Houston Search Engine Marketing and Optimization Services

Multi-Author Blogs – Should you use Single Wordpress or WPMU

Matt Dunlap — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 20:32:07 +0000

Wordpress is so versatile that you can use it as a blog, static business website, community, or CMS (content management system), pretty much anything you need to do, you should reach for Wordpress. Lately, I’ve had a lot of requests for information on multi-author blogs. Using the leverage of multiple authors is a great idea, but you should plan out your strategy before you begin. You will leverage the time of more people for both content and promotion. When you start a website like this, the website owner assumes the role of community manager and has to keep the blog running smoothly. Don’t expect the blog to just take off because you have more content then before, you still have to run it like a professional blog. What platform to use, how will you find bloggers, How to reward your bloggers are a few good questions to start with.

What community blogging platform to use?

Worpdress (WP) and WPMU (Wordpress Multi-user) are both great platforms for a multi-author blog. I have found that a normal Wordpress website is good for a close knit group of bloggers, that communicate regularly and understand the overall strategy for the website. Examples on this type of website is Mashable.com. WPMU on the other hand is better for a blogging website where the bloggers don’t really know each other, but all have similar interests in the overall blog topics. WPMU powers wordpress.com.

A WP website is much easier to run compared to a WPMU site, but the WPMU site can grow to be much larger because a WPMU site creates subdomains for each author. Each subdomain can use different themes, plugins, etc, they are each individual webistes. You can think of it as each website made by WPMU is a normal WP website. WPMU will always be under attack by people trying to make a fake blogs and game your system, but there are many plugins and strategies to stop this.

An example of a WPMU structure will be as follows. maindomain.com will be main website and all sites built under it will aggregate to it. Now as authors start blogs, each one will have a subdomain. Let’s say this is a car site. honda.maindomain.com, toyota.maindomain.com are examples on subdomains.

If you really want to make your WPMU community take off, you can offer Top Level Domains. Besically the author that made honda.maindomain.com, can upgrade to hondacars.com… Now that author can have subdomains under them. CRV.hondacars.com… As you can see it can go on forever and can offer much more benefits that a normal WP install. Again, it will take more effort from the community manage to keep things running smoothly.

How to find Authors for your multi-author website?

When I get approached for a multi-author blog, The first question I ask is “How will you get people to blog or interact on the website?”. Most often, this causes a long pause…

Setting up a blog takes very little time, but the website owner quickly finds out that it is very hard to get people to commit to join their blog as an author or guest blogger. Try to make it beneficial to the authors and make a win-win for everyone. Most authors will have their own personal blogs or websites. It defintely helps if you have a large social following to start, In other words, build your community and group of authors before you start the website.

Rewarding Authors to make your community grow

Your website will live or die by the content and participation. You need to make it worthwhile for high quality authors to contribute. Points systems have long been used to identify the best authors, but this doesn’t always mean you will get good content… and of course if you run a WPMU blog, you will find a lot of authors trying to game the system to get more exposure. Therefore, if you do use a point system, place higher points for creating conversations. Comments, retweets, bookmarks, etc… should get the most points, while blog posts get very few.

Make sure you provide ways to get your blogs’ authors content out into the wild. The community manager should tweet every post, submit it to sharing sites, and make sure the website is running high SEO. Let your authors see the analytics so they can see what organic searches are used to find their content. Not only will they see that you (the community manager) is promoting the site and driving traffic to it, but they will also know what to write about and what people are looking for.

This post was written by Matt Dunlap. He specializes in building Wordpress community websites for small businesses and loves to help anyone with their wordpress problems.He has written a really helpful tutorial on how to start a WPMU website on a shared host

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Mixxing with a Dash of NoFollow

Gerald Weber — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:58:04 +0000

When I first started using Mixx, none of the links on the site had the NoFollow attribute applied to them. However, several weeks ago, I had the “Highlight NoFollow Links” option enabled on my SearchStatus add-on for Firefox as I was using Mixx, and I noticed that all of the links on my profile page were NoFollowed (as seen in the screenshot below):

This observation piqued my curiosity, so I decided to check out the Mixx Popular Stories page. When I saw that the Popular Stories did not have the NoFollow attribute applied to them, I initially assumed that Mixx had taken a page out of Digg’s playbook. However, a little bit of additional research revealed that this wasn’t the case.

