On Wednesday, Chris Pearson and Matt Mullenweg went at it on Twitter in a live audio debate over Matt’s belief that Chris’ premium theme Thesis is in violation of the General Public License that WordPress has in place.

Full disclosure: I am running Thesis on this blog and love it. I even said so on Twitter:

TopherATL Twitter comments on Thesis

I also believe that if you do not enforce a license legally, you cannot and should not get upset when people break it. However, I think Chris and the team at DIYThemes.com need to take a step back and stop trying to piss off the WordPress community.

They are making money on the back of a platform that they did not have to build, and as far as I know, they had no hand in the actual building of the core code that runs WordPress.

To be 100 percent fair, I think Matt and the team at Automattic can be jackholes about how they run the WordPress.org project. Do we really need a section of code in the core of a CMS that forces us the spell a word a certain way?

How hard would it be for Chris to split-license his theme and still have control over his code but also play nice with the full WordPress community? But from what I have read and seen from Chris, it looks to me he would never do that, because it seems he gets too much glee out of pissing off the people at Automattic.

Everyone needs to stop and take a step back and do what is best for the community at large.

Matt, if you think the GPL is all that and a bag of chips, then back it up legally: Go to court (and if you really want to look good, do it outside the San Francisco area).

Chris, do what is best for all of us who love your theme and find a way to work with the GPL and the WordPress community. Trust me, you are not going to lose any money, and you might just get some new users.

I love WordPress. I truly believe that it is one of the best — if not the best — blogging platforms on the market today. What makes it that way is not the code we install but the hundreds of people who work on that code and write plug-ins and themes. They extend it to a point that truly makes it great, and all this little war is doing is dividing a community that needs to be unified.

In my opinion, everyone needs to just grow up and play nice.

Digging into WordPress has a quick overview of the “fight” between Chris and Matt.

Last week, Google announced that the speed your site loads was one of more than 200 factors that figures into the search ranking of that page.

As happens every time Google says something, the Web/Twitter is going nuts over how this would affect a site. I wanted to give my thoughts on why you shouldn’t panic about this update.

Let’s start by saying that if the only reason you’re worried about the load speed of the pages on your Web site is because now Google is using it as a ranking factor, I feel sorry for the people who come to your site. As Google states in the announcement on the Webmaster blog:

“Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users. Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.”

A different way to say that is: Fast page load time is a good user experience.

We know there are more than 200 factors that Google uses in the ranking of a page, so do we really think that now that they’ve added page load speed to the mix, it will all of a sudden become more important than things like well-written, search-friendly content? I really can never see Google penalizing you for giving the end user a good on-page experience.

In the Webmaster blog post, they even said as much:

“While site speed is a new signal, it doesn’t carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation. …”

If we believe what Google says, then why is there all the talk about this and how it will be the thing that keeps you from ranking well?

I think that’s happening for two reasons. One, people just don’t understand what’s happening and how it will or will not affect their site and its rankings, or two, they’re using it as a excuse for bad SEO.

Matt Cutts has a post on his personal blog addressing a lot of the things that have been said about this change, and the No. 1 thing he wanted all the SEO and non-SEO people to know is:

“Don’t Panic!“

I agree 100 percent with him on this.

Should your page load as fast as possible? Yes, it should! Will it help you in the SERPS? Well, it won’t hurt you; that much we know. What is the biggest reason you should work to have your pages load a quick as possible? A good user experience. That will lead to a better conversion rate on your site, and that is just smart SEO.

Google gives us a list of some tools we can use to measure the speed that the Google bot downloads your page:

• Page Speed, a Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of Web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.
• YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve Web site speed.
• WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages’ load performance, plus an optimization checklist.
• Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your Web site as experienced by users around the world.
• Google has also blogged about site performance.
• Many other tools on code.google.com/speed.

I would recommend that you take the time to read the Webmaster blog post on load speed as a search result factor, and then look at your site and pages to see whether there is a way you can speed up the load time.

I am lending an SEO hand at my alma mater, the Art Institute of Atlanta. They do something called a WebRaising every year; it’s much like the concept of a barn-raising, but they build sites for nonprofits that have applied for the help.

