Recently, WordPress.com launched two brand new mobile viewing options that automatically display when a blog is accessed using a mobile device. For iPhone, Android, and other similar mobile devices, a modified version of WPtouch will be displayed. For older, less capable mobile devices, a very stripped-down text only version is shown. These options can be turned off by the user, but remain active by default.
Automattic volunteered some astounding statistics, revealing that thousands of people have been using iPhone and Blackberry applications to publish and moderate content on WordPress.com. Secondly, it was said that WordPress.com, as a whole, receives over 60 million page views a month on mobile devices. There’s no doubt that Automattic has an interest of being the hero in your pocket. There is a much different story with the millions of self-hosted WordPress users. As it stands, if you’re running a self-hosted WordPress blog, making it mobile friendly doesn’t come quite as easy. And also, it’s not done automatically as it is for WordPress.com users.
But that’s ok! Fortunately for self-hosted WordPress users, making your WordPress blog mobile friendly isn’t too difficult at all. Here are a few options available to you that will help you get started on the right foot.
With 300,000 downloads, WPtouch has become one of the most popular and widely accepted WordPress mobile plugins available. WPtouch gives you the ability to convert your blog and optimize for iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, and BlackBerry users. It was modeled after Apple’s app store design specs, and is geared towards helping you make your blog load fast, and to make your content display beautifully for viewers using modern mobile devices.
WordPress Mobile Edition is a plugin, with over 100,000 downloads, that shows an interface designed for a mobile device when visitors come to your site on a mobile device. Mobile browsers are automatically detected, the list of mobile browsers can be customized on the settings page. One of the more appealing features of WordPress Mobile Edition is that it serves a mobile interface to Google and Yahoo mobile search crawlers. You can also add any others by adding their user agents in the plugin’s Settings page. All in all, WordPress Mobile is a mobile/phone/PDA friendly interface for your blog with progressive enhancement for advanced mobile browsers.
MobilePress is a WordPress plugin that has been downloaded 40,000 times and will render your WordPress blog on mobile handsets. It also offers owners the ability to use customized themes, in addition to allowing specific themes for specific devices, such as iPhone, Opera Mini, Windows CE Mobile and other mobile browsers.
MobilePress also allows WordPress theme developers to create custom mobile themes for WordPress blogs using the MobilePress plugin. Theme designers can also then create specific iPhone themes or generic themes. The plugin also comes with mobile SEO features which automatically detect Google and Yahoo mobile search bots. These mobile search bots will see the mobile version of you blog which allows your blog to optimized and indexed on Google and Yahoo mobile search.
In my opinion, I like WPTouch the best. However, the other two plugins offer some SEO features that shouldn’t be ignored. Google Webmaster Central Blog just released some tips on how to help Google index your mobile site more easily. If you discover that your blog isn’t index in Google Mobile, you might want to spend some time correcting that. And using one of the two latter plugins may help.
I am real excited about sharing this tip with you, because figuring this out, for me, was a huge. Recently Google updated Google SideWiki to include the option of sending comments to your Blogger blog. However, at this time, there is no option of sending comments to any other blog platform, more commonly, self-hosted WordPress.
While I was excited to discover that Google included an option of porting comments to Blogger, for me, it simply wasn’t enough. The comment I create in Google SideWiki are ones that I’d like to share with readers on my dot Com blog, rather than my personal Blogger blog. At any rate, here’s the steps on how you can send your GoogleWiki comments to your WordPress blog.
Visit Blogger.com and create a new blog. Name the blog whatever you want, but I would name: Your Name SideWiki Comments. And give it a permalink structure the same: yournamesidewiki.
On the “Choose Your Template” page, scroll down to the very bottom and choose “Simple II” Created by: Jason Sutter. The reason why you you’re choosing this template is not for looks, it’s because there is no sidebar. I’ll explain in more detail in the next few steps.
Create and publish a test post. Don’t worry about what to say, just say anything and speed through this process. The reason why you need to quickly create and publish a post is so that you can have an active entry in your RSS feed, which you will be using in the next steps.
