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Practical Guide to 404 Error Pages: What WordPress is Missing

2009-11-03T13:30:42Z

I make mistakes. You make mistakes. We all do. And some of these mistakes end up providing our readers with a 404 page. Chances are that page says "Error 404: file not found". How does that help your visitor?

Instead of just identifying the problem, your 404 page needs to offer a solution.

In the default WordPress Kubrick theme the 404 page (example) is probably one of the ugliest pages you've ever seen, and chances are yours is not any better. Today is the time to end that. This post will provide you with everything you need to make your "404 - File not found" page a starting point instead of a dead end street.

The goal of a good 404 page is simple: to make sure visitors landing on it continue browsing your site, and find the content they came for. Let's get going.

Get into your visitors mindset

Get into the mindset of the person that just got to a 404 page on your site. They were expecting something else, if not, they wouldn't have gone there. So there's a couple of things you should absolutely not do:

First of all, considering they've probably clicked a link somewhere to get to that 404 page, whose fault is it that they're getting a 404? Theirs? No. Yours? It very well might be, so you'd better apologize.

Second, make sure the styling of your 404 page fits in with the rest of your site. Sometimes designers go overboard with their 404 pages, and make them look like, for instance, a Windows blue screen. This can have the very undesired effect of people leaving immediately.

Third, if you are going to make jokes, like that Windows blue screen, make sure it's a joke everyone gets. Especially when you're blogging in English, you might end up with a lot of readers for whom English is their second or third language. Your puns, though well intended, might be going nowhere because their mastery of the language isn't sufficient. Because of that they might leave... Is that worth it?

Let's make a killer 404 page

Ok so we know what not to do. We also know that the visitor came to your site looking for specific content, usually having followed a link from somewhere. Now it's time to start giving them ways of doing that. If you're not using WordPress and you're lazy, the Google 404 widget might be helpful. If you are using WordPress, we can do better than that.

Let's let us be inspired by some great 404 pages:

I'll be honest: the Conversion Rate Experts guys have inspired the first version of my 404 page. They offer you 4 options to get to the content you were looking for:

search
check the URL for misspellings
check the sitemap
start over at the homepage

That's a great start. Apple gives you a sitemap straight away. Depending on your site's structure that might be a great idea too.

I wanted to add one more thing: a set of pages that actually might be related to the URL people had typed in. To do that, we'd have to parse the URL and see if there's something useful in there. Let's see what we have to work with:

What data does a 404 error page provide?

A lot of people seem to think that a 404 page is a dead end street. It's not, there's a whole lot of data that can help you find the content your visitor was looking for. Let's start with the URL: it contains something very useful. All the text that's there after the slash of your domain should be pointing you to what it is the person was looking for.

Luckily, WordPress stores that information for you. The $wp_query->query_vars['name'] variable holds whatever was in there. It does do some replacing in there though, it replaces all weird entities with a dash (-). We'll use this bit of information to spice up your 404 error page.

First of all, let's check whether there's a direct match for that var in a page name once you strip out all the things that people sometimes add to your URL erroneously. (If you read on there's an adapted version of the Kubrick 404 page which you can use to update your own themes.)

$s = $wp_query->query_vars['name']; $s = preg_replace("/(.*)-(html|htm|php|asp|aspx)$/","$1",$s); $posts = query_posts('post_type=any&name='.$s);

If that doesn't deliver results, you'll want to do a search for that word, to do that we'll have to rip out the dashes in the name, and then do the search. As we're going to re-use the $s variable further on, we'll do that outside of the if statement to check whether the previous query delivered results:

$s = str_replace("-"," ",$s); if (count($posts) == 0) {   $posts = query_posts('post_type=any&s='.$s); }

Now we have an array with posts, at least, we hope we do, so let's check that, and loop through it:

if (count($posts) > 0) {   echo "<p>Were you looking for <strong>one of the following</strong> posts      or pages?</p>";   echo "<ul>";   foreach ($posts as $post) {     echo '<li>';     echo '<a href="'.get_permalink($post->ID).'">'.$post->post_title.'</a>';     echo '</li>';   }   echo "</ul>"; }

I've made an adapted version of the Kubrick 404 error page, which you can download here.