This one is about meta-tags and the info you should have in the head tag, and what Google says it looks at and what it doesn’t care about.

When you are starting out in SEO and development, you can get a lot of different information on what kind of things you should have in the head tag of your site. I hope this helps in clearing up any confusion you might have.

Google and meta-tags

Over at the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, there is a post that talks about meta-tags. It discusses what we should be using and what does us no good in SEO.> Answering more popular picks: meta tags and web search

Some of the things in the post:

Metadata is one of those things that has a level of voodoo involved with it. There was a time in the Web when loading up the meta information was a surefire way to get your site ranked higher and to get it included on as many search results as possible.

Meta keywords

With this in mind, it was ripe for abuse. Google saw that and let us know a while ago that it was putting less weight on metadata and then stopped putting any weight on some of the metadata at all.

This post on the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog from Matt Cutts: Google does not use the keyword meta tag in web ranking

Customizing for meta-tags

We can see that having the correct information in the header is a easy way to get a lot of on-site SEO juice for your WordPress blog. There are three ways to edit that info in WordPress:

1. Editing the code in the files.
2. Using a plug-in that will change the meta-tags.
3. Using a template that allows for editing of the meta-tags.

If you are using a template for your WordPress blog that you did not create, there is a good chance that there are just the default metadata in the header. This doesn’t mean you can’t dive into the header.php file (under Dashboard > Presentation > Theme Editor) and add the data that you think work best for your blog.

But please don’t delete anything you don’t understand. This can really mess up how your blog looks or even whether it will work at all.

The easiest way to edit the info is to install one of a number of SEO/meta-tag plug-ins,. I have tried a bunch of them and have liked some and not others. The ones I can recommend trying:

• All in One SEO Pack I would not pay for the pro version of this one, but the free version works quite well.
• HeadSpace2 I haven’t used this one in a long time, but when I did, it worked really well.
• SEO Meta Tags This is the one on the list that I have used the least, but it looks good, and a lot of users love it.

The last way, and the one I am using, is a theme that has the ability to edit the meta-tags and other things in the head built into it. They usually do this with a theme manager page in your WordPress dashboard. The one I use is called Thesis Theme. It isn’t free, but I believe it is well worth the money for not only the metadata you can customize but for a whole list of other little (and big) things it will let you change on your site. Thesis is a great way to edit and upgrade the on-page SEO of your blog.

One thing to keep in mind, whether you add the information by hand or use a plug-in/theme: Make the data relevant to your blog. Otherwise, you could run the risk of your site getting flagged as spam and get banned from the index.

Hand-coding HTML?

If you aren’t on a WordPress blog or just like to hand-code your site, I haven’t left you out in all of this! Google Webmaster Central: Meta tags has a post that lays out the code and what information should go into the meta-tags to help you get the biggest SEO help for your site.

Do you have the metadata in your blog? Have they helped your SEO? Did I miss a plug-in or site that has good info on the topic? Drop a comment and let me know.

I am lending a SEO hand at my alma mater, the Art Institute of Atlanta. They do something called a WebRaising every year; it is much like a barn raising, but they build sites for nonprofits that have applied for the help.

With that in mind, I’m going to write some SEO 101-type content to help the teams as they build their sites. This one is all about keyword research, the cornerstone of a good SEO work plan.

The Cornerstone of SEO

The simple fact is, if you don’t take the time to figure out what the core keywords are for the site you are working on, you are going to have a hard time with meta description or title tags that will help people find your site in search engines.

With some time and effort, you can build a full list of core evergreen words that you can use for:

• Content creation
• Title tags
• Meta descriptions
• Section / page names

It’s powerful to spend time with some tools and a open Excel spreadsheet, which you can see in your ability to have the site’s pages and content found in the search engines.

How cool is that!

Tools

Speaking of tools, there are lots of free ones out there to help you research your keywords. This is a short list of ones I have used:

• Google AdWords: Keyword Tool
• Keyword Discovery Suggestion Tool
• SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool
• WordStream Free Keyword Tool

Once you have a set of tools that you like (I like to use two so I can get a different set), run the words that are the most prominent for the nature of the Web site.