Two months ago, daveuk submitted this story to Mixx: twitition – Mixx should remove the nofollow tag from links to popular stories. As explained in the twitition:

“About 3 weeks ago social news website Mixx.com started nofollowing all of their outbound links. I understand why they have done it (spammers, no editorial control etc.), but IMO stories that get chosen by the community to be promoted should get link juice – They should use the same setup Sphinn.com uses, only stories that get promoted receive link juice. Mixx has built up all of its PageRank from bloggers linking to it, it’s only fair that we get something back. If Digg did this people would play hell, Mixx does it and nobody bats an eyelid? Come on people lets send @ChrisMcGill a message that this is not OK. Sign to make sure that great web content gets the credit it deserves.”

This story generated a lot of discussion on Mixx (252 comments to be exact), and as a result, Kerry (who is Mixx’s Vice President of Products and Marketing) eventually gave a full explanation of the situation:

“Excerpt: Here is the deal. Google put us in a penalty box with no warning. Some of you might have noticed the Mixx story pages prettyuch disappeared from SERPs. Some of u did notice and asked about it. And we responded honestly to those who asked that basically Google made our story pages have a PR of zero.”

Later in the discussion thread, people started to notice that Mixx had updated their policy to remove the NoFollow attribute from the Popular Stories. So, instead of simply copying Digg, Mixx actually NoFollowed all of their links in response to a penalty from Google, and then implemented this new policy in response to feedback from the Mixx community. I found this to be interesting, because it shows Google is getting serious about controlling social spam and isn’t afraid to hand out penalties, even when its to a well-established site like Mixx.

Now, what makes this story really interesting is that Mixx is still NoFollowing some of the stories that make it to the Popular page, as you can see from the screenshot below:

While Digg applies the NoFollow attribute to all sponsored stories that are on the homepage, I can’t figure out the reasoning behind Mixx’s application of the NoFollow attribute to certain popular stories. For example, as you can see in the screenshot above, a charity story published on Zagat.com (which is a company that has been around since 1979) is NoFollowed.

Since I haven’t been able to discover how Mixx decides which Popular stories should be NoFollowed, if you have any information on this subject, be sure to share it with me below!

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15 Ways To Get Your Blog Comments Noticed

Gloson — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:11:59 +0000

This is a guest post by Gloson. Gloson is a talented 11 year old blogger from Malaysia. He also has written a poetry book, and is officially the youngest published poet in Malaysia. Be sure to follow him on Twitter!

Commenting on blogs is a great way to get yourself (and your blog noticed). If you type in your site address in the comment form, you will get a little link on your name in the comment.

If your comments are noticed, chances are some people might click into your website and you’ll get some traffic.

But now popular blogs receive about 50 – 100 comments on each post. And people usually miss most of them.

Here are 15 ways to get your blog comments stand out from the crowd and catch the attention of people.

1. Write longer comments if the rest are short ones

If most of the comments happen to be short ones, then write long comments to make yourself stand out. Don’t forget to format it though, for no one likes reading long comments.

2. Write shorter comments if the rest are long ones

Do exactly the opposite if the rest are long ones. Of course, don’t write two word comments or that will backfire.

3. Be one of the early birds

People usually pay attention to the first comments. So if you are on a post of a very popular blog and nobody has commented on it yet, go!

But before you do that…

Make sure you are leaving a useful comment, and not two-word comments. So being the 10th commentator with a useful comment is better than being the 1st with a two-word one.

But note that doing this too many times on the same blog can be annoying.

4. Use formatting to dress up your comment

If you are not familiar with HTML,

a = a

b = b

c = c

Formatting a comment is as easy as a b c . People like to read tidy and formatted comments, and that should stand out from the crowd, if there are not many formatted comments.

For example (My comment on 15 Ways Of Getting (Free) Traffic For Your Blog),

Twitter – I once got about 200 visits from twitter because of my follower’s retweets (Thanks tweeps! I appreciate it!). Just be careful not to tweet your blog post too many times in a day, or not that would be quite annoying.

Facebook – Not much traffic from here because I’ve not much friends yet.

Guest Posting – I got about 300 visits when I first guest posted. I should do more guest posting LOL.

Blog commenting – Yes, this has brought me some traffic Especially if you are the first to comment on a post on a popular blog.

5. Bold words that draw attention

Let’s say you disagree on a blog post. You could bold the words, “I disagree,” then people will be curious on why you disagree and read your comment.

Or if you have something to add, bold, “I have something to add.”

6. Ask a thoughtful question

This may prompt the author of the post to write another article answering your question. He would probably put up your comment on the blog post.

Questions tend to generate replies from other commentators, too.

7. Give a thoughtful answer to a ‘question’ blog post

Sometimes bloggers write ‘question’ blog posts to ask the opinions from their readers about a certain topic. In my experience, most of them put up the most thoughtful comment answers in their next blog post.

