We have a number of smaller clients taking advantage of the lower traffic numbers on Yahoo! and Bing to run profitable PPC campaigns where they couldn’t show a profit on Google due to crazy competition running up CPCs.

Unfortunately, when Yahoo! completes the transition on the paid search side, the combined market share will be 20-30%. I have no doubt this will result in a lot more competition on Bing/Yahoo! as larger advertisers begin spending more time and money targeting the estimated 62% larger search volume and that will consequently drive up CPCs. Hopefully things won’t get too crazy, but if there was ever a time to optimize your Bing campaign, it’s now.

I noticed a Tweet the other day from Steve Phillips over at Purple Trout in which he linked to a YouTube video from Matt Cutts that reminded me to nofollow the tag cloud on our blog here at RLM.

Unfortunately, the WordPress tag cloud is generated via a function call to wp_tag_cloud and, as a result, you cannot simply add the rel=”nofollow” attribute like you would a traditional link.

So, I did a bit of searching and stumbled across a nofollow tag plugin at SmartBlogTips.com that will take care of this for you.

That said, I’m not big on adding plugins if it’s just a few lines of code. So, for those of you interested in doing this without the plugin, you can add the following lines of code to your functions.php file:

function add_nofollow_tag($sLink) {
    return str_replace('<a href=', '<a rel="nofollow" href=', $sLink);
}
add_filter('wp_tag_cloud', 'add_nofollow_tag');

That’s it. Your WordPress tag cloud should now use the rel=”nofollow” attribute.

Thanks to @purpletrout for the reminder and SmartBlogTips.com for the simple plugin!

[Image Source: Wordle.com]

SEO is a broad topic and as technology changes, it’s becoming an increasingly large field. SEO is short for Search Engine Optimization and, according to Dictionary.com, SEO is “the process of adjusting the content, structure, etc, of a website so that it will be displayed prominently by a search engine.”

That’s a pretty clear definition, but it only covers one part of SEO, what we’d call On-Site SEO. There is another, much larger part of SEO and that is Off-Site SEO. So what’s the difference between the two and which, if either, is more important?

On-Site SEO

On-Site SEO covers exactly what the Dictionary.com definition suggests. Any work done on the site itself is on-site SEO. This includes, but is certainly not limited to, the following:

• Adjusting meta tags to more effectively target particular keywords
• Adjusting keyword density, or the number of times a keyword appears on a page, of page body copy
• Adjusting image alt tags to clearly and concisely describe an image
• Linking together pages on a website using keywords as anchor text (internal linking)
• Linking to relevant, external resources in page body copy (external linking)
• Adjusting the overall organization of pages into a clear, often hierarchical structure
• Adjusting website code to ensure search engines don’t run into any dead ends when crawling your site (i.e. JavaScript navigation is bad)
• Adding sitemaps to help search engines easily index all pages on the site

On-site SEO tends to be more technical in nature when compared to off-site SEO. When conducting on-site SEO, you’re optimizing for a machine – a search engine bot – and so there are some concrete guidelines to follow to ensure a search bot is able to easily find all pages on your site and easily determine the topic of all the pages, as well as your site as a whole.

However, clear guidelines don’t make on-site SEO easy. The key challenge in on-site SEO is balancing optimizing for search engines and optimizing for human beings. You can never forget that the primary goal of your site is to convert visitors into customers, so it’s important to find a balance. Focus too much on the search engines and your site will read like an encyclopedia. Focus too much on humans and you may not get the rankings you need to sustain your business.

Think of on-site SEO as the concrete foundation of your website. A house with a solid foundation is a great starting point, and without a solid foundation, the rest of the house could come crumbling down. But try selling a house with nothing but the foundation…it ain’t gonna happen.

Off-Site SEO

If on-site SEO is the foundation, off-site SEO is the hardwood floors and granite counter tops of search engine rankings. It’s what really determines where you end up amongst your competitors. While on-site SEO is important, it generally won’t help you rank all by itself.

While the search engines use your website content to automatically determine what keywords you have the potential to rank for, they use other websites to determine where you should rank. Google’s success was, in large part, built upon their realization that on-site content is not enough to determine the quality of a website; they needed another concrete measure of website quality that even a robot could understand.

