For me, I’ve simplified the process by having a category in my feed reader reserved only for  people I have a relationship with.

When I tackle my feedreader (feedly) I  start with my “relationship” category and  try to comment on at least one of the blogs there before I continue to surf the information fire hose.

Do you have any other strategies or tips for how to get more involved on other blogs?

Organic Traffic: Web traffic which comes from unpaid listing at search engines or directories is commonly known as “organic” traffic.

When I started, only 4% of my web traffic was organic and now it’s up to 45%.  People are actually finding my content in searches. Yay!

Considering how little work I’ve actually done to see these initial results, it’s pretty exciting.

I’d like to share the 4 WordPress plugins that I rely on to make this possible.

1. SEO Title Tag *UPDATE: Not compatible with WP 2.7*

Use the SEO Title Tag plugin to hand craft titles for blog posts that appear in the <title> of your page.  If you read the post Easy SEO ips and tricks for blogger from Stephan Spencer at WordCamp 2008 it explains how absolutely invaluable this is.

2. All in One SEO Pack

I use the All-in-One SEO Pack to make sure my category, tag and author pages have great SEO titles and meta data.  Changing WP themes can change the way your titles are shown in the code, so using this plugin is a great way  to keep titles consistent regardless of themes.  Use it to add unique meta data (keywords, description) to EACH blog post. This also makes your search listings come up with a great recap underneath them.

** Note: I don’t use this plugin to format my title tags because I like to handcraft each post’s title using the SEO Title tag plugin above, but this is not yet compatible with WP 2.7 so this is a great alternative!

3. Google Analyticator

Google Analyticator makes it insanely easy to add your Analytics tracking code and not have to worry about hand coding it into whichever WP theme you are currently using.

4. Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator for WordPress

Google Sitemaps Generator creates XML sitemaps from your site structure. You can customize how the priority of pages occur (for example, give higher priority to the most commented posts).  I just used this with its default settings right out of the box.  Make sure to evaluate your sitemaps at Google Webmaster Tools.  It also submits your changes to yahoo, msn and ask.com.

Face-to-face service can make all the difference in how your brand is perceived by your customer. You might have the greatest offering in the world, but one bad experience with a cranking customer service rep can change that customer’s opinion in a heartbeat. In this age of new media, one bad experience can be a big deal for your brand. Information spreads like wildfire on the web.

Service industries (restaurants, photographers, doctors etc) check Yelp.com and see what people are saying for you. If you are in a smaller city, without Yelp, then monitor local forums for ratings on your service.

A poor rating on Yelp isn’t the end of the world. Use it as valuable incite as to what you can improve. I’ve seen tons of companies on Yelp respond to a customer who gave them a bad review to apologize and ask what they could do to fix it.  Nine times out of ten, the unhappy reviewer returns to update their rating and explain how awesome it was that they were heard and what was done to make it better.

Companies and techies make sure that you are on Satisfaction – People Powered Customer Service.  Make sure you are listening to what your customers want from your product. Encourage feedback and open dialogue and encourage your employees to interact with the people who use your product.  If your users are techies and bloggers they can have a huge impact on how you are perceived by the blogoshpere and the technophile masses.

2. Monitor how users tag and keyword you outside of your own site.

One of the beauties of tagging and social media is how easy it is to see the tags and categories that your customers give your content.  I recently read a post by Jeremiah Owyang called Use Delicious to uncover your brand (and improve your SEO). He explains how to use delicious to see how people have saved your posts and pages.  He shows how sometimes we, as bloggers or content authors, categorize our post in the way that we feel is appropriate for the user… or maybe, in some cases, the way we want to “spin it”.  But using delicious, the truth and appropriateness of our own tags can easily be compared with how your users actually tag it.

This can also be extremely valuable keyword research for SEO and figuring out a more organized user friendly information architecture for your own website.

3. Monitor all of the web’s channels.

Monitoring your brand on the “web” is no longer a simple as maintaining your corporate website. In fact it’s more important to manage your brand on OTHER people’s websites.

There are so many different channels that make an impact on your overall online presence. This graphic called People Streams from Elliance SEO Services is a great illustration of the many ways people can find you online and thus can influence by your brand’s rep.