Image you are doing the SEO for a site about homeless shelters. I would start with those words; then you can export or copy the list out of the tool and put it in the Excel document you have open. From there, move on to “soup kitchen” and do the same thing. Think of what you or your friends would use to try to find your site in a search engine, and that’s a good starting place.

Once you have a good base set in your spreadsheet, read over them. Are there ones that don’t belong? Get rid of them. You don’t want to water down the list with a lot of words that aren’t important to your site’s purpose.

We could spend a lot of time here talking about the long tail, but I think I will leave that for the 201-level post on keyword research.

More Resources

Hope this helps. If you want more, below is a list of some sites that have some good keyword research info, so check them out.

• Wordtrackers Keyword Research Guide [PDF]
• Copyblogger’s Keyword Research for Bloggers

If you have any questions or comments, let me know below, and thanks for reading!

All the SEO’s with an iPhone I need your help

With todays world of SEO’s having to be on their game so much I know I am using my iPhone more and more to help me do more of the tasks that I need to do. The idea of the little hand held computer being able for me to call up an app and do a SEO task is very exciting one for me and it also allows me to not be tied to my desk all day all the time.

I have 2 or 3 for SEO that I use but I know there are more of them out there in the iTunes store

What I need from you all to take a sec or two and add a comment below with the apps you use in your iPhone to help you with your SEO work while you are away from your desk.

Add one add ten. Add the name or a link to the app. just add your favorites. If you want also tell me why you like or don’t like the ones you use. Dose it mater if they are free or paid?

I am looking to create a list of apps that can be used for SEO work.

I want to take the list of iPhone SEO apps and break it into some categories. The list of categories I was thinking of using is:

• Research
• Reporting
• Rankings
• Analytics

Re these the right categories? Am I missing any categories? Would you add or rename any of them?

Once I have a good list I will publish the list here with some of your comments but, also pick some of the apps and writes a reviews on the ones that get the most mentions or most comments.

Thanks in advance for your help and as always thanks for reading

Recently I gave a presentation at the February meeting of SEMPO Atlanta[link] on Advanced SEO tactics of using Microformats to help with the SEO of your site.

I am posting the presentation here and wanted to add some links to sites and books to help you get up to speed on Microformats.

Microformats basic info:

• Microformats.org
• Microformat Cheat Sheet
• Google Webmaster Blog info on Microformats

Microformats and SEO info:

• hReview Microformat on SEO Gadget
• Google Rich Snippets Tips and Tricks

Microformats Tools:

• Rich Snippet Testing Tool
• Firefox Microformat Extension
• Safari Microformats Extention

Microformats Books:

• Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0
• Microformats Made Simple

Hope this helps.

Let me know if you have any questions or have any recourses that I might have missed below in the comments.

Thanks for reading!

I am working to improve my blog so I decided I want to add a contact form to Topherkohan.com instead of just adding a link with my email address. The reason I made this choice is three fold.

The first and the biggest reason being that with no email address on the blog there is a much smaller chance of getting random spam email from a bott that farmed my email address off the site.

The second reason to add this to the blog is now that more and more people are using web based email as there only email, a email me link is not as practical. As the code is written, it has a hard time always open up a browser and then launch the web mail site you use like it can with a desktop based mail application.

The last reason is with a form that is accessible, usable, and well thought out, the reader can narrow the question and just zip you off a quick note. That is part of what Findability, Usability and SEO is, giving the readers a well thought out way to complete a task on your site.

So I decided to add a contact page to my blog, and then I got to thinking. I could hand write the HTML / PHP to make the form work and come up with a safety to keep spam out of it, but this is a WordPress Blog and we have a community of WordPress developers that have written some great plug-ins. So, their must be one for this also.

And there was. After some short searching I came across a plugin called Fast and Secure Contact Form for WordPress Blogs . A great secure and accessible form plugin for WordPress written by Mike Cherim.

A great install guide is on the site that walks you through the set up once you have uploaded the files to your server. You can even add custom CSS to it if you like. I started with the default style and it looked good in my template. If it does not look the way you want with yours, you can fix it by hand or there is a list of styles that come with it for a whole lot of popular WordPress themes.