Next, click on Settings and then Formatting. You’ll want to change the Show post on main page count from 7 to ZERO! The reason why you want to set this to ZERO is because you don’t want the content to appear on this blog. In fact, you don’t want ANYTHING to appear on this blog, thus the reason for choosing the theme without the sidebar. I’ll explain more in the next few steps. Don’t forget to scroll down and save your modified settings.
Next, click on Layout and proceed to REMOVE all of the Gadgets in your template. As mentioned in the previous step, you do NOT want anything to appear on your blog, and for sure, you do NOT want your Google SideWiki comments to appear live on the blog.
The only gadget remaining is the Blog Posts gadget because this can’t be removed. However, it doesn’t matter, because previously, showing ZERO posts was set. View your blog live to verify that your published test post is not displaying. Click the RSS icon and copy your RSS Feed URL to clipboard and save it for the next upcoming steps.
Next, login to your self-hosted WordPress blog. Navigate to the Plugins / Add New section and search for wp-o-matic. Install and activate it.
Copy the cron instructions and from cPanel, open your Cron manager, click advanced, and paste the cron string in. Add a campaign and in the Basic tab, title it: Your Name SideWiki Comments. In the Feeds tab, PASTE your Blogger ATOM RSS feed. In the Categories tab, I suggest creating a category called, SideWiki Comments. This will identify to your readers that articles published in this category are your Sidewiki comments.
Nothing needs to be done in the Rewrite tab, you can skip that. From the Options section, adjust the frequency to a time which fits your post frequency. If you know that you’re going to be creating a new SideWiki comment every four hours, then you might want to set the frequency to match that. You don’t need to Cache Images because there won’t be any.
I would suggest CHECKING the Use feed date option. You can leave Perform pingbacks UNCHECKED. You’ll want to leave the Type of post to create set to Published, unless you want to manually go back to your post editor and publish them. The Max items to create on each fetch, I have changed to 0 for unlimited. I would leave the Post title links to source? UNCHECKED and keep the Discussion options setting OPEN and CHECK Allow pings. At this point, you’re done. Click submit.
At this point, you’re going to want to FETCH the RSS data. When this happens, your data will automatically be published into your self-hosted WordPress blog.
Final product is a beautiful article that you retain complete credit, copyrights, as well as what I call, “indexable ownership.” Using Google SideWiki is a great way to express your views and opinions about web pages you visit. However, I believe that writers should retain ownership of their content contributions.
I can’t say that Google quickly recognized that, but I can say that it’s great that they opened up the feature to port SideWiki comments to Blogger. However, I also feel that it’s important to allow users the option to port the comments to other platforms as well. I also feel that my contributions on places such as in Google SideWiki can earn revenue.
I am a professional blogger and it’s important that I have methods for earning revenue on the content I publish on the web. By porting Google SideWiki comments to a self-hosted WordPress blog, the author has full control over displaying contextual based ads. On average, I earn $20 to $25 on each article I publish per year and annual revenue double each year.
Back in May of 2009, Google launched Search Options, which is the side panel that lets you apply filters and view search results in different ways. This might not seem like a big deal to a lot of people, but Google actually put in quite a few long years into the development of this technology. The concept surfaced in 2001 and was later unveiled in May of 2007 as universal search. Fast forward two years, and today we have very enhanced and beefed up search options available at only a few mouse clicks away.
So you may be wondering what can you do with the new search options. The simple answer: a lot! The better question to ask would be what can’t you do with the new search options. The more important question to ask yourself – assuming you’re a site owner interested in increasing organic search traffic – is how can I enhance my SEO to capitalize on these new features. Let’s look at a few of the new features and then I’ll offer some suggestions on how to take advantage of them.
The search options available are as follows: All results, videos, news, blogs, books, forums, reviews.
Additionally, you can add these filters to the first six: Any time, recent results, past hour, past 24 hours, past week, past year, specific date range.
On top of that, you can then filter your view: Standard view, related searches, wonder wheel, and timeline.
The last filter allows you to change your view even further: Standard results, images from the page, fewer shopping sites, more shopping sites, and more text.