There's a plugin that does something similar to the above, called Smart 404. It chooses to redirect the visitor to the first result it gets. It wouldn't be my preference, I actually want people to notice that the URL was wrong.

So now we have a great 404 page, but we haven't used all the data that we were provided with. Another bit of data the 404 provides is the referrer: someone linked to your page with a wrong URL, or is linking to a page that isn't there anymore. So we've got one thing left to do:

Preventing 404 error pages

There's a very cool plugin called 404 notifier by Alex King, which can provide you with an RSS feed of the 404's on your site, and Redirection, one of my all time favorite plugins, offers the same functionality. You could also use my own Google Analytics for WordPress plugin. It tracks the 404's as 404.html (look for them in your content report).

Using Google Analytics has the added advantage that it saves the referrer, so you know which URL the visitor originated from. This allows you to not only redirect the URL to the correct place, but also to ask the site that referred the visitor to fix the URL.

Another great way to keep track of 404's on your site is using Google Webmaster Tools. In the Diagnostics - Crawl Errors area of Webmaster Tools Google gives you a great overview of what 404's it encountered on your site:

Two Things you Need to Know about 404 pages

These are things that WordPress is doing right, but it's good to know these things:

Internet Explorer will only show your custom 404 page if it's larger than 512 bytes (hard to get smaller than that with WordPress).
404 is not only the name, it's also the HTTP header that the page should send, if not, you might end up with 404 pages in the search engines indexes. You can easily check this with a HTTP header checker.

As said, no need to worry if you're using WordPress, but good to know these things.

There's really no excuse left now for a bad 404 page, so go fix yours! Once you've done that, drop your site's URL in the comments, and I'll make a small gallery of cool 404 pages in this post.

Practical Guide to 404 Error Pages: What WordPress is Missing is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Use WestHost, and you'll never have issues again!

The Top Five Misconceptions About Social Media

2009-10-07T05:27:55Z

In the years that I’ve been involved in social media, I have heard so many misconceptions and myths about social media that I am certain this article is long overdue. Here is a list of the top five misconceptions regarding social media:

Misconception #1: Social media is only right for certain brands

Often people ask me: “Is social media only right for web services or for ‘cool’ products?” The answer is no. Social media is right for every brand as long as the brand is able to find its target audience within a certain platform and converse/interact with it in an effective manner. Of course it may be exciting to do a marketing campaign for Apple than for Charles Schwab but for either one of those brands a targeted social media campaign within social networks and the blogosphere can bring amazing results as far as: Brand awareness, Overall buzz around the brand, traffic, customer loyalty and ultimately revenue.

In fact, often it is the “duller” brands that experience the most growth out of social media campaigns because they experience a more substantial change in popularity between their starting point A and their ending point B than the “cooler” brands. Take for example Mint which is an online personal finance service and was just bought by Intuit for $170 Million. Not the most exciting of startups perhaps and yet Mint is a fine example of a company that did a great job in using social media to maximize the buzz around its brand, making its blog magazine-like with articles about tips for young parents and other interesting content. Mint made their content so interesting in fact that users/blog readers promote the brand on their own.

Misconception #2: Social media is all about getting traffic — and quickly

Social media marketing is a long term process that takes time. Once a brand enters any network such as Facebook or MySpace, it takes time to build that brand’s community. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is a community on Facebook. If you want to do social media marketing right and not just spam the hell out of people, you must use conversational marketing to engage them. Conversational marketing is all about conversing with your community. Learning more about their likes and dislikes, listening before speaking and reacting based upon the customers’ feedback.

Whoever thinks that he will open a Facebook page and reach tens of thousands of site visitors on the first day, is dead wrong. Brands that use social media to promote themselves will see a steady growth in traffic to their sites over time as their brand names become more and more viral within the networks – due to the increase in number of fans, number of tweets, exposure in blogs, etc.

