As you know, title tags are the most important on-page factor. They are given the most weight out of anything on the page as far as the search engines are concerned. So it is a huge weakness in WordPress (and most other blog platforms for that matter) that the post title is used as the title tag, usually with some other extraneous bits added on like the name of the blog. That is far from optimal SEO! Instead, you should be able to handcraft your own title tags independently of the post title -- interject synonyms, rearrange the word order, and so forth.

My SEO Title Tag plugin, which has been out since middle of last year, allows you to do just that. But wait, there's more...!

I am happy to tell you that I, along with some of my talented programmers here at Netconcepts, have made a major update to the plugin. Indeed, we have really made some magic, as you shall soon see!

I'm pleased to announce the SEO Title Tag WordPress plugin... Version 2.0 beta!

The plugin now allows you to mass edit title tags for all posts, static pages, category pages, tag pages, tag conjunction pages, archive by month pages, indeed any URL, all in one go.

It also now has a title tag input box on the Edit and Write forms for pages and posts, so no more having to use the custom field box.

It allows you to set a title tag for your 404 error pages and for internal search results pages too.

Not only can you now view all your title tags across all of your posts/pages at once. You can also revise your titles right there within that report! This mass editing functionality is available under the Manage > Title Tags tab in the WordPress admin.

Here's what the mass editing admin looks like:

Maybe I am tooting my own horn a bit too much here, but I think this plugin is the best thing to have ever happened to WordPress -- as far as SEO is concerned! :-D

The plugin also plays nicely with the plethora of meta tag plugins out there, such as Add Meta Tags and Another WordPress Meta Plugin. You can choose to use category descriptions as title tags on category pages, or you can choose not to. The latter is the preferred option if you are using a meta tag plugin, because most of those use the category's description field for the meta description tag on the category page. Don't worry though! You can still set custom titles for your category pages -- even if you are using the description field for your meta descriptions.

The plugin is WordPress 2.1 compatible. If upgrading from the previous version of SEO Title Tag, be sure to deactivate the old version before installing the new version. When you activate the new version, it will create some new database tables.

I welcome any and all feedback to that plugin and I hope it is of value to all you bloggers using WordPress.

I'd love to hear of any success stories using this plugin and the rankings and traffic benefits that ensue. Please report back and regale me with your stories of hockey stick graphs! :-)

Now go get the plugin! Enjoy!

Inspired by yesterday's New York Times article "Some Bling for Your Blog", I put together a list of my favorite blog widgets:

• Swicki "Hot Searches" Buzzcloud (from Eurekster)
• Recent Readers (from MyBlogLog)
• Flash Photo Stream (from Flickr)
• Preview Anywhere (from Snap)
• "What Am I Doing" Twitter Badge (from Twitter)
• Film Loops (from FilmLoop)
• Number of Readers FeedCount (from Feedburner)
• "I'm online" Skype buttons (from Skype)
• del.icio.us Tagometer (from del.icio.us)
• del.icio.us Linkrolls (from del.icio.us)
• del.icio.us Network Badge (from del.icio.us)
• Timelines (from MyTimelines)
• Link Count (from Technorati)
• Polls (from PollDaddy)
• Now Playing (from SIGamp)
• BuzzBoost (from Feedburner)
• Books in my Library (from LibraryThing)

and these which are not really widgets, but plugins (for WordPress):

• Ultimate Tag Warrior (tag clouds)
• Share This (add to social bookmarking services)
• Recent Comments (recent comments in the sidebar)

Many more widgets listed in the Widgetoko and Widgetbox directories.

Just remember when "blinging" out your blog, not to overdue it. Think critically about the value to your reader of each badge / widget that you add, because it adds download time to your pages, which detracts from the user experience.

Any important blog bling that I missed?