So now that we’ve broken down the search options and defined each filter, let’s talk about some SEO tips. Here are a few things that you can do to make the most of the new search options in Google.
Videos: Creating and uploading a videos in YouTube and embedding them in your web pages will increase your chances of pulling up in the video results.
On video sites, such as YouTube, be sure to put the URL of your web page into the description. People as well as spiders will be able to travel from the YouTube video page to your web page. Both activities influence your web pages rankings.
Blogs: Creating and maintaining a blog, and publishing unique and high quality content related to your brand, business, products, and services can help you increase your chances gaining top ranks when users filter and show blog results only.
Don’t discount the possibility of running multiple blogs. The cost and time invested into maintaining blogs is much less than most people believe. Also, I recommend running blogs using multiple platforms. For example, you should have a blog on self-hosted WordPress, WordPress.com, Blogger.com, and LiveJournal. Lastly, I suggest that each blog appear independent and seperate from the others.
The most successful blogs are blogs that grow off the reader’s activity and contributions. Try to write content in a way that captures attention and makes readers feel compelled to take an action. The desireable actions you seek are backlinks, comments, and social network sharing. These are all activities that influence how well your blog post ranks for keyword phrases in search. Also, content can be carefully shaped and molded in a way to attract the attention of people as well as search engines. And that leads to my next tip.
Reviews: Adjusting your writing style can influence your chances of ranking in the reviews only section. Google looks for common writen trends that typically reflect written reviews, such as product reviews. Spend some time studying the content on some of the pages found in the search results and adapt some of their style into yours.
Index Frequency: You should constantly monitor how quickly new content gets indexed from your site. If content gets indexed within a few minutes of publishing, then you should take advantage of that and publish more content. I recommend publishing new content immediately after the most recent content has been indexed. In other words, everytime web crawlers come back to your site, you should have new content ready to be crawled for indexing. Doing so will increase your chances of pulling up in after the past hour, past 24 hours, and past week filter has been applied.
Another obvious reason why I recommend posting new content as frequently as possible is because doing so places your mark in hundreds and in many cases thousands of search result pages. A great pioneer in this strategy is Chris Pirillo. He has multiple blogs, forums, and sites, each being updated almost hourly. Secondly, these updates aren’t done just by hired or team writers. Most of the updates are user generated content. Chris Pirillo’s earns revenue by displaying contextual advertisements off the content created by community members within his network.
Adjusting how you do things and puting yourself more in-line, and in the same direction as Google, can make a significant difference in the amount of organic search traffic your site receives. Just being aware and perceptive of how Google presents information to users via their search results alone can help a lot. And with these new search options available, instantly there is a new resource of traffic that you can be tapping into.
You may be wondering how to syndicate content on your website. Part of having a really cool website is producing useful information for your viewers. I am sure that you’ve heard the saying, “Content is King” and to be honest, I believe that. I believe that in order for a site to stand above the crowd and win against rival competitors, it needs to have a lot of content on it and things users can do. (more…)
Only time will tell whether Bing becomes a major competitor to Google. However, for the time being, thanks to their massive $80-$100 million advertising campaign, there is no denying that for the time being, people are using Bing.
Towards the end of last month, Garry wrote a post that included a link to a blog that is dedicated to sharing information about Bing. While this blog includes some valuable advice about SEO for Bing, I always think that its quite useful to gather information from multiple sources, which is why I want to share this post with you.
The comment was left by Rodney Mason, who is the CMO of Moosylvania (a company that specializes in branding, design, promotions and marketing). Rodney also appears to be an active user of Twitter.
Although I could summarize the thirteen points he made in his comment for you, they were so detailed for a single blog comment that I think it is well worth republishing all thirteen points in their entirety:
Some thoughts for optimizing Bing;
1) Focus on categories presented for your most key search terms. Use Bing’s categories in your key words and in your site navigation.
2) Domain Age is very important. Building micro-sites off your main site vs. independent new sites is key for Bing. Additional findings for Bing thus far.
3) Text Rules
Bing favors pages with at least 300 words of text.
4) Linking Out
Bing favors linking out more than other engines as long as the links are relevant to the overall context of the site and keywords.