Sure there are different ways which will increase the rate of a brand’s virality on the Web. For example, creating strong social incentives for people on your site which will increase their urge to promote your brand is definitely a factor which will heighten the public’s awareness. You can read more about social incentives in this post I had written last year. However, don’t expect to get thousands of visitors to your site before you’ve been able to build 1) a strong loyal online community 2) a strong incentives system to increase brand awareness. Both these goals take time to achieve. From my experience, it usually takes about three months to start seeing effective results when using social media tools.

Misconception #3: “By using social media we will lose control of our brand’s image”

Executives (especially in big companies) often think that their employees will go wild and start telling every horror story imaginable regarding their brand because the company will open a Facebook page. So here’s the scoop: People will talk about your brand whether you like it or not. Opening a Facebook page is not going to change it and not opening a Facebook page is not going to make it go away. The question is: Do you want to be a part of that conversation or not? By having a presence in social networks and blogs, you as a brand show your customers and employees that you care about their feedback and that you are there to listen and satisfy their needs.

I’ll give you a real-time example: My hosting company is Network Solutions. For a few days my blog wasn’t uploading and I started to get very pissed off. I tweeted “Network Solutions Sucks” and specifically addressed @Shashib – the guy who handles Network Solutions’ social media efforts. A few moments later I received a tweet back from Shashib. He wanted to hear what’s wrong and help me resolve the problem. He promised a Network Solutions agent would call me soon. Within a few moments I received a phone call from an agent who helped me fix the situation and upload my site. At that moment, Network Solutions won my customer loyalty forever (or until the next time they screw up :-)). Real time customer care is something that brands can utilize social media tools for (specifically twitter) like no other marketing tools they have had till now. We’ve already seen amazing examples of customer care from Zappos and Dell. Brands should not be afraid of engaging in honest and transparent conversations with their clients online but rather they should be very afraid of ignoring their customers’ complaints and pretending that everything’s fine when it’s not.

Misconception #4: Social media is just a fad

I often hear people who say that social networks are just a passing fad. This is what I have to say to them: Social media is an inevitable digital evolution of our desire as humans to communicate with one another. It is a desire that we always had and will always continue to have as long as we are human. I had written about this topic in the past. To say that social media is just a fad is to say that communication is just a fad. Here are a few stats that might help to change the mind of those who are still apprehensive:

1) Two-thirds of the global internet population visit social networks and time spent on social networks is growing at three times the overall internet rate, accounting for ~10% of all Internet time.

2) Visiting social sites is now the 4th most popular online activity — ahead of personal email!

Care to change your mind?

Misconception #5: “I don’t need a professional to do social media for me”

Many executives think that they don’t need a professional to help them with their social media activities. They’ll just take a student who has a few hours a week and get him to sit on the social networks and play with their company’s branding. It’s inconceivable to me how on one hand companies can be so cautious regarding beginning to use social media and on the other hand they’ll give the work to a mere student who could ruin their branding in a few hours just to save a few bucks. In order to engage in social media campaigns that are effective and successful, companies should use social media expert services at least in the first few months just to understand the specific rules of each community. One must remember that Facebook, twitter, Mixx, Bebo are all communities with their own set of rules and it is crucial for brands to respect the community’s rules in order to survive. Just like a company wouldn’t take on its PR on its own without consulting with a PR expert first, a company should not delve into social media without consulting with a social media expert. After a few months of training, I believe brands can take the work upon themselves, but they must not forgo the training period as they could do more damage than good for their branding.

These are the top five misconceptions I’ve heard regarding social media although I’ve heard many more. I would be delighted if you guys shared in the comments section some of the misconceptions that you’ve heard.

Photo credit: Gary Hayes and Laurel Papworth

Ayelet Noff is founder and CEO of Blonde 2.0, a consultancy specializing in helping brands use social media tools such as social networks, the blogosphere and social software to create brand awareness, recruit employees or achieve any other goal. See her business profile, contact Ayelet, follow her on Twitter or leave a comment below.

