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

From: Aaron Dalrymple & Associates, LLC

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.

From: Aaron Dalrymple & Associates, LLC

I realized after yesterday’s post about hotels in Las Vegas for Pubcon, I may have left out some who haven’t yet experienced a WebmasterWorld event. Here is a press release about the upcoming event in Las Vegas (Registration is now open):

WebmasterWorld’s PubCon Returns to Las Vegas with Craig Newmark of craigslist as a Keynote Speaker

From: Aaron Dalrymple & Associates, LLC

According to Brett’s blog at www.PubCon.com, the Wynn Las Vegas block of rooms for the upcoming PubCon Vegas 2007 (December 4-7) is sold out.

Although I would love to stay at the Wynn, I wasn’t able to get one of the blocked rooms. A buddy of mine has a hotel site that I was able to book a room at the Las Vegas Hilton for about $100/night though, which is really close to the convention center and a heck of a deal! He told me that if I can get another 10 bookings through the blog he would give me $50 – so here I am… plugging his site:

Hotels Near the Las Vegas Convention Center – site of PubCon 2007

Let me know if you book through this link and I’ll gladly buy you a beer at the conference – until my $50 is gone anyhow (-;

From: Aaron Dalrymple & Associates, LLC

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!

From: Aaron Dalrymple & Associates, LLC

I’ve been traveling again this week, so I’m still going through my notes from Pubcon in Boston earlier this month and trying to interpret them before I can’t decipher my own writing anymore. The last session was the Super Session: Search Engines and Webmasters which included Tim Mayer from Yahoo, Matt Cutts from Google and Rahul Lahiri from Ask. They also had a previously unannounced MSN rep that I don’t have the name written down for… Anyone? Anyhow, here are some of notes from that session. Mostly sound bites identified by which engine they refer to:

ask: Provide HTTP last modified header for your pages. Freshness Counts

ask: Don’t require cookies!

ggl: Use Sitemaps as a webmaster tool

ggl: Big Daddy update included an infrastructure upgrade to crawling and indexing. Different Google services are sharing a crawl cache to save bandwidth.

ggl: Using Adsense will make no difference in your natural rankings.

y!: Use distinct meta data for each page and change your meta data when you change your page content.

y!: only use separate domains for distinctly different businesses.

y!: when using Yahoo’s Site Explorer, the inlinks are roughly ordered by Yahoo’s popularity rank.

ggl: use dashes instead of underscores in file names, directories, etc. Dashes separate the words while underscores run them together in the engine’s view.

From: Aaron Dalrymple & Associates, LLC

At WebmasterWorld Pubcon in Boston this year I decided to mix it up a little and attended more of the affiliate marketing and advertising sessions instead of the pure SEO track that I’ve stuck to in the past. I did this because of the direction my own career path seems to be taking, as well as the fact that I wanted to see some new faces and experience another side of these search conferences. I learned some new things about affiliate marketing and picked up a number of tips and suggestions that can be applied to affiliate sites, corporate sites, PPC landing pages and more. Here are 10 of those that stood out when going through my notes. I’ve also included the name of the presenter if I had it in my notes…

1. Write landing pages to your best prospect. Don’t try to be everything to everybody; you’ll abandon your best prospects. Write to the top of the curve and you’ll capture the largest qualified audience. – Ted Ulle
2. Write about the reader, not the product. To do this you must also know your target audience. Make sure you do. – Ted Ulle
3. When exploring new affiliate opportunities, look for emerging markets. Pay close attention to tech research, demographic studies and market evolution. – Jeff Liebert
4. When buying keywords (PPC), target your keywords to customers who are actively looking to buy. Do this with words like “buy” or “send.” Target for seasonal trends (holidays, tax season, etc.) – when people need to buy – or specific model numbers or price points. – Adam Jewell
5. Maximize any coupons, discounts, etc. that you can pass to your users from your merchant. – Adam Jewell
6. Informational, comparison and product review sites are hot and a great opportunity for affiliates. It’s a lot of work though, the site has to be valuable are REAL!
7. Understand your customer’s lifetime value and look for opportunities with cross and up-selling possibilities. ? Ziv Dascalu
8. Always talk to the merchant’s affiliate manager directly and close special deals. Look for something more than the standard deal. ? Ziv Dascalu
9. Look for unique ways to promote expensive products with very specific keywords. Big commissions coupled with low cost PPC is a winning strategy. – Adam Jewell
10. Use emotions to appeal to your target customer. Tie those emotions directly to your product. This can be done with images and words that paint a picture for the reader.

From: Aaron Dalrymple & Associates, LLC

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.

From: Aaron Dalrymple & Associates, LLC

Here is a shot from last weeks WebmasterWorld Search Conference in New Orleans. I hope to compile my notes from the conference into some useful posts in the next week or so. It was a great conference. The Super Session – Search Engines and WebmastersSession featured these four guys from the top 4 engines (from left to right): Matt Cutts of Google, Tim Mayer of Yahoo!, Eytan Seidman of MSN, and Rahul Lahiri of Ask Jeeves. Conference Coordinator Brett Tabke is at the podium with Seidman. Click on the photo for a full size view.

From: Aaron Dalrymple & Associates, LLC