Contact me if you are going to be at SXSW Interactive this week in Austin, Texas.  I’d love to meet any readers or WordPress lovers!

Let’s Meet at SXSW Interactive is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

Have you noticed lately that sometimes the author’s face will show next to a blog post?  This post will show you how you can have your own lovely face show next to your website or blog!

We’ve talked about the importance of Click-Thru Rate in the SERPS and Rich Snippets in SEO before, but this is the best tip I’ve had yet for you guys.

I was delighted this morning to see the Search Engine Results Page showing this:

New Search Engine Results Page

See my face next to the Search Result?  Now it’s one thing if it shows when people search for you by name.  That’s cool but it’s not going to help much because people are already looking for you.  What if it showed in a more competitive search?

Author Picture in SERPS

See my face on the 4th result down?  Now even though my site is still showing at position 4, I guarantee there are more clicks on it than there were before because we know that faces help conversion rates.

How to Add Your Face to Your Google Results

It’s as simple as following these instructions from Google.  If you have any questions or problems, just leave a comment!

How to Add Your Face Next to Your Blog in Google is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

We are lucky in the US that we are able to use Akismet to help cut down on comment spam and contact form spam.  Yesterday, I had an email exchange with a German citizen who isn’t able to use Akismet because of German privacy laws [Correction: This is not against German law, but is a sticky issue because German Citizens' data is held on US servers].  He had to find another way to cut down on all of the contact form spam he was receiving.

After trying a few different plugins, he eventually settled on Cookies for Comments, which takes a very unique approach to cutting down on spam.  From the plugin’s description:

This plugin adds a stylesheet or image to your blog’s html source code. When a browser loads that stylesheet or image a cookie is dropped. If that user then leaves a comment the cookie is checked. If it doesn’t exist the comment is marked as spam. The plugin can also check how long it took a user to enter a comment. If it’s too fast it’s probably a spam bot. How fast can a legitimate user enter their name, email, web address and enter a well thought out comment?

His blog has been spam free since installing the plugin yesterday.  So if you ever need to cut down on comment spam without using Akismet, give Cookies for Comments a try!

Thanks to Marco for all his help with this!

How to Eliminate Spam When You Can’t Use Akismet is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

I was working with a Squarespace site recently and needed to put some tracking code on the success page after a contact form.

I’m not as familiar with SquareSpace as WordPress and had to write some javascript code to run on a contact form tracking page.  Since no PHP was available to write, Eric and I did it strictly in Javascript.  Here’s the final code:

<script type="text/javascript">
if ((location.href)=="http:www.yoursite.com/trackingpage") {
/* <![CDATA[ */
var google_conversion_id = xxxxxxxx;
var google_conversion_language = "en";
var google_conversion_format = "1";
var google_conversion_color = "000000";
var google_conversion_label = "xxxxxxxxxxx";
var google_conversion_value = 0;
/* ]]> */
}
</script>

Naturally you’ll need to change these three values:

1. Change http:www.yoursite.com/trackingpage to the exact URL of the transaction URL.
2. Replace the xxxxxxxx after google_conversion_id to whatever your actual conversion is is.
3. You’ll also need to change xxxxxxxx after google_conversion_label to whatever your actual label is, too.

Javascript Conditional Code for Conversion Tracking in Google Adwords is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

Without the proper protection, comment spam is an absolute nightmare in WordPress.  Fortunately, the proper protections are very easy to come by.

As a primer, comment spam is any comment left on your blog that adds nothing to the conversation and was likely mass posted.  These comments sometimes look like:

Great post!  This makes me really think.

Or something like….

Wow, I couldn’t have said it better myself!

You can spot spam comments because they are usually positive in vibe and could fit just about any blog post.  The spammers do this in the hopes that the link behind their name will help their website rank better.  So if you aren’t sure if the comment is spam, a good way to tell is to look at where their name links to.  If it looks fishy, then you’ve got a spam commenter on your hands.

How Bad is the Spam Industry?

I was amazed and what I found this evening when searching through “WordPress” related keywords.  Check this out:

Top Searched Keyword Terms for WordPress

If you look closely at the terms with the red arrows, you’ll see a disturbing pattern.  These are all terms that spammers would use to locate blogs that are powered by WordPress and accept comments.

What’s most disturbing is the fact that the relative volumes of the 5 spam terms add up to 72, while people legitamately searching for WordPress are only 88 in relative volume.  That means the spammers almost outnumber real people searching for WordPress!

But this article isn’t meant to employ scare tactics.  It’s not a scary situation once you get your blog setup correctly.  So let’s talk about setting your WP blog up to avoid comment spam.