The technologies in this graphic will constantly evolve (for example, the channel of Microblogging like Twitter isn’t on this graphic).  However, the principle is still the same: Go where the people are talking.

(Read the book Groundswell for more info on how to keep up with the technology curve.

Do this for each channel:

• Investigate if your brand is already being talked about in the channel by
  • Searching comments and tags for your brand name and your URL
  • Monitor referring links in your web stats
• Determine if it’s a viable channel for you to be involved in regularly by researching the demographic most involved in that channel. PS. If people are already on there talking about you, posting about you and commenting about you, then that’s a pretty big hint that you should be there too.
• Come up with a plan for measuring each channel on a regular basis. Try to increase communication through a particular channel and monitor the results.

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.

The speaker line up looks good, considering it’s just one short day. I hope I can just go and absorb and get inspired from other bloggers. It’s kinda cool they’re using our gravatars for our name tags (in the true spririt of blogging).

I’m looking forward to:

• Alan Levine on The Future of Education and WordPress
• Chuck Lewis aka the SEO Rapper (see video below)
• and of course Matt Mullenweg himself.

I’ll try to post some updates tomorrow!

I’ve been blogging now for about 3 months and I still have a very small readership.  (Nothing like the image above I borrowed from Flickr!)  Even still, I’m motivated because every once in a while I get a decent comment on something I’ve written. Heck, at this point, I don’t even care if it’s decent, just as long as someone is there on the other end and they aren’t spamming me.

Why comment?

If you don’t blog write your own blog, then you may not have felt what it’s like to post and wait for comments:  You post your article… you wait a bit, you twiddle your thumbs.  You refresh your inbox for potential comments.  You wait.  Days go by.  Check analytics.  Wait.  Check feedburner.  Gradually, your enthusiasm fizzles.

But that one comment, that one jewel that pops up unexpectedly is enough to keep you going.

Comments = Blogger’s currency

If you read someones blog and you love it, then comment on it!  Participate in the conversation the author has started.  Add a new point, a counter point, or a similar link/post you may know of.  If you find yourself in awe of how great the post is, and you notice yourself adding it to your faves, then say that too!  Think of your comment as a donation or a vote for the author and what they are doing. Let them know you appreciate it.

Join the 1 Percent

One percent of people are producers.  1 percent of all the people who use wikipedia write all of the content for it.  1 out of 100 people will ever comment on a blog.  Probably only 1 percent of people who eat at a restaurant will post up a review on Yelp or other review sites.

The other ninety-nine percent absorb and don’t actively participate.  Which isn’t wrong, but I wonder if for some people (like me) it’s as simple as forgetfulness.  Commenting hasn’t been hardwired into my routine – almost like forgetting my manners when I’m ripping through my feed reader.

For more on where I got these numbers, see my post called The One Percenters.  While you’re there, notice that the first comment on this post was from Jackie Huba who authored the book I was writing about… and she totally made my week when she did!!  Comments really are love.

Well hopefully you were able to nab their baseline web stats. But even if you didn’t, all is not lost. Use this handy checklist to cover all your bases. I suggest you keep an excel sheet for each site you operate so you can add new items to the list as new services come available.

Enjoy! (Get the Analytics ready checklist in spreadsheet format now!)

• Run websitegrader.com on the current (yucky) site to get a base grade. Write it down
• Upload everything to the live server.
• Point DNS to the live server
• Insert a permanent 301 redirect for all domains (this is important for web stats – read here)
• Create a Google Analytics account for the client with your gmail address but add your client as a user
• Place Google Analytics tracking code into the live site.
• In Google Analytics, add IP filters for your computer(s) and your clients.
• Submit the URL to Google.
• Submit to DMOZ.
• Submit the URL to Yahoo.
• Add the site to Yahoo Site Explore.
• Place the Yahoo verification tag into the home page
• Add new site to your Google Webmaster profile
• Place the Google Webmaster verification meta tag into the home page
• Upload robots.txt file to block paths to any admin directories or areas you don’t want spidered
• Tell Google Webmaster where the sitemap.xml file is
• Generate an initial Web Grade on your live site using websitegrader.com
• Fix obvious issues if they exist (missing alt values etc)