Ask Kalena

You look familiar. Are you on Twitter? Subscribed to my feed yet?

Hi Kalena…

I am trialling social bookmarking submission sites. I just installed Only Wire to find it does not actually really work. I though this was a good one and now I have lost my faith a bit in using an automated service to achieve this objective.

I see you have a list of icons at the bottom of your blog. Have you manually put them there or do you use a piece of software or an online tool for that? I want to start using the power of submission to social bookmarking sites.

What is your view on that? How will it help rankings and how much time should we put into this effort? Can you suggest one that does work well?

Jen

Hi Jen

I decided to answer your question via video today. The plugin that I mention in the video is Sociable for WordPress.

To learn more about social bookmarking for your blog, please view my video answer below:

If for some reason the embedded video doesn’t work, you can view the video on YouTube.

Like most bloggers, I am inundated with comment spam, where link droppers post a random comment on your blog that includes a link to a web site, for the sole purpose of gaining traffic and link popularity to the site.

Wikipedia defines comment spam or blog spam as:

“Spam in blogs is a form of spamdexing. It is done by automatically posting random comments or promoting commercial services to blogs, wikis, guestbooks, or other publicly accessible online discussion boards.”

Being a WordPress user, I find that most spam is caught by WordPress’ built-in anti spam plugin Akismet, but sometimes a few gems make it past the filter and into my comment review list.

Most comment spam is completely non-sequitur to the post it is dropped on, making it highly amusing. Having chuckled on a daily basis at the comment spam received on this blog, I thought the comments deserved a blog of their very own. Therefore, this week I launched Comment Spam Comedy.

The goal of Comment Spam Comedy is to publish the most amusing non-sequitur blog comments posted across the web. I welcome submissions so if you have a worthy contender for publishing, please contact me via the site or via the Twitter account.

When you submit your comment spam, please include the commenter’s name, the URL he/she link dropped and the URL of the post it was dropped on.

Enjoy the randomness!

Greetings all

After spending the last few weeks providing SEO coaching to small businesses here in New Zealand, I realized that many of them are relying more and more on WordPress-based web sites for their business.

Now I don’t have a problem with this at all – I’m a huge fan of WordPress and so are search engines. It’s really easy to use the blogging platform to build a decent looking, search engine friendly web site. But where people are coming unstuck is in how to optimize their WordPress site when they were previously used to dealing with raw HTML code.

I have started a little checklist for WordPress users, just to remind them of the key SEO tweaks they can make to their blog pages and posts to ensure they are as visible in search engines as possible. I hope to publish the checklist here and also make it available to Search Engine College students as a downloadable PDF.

Here’s where you guys come in. I know many of you use WP on a daily basis and are also busy optimizing your sites for Google and other search engines. I would LOVE for you to share your best tip on how to optimize WP sites so I can add it to the checklist.

Unless you wish to remain anonymous, all tips used will be acknowledged via name and link in the finished document.

Got your tip ready? Please add it in the comments on this post. Thanks so much!

Yes, I’m alive, but judging by this blog, you’d hardly know it would you?

Sorry about that. Life has gotten in the way lately, as has setting up a brand new office and losing broadband for 3 days straight.

I do have a series of articles lined up to post here, as well as some post SMX Sydney Conference observations to make and a newsletter to publish.

Thanks for your patience and normal blog broadcasting will resume shortly.

If you were given the task of coming up with an idea for raising money for your favorite charity, using only your influence to fund the idea, what would YOU do?

Here’s what Evan Carmichael decided to do. He took the popular hobby of baseball card collecting and leveraged his connections with 33 leading bloggers to create the Entrepreneur Heroes Trading Card series to raise money for Kiva.

Evan asked 33 top bloggers to name their favorite entrepreneur and provide a reason why they inspired them. The result is a unique collection of trading cards featuring famous entrepreneurs such as:

• Steve_Jobs
• Seth Godin
• Martha Stewart
• Jeff Bezos
• Steve Wozniak
• Richard Branson
• Ev Williams / Biz Stone
• Gary Vaynerchuk
• Walt Disney

Each card has a picture of the entrepreneur on the front, with some facts and a quote from them on the back, together with a quote from the blogger who nominated them. Featured bloggers include people like Danny Sullivan, Guy Kawasaki, Darren Rowse, Tim Ferriss, Chris Brogan and Tom Peters.  Evan and his team have produced a very collectable set of trading cards for exchange at conferences, events or just to add to own your private collection.

Profits from the sale of the cards will go to support entrepreneurs in Africa through micro-lending organization Kiva. To date, over 825 new business owners in Africa have been helped through the efforts of Evan Carmichael and his team.

The Entrepreneur Heroes trading cards officially go on sale tomorrow. But you can pre-order your packs today and save 20% off the regular price – only $3.95 per pack of 5 cards instead of $4.95.  There’s free shipping if you order three packs or more, plus you’ll receive a limited edition gold hologram Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak card for every three pack pre-order. There’s also a chance to win a baseball signed by Steve Wozniak.

As an Evan Carmichael Elite Author, I’ve been given 12 limited edition, perspex-framed, hologram Steve_Jobs and Steve Wozniak cards (pictured) to give away. In order to win one, please tweet about which Kiva entrepreneur you think deserves support, making sure to include @kiva and @kalena somewhere in your tweet. For example:

“Hey @kalena, I think @kiva entrepreneur Evelyn Paquino deserves support because she is providing a valuable service to her community.”

Every day for 12 days starting 1 April, I’ll choose a winner and post out a limited edition trading card.

Don’t want to risk missing out? Order your trading cards right now.