So did I make the right choice to not include my email address on the site? Do you like a form or a email link? Drop me a comment and let me know what you think.

As always thanks for reading.

A follow up from the last post about Findability and SEO and your WordPress blog.

1) Add the title tag to all the links on the page.

The reason for this is to add more information for the search engine spiders to find and read. When you do this it will add more keywords and information about the page / post into their search results. What that means to the person searching is that the words they type into the search engines have a greater chance of finding the article that you have written.

2) Proper placement of the H1, H2, H3 tags on titles on the page.

The reason to do this is to let the search engine spiders know what the most important information on your WordPress blog is, and then you tell it the 2nd and the 3rd most important. The reason you want to do this is so that the spiders will rank this information and use it to help the users to search for the most important and relevant information on your blog.

3) Have the web site verified as W3C compliant (w3c.org).

The reason to do this is that a WordPress blog that is written with W3C compliant code not only makes it easier to optimize for Findability and SEO, but also, compliant code lets a search engine read the whole blog without any problems. If the search engines can do that then there is a more complete picture and record of your blog in the log, and this will help the searchers return more complete and higher placed search results.

4) Add and fill in the atl attribute to all images.

Again, the reason to do this is it gives the search engine spiders more information about the content in the blog. This will not only show up more in searches for keywords, but also in image searches. Google is saying that more and more people are searching for written content that includes images. I have not added images to this blog because I do not think they add anything to the content I write.

5) Add an XML site map (if one does note exist).

The reason for this is to give the search engine spiders a clear road map in the format that they like and will use. With this information the spiders will crawl and index your blog quicker and more efficiently. This will help get time sensitive information in to them sooner, and it will show up in searches faster. With WordPress it is easy to do this with this plugin Google (XML) Sitemap Generator. After set up of the plugin you can rerun it every now and then so that if you have made changes to your blog you can inform Google of the changes.

Hope this helps. If it did drop me a comment. If you all liked this let me know and I will write up 5 more tips.

Thanks for reading

I was asked to look at a site and let them know what 5 things they could do to their site to increase its Findability and SEO. That got me thinking that a lot of people do not know the first five basic things to do.

We talk a lot about the next five things or five things you did not know. With that in mind I want to talk about the FIRST five things you should do on your WordPress blog to help out with Findability and SEO.

1) Write New and Unique content.

This is where it all starts. If you have strong, well written and unique content, then you will get people to come and read your blog. I know that sounds simplistic, and yes it is, but it is the truth!

2) Add new content often and regularly.

The more often you post the more people will come to your site. Why? Well the more you post, or if you hold yourself to a regular schedule, then search engines will spider your site more often. Therefor, you will have more information in the search engines. This allows people to find you a much more easily when they are searching.

3) Have a great key word phrase that is popular, but not too popular.

One of the first things you should do when setting up your site for Findability / SEO is to come up with a good keyword that works for your blog and the subject you write about. Then think of five more that do the same thing but are not as well known. Why? Well if you use a very popular keyword like coffee you will never get to the top of Google list because a company like Starbucks will have that all tied up. Instead of coffee use Whole bean coffee or cup of coffee. This way you can find a place in a bigger segment of readers.

4) Make sure your site is as accessible as it can be.

Having a well coded accessible site not only will allow the largest group of people to read it, but it will allow the search engines to make it through the site with little or no problems. This will allow them to index more of your content and return a better search result.

5) Use your keywords in your titles, domain name and your url.

This gives you a bunch of new places to put keywords that will not only help you with your search engine rankings, but also to give the people searching for things a new set of keywords to find in their search.

I hope this helps out those of you that are just starting your blog and even with people that have long time blogs that are just now starting to do the Findability and SEO thing to it.

Please drop me a comment if you have any questions. Also drop me a comment if you have tried any of these and let me know what kind of results you had with them.

This is my presentation I gave at WordCamp Atlanta on Advanced SEO tactics for your WordPress blog

If you have any questions let me know in the comments below

Thanks for reading