aaron dalrymple dot com

Here is a free white paper released by Blizzard Internet Marketing and written by my Pubcon friends Mary Bowling and Carrie Hill.  If you’re blogging - or getting ready to start - this white paper is an easy to follow guide on setting up your blog with Wordpress and tweaking it in order to maximize your search engine exposure and reap the rewards of a well optimized blog.  There is also a great list of plugins that help you get the most out of your blog.  In fact, after reading the white paper I setup the contextual related posts plugin, which you will now see under the comment section of my posts.

And, if you’re planning to attend Search Engine Strategies in New York next month, be sure to stop in on the workshop that Mary will be teaching, A Crash Course in Local Search, on Friday the 22nd.

Thanks, Mary!

New White Paper Released- SEO for Wordpress Blogs

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Tagged as: SEO, Search Engine Strategies, WebMasterWorld, Optimization Tips, Blogging, Mary Bowling, Carrie Hill, SEO for Wordpress, Blogs, SES, White Paper

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Today a guest post from SEO Mary Bowling, who I had the pleasure of meeting at PubCon last month:

I’ve attended 3 unique internet marketing conferences this year, each hosted by a different big-name producer. Each had their own strong and weak points and none of them were ideal. So, I started thinking about all the best things that would go into planning the absolutely perfect conference.

Here are the ingredients I crave:

Registration

• A really enticing preregistration discount. Give me some ammo to take to the controller to get her to shake the money loose to pay for this.
• Quick and easy registration. Maybe even online.? Self service kiosks where you can print your own pass?

Venue

• The venue’s in a big hotel or directly adjacent to one. It is so much more relaxing to be able to go to your room if you need to during the day than it is to have to commute to the conference area and make your headquarters there.
• Free wireless in the hotel rooms. Come on, the internet is a required utility for the set of people who go to an INTERNET marketing conference. You don’t charge them extra for water or electricity. Why make them pay $10-15 a day for internet access? And no, if we’re going to get any work done at all during the conference, please don’t expect us to conduct it in noisy and distracting common areas, so free internet in the lobby doesn’t count. If you can’t negotiate free internet, then at least get the hotel to include it in the room price. Then, we’ll never have to know.
• Free wireless internet access in the conference area and adequate bandwidth to accommodate all the laptops in the audience. A lot of the people typing away are blogging about what’s going on at the conference. Do you want them complaining about inadequate internet service?

Amenities

• Power to the people! Electrical outlets would be everywhere so that we could stay fully charged throughout the day and into the evening sessions and events.
• Good food. You will be judged by the food you serve and the way it is served. A cold box lunch from a long table? or a long buffet of catered food we’ll all be blogging about?
• Comfortable chairs. We can sit on hard plastic chairs all day, including at lunch, but we won’t be comfortable. Can we have a bit of padding, please?
• Tables, as well as chairs in every session room. They call them laptops, that’s not really the preferred way to use them.

Sessions

• Good acoustics and audio equipment. We want to hear what everyone says in every session. That’s what you’re selling and that’s what we’re here for.
• Prepared presentations. No matter how celebrated a speaker may be, it ‘s disrespectful of the audience if they do not make any effort to prepare for their conference role.
• Coordinated sessions. It’s a total waste of time when more than one speaker in a session gives us the same information. The moderator should review and coordinate the presentations to insure against the dreaded duplicate content.
• No pitches. Nothing ruins a session faster than a speaker trying to sell the audience on their product or service.

Networking

• Networking opportunities. Give us plenty of meals together, parties, evening sessions, exhibit hall time and creative events, like charity poker tourneys and roll-playing extravaganzas. Who we hook up with is often as important as what we learn.
• Friendly, accessible speakers. It is so cool to have breakfast with an SEO hero or two. Meeting and speaking with the speakers is a highlight of any conference.

Here are a few niceties I’ll throw in, too: dimmable overhead lighting in the session rooms; comfortable temperature; snacks and drinks available throughout the day and at least a 10-15 minute break between sessions.

Mary Bowling is the senior SEO for Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc and blogs about optimization.

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Tagged as: Online Marketing, Search Engine Strategies, WebMasterWorld, Blogging, Other, Mary Bowling, Blizzard Internet Marketing, PubCon, Search Engine Conference, Internet Marketing, Internet Marketing Conference

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Nothing too earth shattering here.  But, Stephan Spencer has posted some tidbits from Matt Cutts’ talk at WordCamp 2007.  Most aren’t specific to just bloggers and offer more insight into ranking well (or ranking poorly) with Google.  Matt never gives up the real juicy stuff, so I assume this is just an opiate for the SEO masses more than anything else…

Here are a few of the general SEO items that Spencer notes:

• Underscores in URLs are now seen as word separators, just as hyphens have always been.
• Keep query parameters in the URLs to no more than 2 or 3 and Google will treat your URL the same as a static one.
• Directory depth of your pages does not matter to Google.
• Page file extensions don’t affect your rankings.  Do avoid using .EXE, however.

