9th Annual Strategic Communications and PR Forum — Auckland, NZ
New digital communication technology has drastically changed the landscape of possibilities in reaching your audiences. Find out what the latest technology trends are, and how they can be utilised to add value to your brand.
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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).
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What follows below are some of my favorite WordPress plugins and why. Many of them I have in common with Cavemonkey’s excellent Top Ten WordPress Plugins list. Here’s my list, in no particular order:
What are your favorites? Did I miss any important ones?
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A report conducted by the recruitment firm OfficeTeam, the Office of the Future: 2020, looks ahead to the future of office work and the kinds of jobs that will be invented in the coming years, which they purport will include such things as Virtual Meetings Organizer, Human Resource Coordinator, and Information Integrator/Abstractor.
It was the Information Integrator/Abstractor role that intrigued me the most. According to the report, the job will include the collecting, compiling, and indexing of text, data and images in order that this content can be searched in a variety of ways.
It occurred to me that the business blogger of today is the predecessor to the information integrator/abstractor of the future. After all, what does a business blogger do but the following:
This could be the job description for a Corporate Blogger in 2006 as much as it could be one for an Information Integrator/Abstractor in 2020!
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You’ve probably heard it before, that the vast majority of the jobs that our children will hold when they grow up haven’t been invented yet. But what you may not have heard yet are some example future job functions being postulated.
According to the Office of the Future: 2020 report, these new roles will include:
It was this last role that most intrigued me, since I am a search geek after all! I just imagine a scene from The Minority Report where the Information Integrator waves his/her hands in the air purposefully and talks to a computer while within a virtual world of information projected onto the back of his/her retinas. In this world he/she categorizes schemas for datasets, slices and dices incoming datastreams into more manageable segments, gives directions to an AI to do further categorization on its own, and so on.
As a business blogger, I also got to thinking that the business blogger of today is the predecessor to the “Information Integrator/Abstractor” of the future.
Think about this, what does a business blogger do but the following:
Sounds like a plausible job description for an Information Integrator/Abstractor of the Year 2020!
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There’s an art to making an effective link request. For starters, you should not propose a reciprocal link, for 2 reasons: 1) the reciprocal nature of the link will basically nullify the SEO benefit you would have gotten, and 2) all the link request spams flooding webmasters’ inboxes are of a reciprocal nature and you need to differentiate yourself as much as possible from that rubbish. Say these sorts of things and rest assured that your link request will go straight into the recipient’s Trash:
When requesting links, think and act like a PR professional or a biz dev director, not an SEO. Or even think and act like an end-user of their site. “Hi, I found a broken link on _____. Have you thought about adding features like _____ to your ______ on your site? BTW, you might want to add xyz.com and abc.com as links.” Just don’t be disingenuous; provide real value with your suggestions. Even suggest links to competitors or sites that you have no vested interest in.
We all get link request spams, even Google engineers! (such as this one posted by Matt Cutts). Here’s one I got recently:
Subject: Quality link request
Hello,
I found your website www.stephanspencer.com on Google.
We have a quality website at www.ace-mobility.com that will be well ranked on Google.
We are happy to upload a link onto this website in any way you request in exchange for a return link. I’m sure you appreciate that this would be of great benefit to us both.
To go ahead with this exchange please upload our link information below to your links page.
Please reply to to say where you have uploaded it.
If you would like your return link presenting in a particular way please include this information in your email.
I will then arrange for your link to be uploaded and email you again to let you know.
Thank you.
Regards
JessicaPlease note, the link needs to be set out as below in order for it to be returned.
[rest of email ommitted]
All I’ve got to say to that is, “Yeah, right!”
Eric Ward shared some secrets on how he crafts link requests that work in Thursday’s link building webinar for MarketingProfs which Eric and I co-presented. MarketingProfs will post the archive of the webinar in their Premium Library soon. And for those of you who aren’t MarketingProfs premium subscribers (you should join, btw, it’s well worth it!), I’ll see if I can get permission from MarketingProfs to post an archive of the webinar here on my blog.
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If your blog isn’t linkworthy, it’s not going to get very far in the blogosphere. Indeed, links are the currency of the Web, at least as far as search engines are concerned. No links = no rankings, and lousy links = lousy rankings.
One might even go so far as to valuate a business blog on its links (at least in part). For fun you might try out the free tool at the Business Opportunities Weblog and see how much your blog is worth. The computation is based on the link-to-dollar ratio of the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal. According to the tool, this blog is worth $200,000. Anyone want to buy it from Rick? 
So how do you make linkworthy posts? In The Art of Linkbaiting, Nick Wilson and commenters offer some great suggestions:
Building links is both art and science. It requires a great toolkit as well as loads of creative ideas.
MarketingProfs is holding a webinar on Feb. 16 on the topic: “Inside Secrets to Building Links for Online Publicity, Buzz and Search Engine Optimization”. The undisputed link guru Eric Ward and I (Stephan Spencer) are both presenting. Sign up here.
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I’ve produced my first screencast, using TechSmith’s excellent software program Camtasia Studio. In it I show how to install and configure the Google Toolbar in the Firefox web browser to display PageRank scores on any web page that you visit. I also show how to change the display of the Toolbar and some other settings. If you don’t have the Google Toolbar installed on your PC or Mac, this little 6 minute video will show you the process along with some of the benefits.
I’d love feedback on how to improve my screencasting. I intend to do quite a few more of these, so feedback early on will help ensure that these screencasts are the best they can be.
Note that I will be providing beginner, intermediate, and advanced level SEO tips and tricks. This particular one is beginner level.
Download the screencast as either a 5 megabyte WMV file or a 6 megabyte MPEG-4 file (iPod video compatible)
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I heard at the Search Engine Strategies conference earlier this month in Chicago that the Ask Jeeves spider doesn’t cope well with websites that don’t have robots.txt. So if you don’t have a robots.txt file hosted on your blog’s document root, create a blank one.
Another detail often missed by bloggers is to create your own custom favicon.ico file. The favicon is a little 16 pixel by 16 pixel image that appears in the location bar on people’s web browsers; many of the RSS readers use it as well. Peter Brady at Performancing has some interesting things to say about whether or not bloggers need to have a favicon. My take on it is this: with a custom favicon, you look cooler and more with it, plus it differentiates you from the rest of the pack in your subscribers’ RSS subscription lists. If you don’t have time to mess around creating one in Photoshop, you can do a quick and dirty one pretty easily using the free web-based tool Favicon Generator. It took me all of two minutes to create my favicon for my blog using this tool.
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Content is king on the web. A site without content is doomed to lousy search engine rankings. Search engine spammers can’t be bothered writing good content. Especially when they can easily steal it from other web sites. How do they do it? They use “scrapers” — spiders that trawl web pages and/or RSS feeds and siphon off the content. They then stick your content on their own site and slap their own ads and affiliate links onto it.
The spammers especially want you to use relative links across your web site. That way they can lift your entire website and they don’t even have to go to the trouble of rejigging your internal links to make them point back to the scraped site. Granted, as far as bandwidth conservation, relative links are better than absolute links (also known as “hard links”). But let’s not make the spammer’s job any easier.
So use absolute links throughout your site.
As a side benefit, if your site responds to multiple domains and you use absolute links, you’ll also be helping the search engines reduce the potential for duplicate content by definitively identifying the full, canonical URL.
Also, to check if your site has been scraped, use Copyscape.
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