Remember those old commercials... "This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs." ? Well, if you do, then just imagine a take-off on the commercial... "This is your website. This is your website on WordPress." But in this version, imagine the latter is an Olympic weightlifter on steroids. If I hadn't made the case enough for WordPress as a CMS for regular websites (not just blogs) in this recent post and in this recent case study, then I guess the traffic increases must not have been impressive enough for ya! ;-)

So we decided to start experimenting with WordPress on microsites for clients. The first client guinea pig was Countrywide, and the site was Credit Demystified. I don't have any Before and After stats to share on this one, because the site was launched under WordPress from the get-go. Once we have a bit of a track record going (the site is less than a month old), I'm hoping that our client will give me permission to share some metrics here. So stay tuned. And in the meantime, check out the site. Any feedback is welcomed!

Here are some of the advantages of a website powered by WordPress:

1. tag clouds -- which provide keyword-rich text link navigation, which link to...
2. tag pages -- which contain excerpts of posts/pages that are related (by the fact they have the same tag in common)
3. RSS feeds -- which help with link building and garner you visibility in the feed/blog search engines like Feedster and Google Blog Search
4. Technorati tags -- to garner visibility on Technorati's tag pages, thus delivering you Google visitors too by the fact that Technorati tag pages tend to rank really well in Google
5. keyword-rich, search-friendly URLs -- that are spider-friendly and tend to be indexed and ranked better in search engines than the complex, dynamic-looking URLs that are typical of content management systems
6. content-rich, search-friendly HTML -- thanks in part to the presentation layer (usually) being cleanly separated from the content layer, along with semantic mark-up, which gives the search engines good clues as to what copy is important and what is not
7. visitor participation -- through comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks
8. post-dating of content -- to automatically "go live" on a scheduled date
9. ease of maintenance -- with no, or minimal, HTML skills required
10. extensibility -- through plugins (it's pretty easy to write your own. Heck, I I managed to), sidebar widgets (like the Swicki buzzcloud**), and direct hacks to the open source PHP codebase.
11. easy handling of "rolling events" -- like speaking engagements, news releases etc.
12. free support -- from the very responsive developer and user communities

The first six of the above list are of primary benefit to your site's SEO.

These were compelling enough reasons that search marketer Alan Rimm-Kaufman is porting his corporate site to WordPress. Good on ya, Alan! Now who else can I count on to make the switch? :-)

So remember, you don't have to have an actual "blog" to reap the benefits of having a "blog". I recommend you peruse both Netconcepts.com or CreditDemystified.com and prove it to yourself.

** Footnote: In case you were wondering what the heck a swicki was, it is a custom search engine, like this one, and a buzzcloud is a tagcloud type thing, but of popular searches rather than tags, that displays on your site along with the Search box, like the one displayed in the right column on my daughter's Neopets Cheats site.

Truer words have never been spoken.

Wanna know how "The gizzle has changed"? Well, then, read all about it!

haha, what a crack-up!

Now if only I could talk like that without the help of a tranzliatin' machine! ;-)

Even better is my blog tranzliat'd. I actually think it's an improvement. ;-) I challenge you to read a few entries without laughing! Be sure to read my post "Whizzay you NEED ta kizzle 'bout tha DMCA".

I'd like to offer my RSS subscribers with an RSS feed that's been run through Gizoogle. I feel a WordPress plugin comin' on! In fact, I think I will write that plugin right now!! Stay tuned...

It is amazing what you can achieve in regards to SEO just by reaching into your Web 2.0 toolkit. A corporate brochure is about as Web 1.0 as you can get, yet even brochureware can be transformed in ways you may never have thought possible and boosting search visibility in the process.

To prove that point, we redesigned our Netconcepts.com site and launched it this month. It's a typical corporate website, with a portfolio, testimonials, case studies, an article library, bios of our executives, information on our services, etc. The redesigned site is now powered by WordPress, a popular blogging platform.

Because it is now qualifies as a blog, our corporate site can start to enjoy some visibility in the blog search engines and directories and, because WordPress comes with RSS feed capability built in, we can now start to enjoy some visibility in the feed search engines and directories too. We don't just have one RSS feed, by the way. We have many, grouped by topic (e.g. SEO, email marketing) and by type of resource (e.g. articles, testimonials), done through the use of tagging.