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Quick Hit Tips for Higher Ranks in Google - Stephan Spencer (6:16)

2009-09-01T12:22:06Z

In this video interview, SEO expert Stephan Spencer explains some of the quickest things you can do to get higher rankings in Google. These "quick hit" opportunities include title tags, keyword-rich anchor text, external links containing keywords, and a well-designed internal linking structure.

Free Keyword Research Tool for Bloggers

2009-06-24T16:41:28Z

Wordtracker launched a free tool to help bloggers quickly and easily do keyword research and optimize their blog posts.

How To Spot Keyword Trends

2009-06-25T05:22:39Z

Tips on how to find trends and use them to help drive your SEO strategy.

Traffic drops and site architecture issues

2009-06-28T10:39:00Z

Webmaster Level: Intermediate.

We hear lots of questions about site architecture issues and traffic drops, so it was a pleasure to talk about it in greater detail at SMX London and I'd like to highlight some key concepts from my presentation here. First off, let's gain a better understanding of drops in traffic, and then we'll take a look at site design and architecture issues.

Understanding drops in traffic

As you know, fluctuations in search results happen all the time; the web is constantly evolving and so is our index. Improvements in our ability to understand our users' interests and queries also often lead to differences in how our algorithms select and rank pages. We realize, however, that such changes might be confusing and sometimes foster misconceptions, so we'd like to address a couple of these myths head-on.

Myth number 1: Duplicate content causes drops in traffic!
Webmasters often wonder if the duplicates on their site can have a negative effect on their site's traffic. As mentioned in our guidelines, unless this duplication is intended to manipulate Google and/or users, the duplication is not a violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. The second part of my presentation illustrates in greater detail how to deal with duplicate content using canonicalization.

Myth number 2: Affiliate programs cause drops in traffic!
Original and compelling content is crucial for a good user experience. If your website participates in affiliate programs, it's essential to consider whether the same content is available in many other places on the web. Affiliate sites with little or no original and compelling content are not likely to rank well in Google search results, but including affiliate links within the context of original and compelling content isn't in itself the sort of thing that leads to traffic drops.

Having reviewed a few of the most common concerns, I'd like to highlight two important sections of the presentation. The first illustrates how malicious attacks -- such as an injection of hidden text and links -- might cause your site to be removed from Google's search results. On a happier note, it also covers how you can use the Google cache and Webmaster Tools to identify this issue. On a related note, if we've found a violation of the Webmaster Guidelines such as the use of hidden text or the presence of malware on your site, you will typically find a note regarding this in your Webmaster Tools Message center.
You may also find your site's traffic decreased if your users are being redirected to another site...for example, due to a hacker-applied server- or page-level redirection triggered by referrals from search engines. A similar scenario -- but with different results -- is the case in which a hacker has instituted a redirection for crawlers only. While this will cause no immediate drop in traffic since users and their visits are not affected, it might lead to a decrease in pages indexed over time.

Site design and architecture issues
Now that we've seen how malicious changes might affect your site and its traffic, let's examine some design and architecture issues. Specifically, you want to ensure that your site is able to be both effectively crawled and indexed, which is the prerequisite to being shown in our search results. What should you consider?

First off, check that your robots.txt file has the correct status code and is not returning an error.
Keep in mind some best practices when moving to a new site and the new "Change of address" feature recently added to Webmaster Tools.
Review the settings of the robots.txt file to make sure no pages -- particularly those rewritten and/or dynamic -- are blocked inappropriately.
Finally, make good use of the rel="canonical" attribute to reduce the indexing of duplicate content on your domain. The example in the presentation shows how using this attribute helps Google understand that a duplicate can be clustered with the canonical and that the original, or canonical, page should be indexed.

In conclusion, remember that fluctuations in search results are normal but there are steps that you can take to avoid malicious attacks or design and architecture issues that might cause your site to disappear or fluctuate unpredictably in search results. Start by learning more about attacks by hackers and spammers, make sure everything is running properly at crawling and indexing level by double-checking the HTML suggestions in Webmaster Tools, and finally, test your robots.txt file in case you are accidentally blocking Googlebot. And don't forget about those "robots.txt unreachable" errors!

