Yep, it’s ma birthday today!

It’s my birthday… but the presents are for YOU!

It’s ma birthday, I’m off on an adventure tomorrow (more about that tomorrow) and I’m feelin good!

So good in fact, that I prepared this for you…

Below are the links to a 6 part video series I finished recording this weekend.

The series is about how to achieve perfect on page search optimization for all the content you ever write for your wordpress blog.

There’s over an hour’s worth of valuable info here, all free – no opt in, nothing.

It also marks my first foray into Youtube, so I’d really love to hear your feedback, and I’d love it even more if you could rate the videos at youtube based on how valuable you found them.

The first one is here and then the links to the others are below.

Enjoy!

P.S. When you’re done, go over to here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/AndrewHansenDotName

And hit subscribe to keep up with all the new videos I’ll be posting in the coming months.

Here we go…

Part 1: Perfect Permalinks

Part 2: Blog Post Titles And Keywords

Part 3: Avoiding Duplicate Content

Part 4: Achieving Perfect LSI Relevance

Part 5: Working With SEO Plugins

Part 6: SEO Plugins Part 2

In my research tonight I’ve come across another two plugins that I strongly recommend you use to improve the reader friendliness of your WordPress blogs.

The first is one that creates a sitemap for your readers.

This is different from a sitemap that you make for the search engines – such as one you’d create with the Google Sitemaps plugin.

This is a sitemap for your readers – a page on your site where they can go to see a full listing of your site’s content.

Not only that but it improves your site’s deep linking and helps the search engine spiders crawl easily through all your pages too

You can see more about the sitemaps plugin here.

Oh and btw, you can see the new sitemap page I created too.

The second one is an Advanced search plugin.

If you know wordpress you’ll know the search feature is pretty average.

This plugin makes an advanced search page on your site where a user can actually make a meaningful inquiry about something on your blog – and maybe even find the right result too.

Both of these plugins mean a more user friendly blog, and in a market where we’re constantly competing to be seen as the best by our target market, every little bit helps

In my weekly research this week I came across a number of cool little snippets worth sharing with you.

The first is as follow:

If you use WordPress you’ll know the default archiving system is pretty average. Not particularly well organized, and it usually takes up valuable space in your site’s sidebar for little or no benefit.

I came across a great archiving plugin called SRG Clean Archives.

If you check out my new archives page, you’ll see what I mean!

Not only does it remove the need to have archives in your sidebar, it makes your archives page clean, I’m talking SUPER clean, adds more info to the page (like the order the posts were made, how many there were and how many comments each had)  making it far more user friendly.

You gotta grab this thing for yourself, it rocks!

Those more informed marketers amongst you will know that [tag]Wordpress[/tag] released a much anticipated update last week – WP 2.5

Apparently it’s got some cool features like media libraries and a customizable admin interface.

Here’s a great post that goes into depth about it’s new features and how they’re different from WP 2.3:

10 things you need to know about wordpress 2.5

From what I can gather so far, feelings are mixed – people are digging the new look and feel but there seems to be a few features that underwent somewhat unnecessary changes.

Personally I’m holding off on upgrading for two reasons:

1.  There’s more than likely a number of bugs that will be revealed as the new version gets put through it’s paces by the blogging community – not a dig at wordpress, just the reality of a major update to any important piece of software.

2. On this blog for example, I’m so high on plugins and extra add ons to my WP that alot of the new features in wp 2.5, I’ve already got happening in one way or another anyway – as I suspect will many of you.

Anyway that’s my 2c on it. I’d love to hear from people who’ve upgraded and how you’ve found it so far.

Just making sure y’all saw this..

On the firepow prelaunch blog we released a free plugin for you to try…

It’s one that allows for the testing of different posts from within your [tag]wordpress[/tag] control panel.

I won’t go on explaining it too much because all the info you need can be found here

Let me know what you think!

Andrew

One interesting thing that was revealed to me after the use of the crawl rate plugin that I mentioned yesterday was…

how popular some of the tag pages on my blog were…

Some of the stats were crazy… like that my tag page for something like andrewhansen.name/?tag=wordpress or whatever it is, even though only having one post on it, got more spider activity, and I can only assume more traffic, than any page with [tag]wordpress[/tag] in the URL, wordpress in the meta tags, the lot…

Why is this?

I don’t know!

To be honest, I don’t even CARE!

All it means is that I have to utilize them more – and I hope you will too!

I use the Ultimate Tag Warrior [tag]plugin[/tag] and just add a little “tag” tag to any significant words in a post I think that other posts might also have.

I haven’t even been dong it enough, and I even forgot about it completely for a while but the few that I did still increased my spider activity and SE traffic by that much.

Get onto your tag pages now!

I actually already had this post written then accidentally deleted it while I was fiddling round inside my blog – the agony

The point of the post was that I, in my internet travels, came across a cool [tag]wordpress[/tag] plugin that I thought I’d share with ya…

It’s called Crawl Rate Tracker (or something) and basically allows you to view the activity of search engines spiders on your site, from inside your wp-admin (rather than having to login to your control panel.

More than that, it graphs your spider activity nicely, to individual pages, and also shows you the links each page has coming back that are potentially generating the activity.

The frequency of spider visits can be an indicator of a [tag]search engine[/tag]s trust of your site, so to have the data laid out like this plugin does, and right from in your admin, is pretty cool.

Oh and you’ll learn some interesting things about your blog too, I have already.