To read Spencer’s entire piece:

Underscores are now word separators, proclaims Google | Tech news blog - CNET News.com

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Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, SEO, Online Marketing, Optimization Tips, Blogging, matt cutts, stephan spencer, cnet, underscore, optimization, search engine optimization

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On Friday I upgraded this blog to the latest version of WordPress (2.0.4); hopefully I didn’t screw anything up too bad.  In the process I found that Yahoo still had a bunch of pages from my old blog indexed in its search engine.  I had imported all of those posts to this blog, so they weren’t really doing much good out there.

So, I decided to use a mod_rewrite 301 to redirect traffic from the old blog to the new.  I didn’t do it on a page-by-page basis since I wasn’t really getting any human traffic to the old blog, the new pages are already indexed, and I didn’t really feel like it was worth putting the time into redirecting each of the permalinks.

So, I decided just to 301 redirect every page at the old blog to the home page of the new.  That way the search engines will drop the old pages and any real visitors will find the new site.

I opened up my .htaccess file in the directory where my old blog resides and added the following code to it:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^blog(.*)$ http://www.aarondalrymple.com [L,R=301]

“blog” refers to the old directory name where the old blog lived.  So, all traffic to that directory now forwards to www.aarondalrymple.com.  To see it in action, go here: http://www.aarondassociates.com/blog/.

I should note that if your site is on a Windows server, there is a different process for this, which you should be able to find by digging around this post on redirects.

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Tagged as: Search Engines, Yahoo, SEO, Blogging, Other, 301 redirect, redirects, WordPress, mod rewrite, htaccess

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I’m often asked, “how do you keep up with search engine marketing?” “Isn’t it always changing, how do you know what to do?”

There’s so much free search engine marketing info, both natural and paid, on the web via newsletters, blogs, etc. that I usually don’t find it necessary to pay for informational products related to SEO.

Tools are another matter; for instance, Word Tracker is well worth the $254 yearly fee. However, for most industry information, I’ve found that reading newsletters, blogs, and occasionally browsing the forums keeps me in tune with what’s current in the industry.

If search is not the main focus of your job though, keeping up can may be a daunting task. If that’s you, here is a short blogroll (list) of the search and/or marketing blogs that I currently follow:

Bloglines Blogroll

There are thousands more, but this selection has a good mix of authoritative voices as well as others who closely follow the industry and post on what’s being discussed. If you would like the OPML file for these feeds so that you can track them yourself or add them to your feed reader, you can find it here: www.bloglines.com/public/aarondalrymple - choose the “Export Subscriptions” link on the bottom of the left hand column to add it to your own RSS reader.If you feel the need to pay for a subscription, you should check out Planet Ocean’s Search Engine News, it may be the closest to a “one-stop” resource available:
www.searchenginenews.com

In the past week I’ve also run across two fantastic, free, in-depth guides on search marketing. One focuses on natural search and one on paid search marketing.

Essential Guide to Search Engine Marketing - DM News

Defining Search Engine Relevancy - SEO Book.com

As far as forums, there are two that I actively troll. I’m not a big poster to the forums, I did for a while but it takes too much valuable time and sucks me into too many of the debates/arguments that seem to dominate the boards at times. If you need some info you can’t find anywhere else, though, you can usually find an answer in the forums. Just make sure you use the forums search function first and only post a new thread if you can’t find it already discussed. If not you will be nailed by the forum junkies that insist on taking time to tell you that you’re wasting their time by posting a question that has already been answered.

Here are the two I watch:

webmasterworld

searchenginewatch

Have a great 4th of July!

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Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, Yahoo, SEM, SEO, Online Marketing, MSN, WebMasterWorld, Optimization Tips, SEO Tools, Blogging, search engine marketing, Search Engine Blogs, Search Engine Guides, SEOBook, DMNews, Search Engine Watch

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Well - that may be a bit of a stretch. But, while playing with the new Google Blog Search tool today, I did discover something interesting about Jeremy’s blog platform and Google’s new Blog Search tool. Jeremy is a long time blogger and Yahoo employee who I’ve seen several times at conferences on panels about blogging and search. In fact, he was part of one of my favorite sessions at this year’s PubCon in Boston.