Speaking of tags, that is where the real SEO magic happens in this corporate site because every testimonial, every portfolio entry, every press mention, as well as each bio, article and case study, is broken out into a separate post. That post is tagged with appropriate keywords, for example all the testimonials are tagged with the word "Testimonials". So instead of having a single testimonials page as we used to, we have a testimonials tag page that spans three web pages (at 10 posts per page) and each of the 30 testimonials is a separate web page now too. In other words, we want from 1 page to 33 pages; that's a lot more search engine fodder, all with different keyword foci!

Spiders can find and index these tag pages through the text links contained within the tag cloud on the home page, and through text links underneath each post, and through links to "Related Tags" on each tag page. Related Tags are determined from posts that have the tag (from the tag page in question) in common. So, for example, because we have posts that are tagged with both "SEO" and "Testimonials", therefore "SEO" appears as a related tag on the Testimonials tag page and "Testimonials" appears as a related tag on the SEO tag page. We display links not just to the related tag pages, but to intersections between related tags. So, for example, you will find on our Testimonials tag page a number of Related Tags in the right hand column, all with "AND" and "OR" links adjacent to each one.

Let me restate that a little bit differently just to clairfy... All our SEO-related items (testimonials, case studies etc.) are tagged with "SEO". Consequently, there is a tag page that relates to "SEO" and a tag page that relates to "testimonials". There's even a tag page that relates to "SEO testimonials" -- the intersection of those two tags. That makes for boatloads of tag pages, considering how many different permutations there are for various combinations of tags being "ANDed" or "ORed" together.

By moving to a more modular structure (based around Posts rather than Pages) along with the large inventory of new pages, allows us to capitalize on the "Long Tail" of natural search in ways we couldn't dream of with our previous incarnation of brochureware.

Above the "Related Tags" you will see a RSS button which leads to a RSS feed specific to that tag page. We use that RSS feed to pull the latest articles, testimonials, seminars etc. and feature them as related content on the right column of our Services pages. For example, our Email Marketing page lists Related Articles on email marketing, because we've specified that the topic of the page is "email marketing" (in other words, the tag that it relates to). We use that information to grab RSS feeds of tag pages for email marketing + articles, email marketing + testimonials, etc.

Besides tagging, we have also employed many other blog SEO tactics, a number of which I detailed in my article for MarketingProfs, 10 Tips to Help Your Blog Soar in the Search Engines. This includes use of sticky posts, adding buttons to add a post to del.icio.us and various other social bookmarking services, and linking to a "Top 10" list of sorts -- namely, under "Free Stuff" on the home page, some of our best content from the past year or so.

To my knowledge this approach for search engine optimizing a corporate site has not been done before, particularly the aspect of breaking up all the discrete bits of content (each testimonial, each portfolio item, each FAQ, etc.) into individual posts and tagging all them, and then relating that tagged content with the appropriate Services pages and highlighting those as related content. If you have heard of a corporate site doing this, please let me know. I would love to check it out.

I also welcome any feedback on what we have done here on the Netconcepts site. We still have a few issues to tidy up with the site (so don't expect perfection), yet overall I am quite pleased with how it all came together.

And, last but not least, the new redesigned site, although it doesn't look markedly different from our old site, is better designed with XHTML and web standards in mind. No more tables for layout. Yay! That was long overdue. Now maybe we will see a rankings benefit in Google Accessible Search. ;-)

Well I've done something I wasn't supposed to do. I sat down and wrote a plug-in for WordPress. I've been "encouraged" by my fellow executives at Netconcepts not to do any programming. "Leave that to the programmers" they told me. "Stick to the strategic planning stuff and the article writing and the conference speaking that you do so well." Did I listen? Well, no.

Their loss (I guess I'll have to work on that strategic plan document over the weekend!) is your gain. I've created a whizz-bang little WordPress plugin that solves all your SEO problems in one fell swoop. Well maybe not all. But it does make the title tags across your WordPress site or blog a heck of a lot more search engine optimal than they are by default.