8. Make constructive criticism

If you realize that the post has got something wrong or you just don’t agree with the post, make an “I disagree” comment.

Remember, constructive criticism are not insults. They are advice.

Please don’t, again, make short comments. Explain why the thing is wrong and explain how to correct it.

9. Reply to the first comment

If the popular blog allows threaded comments, cool! Reply to the first comment. Your comment will be just below that comment (unless someone else replied). Of course, please make it relevant to the first comment to make it a reply.

10. Comment on a less popular blog

If you comment on a less popular blog, there are more chances of you getting noticed because most popular blogs have a hundred comments on each post. And people, of course, don’t read every single one of them.

And even if no one reads your comments on a 1 week old blog, the blogger whom you gave a comment would be encouraged .

11. Add another point to the post

Let’s say you are commenting on a post on 15 ways to get your blog comments noticed. Then you’ve thought of another way to do it. The author will probably see it and add your point to the post.

If not, at least other people will benefit from it.

12. Use Gravatars

Gravatars are the avatars (pictures) of the commentators. Though, not every blog supports it, so you don’t see them on some blogs.

To get one, go to www.gravatar.com and register. Now whenever you comment on a blog, gravatar will detect your email address and assign the gravatar you’ve chosen (I recommend a photo of yourself).

Gravatars help to increase your personality and build your brand around blog comments.

Gravatars also help your friends or fans recognize you in the comments by looking at your gravatar –

(e.g. *Scrolling..scrolling..scroollling. Oh look! John Chow commented on my friend’s blog!*)

13. Comment more often

If you comment more often on the same blog, loyal readers of the blog would probably say,

“Hmmm… This guy gives lots of good comments here. Gonna check him out.”

Or if you comment on a lot of blogs, they’ll say,

“I frequently see this guy around in the comments. Gonna check him out".”

Commenting frequently also helps to build brand.

14. Become famous

If you are really famous, your comments are so going to get noticed.

So one day, a famous blogger…uhh… let’s say Darren Rowse commented on a popular blog post. His comment is going to get attention and many are going to reply to his comment.

But please, don’t impersonate celebrities, for it will be easy to detect.

15. Engage in comment discussion

That is, to reply to other comments on your and other blogs. But leave helpful ones instead of pointless ones.

Engaging in comment discussion will get you noticed especially by the people who subscribed to the post’s comments.

Criteria that your comments are getting noticed

Your comments receive replies

Some people like to engage in comments discussion, and they like to reply to certain comments. If your comment gets replied a lot, you are getting noticed.

Your comments get blogged

Some bloggers are interested about your comments and they blog about it, probably because they are useful, motivating, touching, thought-provoking, making a difference, or such.

You receive lots of visitors to your site from your comments

People might wonder what your site is about if your comment is interesting. So they click into your site to see what you write about. Or some people just tend to click the first comments. Check this post out – The Power of a Comment.

But Wait!!! Before you make any comments…

As I said, leaving Short and Pointless comments is Annoying and Meaningless and will bring down your brand.

Askiment, the spam-filtering plugin that most bloggers use, may mark you as spam and your future comments might go straight into the spam section.

So, please, please don’t leave short and spammy comments simply for the sake of promoting your brand. It does the opposite, actually.

Be sure to read this post, too –>

10 Ways to Hurt Your Blog’s Brand by Commenting on Other Blogs

__________

So, there you go! 15 ways to get your blog comments noticed! Do you know of another way to do so?

Leave your answers in the comments. And I’ll, of course, put up your answer here if I like it. See what I’m doing here? Hehe…

More tips from commentators below

Napoleon @P0_P0

Here’s #16 (possibly) Make sure you include a URI so readers can see your site, or twitter page.

Chris

I’m surprised you didn’t mention Comment Luv!

It’s a pretty nifty plugin for Wordpress blogs that lets you include a link to one of your blog posts in your comment!

Your article certainly does cover the basics though.. and often times even experienced pros need to be reminded of the basics .

Ann Smarty

Good humor is one of the best ways to get noticed… as well as trolling – but you know that better

Lorenz

Very insightful post, young man! May I suggest adding:

Commenting on the responses of those people that commented. If your response is interesting enough it will get you noticed.

Also, if the comment platform allows it, leaving an unusual comment, e.g. add a funny picture, create a video response, etc.

Always create an account when using social commenting services like Disqus’.

Thank you for your post. It provided a very good overview.

