me a question that I found quite intriguing, “How do I get people to find my blog posts?”

There are a number of ways that people can come across you and your blog posts. Here are just a few.

1. Search Engines - Google, Yahoo, MSN and Ask are constantly looking for new content to crawl and rank. Ensure your site is search friendly and submit an XML sitemap for faster indexing. Before you know it, the search engines will start bringing traffic.
2. Tagging Engines - Sites like Technorati have blog searches that focus on serving up content based on what categories and/or tags you’ve used with your post. Ensure you’re using good categories and tags for additional exposure in tagging sites.
3. Blog Sites - Technorati, Google Blog Search and community sites like Topix all index blog sites specifically and use those posts to feed their content. No websites allowed, only blogs.
4. Feed Reader Suggestions - Rojo and Bloglines have the ability to share or suggest feeds based on what the user is already subscribed to.
5. Social Networks - If you have a Facebook, MySpace, MyBlogLog or one of the many social bookmarking sites, included your feed in those sites to gain a bit more exposure.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Have you ever had to install Google Analytics on each page of a website manually and wondered if you got every page? Or wondered if a new client’s site already had Google Analytics running? If you are a developer, than you know a quick peek at the source and you’ll know in no time. But for those that don’t know what to look for, you can install the GA? bookmarklet and it’ll do the checking for you and report back.

The GA? bookmarklet code is a small piece of JavaScript that simply checks to see if Google Analytics is installed on the page you have loaded in your browser. If it is, it’ll return “Yes, Google Analytics is installed on this page” if not, it’ll say “No, Google Analytics is not installed on this page.”

Install GA? by dragging the link below to you bookmarks bar or right click on it and adding it to your bookmarks.

GA?

Now, I had plans of making this a Firefox extension that automatically checked, or a Greasemonkey script, but both didn’t work out. There is more research to be done in those areas. If you already know how to make it work, please do tell me.