Written by Luisella Mazza, Search Quality Senior Analyst

SEM Training: Do You Make These 14 Common SEM Errors?

2009-06-26T08:52:30Z

Here are 13 common search engine marketing issues that are common amongst webmasters new to the field of SEM. What are some of the most common and frustrating SEM issues you have come across?

Get Started With Social Media

2009-06-18T16:56:38Z

Three things you can do today to get started in social media.

Blurring Personal and Professional Lives on Social Media

2009-06-18T16:56:27Z

Start getting comfortable with yourself so you can share with others!

Is There a Link Between SEO and Social?

2009-06-18T16:56:12Z

Search marketers will need new skills. Here's why.

Use Text Messaging in Your Business

2009-06-18T16:55:08Z

Seven ways to get you started using texting in your business.

What Does "Semantic Web" Mean?

2009-06-18T16:55:03Z

Search on the Web has its limits, but researchers are working to change that.

Social Media Is Changing the Content Marketplace

2009-06-18T16:54:59Z

What's traditional media to do? Five ways social media is affecting content.

Twitter 101: Tweetable SEO

2009-06-18T16:54:40Z

Twitter should not be ignored if you seek one more way to rank in search results.

Email Open Rates: What Marketers Need To Know

2009-05-26T18:00:51Z

(The following was written by Patrick Knight, Director, Client Deliverability, and myself.)

When you send out an email campaign, you need to know how many of your subscribers actually took the time to click on your message and open it. This measurement is called the “open rate.”

The open rate compares the number of people who opened an email message to the number who did not. It’s a percentage of the number of messages “delivered.” An open rate is dependent on a number of different factors. It could be affected by aesthetic reasons, or it could reflect your data management, which in turn may have to do with deliverability issues.

For instance, if your email is blocked by Yahoo!, and the majority of your subscribers have Yahoo! email addresses, the open rate for your email campaign may be disproportionately low.

On the aesthetic side, an open rate is influenced by things like the subject line, sender identification, HTML rendering (such as how the email is show on a mobile device), bulk folder delivery, relevancy of content, and timing of send.

Sometimes a message might be reported as having been opened multiple times. This may happen for a number of reasons. For example, email clients such as Outlook render HTLM within the preview pane, so that each time the user scrolls through his or her inbox and passes your message, it will count as an open. This happens because each time the user previews the message, the user is actually requesting the embedded image from your server, resulting in the report of an open. Ultimately, this would be counted as multiple opens versus a unique open.

Unique opens are somewhat like total opens. The important difference is that only one user is being counted or reported. For example:

User #1—opens email 2 times.
User #2—opens email 4 times.
User#3—opens email 4 times.

This makes a total of 10 opens. However, there are 3 unique opens.

Whether or not emails are opened consistently is largely based on sender reputation, relevancy, and other factors mentioned earlier. Although open rates render inconsistencies, email is very much about building a relationship with your subscribers. As you achieve this through relevant content, setting and honoring expectations, creating trust with your brand, and following best practices, email open rates tend to increase.

An increasing email open rate is indicative of a campaign’s success, even if it’s not absolute. A number of factors can increase open rates, which are the starting point of determining the true impact of your campaign. Increasing email open rates can depend on a variety of factors. For example, open rates only account for HTML emails, not plain text.

Other things to consider: Is the origin of your list in-house or not? Have you emailed these people before? Are you sure this is the content they want to receive? The more you follow best practices and keep up list hygiene, so too will open rates be more optimal. At mobileStorm, we have experienced professionals who can provide guidance on best practices and offer strategic services to ensure that you stay whitelisted as a sender. With our constant monitoring of deliverability statistics and relationships with ESPs like Google, AOL, and Yahoo!, you have the best chance of getting delivered.