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When SEO Advice Goes Wrong

Gerald Weber — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 04:03:07 +0000

Before I start this post, I want to make it clear that I like the SEO Hosting Blog. In addition to being a regular reader and commenter, I also have a professional relationship with two of the SEO Hosting writers. However, with that being said, I have to admit that I was quite disappointed with a post that I came across on Wednesday.

The post that caught my attention was titled “Why Does a Blog Help SEO?,” and was written by Garry Conn. Since I am a blogger and own an SEO company, I thought this post was going to be right up my alley. However, my opinion of this post changed once I reached the second half of it. In the spirit of fairness, I’m going to quote the entire section of the post that I have an issue with:

“Last item is gaining inbound links to your site. Now, this part is something that not many people do very often. If you have a website and you’re trying to get it to rank for top rated keywords, the blog itself is what can thrust your website into top rankings. The key to doing this is to make sure that you’re blog is completely separate from your website. Meaning, if your website is YOURBUSINESS.COM, don’t make your blog YOURBUSINESS.COM/BLOG or BLOG.YOURBUSINESS.COM.

Instead, make your blog something like YOURBUSINESSBLOG.com. Additionally, your blog and website should be different IP addresses, in fact, maybe hosted by different companies. The purpose of doing this is to have the ability to point links back to your website and have search engines credit these links as true external inbound links.

This part handles a portion of inbound links to your website, which there should also be other link campaigns going on as well. Perhaps a second or third blog as well.”

Simply put, this is incorrect SEO advice. While blogging can be a very powerful tool for attracting inbound links and improving your rankings, this isn’t how you go about accomplishing this at all. In fact, this is the opposite of what you should do if you want to start blogging to attract more links. You should put your blog at YOURBUSINESS.COM/BLOG! The reason is because each time another blog or website links to your blog or one of the posts on your blog, that link is going to add to the authority of your domain. And as any competent SEO will tell you, having a large amount of trustworthy links from a variety of sources is a major search engine ranking factor.

However, if you decided to follow the advice in this post, instead of attracting links from a variety of sources, the only links you would attract are from the one, two or three external blogs that you created. And speaking of having multiple external blogs, this is the other part of this post that really bothered me. When you start setting up multiple blogs for the purpose of pointing links back to your site, it’s not going to encourage you to write great content. Instead, you’re probably going to set the blog up, throw up a few posts with links back to your site, and then move on. And this means that those links are not going to have any more value than the links from splog (spam blog) networks that people in webmaster forums are willing to create for a very small amount of money (because they don’t have much value).

To avoid turning this into a rant, I’m going to wrap this post up, but the two key takeaways I want you to get from this post are:

Blogging can attract a lot of inbound links for your website when you do it from your domain and focus on publishing quality content and establishing real relationships with other bloggers,

and

There has always been and will continue to be bad advice given on SEO blogs, so while you can learn a lot from reading them, make sure you don’t automatically take everything you read at face value and instead think about if what you’re reading actually makes sense.

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How to Free Your StumbleUpon Inbox From “SPAM” Shared Messages

Phaoloo — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 17:13:34 +0000

photo credit: Paige Filler

StumbleUpon is a great place to discover interesting things randomly online. Once found an awesome page, you can share it to all your friends just with a few clicks. The thing is that your inbox is usually flooded by many shares and in order to discover new things, you have to wade across them. Some of them are great content from real stumblers, but many are crap shares from spammers. In this post, I tell you a small trick to free your StumbleUpon inbox from these shares.

First, download AutoMouseClicker and run it. It’s a portable utility and was designed to automatically click on a specific position on the screen certain times.

Second, click on the button Locate, then move your mouse onto the Stumble button on the toolbar and click on it. The utility will automatically get the mouse position.

Then, fill in the Click Interval in ms textbox the period you want the utility to wait between two clicks. It’s should be about 10s to 30s and it’s the time your browser is loading the page. You can disable JavaScript, flash and image to save the bandwidth and reduce the loading time.

Next, click on the Click checkbox and fill the times to click. It is the number of messages shown on your toolbar.

Finally, click on the START button and leave your computer automatically clicking. Meanwhile, you can go out for a drink or do something else. After that, you just come back and start discovering new things as usual.

If you don’t want to miss some important shares from your friends, you can see them in Recent Share page. All the items are easy to scan and you can figure out the important shares from your friends without any effort and much easier than just wading across shared pages.

This is a guest post written by Phao Loo, he is a very enthusiastic social media enthusiast, who shares quality content on a regular basis follow him on Twitter @Phaoloo or send him a friend request on StumbleUpon

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