WordPress Ping List for 2016

May 5, 2016 / Search Engine Optimization, WordPress / by Kathy Alice

Young man playing ping pong
Letting the world know about your new content!
Three years ago I published “Just Say No to a Big WordPress Ping List“. Up to that point, like many other bloggers, I thought the more the merrier when it came to pinging services. After all, why wouldn’t I want everyone to know about my sparkling new post?

Then I wrote a script to vet many of the services that many bloggers were using and found several returned errors or didn’t respond at all. That was the first red flag. The second red flag showed up when I found out about a Matt Cutts warning that Google looked unfavorably on some of the services that many were using. Essentially some of them are spam magnets and you really don’t want your site associated with them.

So I cut down my ping list down from 31 services to just 3. And published my post, which got a lot of attention due to my contrarian stance.

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22 Keyword Research Tools

March 24, 2016 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

Search icon

Even in an era of the semantic web, keyword research is still important. But it’s not just about the specific keywords. We need research to understand our market and competitive landscape, we need research to help brainstorm the topic of our new blog post. The 22 keyword research tools I cover below will not only help determine keywords for your on page SEO, but help you assess your competition and may even help you validate a new idea. Most of the tools listed below are free, but I’ve included a few that are not.

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Do You Need to Worry about SEO with WishList Member?

March 12, 2015 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

At first glance SEO and membership sites seem to be two entirely unrelated things. When Googlebot encounters a login page, that page is a brick wall that stops it cold, since search engine bots don’t have a way to log into your site. So any content behind an authentication wall is essentially invisible to Google and the other search engines. So when you are setting up a membership site do you need to worry about SEO at all?

WishList Member Login Page
Example of WishList Member Login Page
Up to this point I had just assumed no. But I was wrong; when I started looking at a WordPress site using the WordPress plugin WishList Member, I ran into a number of issues. Some issues are specific to WishList Member – and I cover those below. But there is also some general SEO friendly practices around managing your content that applies to any membership site that I want to cover as well. Let’s start there.

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Checklist for Choosing a SEO Friendly Content Management System

January 20, 2015 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

site map
Dynamically generated XML sitemaps are one CMS feature you will want.
Although I often recommend WordPress as a CMS (Content Management System), I’ve worked with a variety of other CMS – including some in house developed ones.

If you are considering selecting a Content Management System for your website, make sure you select one that provides a rich set of SEO friendly features.

Here’s my checklist to make sure you get a CMS that won’t set you up for failure.

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5 Awesome Things About Google Webmaster Tools

June 9, 2014 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

5 Awesome GWMT Tools
My Favorite GWMT Features
Most website owners I meet know about Google Analytics and have set it up (or some other Analytics package) on their website, but not everyone also sets up Google Webmaster Tools (often referred to as GWMT). This is a shame because they are missing out on an important conduit of information from Google about their website. In fact, I’ll go so far and say you are blind if you don’t have GWMT set up for your website.

While Analytics is all about your traffic, GWMT focuses on how your site is crawled and indexed. GWMT is also the place where Google notifies you of any penalties and when malware is detected on your site.

  

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Duplicate Content on Dynamic Websites

May 8, 2014 / Search Engine Optimization / by Kathy Alice

This post originally appeared in 2012. I’ve updated it to include more approaches on handling duplicate and similar content. May 8, 2014

A while back, I wrote about how Bing had duplicate content in its index even with the use of some tools that should have removed it. Here I cover the topic of duplicate content on dynamic websites. As you probably know, duplicate content is a common technical SEO problem, and it is frightening easy to get it on dynamic websites.

Duplicate Content isn't Cute
Duplicate Content isn’t Cute

First some definitions

  • Dynamic Websites are websites that are generated in all or in part at the time of access. This is often done by assembling information retrieved from a database. WordPress is an example of a dynamic website. All the content is stored in a database and it is presented as needed in multiple forms.
  • Duplicate Content here refers to duplicate content within a site (not duplicate content across domains). In this case, duplicate content is when more than one page has the same content. Or, put another way, there are multiple URLs that lead to the same page. SEOs also classify pages with very similar content as duplicate content, I touch on this briefly below, but it really deserves a separate post.
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