Four of the most important factors a marketer can control in terms of increasing open rates are:

To build ongoing relationships.
To develop a trusted “from address.”
To create relevant subject lines and content.
To encourage recipients to add you to their safe senders list.

True, by itself an open rate can’t serve as a complete gauge of the impact of the campaign. It is only a starting point, because an “opened email” doesn’t necessarily equate to a “read email.” Moreover, it doesn’t tell you whether or not the recipient completed the marketer’s desired action. Other metrics such as the render rate can help create a more complete picture, with data such as click-through information, delivery failures, conversion data, etc. Having said all that, however, it’s important to know that along with other metrics, the open rate gives you a starting point to determine how your campaign performed.

(The preceding was originally a two-part series that appeared in mobileStorm’s email newsletter about digital marketing, Outside The Inbox. Such articles offer in-depth instruction to messaging marketers, new and experienced alike. To make sure you don’t miss any of this valuable advice, subscribe to Outside The Inbox today!)

Innovative Uses for Twitter for Small Business - Avinash Kaushik (8:28)

2009-05-27T07:01:05Z

In this video interview Avinash Kaushik discusses various uses that small businesses have found for Twitter. He recommends three analytics tools: Retweetist.com, Tweet-Rank.de, and TR.IM.

Social Media Marketing for Small Business

2009-06-16T19:37:47Z

Social Media -- Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and the like -- can serve small businesses in three ways. They help small businesses sell through (1) communication, (2) collaboration, and (3) entertainment. Lorrie Thomas explains how the process works in this article.

Vanity URLs on 3rd Party Websites Are Worth Almost $10

2009-06-17T00:42:32Z

An explanation of why vanity URLs on social media sites are not that valuable.

An Update on Sitemaps at Google

2009-06-11T11:26:00Z

Did you know that the number of website hosts that have been submitting Sitemap files has almost tripled over the last year? It's no wonder: the secret is out - as a recent research study showed, Sitemaps helps search engines to find new and changed content faster. Using Sitemaps doesn't guarantee that your site will be crawled and indexed completely, but it certainly helps us understand your website better.

Together with the Webmaster Tools design update, we've been working on Sitemaps as well:

Google and the other search engines which are a part of Sitemaps.org now support up to 50,000 child Sitemaps for Sitemap index files (instead of the previous 1,000). This allows large sites to submit a theoretical maximum of 2.5 billion URLs with a single Sitemap Index URL (oh, and if you need more, you can always submit multiple Sitemap index files).

The Webmaster Tools design update now shows you all Sitemap files that were submitted for your verified website. This is particularly useful if you have multiple owners verified in Webmaster Tools or if you are submitting some Sitemap files via HTTP ping or through your robots.txt file.

The indexed URL count in Webmaster Tools for your Sitemap files is now even more precise.

For the XML developers out there, we've updated the XSD schemas to allow Sitemap extensions. The new schema helps webmasters to create better Sitemaps by verifying more features. By validating Sitemap files with the new schema, you can be more confident that the Sitemap files are correct.

Do I need to mention that Sitemap file processing is much faster than ever before? We've drastically reduced the average time from submitting a Sitemap file to processing it and showing some initial data in Webmaster Tools.

For more information about using Sitemaps, make sure to check out our blog post about frequently asked questions on Sitemaps and our Help Center. If you have any questions that aren't covered here, don't forget to search our Help Forum and start a thread in the Sitemaps section for more help.

Written by John Müller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Google Switzerland

Tim Ferriss: Tips on what works in a blog

2009-06-08T09:37:26Z

Yesterday was my first WordCamp, held all day at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. I’ve been caught up by WordPress fever since early this year when I switched from TypePad.

Some 730 people turned out at WordCamp, about double last year’s number. Here’s a Flickr set of WordCamp photos I took.

The biggest learnings came right at the outset, when Tim Ferriss (pictured above), author of The Four-Hour Workweek, gave a deep dive into what has worked and not worked on his well-trafficked blog. (I finally got to meet Tim and invited him to attend a future Traveling Geeks trip abroad.)