How to Kill Comment Spam

1. Have Akismet Set-Up
2. The stats above would imply you should remove the ‘powered by wordpress’ and ‘leave a comment’ text from your site.  I’ve never tested it before, but it can’t hurt!
3. Finally, if your spam is coming from a contact form and not from a comment form, read Protecting Contact Form 7 from Spam.  It’s a bit more involved to protect your contact form than your comments form, but it’s well worth the time.

WordPress Comment Spam: How to get less comment spam on your WP Blog is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

Google released a breakdown of thirty changes to their search algorithm on January 5th.  If you didn’t make it to the bottom of the list, you missed something special:

Faster mobile browsing. [launch codename “old possum”, project codename “Skip Redirect”] Many websites redirect smartphone users to another page that is optimized for smartphone browsers. This change uses the final smartphone destination url in our mobile search results, so you can bypass all the redirects and load the target page faster.

In other words, if Google sees you are searching from a mobile device, they’ll send you directly to the mobile version (if there is one) of a website first.  This is huge news if you really think about the logistics behind this change.  This change means…

• Google is taking note of websites with mobile versions of their website.
• Google acknowledges that mobile users prefer a mobile version of a website.  (How long will it be before websites with a mobile version will get a boost in rankings for mobile users?)
• Google sees a future in mobile and is preparing for it already.

Google’s December Algorithm Change Hints at a Focus on Mobile Websites is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

There is a lot of of advice about recovering from Panda, but I felt like this advice from Mike Gordon, the Toronto SEO Guy, was the most elegant:

In most cases, sites that have been hit with Panda were over-optimizing their on-page factors (keyword spamming) with the intention of ‘gaming’ Google while offering no additional value (or lesser value) to visitors. Other sites got hit for using link farms and other forms of paid links that are against Google’s policies, and again, are designed to manipulate the engine without offering benefit to the user.

For sites in the above scenario, it’s time to recognize that they’ve gotten away with undeserved traffic for a long time and now they’re paying the price. What they need to do is kill the link farms and paid links (which are almost always crappy links anyway) and edit their pages to remove the over-optimization.

So, for example, there’s no need for a 5-10% ‘keyword density’ (keyword density is a myth anyway). Bottom line here is to just write naturally without thinking much about keyword usage and you’ll be fine. Of course, you do need your primary keyword(s) in the title tag, body text, etc., but 2-3 instances of the keyword in the body text is all you need. More than that really doesn’t help contrary to popular belief – but it might hurt (and probably will).

Most importantly, sites need to pay more attention to structural issues (which in most cases haven’t been an issue for Panda, but having a good site structure will go a long way to helping a site prevail post Panda). For example: ensure that there are no duplicate content issues (the vast majority of sites have this problem to some degree in Google’s eyes and don’t even know it e.g. URL issues, parameter issues, etc.); ensure that there are minimal pages returning 404s or other errors; have a user friendly and consistent global navigation; remove unnecessary keyword-rich footer links sitewide; etc.

In a nutshell, site owners/webmasters need to ask themselves this question when creating/editing anything on their website: Does the change I’m about to make help Google *and* users, or just Google? If it’s the latter, you need to seriously reconsider whether it’s a wise move. Making websites easier for Google to crawl, understand the content, and index pages – and making sites more relevant for users – are still the keys.

Yes, I know, I sound soooo white hat – and I am – but I truly believe that in the long term, that’s what works best (though there will always be smart black hat guys out there who succeed for a period of time, but it’s getting *much* tougher).

Unfortunately, some legitimate sites got undeservedly Panda’d. Beyond doing all the kinds of things I’ve outlined above, they should attempt to contact Google and make their best case. For most of us, this isn’t easy as Google is not the most responsive company to the little guys (surprise surprise). If you can develop a Google contact through a friend or even via an AdWords rep, you may have a better chance of your message being responded to, and if the request is reasonable then you have a much better chance of a reversal of penalties on the SEO field.

SEO Tip: How To Recover From Panda is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

Found some better code to pull your latest tweet:

<?php
	$username='thatbradleyguy'; // set user name
	$format='json'; // set format
	$tweet=json_decode(file_get_contents("http://api.twitter.com/1/statuses/user_timeline/{$username}.{$format}")); // get tweets and decode them into a variable
	echo $tweet[0]->text; // show latest tweet
?>

Pull your latest tweet with PHP is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

I love RackSpace but was frustrated by how hard it was to set up automated backups for WordPress.  If you find yourself in the same boat, I’d really suggest checking out Automated Cloud Site backups.

And if you are frustrated by your current webhost, I’d really suggest you try RackSpace.  They are awesome, knowledgable, and have amazing uptime.

Backup Your Rackspace Cloud Site Automatically is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme

Video- How to go from Keyword Research to More Traffic in 17 Minutes is a post from: WordPress Consulting & SEO which runs Thesis Theme with WordPress Landing Page Theme