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.
Yesterday I gave out the Sphinn buttons, today you get a bookmarklet!
Sphinn This
To use the bookmarklet right click on the link above and bookmark the link. If you are in Firefox or Safari, you can also just drag it to your bookmarks bar. Then, when you are on a site with a great SEO/social media story, simply go to your bookmarks and hit the ‘Sphinn This’ button. You’ll then be sent to Sphinn.com’s submit page with the URL automagically inserted.
Enjoy!
[tags]Sphinn,Social-Media,bookmarklet[/tags]
You can now add a Sphinn button to your site to let visitors quickly submit your post to Sphinn, the SEO Digg clone from Search Engine Land.
Here is the button: 
Feel free to download it and host it yourself. It also does measure up to Danny Sullivan’s button standards.
Wordpress Code:
<a href="http://sphinn.com/submit?url=<?php echo get_permalink() ?>"><img src="http://bloggerdesign.com/downloads/sphinn.png" border="0" alt="Sphinn" title="Add to Sphinn"></a>
JavaScript Code:
<script type="text/javascript">
var URL = window.location.href;
document.write("<a href='http://sphinn.com/submit?url="+URL+"'><img src='http://bloggerdesign.com/downloads/sphinn.png' border='0' alt='Sphinn' title='Add to Sphinn'></a>")
</script>
I’ll be working on getting the Sphinn button into the social bookmark tool too in the upcoming week or so.
[tags]sphinn,search-engine-land,social-bookmark,digg[/tags]
After the recent site relaunch, I had some good feedback on the design and I’ve been working away at updating things.
Today you should see an all new header design. It has been lightened up, cleaned up and should look better across the board.
I’m still working on a few things so feel free to leave your feedback in the comments and I’ll see what I can do. 
If you missed the announcement just before the Fourth of July holiday weekend, FeedBurner Pro is now free. That’s one of those good things about a Google acquisition; things become free. All users now get Pro stats and MyBrand for feeds.
Honestly, I never quite saw why the Pro features were so great. MyBrand is a cool thing, but I prefer to promote and use my own feed URL that has been redirected to the FeedBurner version. I do this with the FeedSmith Wordpress plugin from FeedBurner.
The two additional stats items do sound nice though. Reach estimates the number of users that interact with our feed (including feed search engine or news filter sites) and we get better click though stats.
Now everyone is a Pro at FeedBurner thanks to Google.
[tags]FeedBurner,Google[/tags]
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.
One nice option that FeedBurner offers is the ability to send out blog updates via email. This is a vital option as there are many more people that understand email but don’t understand feeds.
Just turning on email subscriptions is a good start. Customizing the email that goes out is even better. FeedBurner allows you to edit the subject, fonts, sizes, colors, message and add your own logo. There are really only a few options, but you can better brand your emails with the options available.
To customize your FeedBurner emails, log into your FeedBurner account and click on your feed. Then click on the Publicize tab and then Email Subscriptions in the left column. If this option is not activated, do so now.
Then, click on the Email Branding link. On the branding screen, you’ll have the option to change the following:
- Email Subject/Title - Work on the wording to encourage your visitors to open the email.
- Logo URL - This is where you get to put in a visual que to re-enforce your site’s identity. I’d highly suggest this for all.
It’s been about one year since BloggerDesign launched and today we are celebrating with a brand new design & logo.
The new design is aimed at showcasing the content and cleaning up the interface a bit. This is especially noticeable on individual post pages. Overall we’ve gone from a three column to a two column design and have added more options in the same, if not less, space.
Design is always fun in the fact that getting all browsers to show the same thing isn’t that easy. However, the only area I’m seeing minor issues in is IE6 which only about 15% of the visitors use. I’ll continue to dig into IE6’s issues, but since it wasn’t a big one, I wasn’t going to hold up the launch.
As you browse around BloggerDesign, keep your eyes open for any problem areas. If you find one, post it below and I’ll take a look into a fix. Of course, you can post feedback in general, it doesn’t have to be bugs. 
Safari 3, now for Mac and PC, recently came out in beta form. Included in this release was the ability for users to use visual editors also know as WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors. No longer do Safari users have to know code to make basic formatting in blog posts.
Safari 3.0.1 Beta on Windows XP
I’ve tested it in Wordpress 2.2 and it works great.* As far as I understand, previous versions of Wordpress don’t support Safari’s rich text editing. Testing it out under 2.0.10 confirms this.
I also tested out Blogger and had no issues. They seem to be on board with the Safari 3 crowd too.
TypePad however didn’t seem to support rich text editing with Safari yet.
With Safari 3 being so new, and brand new to the Windows world, blog software creators are working in Safari support as they feel the need.
If you use TypePad, or other software that doesn’t support Safari’s rich text editing yet, drop and email to their support so they know your interested.
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…
4