So, what to do? Well, when you’re in a situation where you have very limited information with which to make a decision, what do you do? If you’re like me, you seek out the advice of others; you ask for recommendations. That’s exactly what Google did to solve it’s problem. Google started looking for recommendations to determine the quality of a website. And in the online world, a link from one site to another is a pretty good indication that the former is recommending the latter in some way. Now, of course a link is not always a recommendation, but it’s a concrete, efficient metric that a search engine bot can understand and, perhaps more importantly, it was better than any other method of determining quality at the time.

And when it comes to recommendations, everyone knows they aren’t all created equal. A recommendation on a reliable car is going to hold more weight coming from your mechanic than it is coming from the girl you struck up a conversation with in the supermarket checkout line. Likewise, Google gives more weight to recommendations (links) from other sites if those sites have more and higher quality recommendations (links) themselves.

PageRank is the name Google gave it’s method of determining web page quality based on the number and quality of links pointing to that web page and it’s the primary reason Google is the dominant search engine today. Other search engines took a queue from Google and have been factoring links into their ranking algorithms for some time, but Google had a big head start and, arguably, still does it better.

So now that we understand the way search engines rank web pages, we can understand the purpose of off-site SEO, and that is, primarily, to generate links.

Off-site SEO encompasses an enormous array of tasks; here are just a few of those:

• Publishing quality content: Quality content could be an interesting article like the one you’re reading now, or it could be a free tool like Wordtracker’s SEO Blogger tool. It could be on your site or published elsewhere, and since quality content is the starting point for off-site SEO, I’ve included it here. Anything that people find genuinely useful will fall into this category. Unfortunately, in the beginning, you run into the chicken or the egg dilemma. If you don’t rank well for any search terms, nobody will find your site. But if nobody finds your site, they can’t link to your quality content and so you can’t rank well for any search terms. So the rest of off-site SEO involves getting eyeballs to your website.
• Commenting on related blogs: Once you’ve got great content, people have to find it. Comments on related blogs will be clicked on, leading those visitors to discover your quality content.
• Commenting in related forums: Same idea as commenting on blogs.
• Social networking and bookmarking: Sites like Facebook and Digg.com offer other avenues for web surfers to find your site.
• Ask for links: A lot of people are afraid to do this, but if you have something genuinely useful to offer, other website operators and bloggers will be glad to share it with their readers.
• Guest Blogging: Many bloggers are receptive to you submitting blog posts for publication on their sites. This one takes a lot of work. You might spend a few hours or more writing a quality post for another blog, but it’s a great way to get very high quality links from websites that might not otherwise link to you at first as well as bringing in traffic and potential customers from the other blog.

What is SEO to you?

Some may argue that SEO encompasses a much wider variety of tasks that just those mentioned above. What do you think? What is SEO to you? Does it include posting to Twitter and Facebook? What about offline tasks like speaking with reporters or publishing articles in your local newspaper? Could these also be considered SEO?

Unfortunately if you want to have a client test a WordPress site before it goes live you have to do a search and replace on the SQL file to change all occurrences of the client’s domain with the domain/IP for your staging server. In my experience though, that can end up being one big hassle and may not work as easily as you want it to…especially when plugins come into the picture.

Another option is to have the client edit his own Windows hosts file to point the domain at your staging server. That solves the problem of having to edit the database away from, and back to the production host name before launch. But then again, some clients don’t have the computer savvy to get this done easily…even if you walk them through it step by step.

Introducing Windows Hosts File Editor

After spending 30 minutes on the phone with a client to help him edit his Windows hosts file I thought to myself, “There has got to be a better way!” So I went searching and stumbled on a great little freeware app called Windows Hosts File Editor.

Have your client download and install this app and instead of guiding them through painful telephone tutorials on how to find the hosts file and how to show hidden files and folders, they can run the program, paste a line you send them via email into the text editor and voila, hosts file edited.

Sure it’s totally overkill for someone who can edit the hosts file himself, but never underestimate the power of simplifying tasks when working with clients. It’ll help make your job easier and you’ll look more professional.

