Optimize your title tags!

This was probably the most eye-opening thing I learned here about my blog. I’ve always auto-generated the <title> tag based on the actual title I put in my post. I’ve done it before in Content Management Systems and WP does this too.

Stephan said that re-using the post title for your <title> tag is a bad practice because people don’t often search for it the way you wrote it. You can be as witty and cute and lyrical in your post title as you want, for the article’s sake, but make damn sure your title tag doesn’t read that way! The title tag should be wordy, keyword rich and full of information.

For example, the title of this post is “My WordCamp Notes: SEO for blogs”, but if you look at the title bar at the top of the browser my actual <title> tag is “Easy SEO tips and tricks for bloggers, a presentation by Stephan Spencer at WordCamp 2008″. Way more search friendly.

• Decouple the post name from the title page
• The first words in the title tag get the most rank
• Hand craft the title tag
• Do keyword research on plural vs signal
• For WP, install the SEO Title Tag plugin – mass edit titles and add Custom titles for each
• Use related post links at the end of the post
• B2B Lead Generation Blog

Sculpt your PageRank.

You only have so much PageRank “flow of link gain” on your page and you want to make sure you don’t spread it around needlessly. Reserve true links for the important information. On all the rest add rel=”nofollow” to the link to tell Google it’s not as important as the other content on your site:

• Use it on all print and email links.
• Use it on links, trackbacks and comments that you don’t want to give “flow” back to if you don’t want your precious PageRank to pass from your page to this link.
• Use it where the link would be reciprocal.
• Use rel=”nofollow” on any internal links to date-based pages. No one searches in google for “what christen said on June 6th, 2008!”

Minimize Duplicate Content

• Craft optional excerpts on everything but the permalink page itself.
• For each post, write unique content (ie paraphrase) for the excerpt – don’t just use the first couple paragraphs!!! Don’t use the “read more” insert for WP, this creates DUPLICATE content!
• Meta robots noindex & rel-nofollow are your friends – printer friendly
• Make sure that each tag or category page (that pulls aggregate posts) has it’s own “sticky” post that resides at the top and explains the tag or category.  This unique chunk of text will allow this page to be indexed.

Optimize your Anchor Text

• Post title should be always be a link to the permalink page.
• Never link with the word “here”. Link text should equal the <title> tag of the post you’re linking to which is important for context.

BuddyPress is an extension to WordPress which will allow WP to be a full fledged social network. This means, that you can use it to make your own “Facebook” of sorts.  It’s currently under development but it is very close (they are predicting December).

BuddyPress is well thought out.  It lets you (as the administrator) customize different parts of the installation to suit your needs. For example, if you are making a network for dog lovers, you can add your own fields to each user’s profile like (I have __ dogs.  Favourite dogpark: ___.  etc)  It also lets you have private messaging between members, friending and photo albums.

It’s pretty crazy that this is free and open source.  WP is getting more and more impressive.

Download the presentation slides for LOLcats and the Secret of Virality

Facebook is viral, but is it spam?

Why Facebook is spamming (you know all those emails you get from your friends telling you to sign up for the next latest app?)

• You can ONLY use these apps, if you invite a ton of people, then some will sign up and then you can use it
• They make you spam?
• It’s a serial process, you can’t just send to 1 person, your chances suck.
• So Facebook is addicted to invite based virality
• It gets in your system you send them, everyone clicks it, but then you get to the service and you realize it sucks.  Don’t be a dick.  It can only piss off your user.
• The Invite-Virality is not what you want. You want the slooower process that is sustainable and you wind up with users that LIKE YOU.

Invite-based pros and cons

Pros

• fast
• fast
• fast

Cons

• You are a virus – you just generated a negative experience for 99% of the people that add you
• churn and burn

Why are you on this site?

• I was suckered by an email
• OR I like this site enough to return to it
• “Too many people are flagging our emails as SPAM”. Uhh it is spam.

Sustainable and slow pros and cons

Pros

• Trust and goodwill
• Real traffic
• You’re not a digg
• Realistic return on value

Cons

• Slow.Er.
• Requires a quality product
• May not be possible

SPAM invites are the equivalent of telemarketing

Viral Coefficient can be changed so that teh # of invites occurs of the LIFETIME of the USER. Build reasons to invite.  Lolcats makes their photos available for use on their blogs. They don’t make them spam it.

Reasons for Inviting

• Create content
• Preferencing
• Personal Messages
• Comments – people want to be appreciated for their feedback.
• Feedback and Replies
• (Find reasons for your site)

Tracking Conversations

• Track a group of people (a cohort) that go through a particular process.  So maybe give cohort A one message and Cohort B another message. You measure the end result of each.
• Andrew Chen – runs a blog on virality
• The Loop.  Like ShareThis but from a marketing perspective, much prefer to have links. On engrishfunny.com they focused on just 6 big sharing buttons.  (They may change myspace to twitter eventually, but the key is to react to the conversation and the tools that are popular right now on the internet.)
• Friendfeed or microblogging has a real impact on how quickly your content gets out there.  Twitter lets you communicate with a very specific audience, so the conversion rates from Twitter are much higher.
• Detecting virals: WP Metrics – pageviews.  Put that page in analytics and reverse the curve. You can track over time. You will not get a single referrer if it’s viral. The true viral ones have no referrer because they were actually emailed from a friend.

Achieving viral virility means not being a dick.

How do you determine the stickies – the users that stick around with your site

They divide into Consumers and Contributors.  Have a genuine dialogue with the people who buy your product. Get them to tell you about reviews they’ve written, posts they’ve made about you etc. If you communicate with them and ask them how they feel, they will blog about it and give you more positive feedback.