Ask Kalena

A very Merry Xmas and Happy Holidays to all my blog subscribers. Thank you so much for being such loyal readers and avid commenters. It means a lot to know at least a few of you are listening.

I’d also like to say thanks to my trusty guest bloggers Andy and Pete who have been helping me answer Q and A’s when I’m inundated.

I’m taking a well-deserved week off from writing duties, but will be back in the New Year with lots of tricky search engine questions to answer and juicy industry gossip.

See you all in 2011!

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.