The interesting thing is I’d bet a good chunk of people don’t even know what incontinence is…hell, I didn’t know until I saw a pharmaceutical commercial a few months ago and I just started to wonder until eventually it was all I was thinking about and I just had to know…so I looked it up.

So my question is…was this an accident, or is someone trying to subtly insult me? Pretty funny regardless.

By the way, I’ve removed the support agent’s info as I don’t want him/her catching heat should his/her higher ups come across this post; he/she was extremely helpful after all.

Highlight added for emphasis.

Dear John ,

I called to follow up on your service request regarding your Microsoft adCenter account with Bing. I’m happy to tell you that your account is now active and running. The editorial team overturned the appeal for your landing page containing pharmaceutical. I’m very sorry for the incontinence this may have caused you. I understand how it can be frustrating.

We value each of our customers and would like to provide you with a positive experience.  You may receive a survey asking you to rate our performance. Please take the time to provide your feedback as your opinion is very important to us.

If the issue you called about was not resolved or if you feel we did not provide an excellent level of service, please call us immediately and we will gladly answer your concerns.  I have documented this e-mail under service request #[request number removed].

We want to thank you for allowing us to help build your business by advertising with Microsoft adCenter.

Sincerely,

[name removed]

[department removed]

Example of local map results for a local search query

Needless to say, if you’re a dry cleaner in Cincinnati, you want to own that top maps listing. But how do you get there? Simple, you claim your company listing in Google Places, much like the Yellow Pages of the web. Of course, then you may have to do some local SEO to get to the top, but claiming your listing is the first step. So, before you read the rest of this post, go claim your Google Places listing (it’s free)…go ahead…I’ll wait.

Google Tags

Okay, all set? Now that you’ve claimed your Google Places listing, Google is offering 30 days free advertising with Google Tags for Google Places. Google Tags are a simple way to help your site stand out amongst the competition in the map results. In the image above I searched for “cincinnati dry cleaners,” and you’ll notice all the listings in the maps section are pretty much the same. Now compare that to the maps results for “plastic surgeon in los angeles“:

Local Search Results using Google Tags

Notice the yellow tag beneath Athleo L. Cambre, M.D. That is a Google Tag. And it quite obviously makes that particular listing stand out quite a bit more. They even have a call to action (“Visit our website”). I actually had to run quite a few local search queries before I found any company at all taking advantage of Google tags for the image above, which means your competition is probably not on this yet. This could be a great way to get more clicks than your competitors even if you don’t hold one of the top spots.

Google Tags Pricing

Google has been offering tag-enhanced listings for $25 per month, but they are currently running promotion – 30 days free. You have until July 23rd to sign up, so this is your chance to give Google tags a try and you don’t even have to pay for it.

If anyone has seen a serious change as a result of adding tags to your Google Places listing, I’d love it (and I’m sure the readers would too) if you could leave a comment and let me know what kind of change you experienced.

[Google Places]
[Google Tags Promotion]

Required Steps

I’ll cover these steps in more detail below, but this is a basic outline of what’s required to take advantage of the custom navigation menus in WordPress 3.0:

1. Define your custom nav menu in functions.php
2. Define a function that WordPress will call in the event a particular navigation menu does not exist
3. Create the navigation menus in the WordPress admin
4. Assign the newly-created navigation menus to their appropriate locations in the WordPress admin
5. Add function calls to display the navigation menus to your theme

Define Your Custom Navigation Menus

The first thing to do is let WordPress know about your new navigation menus and what you’d like to call them. So, open up functions.php and add something like the following:

add_action('after_setup_theme', 'my_after_setup_function');
function my_after_setup_function() {
    /**
     * The register_nav_menu function takes two parameters
     * @param string $location This is the location you'll reference when you call this nav menu in your theme code
     * @param string $description This is the description that will appear in the WordPress admin to help you assign a nav menu to the proper location
     */
    register_nav_menu('Main Menu', 'The main site navigation menu');
    register_nav_menu('Footer Nav', 'Footer navigation menu');
}

Pretty simple. In case you didn’t get it, the first parameter of register_nav_menu() is what you’ll specify in the function call to tell WordPress which nav menu to display. The second parameter is what WordPress will show you in the navigation menu admin panel that helps you assign newly-created nav menus to their proper locations.