Anyhow, it appears that Google Blog Search is some how exposing the email addresses of the people leaving comments on his blog posts. I’m not sure how or why, but I know that Jeremy isn’t letting it happen intentionally, it must be from the feed that Google is using?? Jeremy states on his site: I do not share or publish the email addresses or IP addresses of anyone posting a comment here without consent.

Here is the post I just left for him with the details:

Jeremy - Hope you’re having a great vacation. I was trying out the new Google Blog Search and discovered something scary about your blog and Google’s new search tool… It’s exposing the email addresses of your commenters. I did a search for my name and came up with a comment that I had left in one of your posts. Even though my email isn’t exposed on your site as intended, it’s showing up in the Google Blog Search result.

So I tested plugging in a few random strings from comments on your site on various posts and sure enough, I can see the email address of any comment poster on your site, if that comment has been indexed… I assume it has something to do with your feed?? Not sure if it’s just your blog or a certain platform…

Here is an actual screen shot:

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Tagged as: Google, Search Engines, Blogging, Jeremy Zawodny, Google Blog Search

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Lee Odden has posted an interview with Eric T. Peterson, Vice President with the Visual Sciences division of WebSideStory.  WebSideStory is a web analytics firm based in San Diego and is the company behind the HitBox stats product as well as HBX Analytics, search and bid management tools, consulting services and more.  Peterson is also the author of several books on web measurement and analytics.  It’s a great post from one of the best general SEO/Online Marketing Blogs out there.

Lee is, like me, based in Minneapolis - although he’s been here a lot longer than I have.  I’ve followed his blog for a year or so and finally got the chance to meet him at Pubcon in Boston this year.

Peterson is speaking tonight in Minneapolis, which I am going to try to make if I can shift around some other plans, and it should give some good insight into web analytics, which most of us do need.  I find that many companies I work with study, view and process web analytics - and LOVE to use them in presentations - but few know how to make that extra step of applying that knowledge to site usability and making the customer experience better and more profitable.

Read Lee’s piece here:
Web Analytics Demystified - Interview with Eric T. Peterson » Online Marketing Blog

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Tagged as: Online Marketing, Blogging, Analytics, web analytics, WebSideStory, Lee Odden, Eric Peterson

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I attended the Webmaster World conference last week in Boston. By far it was the best search conference I’ve been to. Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point, Blink, the New Yorker) gave the keynote and was great. I really enjoyed the focus on the social aspects of search, communication and the web; which was kicked off with Gladwell’s keynote and seemed to carry throughout the sessions. I think it’s a nice compliment to the more technical side of this business and gives the technology a context to exist within. I also thought that there were some fresh faces on the panels this time, which was great.

I also enjoyed the blogging session, which included Matt Cutts, Robert Scoble and Jeremy Zawodny. All of these guys have great blogs and it inspired me to re-tool my blog a bit as well. You’ll notice a new look, new subjects and that I’m now using Word Press instead of Blogger.

I had a heck of a time getting home to Minneapolis from Boston though. I had booked a ticket on AirTran because I could get a business class ticket for the same price as coach on Northwest (which I avoid at all costs). I made it to Boston with no problems; I had a quick stop at Midway in Chicago.

Coming home, however, I was connected through Atlanta (I wasn’t paying attention when I booked). Atlanta was having “weather delays” and the plane from Boston to Atlanta was scheduled to leave 2.5 hours late, which would mean that I would miss my connection and be stuck in Atlanta overnight. The AirTran desk was EXTREMELY unfriendly as well, which didn’t help… Then it hit me, I bought a refundable ticket in business class! I can cancel and try to find another flight home.

I visited the Northwest counter and was quoted almost $700 for a one-way back to Mpls. Well, my refund was worth almost $400, if I stayed in Boston another night it would probably be a wash. Then I had my second epiphany! I was the holder of a shiny new Visa Signature card with its own travel concierge service, of which my wife and I were just joking that nobody ever actually uses. I called them up on my new Blackberry 8700g and was able to book a flight home on United for $40 less than my AirTran refund and got home 1.5 hours earlier than originally scheduled!

Wow, I used up some good karma on that trip. I was glad to make it home. Since the conference I’ve started reading Gladwell’s Blink. I read The Tipping Point a couple of years ago as well. I tend to read them from a more sociological point-of-view than with a business perspective (I’m not sure why or if it’s any different than most??). I know both books have great business applications too though. I will write up a review on Blink as soon as I am finished. I also plan to post some notes/tips from Pubcom in the coming days.

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Tagged as: Search Engines, WebMasterWorld, Blogging, Pubcon Boston, Malcolm Gladwell, AirTran, Northwest, Matt Cutts, Robert Scoble, Jeremy Zawodny, blog

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