Learnings: What works in a blog post

Ferriss’s suggestions were useful not just for beginning bloggers but also for veterans who like to pick up a trick or two.

• He uses CrazyEgg (which has plans at $9, $19, $49 and $99 per month) and Google Analytics for all his blog metrics and checks them religiously.

• For archived blog posts, just a simple change in the title wording from the default “Categories” to “Topics” increased click-throughs significantly. (I did this on my blog years ago.)

• Tim uses Slinkset as a polling mechanism to ask his readers questions, and they in turn vote options up or down. He calls it “a personal Digg.”

• He finds RSS “less and less valuable” because it reduces traffic (and thus, presumably, the potential for advertising income) and gives uers an easy excuse for staying away from his site.

• Ferriss likes to experiment. He added the word “Gear” to the top nav of his Four-Hour Workweek blog and it quickly became one of the most-clicked links on the site — even though it’s just a holding page. Now he knows that putting up content there will attract visitors. Smart.

• He deemphasizes the display of the date on his older posts. “New visitors are biased against old posts,” he says. Absolutely.

• For new bloggers, “the most important thing is to have a voice” — that is, to identify a writing tone and style that reflects the real you rather than trying to write the way you think others may want you to.

• Write about things that get you excited. “Passion beats polling and focus groups.” Also, if you don’t overdo it, he cited author Po Bronson’s suggestion to “write about makes you angry” — as long as you don’t attack anyone and write about the problem, not the person.

• Here’s a tip I never heard anyone else suggest: Ferriss says to create a lot of drafts of blog posts — and publish only 5 to 10 percent of them. “Put your resources into drafts,” and then flesh out the posts that will have an impact.

• Get in touch with your biorythms. That is, find what time of day or night works best for your writing. Tim is most productive at 1 am to 5 am. (I’m a late-night owl, too.)

• Ignore search engine optimization (SEO) for first drafts. Circle back when you’re nearly ready to publish and add in terms to draw higher search engine rankings. Otherwise your posts will sound phony and artificial.

• To find those key terms that users are looking for on Google, use Google keyword search and check the last three months of keywords on the topic you’re writing about. Make sure to include the most popular search terms.

• Make sure your post focuses on just one idea. If you dilute your post with multiple topics, it won’t have the same impact.

• If you use video in your post, make sure you summarize the highlights of what the video is about in text in the blog post. “Nothing travels faster than text,” Tim said.

• Don’t chase topical news. “That’s a losing proposition,” he said. Those kind of posts don’t have much evergreen value and other sites are probably doing it better.

• Make use of the millions of free Creative Commons photos on Flickr to dress up your site. (That’s exactly what we’re doing at Socialbrite.org.)

• He mentioned two WordPress plug-ins he likes: Popularity Contest (determines which of your posts are most popular) and Redirection (website management).

• Be ruthless in zapping the lunkheads who leave vitriolic, off-topic or offensive comments on your blog. “There’s enough negativity in the world, you have no obligation to put it on your blog.” Agreed.

• Take user suggestions with a grain of salt. “The sure path to failure and misery is to try to please everyone.”

• Ferriss suggested using Seesmic Desktop to get the pulse of conversations around particular topics.

• He uses Media Temple for hosting his blog.

WordPress’s explosive growth

I tweeted some of the session but kept my powder dry for this blog post.

Some metrics from WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg (I interviewed Matt and will post that soon).

• There are now 5.5 WordPress.org blogs (such as this one) and 3.4 million hosted WordPress.com blogs.

• There were 58 million WordPress blog posts this year compared with 31 million last year.

• WordPress blogs had 22 billion page views over the past year, about double from the previous year.

• 42% of downloads came from international users, compared with 27% last year.

• WordPress’s Akismet plug-in (which Matt wrote) killed 4.9 billion spam comments and trackbacks this year, up slightly from last year (when Matt said “this year” I assume he means June 2008 to May 2009).

JD Lasica works with major companies and nonprofits on social media strategies. See his business profile, contact JD or leave a comment.