Define an empty navigation menu function

My testing shows WordPress does some weird stuff if you register a navigation menu (as we did above), add the function call to display that navigation menu (as we’ll do below), but you don’t actually create the navigation menu in the WordPress admin. A perfect example of this might be if a client tells you he wants to add footer navigation at some point, but isn’t quite sure what he wants there just yet.

By defining a function to be run in the event a navigation menu is not created or assigned in the WordPress admin, you can future-proof things a bit.

Again, you’ll add this to your functions.php file. In this case, I’ll be returning an empty string, which is exactly what will be printed, but if you get creative, you might find a number of uses for this.

function default_nav_menu() {
    return '';
}

Create the navigation menus in the WordPress admin

If you’ve read this far and you can’t figure this out you need a swift kick in the teeth, but here are a few things to remember:

• It doesn’t matter what you call your nav menu. Name it whatever you want.
• Can’t find a “home” link in the pages list? Try creating a custom item pointing to your site’s homepage
• I thought this list would be longer when I started it so here’s another bullet for you to chew on.

Assign the newly-created navigation menus to their proper locations

Remember the description parameter in the register_nav_menu functions we created earlier? Take a look at the panel that says “Theme locations” and you’ll see those descriptions above select boxes. Select the nav menu you want for each location and save it all.

Add function calls to display the navigation menus in your theme

Here’s the code to display the navigation menus. You’ll need to add this…you guessed it…where you want the navigation menu to appear:

<?php
wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'Main Menu', 'sort_column' => 'menu_order', 'container_class' => 'main_nav', 'menu_class' => 'main_nav_menu', 'fallback_cb' => 'default_nav_menu' ) );
?>

A few quick notes on this function:

• There are a lot of parameters you can use for this function. Check out the function reference here
• Notice that ‘theme_location’ is the same value we specified for the $location parameter in our register_nav_menu functions in functions.php
• Also notice that ‘fallback_cb’, or fallback callback, is the empty navigation menu function (default_nav_menu) we defined in functions.php

What about formatting?

Unfortunately, WordPress only gives you the option to output the navigation menu as an unordered list. For most cases that should be fine, but in my recent experience, I had to add those little vertical lines (you know, the pipe character) between each menu item to match an existing site design. So I used the str_replace function to address the issue:

$sNav = wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'Main Menu', 'sort_column' => 'menu_order', 'container_class' => 'main_nav', 'menu_class' => 'main_nav_menu', 'echo' => false, 'fallback_cb' => 'default_menu' ) );
$sNav = str_replace("</a></li>\n<li ", "</a> |</li>\n<li ", $sNav);
echo $sNav;

There might be a better way to do this but I prefer not to make things too complicated.

That’s it.

And now for the obligatory post image:

WordPress 3.0 Nav Menu

Applies to .com, .net, .mobi, .biz, .us, .org, .ca, .co.uk, and .in. Additional 18-cent ICANN fee applies.

Use code SOCCER99. Total cost after fees: $1.17.

GoDaddy

[Slickdeals]

GoDaddy Logo

Bing iPhone App

For you iPhone junkies, there’s an updated iPhone app available.

Mobile Social Search Results

Bing Mobile has a few social media powered enhancements. Bing claims that  over 40% of ambiguous search queries are better answered by social networks than by traditional search algorithms. In an effort to improve it’s results, Bing is including relevant results from your social network along with it’s traditional results. “So if you search for a movie, you’ll see movie showtimes first, then anything your friends may have said about it next.

Barcode Scanning

Want to do some comparison shopping? Next time you’re in a brick and mortar store, scan a product barcode or album cover art and Bing will supply comparison shopping information for that item. Sounds great, but I haven’t been able to test this yet to see how effective it is.

Bing has quite a few other enhancements, which you can read about at Discover Bing.

[Resource Shelf]

Get it here: WordPress $post Object Cheatsheet