Here's why you'll want it:

• Free & open source
• Allows you to override the title tag with a custom one (defined through a custom field in a post or a page)
• Allows you to define a custom home page title
• Reverses the order of the blog name and the title, or drop the blog name altogether, or replace it with a shorter nickname
• Puts the tag in the title of (UltimateTagWarrior) tag pages
• Uses the category's description as the title on category pages
• Has an Options page in the admin to change settings

Who could say "No" to all that?!

Here's where to get it: SEO Title Tag

I'm open to suggestions for further improvements to the plugin. This is my first plugin, and this is a 1.0 release, so please be gentle!

I've posted onto BusinessBlogConsulting.com a list of my favorite WordPress plugins and what they do and why I like them. If you're blogging under the WordPress platform, you might want to trick out your blog with some of these great plugins.

The list includes: PodPress, Popularity Contest, Google Sitemaps Generator, Akismet, Adhesive, Ultimate Tag Warrior, EmailShroud, Transpose Email, WP-EMail, WP-Print, Subscribe2, In-Series, Permalink Redirect, Gravatars, Subscribe to Comments. WP-Notable, A Different Monthly Archive, Related Posts, Related Posts for your 404.

That's not quite 20, so I'll add one more to that list — a suggestion from commenter Neville Hobson (thanks, Neville!) — FeedBurner Feed Replacement, which makes it easy to "migrate" your pre-existing RSS subscribers over to Feedburner once you sign up for the service (which is excellent, btw).

Raj Setty offers some great pointers for starting a business blog in his Blogging Starter Checklist:

1. Register a domain name with your name and redirect to your blog.
2. Get a "Creative Commons License"
3. Get a feedburner account and direct feeds through feedburner
4. Implement subscription chiclets
5. Enable search
6. Claim your blog at Technorati
7. Allow users to get your blog via email
8. Link to your profile
9. Link to your photo album
10. Announce your blog to the world
11. Provide a way to contact you
12. Link to your bookmarks
13. Create meaningful categories and chunk content
14. Put your photo on the home page
15. Ensure that your RSS feeds are OK
16. Geo-tag your blog at Feedmap
17. Include a blog link in your email signature

This is a great list. Be sure to check out Raj's post for the details behind each of his 17 points.

Some things I might add:

• Add Technorati tags to your posts. It's as easy as adding some hyperlinks at the end of your post, like this:Technorati tags: Tagging, Blogging

  There are some handy plug-ins for WordPress that make this even easier, like Bunny's Technorati Tags plugin and Ben O'Neill's Technorati Tags plugin.

• Add a "tag cloud" that shows what tags and/or categories are most popular on your blog. For example, check out the tag cloud on the right hand side on O'Reilly Radar. Two different WordPress plug-ins that allow you to do this are: Ultimate Tag Warrior and the Weighted Categories plug-ins.While you're at it, also add a Swiki "buzzcloud" from Eurekster to your blog. You can see an example of a buzzcloud on the Eurekster blog on the top right undeneath "Hot Searches". It's a great way to show your readers at-a-glance what search terms in your niche topic area are the most popular.
• Have a custom favicon. This allows subscribers to your blog to see this custom icon in their newsreader. Take a look at the screenshot of part of my subscription list in the newsreader I use, NetNewsWire. Notice that the Dilbert Blog, Matt Cutts' blog, and ResearchBuzz all show the same generic favicon. Custom icons would look much cooler.
• Post a Flickr badge on your blog. Here's an example (underneath "Recent Photos" on the right). You can use the badges supplied by Flickr or some free third-party ones like this one.
• Install an industrial-strength comment spam plug-in into your blog, such as Akismet or Spam Karma.
• Give your blog a boost in link popularity. Link to it from your home page and ask customers, suppliers, business partners, and colleagues to link to it too. Review my Powerpoint on link building for many more tips on boosting link popularity.